Winston's Diary

More on Yesterday's CFP

2005-10-07T13:04:00.000-05:00

The "Secret Lives of Republicans" CFP generated a lot of discussion at some of the other blogs whose owners also posted it, and I feel the need to make some follow-up commentary, particularly as the MLA Conference program will soon be coming out, and it will provide a lot more of the same in terms of politically motivated and politically biased panels, if the last few MLA Conferences are any indication.

One thing that disturbs me about the academic/leftist reaction to a panel like this is the immediate counter-argument that this is just one panel, and that it's not in any way indicative of academia as a whole. But how many times do we have to point out "just one panel" before the number of such panels finally makes it clear that while such blatant bias and shameful lack of scholarly aspirations as we saw in yesterday's CFP are not the norm, academic conferences--literary academic conferences, mind you--are filled with panels that exhibit their biases hidden only by the obfuscating language of theory, and with panels that do not seek to ask questions, but to propagate "truths."

Two years ago, I spent a lot of time on this blog looking through college catalogs, examining the offerings of English departments, and finding that much of what was on offer was not really focused on literature at all, but on politics and on a very leftist brand of sociology. I also went through the MLA Conference program, with the help of a few people who were emailing me suggestions (Blogger had no comments function back then), and found numerous panels and papers that could only be said to be on a topic of relevancy to the MLA through the most contorted theoretical reasoning. Last year, I didn't bother to go to MLA, and I let my membership lapse whenever I'm not on the market, so I didn't receive the program, but emails I received from colleagues and from others who are interested in what academia has become emailed me with some of the details, and the only difference I could find was that the level of political bias had increased, and there was more of the MoveOn.org type of nonsense than ever before. This year, knowing that panels and papers were proposed after the end of the 2004 election, I expect the conference to be even more politically charged. I guess we'll see in a couple of weeks whether or not I'm right.

But the point is that there is a pattern here. This is not just one isolated incident, but a laying bare of what has been going on all along. This particular professor was either not clever enough to make his intentions for this panel ambiguous, or, more frighteningly, he just didn't care, because he felt no need to hide his blatant bias on the CFP listserv, where he assumed that all readers would share his biases and that they would cause no stir.

And this assumption is common. My own colleagues speak around me as if I were a committed leftist, and I regularly listen to them trying to figure out how they can convert their students to a left way of thinking--"enlighten" them, to their way of thinking, but there is no effort to hide the fact that their brand of enlightenment is firmly entrenched in leftist ideology, and that one of their major goals as professors is to reveal to students the errors in their thinking, which they assume to be red state Republican, handed down from their parents, who are also assumed to be red state Republican.

And the other academic listservs I'm on are the same. Discussion regularly veers off into politics, and the content differs little from the sorts of things you hear on Air America. In fact, I have even seen professors recommending Air America broadcasts as unbiased sources of information for their students on these lists, making the argument that the mainstream media is far too conservative to be trusted to deliver the truth.

So yesterday's CFP wasn't really that much of an aberration. Yes, it was more blatant that a lot of things I've seen in print, but as I think about it, it's no less blatant than what I hear or read my colleagues talking about when they think they are safely ensconced in their cocoon of leftism. Indeed, yesterday's CFP is a pretty accurate indicator of the thinking of about 80% of academics I've come into contact with, and it's the kind of thinking that is steering course offerings, conference offerings, and publications.

Check Out this Call for Papers

2005-10-06T00:24:00.000-05:00

If you're in academia, you know what a CFP is--a call for papers, generally for a conference.

Well, here's something that came over the English CFP list out of UPenn. I cannot believe the audacity of this individual, and I hope that if you're reading this blog and you're a blogger, that you'll report this atrocity on your blog and get the word out. This is quite possibly the most blatant admission of academic bias I've come across in a decade and a half in academia, and certainly the most pathetic excuse for an academic panel I can possibly imagine.

Citizens of Kansas--your tax dollars are paying this guy's salary, and have been since the 1970s.

Date: 5-Oct-2005 16:40:47 -0500
From: hedrick@ksu.edu
To: cfp@english.upenn.edu
Subject: CFP: The Secret Lives of the Conservatives (10/24/05; KSU CSC, 3/9/06-3/11/06)

I invite papers for a panel to be held at the fifteenth annual Cultural
Studies Conference at Kansas State University, Manhattan, Kansas, March
9-11.  Papers can be on a wide variety of topics related to the conference
theme of privacy and secrecy and the public sphere.

Papers on specific instances are welcomed, and papers considering a
variety of issues and concerns:  tabloidization and the neutralization of
the political; the personal as political; hypocritical Puritanism; the
defense by offense; vast right wing conspiracies; "outing" as a political
tactic; scandal amnesia; "spin" and tactical framing; true evil beneath
the compassionate, Christian front; why nothing makes a difference; left
tactics and despair; the politics of denial and shame; business secrecy
vs. personal secrecy; liberal vs. conservative secret lives; sexual dysfunction in conservatives; Laura Bush's private life; scholarly muckraking and shockjocking.

Send brief, 200 word abstracts by email, not attachment, to Don Hedrick,
along with a very brief bio, to Don Hedrick, Department of English, Kansas State University, at hedrick@ksu.edu, by October 24.  Inquiries welcome.

Don Hedrick

         ==========================================================
              From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
                        CFP@english.upenn.edu
                         Full Information at
                     http://cfp.english.upenn.edu
         or write Jennifer Higginbotham: higginbj@english.upenn.edu

UPDATE: A comment over at Critical Mass points out the propensity among the Democrats to "out" their political opponents--such as outing Mary Cheney's daughter, but the comment didn't go where I thought it was going to go, something I wish I'd thought to point out last night. Doesn't this bozo appreciate the irony of asking for people to come and whine about outing as a political tactic and in the next breath to come and talk about Laura Bush's private life? The comment skirts around this fact, but I was waiting for the skewer, so I went ahead and provided it here.

Saturday Night Boozing

2005-08-27T20:42:00.000-05:00

I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm a big fan of all things fermented, with only a very few exceptions.

We're watching Lost in Translation tonight, something we've seen before but which I decided to TiVo anyway. I never feel like I've really seen a film until I've seen it at least twice. A nice film--excellent freshman effort from Sofia Coppola.

And there's my segue back into alcohol, since there are those little pink cans of sparkling wine (Champagne only comes from the region of Champagne, and I'm sure I've said more than enough in a couple of years' worth of blogging to piss of the French already) named for Sofia Coppola.

Tonight we're drinking an excellent find. Kendall-Jackson's 2002 Collage, a blend of 76% Zinfandel and 24% Shiraz. It has the jamminess of a Zin with the pepperiness of a Syrah/Shiraz. And, it goes with tomato sauce, which I find most wine doesn't. $6.99 on sale at the local supermarket. Definitely worth it.

And, when the bottle is polished off, I've decided to have a small tumbler of Ardbeg Uigeadail. Somehow, I think it's better than the Santori whiskey Bill Murray is hawking in Lost in Translation.

A Pop Culture Blog?

2005-08-26T12:16:00.000-05:00

Wow. Posting about television increased my traffic three-fold, and the post actually garnered some comments.

Should I just start posting about television, film, and video games, and screw academia?

I guess I'll get started on television shows 11-20 right away.

Top Ten Shows

2005-08-22T23:48:00.000-05:00

I saw this over at Rose Nunez's blog, No Credentials, and couldn't resist opining, since television viewing has likely taken up a good one-third of my life thus far. Jeff Jarvis says you aren't aren't supposed to list "dutiful" shows. Okay. Here goes.

1. Star Trek: This has been my favorite show since I first saw "The Immunity Syndrome" at my grandmother's house at the age of five. Classic science fiction and great chemistry between "The Big Three." Good allegorical episodes and good human epsiodes. There are also no easy answers to the big questions raised, as in "A Private Little War," a thinly-veiled Vietnam allegory in which Kirk defends his decision to arm the Hill People to fight against the Villagers, who have been armed by the Klingons. A great show, but also one that is like going home to visit family. In fact, the death of DeForest Kelley was like losing family. I met him once--a very, very nice man.

2. South Park: Nothing makes me laugh harder, and by God, I don't feel guilty about it, either. Just finished watching the kindergarten class president episode, and the parody of the 2000 election was dead on. This show, unlike the unjustly touted Daily Show, takes swipes at all sides, and all of them are well-deserved, like the episode with Saddam and his "chocolate chip factories" in heaven and God's complete inability to see through the deception. On South Park, everybody gets served. And if you don't agree with me, well, then I've got something in my front pocket for you.

3. Family Guy: This was almost number two, but South Park beats it by a smidgen. However, this show has made me lose a contact once or twice, I've laughed so hard. I think my favorite episode is the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory parody. The Chumba-Wumbas singing to the crippled Joe: "What do you do when you're stuck in a chair? / Finding it hard to go up and down stairs. / What do you think of the one you call God? / Isn't his his absence slightly odd? / Maybe he's forgotten you." That's evil and I shouldn't laugh, but I do. Not quite until I pee my pants, but awfully damned close.

4. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: The best of the modern Treks, none of the gaggy PC crap that plagued The Next Generation or the crappy writing and acting that plagued Voyager. I didn't like it when it first came out, but it gradually grew on me, and I've recently rewatched the whole series, thanks to SpikeTV and TiVo and Netflix. The best episode? "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges." Agent Sloan, of the secret "Section 31" tells the somewhat naive Dr. Bashir, whom he's tricked into undertaking an ethically dubious mission, "The Federation needs men like you, Doctor. Men of conscience, men of principle, men who can sleep at night. You're also the reason Section 31 exists. Someone has to protect men like you from a universe that doesn't share your sense of right and wrong." Damn straight.

5. Battlestar: Galactica: The new one, not the old one, though I confess that the old one is a guilty pleasure. I was dragged kicking and screaming into the remake. "Starbuck's a chick?!? Bullshit PC casting." Was I wrong. This is not your father's Battlestar: Galactica, but it's one of the best shows on television right now. No surprise that the people behind Deep Space Nine are involved--it has the same moral and ethical ambiguity that made DS9 a classic. Still not sure what they're going to do with the fight between the militaristic Adama and the touchy-feely lefty President Roslin, but they are not making the politics simple, that's for sure.

6. As Time Goes By: I almost didn't put this one on, because it is technically a "dutiful" show, as anything starring Dame Judi Dench must be. But I love this show, and am about to plunk down $150 for the boxed-set DVDs. Spending half an hour with Jean and Lionel is like putting on your most comfortable stay-at-home outfit, and Judy, Sandy, Alastair, Rocky, Madge, Mrs. Bale, Lol Ferris, and all of the rest are fantastically well-written and well-acted characters. I almost cried when this show was over, and I still find that watching the final episode makes me sad. I wanted Jean and Lionel to stick around forever, reading Winnie the Pooh and other classics in that big, feather-stuffed bed in their comfy, Holland Park flat. Lionel, I'll join you down the pub for a swift half any day.

7. Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law: You have to have watched a lot of Hanna-Barbera cartoons as a kid to get this one, but former superhero Birdman is now an attorney, and he defends his fellow cartoon characters in court. Highlights include "The Dabba Don," in which Fred Flintstone is a Tony Soprano-style mob boss (complete with a BEAUTIFUL opening sequence of Fred driving through Bedrock to a parody of The The's Sopranos theme song) and another episode in which Shaggy and Scooby are up on drug charges, pulled over while driving The Mystery Machine. (Turns out they aren't stoned--just really really stupid.) This is one of the most clever cartoons on The Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim," and I hope for a few more seasons of it. Hah hah!!

8. Buffy, the Vampire Slayer: Another one I was dragged into kicking and screaming--sounded like a really stupid premise, and more MTV style programming for Generation Y, or whatever the hell they're called--but a show which I wound up really enjoying, at least up through season five, with selected episodes in six and seven. Joss Whedon is a good writer, and he understands how to do tongue-in-cheek without going over the top. The characters are well-written and well-performed (save for the poor girl who played Tara), and there's just a comic edge to this show that the various pretenders haven't managed to capture at all. Plus, Charisma Carpenter's a babe. Why isn't she on television anymore?!?

9. Barney Miller: Yes, I did watch television before the 90s. This was a classic 1970s sitcom, with a fantastic ensemble cast, in all of its various permutations. James Gregory's appearances as Inspector Luger are probably some of my favorite moments, particularly those last episodes, where he orders the bride from Asia. And we can all thank God that Yemana doesn't work at our local Starbucks. James Gregory and Jack Soo, rest in peace.

10. Magnum, P.I.: I'm not sure how to explain this one, save to say that a couple of years ago, I stayed up every night until 3AM to catch the reruns on the Hallmark Channel, reliving fond memories of watching them at my parents' house back in the 80s. Great ensemble cast, and just a fun show. The whole Vietman vet angle always worked well--the camaraderie between Thomas, Rick, and T.C. always seemed real and undefeatable. And of course Higgins: "Oh . . . my . . . God, Magnum!" Hard to believe Jonathan Hillerman is a Texan. Tom Selleck's camel toe can be a bit offputting at times, though. Why did men wear such short shorts in the early 80s?

Okay, so I'm supposed to put this little baby at the end of this post: 10shows.

This was fun. Maybe I'll do 11-20 on my own.

And Apparently I'm Catch 22

2005-08-21T23:20:00.000-05:00

You're Catch-22!

by Joseph Heller

Incredibly witty and funny, you have a taste for irony in all that you see. It seems that life has put you in perpetually untenable situations, and your sense of humor is all that gets you through them. These experiences have also made you an ardent pacifist, though you present your message with tongue sewn into cheek. You could coin a phrase that replaces the word "paradox" for millions of people.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

I'm Ulysses?

2005-08-21T16:09:00.000-05:00

You're Ulysses!

by James Joyce

Most people are convinced that you don't make any sense, but compared to what else you could say, what you're saying now makes tons of sense. What people do understand about you is your vulgarity, which has convinced people that you are at once brilliant and repugnant. Meanwhile you are content to wander around aimlessly, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. What you see is vast, almost limitless, and brings you additional fame. When no one is looking, you dream of being a Greek folk hero.

Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Hmm. Interesting to be a book which, I must confess, I've never read.

Do I really not make any sense? (No answers from left-wingers, please.)

I am content to wander around aimlessly, though, particularly here:

There was a York episode this morning on Location, Location, Location. I need an all-expenses paid U.K. trip.

Winston's a kind fellow, isn't he?

2005-08-19T21:28:00.000-05:00

I've known Winston for about a year. If you've been reading him and his wife, you have, like me, come to appreciate their keen perceptions on politics and culture, and the strange progeny which springs from the union of the two (politics and culture, not Winston and Julia...get your minds out of the gutter for a minute, will ya?). I, for one, consider myself lucky to have ever found myself running in the same circles as he and his wife.

So, it's something of an honor for me to have Winston describing the instrument which I wield as being able to, "speak my mind." That's pretty much elevated from what I've always classified as, "having a half-baked opinion on just about everything, and being socially careless enough to speak about them in public fora." So, I'm printing out his brief but potent introduction for framing later before I write something here which makes him change his mind.

And, since I mentioned it, I'll start with a short comment on Cindy Sheehan.

I've never liked Demi Moore. Not even when she was the still-unaltered-by-plastic-surgeons Demi Moore, and before she became trying-to-relive-my-twenties-with-Astin-Kutcher Demi Moore. And, while I thought she was the wrong choice to play JoAnne Galloway in A Few Good Men, she was, nonetheless noteworthy for using the term "Persian bizarre". For years, I've tried to figure out a good way to work the expression Persian bizarre into conversation in reference to something that had really gone awry because, the way Demi delivered the line, Persian bizarre, you just know it had to be the be all, end all, of "out there," and much more polite than saying, "F***** up."

So, for lack of looking, or for being too wound up in my own personal dramas and/or pursuits, in the 13 years since Demi uttered those words, I've not found a situation worthy of earning the term, Persian bizzare.

At least, not until I started paying attention to Cindy Sheehan.

The fact is, inarguably, the event of her son's death is a tragedy, as are the deaths of any of the brave men and women who've been sent to Iraq to fight.

However, at the risk of sounding like an unsympathetic, heartless crumudgeon, Cindy's actions and the ensuing media tidal wave that's come crashing into the living rooms of American homes during news broadcasts has, without any equivocation, earned Cindy a trip to Perisan bizzare, as in, "In what Persian bizarre state of mind do you have to be trapped when you actually believe that it's reasonable to expect that your son, who's enlisted in the military, could never possibly be sent to fight at the behest, and on behalf, of his country?"

Perhaps that's the wrong question. The statements which Cindy's made in regard to her inability to wrap her brain around the idea that Casey got sidetracked on his way to GI Bill Scholarship money, and was killed in the process are really not as Persian bizarre as the hows and whys of her renewed and continued campaign against Bush. Now, if you're even thinking about mounting some damned-fool argument about deceptive recruitment practices, the hand is raised, and you need to talk to it. It's the military, not a scholarship organization or vocational training school with a great fitness program and free clothes. Fighting and dying is implicit, (despite reduced military mortality over the past 25 years), and that fact isn't buried in the fine print. Cindy's going through the motions, because I'm sure she knows these truths.

And from reports from most other sources that aren't generated by Cindy, Casey knew those truths too, and that suggests that the kid had some character.

Too bad it didn't rub off on mom.

"Syme, you miserable, cold hearted (fill in your favorite personal epithet here), you're coming down awfully hard on Cindy, and those comments are probably just the emotional outlet of a grieving mother," is something you might be saying right about now, "Cindy isn't Persian bizarre at all."

I'd almost be inclined to agree with you, and accept the title of cold-hearted (fill in your favorite personal epithet here) humbly and quietly, if Cindy hadn't started whistling a different tune than she was a year ago, when she and Bush first met. In June of 2004, she was nearly gushing about the effort GWB made in order to express his condolences, but now, she's on a tear to vilify Bush, joined by MoveOn.org, and as many news cameras as Cindy can round up. To be honest, I don't know who's pulling her strings, although, it's known that she's in bed with MoveOn, and is associated with that fat guy from Detroit, the one who makes movies ala Photoshop, but that's not really the point. The point is that it's no longer a grieving mother looking for closure and expressing her grief about her dead son, it's about Cindy Sheehan, her newly discovered moral indignation, her ego, and how long she can stretch her fifteen minutes of fame while standing on the casket of her aforementioned dead son.

Hell, if you ask most people, they know Cindy Sheehan, but the lion's share have no idea that her son was named Casey. That mom's grabbing headlines and advancing the agenda of political opportunists based on this tragedy is a disservice to the life and sacrifice of the son. That it took her almost a year to figure out she could be media-flavor-of-the-month by serving up Casey's death and memory so it could be spun by shameless idealogues confirms, for me, that Cindy Sheehan has earned her status as Persian bizarre.

It was worth waiting 13 years to make such an association.

So, with that, I'm off to frame and hang my thumbs-up from Winston. Hopefully, after this, he won't retract it, or take back the keys to the place.

New Addition to the Team

2005-08-19T21:13:00.000-05:00

As I said a few weeks ago, Winston's Diary will be making some changes in the weeks to come. One of those changes is the incorporation of new blood, in the form of a poster who will be going by the name of "Syme," a character from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four who works as a philologist on the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary. If you've read the novel, you may remember Syme and Winston having conversations about Newspeak over gin in the lunch room, and that Syme is eradicated for reasons unknown. Like Winston, perhaps he knows too much.

I think you'll like Syme, and I'm hoping that his ability to speak his mind without worrying about losing his job--Syme isn't an academic--will bring some fresh air into this blog and perhaps get people reading it again. Like me, Syme has lost patience with the political left, but unlike me, he has to deal with them in the real world, instead of the ivory tower. I think that makes him a little more sensible than I am.

Julia and I will still be posting here, and we'll both be making a sincere effort to post at least a few times a week. I do have some stories to tell, and I will be making the effort to tell them while still hiding enough information to avoid outing myself.

Also, Winston has a new email address, and Julia will soon be following suit: 6079.Winston@gmail.com. I've changed the email address in my profile.

I'm not sure when we'll be getting our first post from Syme. He's reading around on the blog, and looking over some of the blogs and sites I've linked to, to get an idea of the greater conversation we're all taking part in.

So, if you like what you see in weeks to come, pass the word. We had a pretty good conversation going here for awhile, and my own inattentiveness allowed it to deteriorate. I'm going to try to rectify that.

To Blog or not to Blog

2005-07-31T13:53:00.000-05:00

As those few people who've kept coming back and checking this site for the last few months have noticed, there haven't been any new entries since May.

The reason for this is not that I don't have the time to blog, or that I don't have stories to tell. No, I have the time, and I have at least two to three new stories every week. The problem is that these stories can only be told by providing specifics, and the specifics are such that it would be quite easy to discover which school at work at, and from there it would be a very small leap to learning my identity. And this would most definitely result in my termination.

So I develop quite a case of writer's block any time I think about coming in here and posting. What I want to write about is the idiocy I encounter almost daily. I feel the need to expose the school at which I work, and to see whether or not the experiences I am having there resonate with others. I also think that it's important to have as much personal testimony as possible floating around out there; perhaps someday someone with some authority will gather it all up in an effective manner and do something about the radical excesses of academia.

I've considered the idea of feeding some of these more specific stories to other bloggers, but even were I to spread them out, this school and its faculty are too small for me to be able to hide myself, should the wrong person choose to read the blog entry in question.

What this means is that I need to find a way to reinvent Winston's Diary, something I'm going to try to do over the course of the next couple of weeks, before the school year begins again.

For those 10-20 people who've kept looking in, stay tuned.

I'm Probably Insane, But...

2005-05-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

I'm thinking of working up a course in feminist theory. (Julia here, by the way--you didn't think Winston would be thinking such a thing, did you?) I know I'm probably opening myself up for a great deal of grief and irritation, but I think it's important for students to realize what is actually useful and insightful in feminism, and how to sort the wheat from the chaff. I keep getting cranky with my young feminist students, generally a thoughtful and intelligent bunch overall, who tend to spout a bunch of women's studies truisms without examining the assumptions that underlie them. However, I can't be too cranky if there's nothing out there providing other views, so now I feel obliged to fill the gap. If I don't do it, sure as hell no one else will.

I'm still trying to articulate exactly what such a course would look like and what its objectives would be, as well as what texts I'd use. Thoughts?

Furniture Math

2005-04-14T00:39:00.000-05:00

So, my wife and I have been shopping for some new furniture, because the grad student press board stuff is starting to sag and crack.

Buying room sets seems to be the way to go, because you wind up saving a couple of hundred bucks or more when you buy the furniture in a set. Plus then it all matches, unlike the furniture we ave currently, including the K-Mart entertainment center and the Wal-Mart coffee and end tables.

Anyway, we're looking at both living room and bedroom sets, though the bedroom will likely have to wait until 2006.

But I find that furniture stores have a great deal of difficulty counting the number of pieces in their sets.

For example, a bed, two end tables and a dresser is a seven-piece set. Apparently, the way this works is that the bed is actually three separate pieces of furniture: the headboard, the footboard (if that's what it's called), and the rails. I'm not sure how that works, exactly, since you need all of the pieces to complete the square in which the mattress rests. Nevertheless, these are three separate pieces, though I can't imagine anyone coming in and buying just a footboard. Or perhaps just the rails.

Also, I was surprised to learn that not only does an ottoman count as a separate piece of furniture, but that an ottoman often costs only $50-$100 less than the chair it "comes with." $350 for a square thing with fabric on it seems a bit excessive.

I'm waiting to hear about the fifteen-piece bedroom set: six drawers in the dresser, one in each of the end tables.

I can remember furniture shopping with my parents when I was a kid--I don't remember this kind of B.S. When did it start?

Friday Morning Blogging

2005-04-08T11:29:00.000-05:00

The original title of this post was "Wednesday Blogging." Then it was "Thursday Blogging." But, since I've been getting "page has no data" or some such message from Blogger for the last couple of days, either when trying to just get into the dashboard or when I tried to hit "publish post," it's now "Friday Morning Blogging." Blogger needs to get its act together.

So, not a whole lot to report, but as it's now been a week since my last blog (hmm, how Catholic that syntax was--I feel like I'm in the confessional), I figured I should post something.

The problems at my institution that I've outlined in the last couple of blogs remain, though I was able to achieve an extremely minor victory in the curriculum department though persistence and a great deal of backroom dealing with fellow department members.

Also, I have learned of an unexpected ally in the fight against our freshman indoctrination course, someone I was certain was completely in favor of what the university is doing. This doesn't mean anything is going to change in the near future, but if we can become a somewhat more organized underground, perhaps little changes here and there will eventually amount to something.

I've also had several student visits over the last couple of weeks, I suppose because of the stance I've aken on various issues in my courses regarding standards and the need to assign works that are more open to interpretation than the ones we generally ask students to read, and am finding that there is a great deal of discontent amongst our students. They feel unchallenged, for one thing, and they feel that their professors are using their classes to pursue ideological goals, rather than using them to make certain students are adequately trained in their chosen fields and exposed to the knowledge necessary to making their degrees worth more than the paper they are printed on. This is particularly true of those who have attempted the GRE and are finding that a curriculum heavy in twentieth-century ethnic American literature (with the earlier periods in American literature being represented heavily by slave narratives) and which emphasizes "Anglophone" literature instead of British literature is not serving them well on the subject test.

So I'm doing everything I can to foment small revolutions here and there.

On the other hand, I had a bit of a row with one of the radical feminists, though I don't think it was serious enough to jeopardize my position here. Of course, you never know, but she was cordial enough to me the day after, so it's possible we kept the difference of opinion at the level of the profession and not the personal. Time will tell.

In the end, a bit of hope. Suggestions for successful fifth column activities are welcome.

Blueberry Drops

2005-04-01T13:14:00.000-06:00

The blueberry drop recipe gets its own post, because, as J points out in the comments below, this is really the most important thing discussed in my post below.

Basically, it's just a variation on a lemon drop. The trick is to find good blueberry juice. We've been using a brand called Wyman's that we picked up at CostCo--two 64 ounce bottles for six bucks, which is a damned sight cheaper than Knudsen's juices.

If you can't find Wyman's, then check the ingredients label. It's never 100% blueberry juice, of course, but the level of blueberry taste varies greatly. I've found that if apple juice is listed too high on the ingredients, the taste of apple has a drastic effect on the taste of blueberry. In the Wyman's, the ingredients are blueberry juice, grape juice, and then apple juice.

Anything that doesn't have blueberry juice as the first ingredient will likely not have a strong blueberry flavor.

That said, the drink is simple. 3 ounces of vodka (we've been using Svedka lately--Wine and Spirits gave it a 93, and you can pick up a 1.75 liter bottle for under $20). One ounce of blueberry juice, and one ounce of simple syrup (which is simply equal parts water and sugar dissolved over a low heat--make a couple of cups worth and store in the refridgerator, as it's excellent for iced coffee drinks). Shake well with ice. If you use a blender, please don't tell me about it, as I can't really be friends with people who make drinks in a blender.

You can adjust as your taste dictates. I usually do 4 ounces of vodka, 1 1/2 ounces of blueberry juice, and 1/2 ounce of simple syrup.

I also created one variant, which is to pour the 4 ounce version into a tall glass and fill with club soda--basically a vodka collins with blueberry juice instead of lemon juice.

When blueberries come into season again, I'm going to make a batch of blueberry liqueur and see how that mixes with the vodka. I made some cranberry liqueur a couple of summers ago, and I've been using that instead of cranberry juice in Cosmos for a little extra kick.

Anyway, I think you could use any fruit juice as a variant in this recipe. A company called Pom has marketed a series of pomegranate juices and pomegranate juice blends. These might be interesting. I also used freshly squeezed grapefruit juice to make a grapefruit drop. That one was tricky--I had to add a lot of grapefruit juice to get the flavor correct, and of course it needed more syrup to offset the bitterness of the grapefruit. Next time I may try some grapefruit infused vodka, and see how that works.

Hmm. Maybe I should start a bartending blog. This was so much more enjoyable to discuss than literature and politics . . .

Whither Academia?

2005-03-31T19:55:00.000-06:00

First of all, let me make the required complaints about Blogger. It's taken me far too long to get into my "dashboard" tonight, and I'm tired of the numerous "time-outs" before finally getting a page to load.

That taken care of, I'm in the process of drafting replies to those of you who emailed me on this question. Because my response to depression over academia generally involves the extensive administering of cocktails and bad television, these will be understandably slow in coming.

Some good suggestions here. I will be hitting the job market again next year regardless of any other decisions I may make in the meantime, so hopefully there'll be an opening in my field at one of the sensible schools Juvenal mentions. In 2003, I interviewed at what I thought was one of the most sensible schools in the nation, but they turned out to be a rather irritating bunch, and the interview was quite unpleasant. So it's a hard call. I need to find a sensible school whose English department isn't inhabited by assholes. Is there such an animal?

One major problem I'm having as a scholar right now is that I teach absolutely nothing in my field. This makes research and publishing very, very difficult, particularly as I am teaching to set reading lists in the courses I do teach, often with texts I am not familiar with, because they are either non-canonical (this is a work of literature because it was written by a Mexican woman!) or they are not even literary texts (like the Ehrenreich). And I do have a responsibility to my students, regardless of my personal feelings about this crap. So time that I could spend working on my own projects is often spent prepping to teach, and prepping to teach books you think are utter garbage is a difficult task indeed.

I guess I'm just not sure how worth it all of this is to me anymore. The odds are against me in so many ways. First of all, the longer I adjunct, the less attractive I become on the job market. I've already adjuncted for three years before the Ph.D., and now we're looking at two years after. I've heard that seven years of adjuncting is the terminal number--after that, you are considered unhireable.

Second, even if I do land a tenure-track position, will it be one I can live with? I'm getting very, very tired of contributing to the dumbing-down of the academy, and of sitting silent while I watch critical thinking replaced with ideology. I literally wanted to jump across the table at a department meeting and strangle a colleague. Or thrust my Ticonderoga through his eye. He is, frankly, an idiot, whose ability to think logically was compromised decades ago, if it truly ever existed in the first place.

Finally, I find it harder and harder to actually give a shit about literature. I can't quite figure out why what I'm doing is important anymore, particularly when much of the effort I put in is undermined by the low standards of my colleagues, who think that writing an interpretive poem is somehow a satisfactory final project in an introduction to literature course. We haven't quite gotten as far as allowing students to submit a diorama in lieu of a piece of writing, though if the school of education has much more influence over our curriculum, we're not far from it.

I just feel like my days at work are spent pissing in the wind.

My days at home are spent trying to recapture my interest in my field, an activity that generally degenerates quite quickly into hours of PS2, followed by massive guilt and self-loathing. This is doing wonders for my CV.

And I know that the "real" world is just as irritating in its own way. I think the problem is that after a decade of having professors blow sunshine up my ass about how wonderful and pure the academy is, how lofty its aspirations, the reality of what a shitpile the whole thing has become is difficult to deal with.

Anyway, comment way. I've just invented a new drink I call a "blueberry drop," so I'll comment on your comments for as long as the brain remains more or less fuzzless.

I cannae take much more o'this!

2005-03-29T18:21:00.000-06:00

It's altogether possible that I have had my fill of academia, hence the fall off in blogging. Blogging in anger rarely results in anything useful.

The general problem I'm having is that the field that I entered more than a decade ago is becoming more and more unrecognizable to me, as it is encroached upon by cultural and area studies, and as the political left makes it more and more impossible to exist as a conservative in an English department.

On of the straws that may have broken the camel's back has to do with asinine curriculum decisions--more mandatory leftist texts (works which force an instructor to talk about race, class and gender, as that's all they are about), less in the way of real reading and writing standards in the classroom--but the anvil was a minority woman being given a tenure-track position. I kid you not. A minority woman was given a tenure-track position without even interviewing for it. All of a sudden, she was a member of the department. Just like that. No national search, no MLA interviews, no campus visits. It was all handled on an administrative level and it was presented to the department as a done deal.

This is not, mind you, a famous scholar--it's not like we've hired a superstar here. This is a person at the very beginning of her career, with minimal teaching experience, all of it thus far as a graduate student. She was, I have been told by a number of colleagues, hired because she was a minority.

And she has become well-known amongst the students and select colleagues--the ones whose opinions I value--as a lousy teacher.

So I'm kind of at the end of my rope with the academy.

So what in the hell do I do with myself? What does a Ph.D. in English literature in his mid-30s do with himself, when he has done nothing outside of the academy for decades? What am I qualified to do?

I know that there are others out there who have successfully made the transition from academia to the real world. I would like to hear their suggestions for how I might do the same, and strategies for coping with the transition from being the master of much of your own time to having others master your time for you.

You say you want a revolution?

2005-03-25T14:34:00.000-06:00

I think I've said before that while I agree with David Horowitz's criticisms of the academy, I'm quite apprehensive about the methods by which Horowitz thinks these problems can be solved. Recent legislation in Florida and Tennessee, which opens the door to students suing their professors for "oppressing" them with leftist ideology (or right wing ideology, too, though nobody worries much about that) frightens the hell out of me, and is going to have the sole effect of making me even more reluctant to deal with matters of any substance in my classroom, for fear of opening myself to a lawsuit.

When the left started taking over colleges and universities in the late 1960s, the promise was that we'd end up with universities that were more open-minded and willing to deal with ideas that some found offensive and dangerous. We know where that went. Why this push, instigated by many on the far right and by a group of neo-cons who are fighting a battle decades old (and preventing us from moving forward), should produce a different set of results, escapes me.

So, to mix pop icons, I reproduce here the wisdom of Mr. Peter Townsend, whose words seem particularly apt:

New Linky

2005-03-20T17:13:00.000-06:00

I recently discovered The Moonbat Abattoir while reading some comments under a post by a definite Moonbat whom Stephen Green for some reason saw fit to help fill his martini glass while he was on vacation.

A very nice job of explaining what's wrong with the Democrats. I wait for his/her response to Howard Dean's recent remark in Canada that Republicans are brain dead. So far, he/she seems to think Dean is an okay guy.

Hate to break it to you, Mr. Abattoir, but Dean is as big a moonbat as the rest of 'em.

Cinema Studies

2005-03-19T20:25:00.000-06:00

Last week, the folks over at Hatemonger's Quarterly wrote a post on Cinema Studies that caught my eye.

You see, I make use of film (and sometimes television) in my literature classes on a regular basis, and I have been doing this pretty much since the first time I started teaching. I'm of the opinion that good cinema does indeed count as literature, and that it can be as difficult to "read" as any novel, play, or poem.

Yet I cannot help but agree with the myriad of "Chips" over at Hatemongers that Cinema Studies is, for the most part, complete and utter bullshit. Most of what is being produced by the "scholars" in this field is the same sort of self-indulgent crap I was complaining about last week in my Boomer vs. Gen X post.

A not-so-brief quotation from the Hatemonger's post in question highlights what I'm talking about:

Don’t believe us? Then clearly, dear reader, you have not taken a gander at the Fall 2001 number of the journal Cinema Studies, which features an article penned by one Nicholas F. Radel, a professor of English at Furman University.

The magnificently ridiculous title of Mr. Radel’s piece says it all: “The Transnational Ga(y)ze: Constructing the East European Object of Desire in Gay Film and Pornography after the Fall of the Wall.”

Delicious, isn’t it? We, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” particularly savored Mr. Radel’s pathetically typical use of parentheses. You can imagine him patting himself on the back after typing the word “Ga(y)ze,” can’t you? Sure, his ideas may all be pseudo-radical academic boilerplate; but, man, can he use those parentheses!

Mr. Radel’s article begins with a sublimely ridiculous sentence: “Of all the effects of the collapse of the Iron Curtain on East-West relations, perhaps the one that will be the least discussed is its effect on gay communities in the United States.”

Gee, Mr. Radel, we wonder why that is? Actually, given the number of idiotic English professors in these here United States, we have the sneaking suspicion that the influence of the collapse of the Iron Curtain on US gay communities will be among the topics most pondered.

So what, you may (or may not) be asking yourself, is Mr. Radel’s landmark work of scholarship about? Let Mr. Radel tell us himself: “In particular, I wish to examine the ways of in which Eastern Europeans are constructed as desirable sexual partners for American gay men in Gary Terracino’s popular short film My Polish Waiter (1994) and in some examples from the increasingly large number of gay pornographic films that feature young men from Eastern Europe.”

I wish I could say that my own perusal of cinema studies journals belied the findings of the Hatemongers. It has not. Oh, this is an extreme example, of course, but it's pretty much par for the course in a field which now boasts "pornography studies" under its every widening umbrella. You should read some of that stuff. It's porn people. It's there for people to wank to.

But I digress.

As I said, I like to use film in my courses, and I'm of the opinion that in an age where the ideas that were once delivered to the populace via the printed word are now delivered via the projected or broadcasted image, it's become just as important to teach students to do close readings of film and television shows as it is to do close readings of novels. Oh, not all of them, of course. I would never bring an episode of Survivor or some crap like that into class, but there are some very well-done episodes of The Twlight Zone, the original Star Trek, and even The Simpsons that need "textual unpacking" to really appreciate them in full. And, of course, there are hundreds of films out there that reach a level of artistry and philosophical complexity competitive with some of the greatest works of literature.

The problem I've run into is trying to find criticism that I can hand to my students that isn't full of the sort of masteurbatory nonsense cited above.

Honestly, I've never seen a field as myopic as cinema studies. From what I've seen of it so far, it's all theory. With a few exceptions, the majority of essays and books I've examined looking for sources for my students are chock full of Lacan, Freud, Marx, Althusser, Foucault, etc. In many cases, there are more pages of an essay or book dedicated to a theorist than there are to the filmmaker being examined. In fact, I've made a practice of examining the index of every film studies book I pick up to see what the ratio of artist to theorist is.

Is there anything going on in cinema studies that even remotely resembles old-fashioned, close reading of literature? That examines the formal elements of films and television episodes without using them to make some sort of lefty argument? Readings of films by straight, white men that are not hostile? That do not seek to prove that the straight, white filmmaker was/is some sort of evil monster, out to pervert the minds of innocent viewers with radical conservatism?

Where is the common sense in cinema studies? Anyone? Anyone?

(More on the Boomer stuff soon. I've had a few Boomer vs. X encounters this week--or at least encounters I was predisposed to examine in terms of generation because of my earlier post--and I need to fit them into my overall concept. Soon.)

Student Writing Crisis

2005-03-13T21:30:00.000-06:00

Well, I thought I was going to finish my blog on Boomer versus Gen X, but the stack of papers I had to grade over the weekend begged to differ.

Simply put, I have a student writing crisis, and I've had to spend the bulk of the weekend making extensive comments on the batch of essays I've been grading as well as constructing a lesson plan for Monday that will, I hope, address the worst of the problems I've encountered and help my students understand what it is they just don't seem to be getting.

I think what I'll do is break my Boomer observations into chunks and start posting them ASAP.

In the meantime, any suggestions from those of you who teach writing how best to hammer into these kids' heads that a thesis statement needs to argue a point and that paragraphs need to support that argument and not just provide a summary of the work being written about?

I'm not sure how many more times I can repeat myself before I pull an William Hurt in Altered States in the middle of class.

Yet Another Academic Obscenity

2005-03-11T23:16:00.000-06:00

This is obscene. How much you all wanna bet this reprehensible POS already has a tenure-track job lined up somewhere?

The blogger I've linked to provides a link to contact both Bowling Green, this student's degree-granting institution, and Boise State, his former alma mater, which has invited him to come speak on his thesis topic, "In Defense of Terrorism: When is it Permissible to Target Children?"

Mr. Gatliff, you should be immediately deported, preferably to a nice, deserted island, which you can share with your Islamofascist buddies.

Boomers, Version 1.5

2005-03-11T16:29:00.000-06:00

Well, I'm still working on Boomers Versus Gen X, Part 2, so that'll have to wait until later this evening or possibly tomorrow. I've been reading an interesting article on Woody Allen's Zelig, and the argument it makes regarding the portrayal of intellectuals in that film has added a facet to my Boomer thesis, while at the same time provides ammunition for Juvenal's arguments regarding ideology in the academy. Essentially, I want to examine the effect that the "me-centered" culture of the Boomers (don't forget the "Me" Decade) had on criticism and interpretation--whether this contributed to the critic-centered scholarship that currently dominates the academy in a sort of Satanic marriage between Boomerism and leftist ideology.

Simply put, the next post on the Boomers will be a long and complex one, and it's taking me a while to write.

Also, we've begun the process of house hunting, and that's been taking a great deal of my free time. We've simply had it with apartment living, and if we finagle the finances, we can probably buy a place for only slightly more a month than we pay in rent. And, what with the massive amount of HGTV and TLC being watched in our home, the home owner bug has really set in.

I guess this will make us members of the "owner class," and securely ensconce us in the ranks of the evil capitalists. 'Bout f***ing time, too.

Boomer Vs. X in Academia

2005-03-05T20:45:00.000-06:00

A sequence of events, culminating in an odd desire to hear Bananarama's "Robert DeNiro's Waiting (Talking Italian)" (which I actually own on CD) reminded me that I was a member of Generation X. I think my current liminal status in academia is reminding me of 90s films like Reality Bites and Kicking and Screaming--I'm about as happy with my post-college life as the characters in those films.

Now, an initial disclaimer. I don't buy completely into the whole generational labeling game, and I certainly understand the objections raised against it. However, I also recognize that despite my own efforts to the contrary (particularly in the wake of the Peter Sacks book on Gen Xers in college), I'm more or less a typical Gen Xer. And many of the Boomers I know are more or less typical Boomers. Whatever the origins of these labels, there is something to them. Call it zeitgeist, unpopular as that term has become in academic circles. Whatever. I still like it.

But, this post isn't so much about me or about the labels themselves as about what I was able to discover while playing around on the internet, looking for stuff about Generation X.

A search of Amazon, followed by a Google search, revealed three distinct areas of study currently being conducted in Gen X department: how to best sell us stuff (to which my answer is: provide us with greater economic stability), how to bring us into (or back into) organized religion, and how Boomer bosses can successfully understand their Gen X employees and integrate them into the pre-existing workforce, itself largely the product of Boomers and their values.

This last seems to be a major concern, and was the subject of at least ten of the first forty or so books that came up when I did a subject search of "Generation X" at Amazon. Apparently, the effects of the generation gap are quite severe in many places of business. The values of Generation X, these studies seem to stress, are very different than those of Boomers, and this has caused no small amount of strife in the workplace. For one thing, we appear to be far more interested in our private lives than Boomers--we aren't willing to work as much overtime or devote ourselves to our work to the exclusion of home and family. We also desire greater economic stability, and are resentful of Boomers who block our way up the employment ladder. Finally, Gen Xers have largely rejected both ends of the Boomer "value spectrum": the crass materialism generally associated with Boomers as well as the leftist political activism of the Woodstock crowd. Some pundits have even made the argument that we are more conservative as a generation, though from what I am able to gather, this doesn't necessarily mean we are a Republican generation, but that we seek a stability that was severely lacking in our youth--this is particularly true of the large number of Xers who are the children of divorce and the children of workers who were laid off during the recession of the early 1980s. (Personally, I think it also has a lot to do with the fact that we were weaned on films like The Day After and Testament.)

But my question is, why don't we see evidence of this large generational gap in academia? From what I've seen, most of my fellow Gen Xers have bought into the left-wing branch of Boomer culture hook, line, and sinker, and I can generally find little or no difference between the Boomers and the Gen Xers I work with, even when the discussion is limited to Xers, and the Boomers are nowhere near.

It seems to me that if the problems of the business world were duplicating themselves in academia--and by academia I mean the humanities and social sciences, since that's where I work and those are people I have daily contact with--then we should be seeing a rejection of what I can only characterize as "60s think" among up and coming scholars. They should also be interested in stablizing fields of study, rather than trying to explode them, a la cultural studies and the various ethnic and gender enclaves.

Yet in academia, Generation X scholars are, for the most part, simply replicating the thoughts and work of the Boomers. Oh, we've added things to the mix, but we haven't added anything that smacks of Generation X, at least not as it is described in the non-academic world. Instead, we're just helping the Boomers move their projects further ahead.

Does anybody have any insight into why this would be?

Have Gen X academics allowed themselves to become Boomer clones, or are we going to see a massive Gen X revolution once more of these omnipresent Boomers retire?

(Click on "Confess Your Thoughtcrime Here" to leave a comment.)

The Joys of Adjuncting

2005-03-02T23:28:00.000-06:00

With the demise of The Invisible Adjunct, I should probably do my part to make certain that the concerns of adjuncting remain visible in the blogosphere. Since Winston the graduate student has moved to Winston, the spousal hire adjunct, I suppose I'm in as good a position as any to voice some of my concerns as an adjunct. Also, I was a freeway flyer adjunct in Southern California for several years between the M.A. and the Ph.D., so I have that experience to draw from as well.

I will say that my current adjuncting experience is quite different from the earlier one. For one, I am at a single institution, primarily because we do not live close enough to another insitution at which I could pick up classes. All we have within driving distance are Research One schools, with a vast pool of graduate students slaves to staff the classes the profs avoid, and schools that require I make a statement regarding my relationship to Jesus and promising to adhere to a certain code of moral conduct which includes abstinence from alcohol. Not to weasel in on Vodkapundit's territory, but I drink like a fish, so these schools are out of the question. Life without cocktails and fine wine would be no life at all.

Plus there's the fact that all of these schools are at least 1 - 1 1/2 hours drive away, and only pay abour $1,300-$1,600 a course. That doesn't make it particularly attractive. And, of course, they'd all want me to teach composition.

The position here is not too bad. The Freshman Indoctrination course will, within the next year or two, cause some definite problems between me and my department chair, but I'll deal with that when the breakdown comes. Beyond that, I've mainly taught literature and film, and have even been offered a graduate level course for the next Spring semester.

The teaching itself has been enjoyable, sans the actual material in the Freshman Indoctrination course. The students are polite and attentive, such a change from the large Research One school where I did my Ph.D. The material in the literature classes I've been given is quite enjoyable, and I have been given more or less free rein in determining the content of these courses.

Yet I am teaching completely out of my area, at least in terms of my dissertation work.

This poses some massive problems, at least as I see it, for going onto the job market next year (this year, by the way, was an ENORMOUS flop). Where to concentrate my attention? Certainly, the way to success in academia is to teach courses that follow along with your own research--definitely the explanation for some of the narrowly conceived, esoteric graduate seminars I took. Yet I do not really have this luxury. I'm teaching right now in an area about as far afield of my dissertation area as it is possible to go. And Freshman Indoctrination takes up far more preparation time than I'm being remunerated for, and has NOTHING to do with anything I've ever worked on or will ever work on.

So what the hell do I go on the job market on as next year? How do I work in the necessary research to produce an additional article in my dissertation field--work that will require a massive bifurcation of my brain?

Or do I instead try to market myself as the "ultimate generalist"? God knows, I'm not adverse to teaching a variety of literatures, and actually enjoy my work more when there is some variety to it. And I'm enjoying the material I'm teaching right now in many ways more than the material and era I dissertated on.

So I find myself in a dilemma common to many of the adjuncts I've known, wrestling with the disparity between their graduate school work and their teaching.

Of course, it may be the case that I will adjunct at this school for the rest of my life, or at least for as long as they'll throw me the bone of a couple of classes a term for twenty cents on the dollar. Hopefully, my wife will move to an associate professorship on schedule and get a reasonable raise that will allow us to live and pay off our student loans.

Can you be an adjunct forever?

Adjuncts and former adjuncts, comment on your experiences.

Like Water for Chocolate--An Update

2005-02-27T01:08:00.000-06:00

This book wasn't as painful to teach as I had feared, since almost all of my students complained that they were being asked to read something that basically compared to a soap opera, something I noticed pretty quickly as well. Thus we were able to discuss the book's shortcomings, and many students expressed the opinion that the book was on the list thanks to affirmative action, saying if it had been written by whomever wrote Bridget Jones's Diary, it would not have been assigned, and that it truly belonged on that table that Border's puts out every summer with all the "chick" books on it. (Which always puzzles me--do women have the summer off, or something? Was this some feminist victory of which men have been left unaware? She says she's going to work on those lazy July mornings . . . )

Anyway, from Esquivel we moved to two books with very Marxist leanings, and the students picked up on that, as well. We actually had some good discussions about the left-leaning nature of the reading list for this course, as well as ways in which a reader can pick up subtle bias. A couple of very left students were a bit disgruntled, but I gave some examples of right-wing bias to show that it existed as well, though not in any of the books on our reading list.

This has led to some interesting discussions regarding the course itself, but I'm not sure what effect they will have on future versions of the course, if any. The students are comfortable talking with me, but if I suggest that they talk with someone in charge, they become quite reluctant to continue speaking. Still, I tell them they're paying a buttload to go here, so they should voice their concerns. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.

I would, of course, be far more specific about which books we're reading and what I'm supposed to be doing with them, but I'm 99% sure that doing so would reveal where I work, so I have to be vague about some of this stuff. The course and the reading list aren't necessarily unique, but what this university has chosen to do with the idea is, so it wouldn't take one of my colleagues more than a minute or so to figure out where I worked.

I'm hoping that when the academic year is over, I will be able to talk about it in such a way as to make it sound a bit more generic.

Also, I'll try to blog again in a couple of days with as much of the hiring story as I can tell. Again, it's hard to make these stories have a real impact without giving away the details. But, I'll see what I can do, and I'll bounce them by someone I trust to keep silent.

In the meantime, I intend to start blogging a whole lot more. Hopefully, some of the readership I gained after Erin O'Connor's mentioning of me will start to come back.

Like Water for Chocolate--Or Perhaps Another Brown Substance

2005-01-29T13:49:00.000-06:00

Sorry not to have blogged in so long. Teaching has been keeping me busy, and we haven't had a home internet connection in awhile.

I appreciate all of the emails I received when I changed the template asking me to come back.

That email address (6079_Smith_W@comcast.net) no longer works, by the way, and I am now disgruntled_academic@yahoo.com. The same goes for Julia. For now, you can talk to me through the comments section here.

I find myself in the position of teaching Like Water for Chocolate, a poorly-written work if I've ever read one. It reads like a mediocre writer trying to channel Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, and failing miserably. The magic part of the magic realism is dreadfully forced, and the prose (albeit in translation) is tortured.

We are reading this, of course, because of the desperate importance of making certain that our students understand Mexican culture, a fact that has been admitted by several professors responsible for its inclusion in our Freshman Indoctrination course.

I've begun taking a very tentative subversive approach to this course, and have made my feelings about several of the books assigned quite clear to the students.

What I wonder is whether or not there are any good reviews out there--preferably online--that discuss the numerous problems with Esquivel's book. I haven't read Marquez in at least five years, and though I've looked through several short stories to find passages we might compare with Esquivel, I really don't have the time to do a proper job of showing students what good magic realism is like--providing passages from Marquez (and other authors) that show what Esquivel wishes she were capable of as a writer.

If you have any suggestions, let me know. I've Googled the book with as many variants on "bad review" as I can think of, but am innudated with sites referring to a Hip-Hop album of the same name, or references to the film.

I need the stuff soon.

I'll blog more as the term moves along. I have a number of excellent stories about academe, but so many of them need to be modified a great deal in order to avoid revealing who I really am. I really need to find ways to discuss the job search we're conducting--everything I've always suspected about the way these work is absolutely true. We'll see whether or not my predictions as to how this search will end come true.

The Spanish Civil War--Book Recommendations?

2004-11-11T23:37:00.000-06:00

I would like to locate a book on the Spanish Civil War that takes a balanced approach, condemning fascism where warranted but without acting as an apology for communism, or, worse, romanticizing the Republicans.

Suggestions?

It's not (all) about the morality, baby

2004-11-05T22:46:00.000-06:00

The news that morality was given as the main reason for 22% of Bush voters has caused quite an uproar on the listserv. Many posters are determined to reclaim morality from the right, which has the "wrong" definition of morality; they urge their fellow liberal Christians to resist the appropriation of the terminology of morality, and to discover ways to use such terminology themselves to fight the apparent tide of mindless Christian voters:

As long as we allow the political and religious right to continue to arrogate the words "moral" and "ethical" to themselves and to frame political discourse according to their own (mis)definitions of those terms, we will continue to lose these contests.

I personally want to retrieve from the immoral grasp of the Christian right my personal choice of being pro-life, anti-war, anti- state decreed murder (aka, death penalty), vegetarian, preferential option for the poor (my Catholic social justice mantra), feminist/ liberation theologian, etc., etc. We have for too long let the big mouths on the right- and to be fair, the left-- frame the debate and frame the
terminology...

Now, mind you, I am highly sympathetic to the notion that being a Christian is only compatible with the views expressed by the religious right is, frankly, absurd. Kudos to those who want to undertake such a reclamation of religio-political identity. However, more and more questions are being raised as to the validity of the inferences drawn from the exit polls. The Swanky Conservative has a breakdown of the statistics showing how, when we combine terrorism and Iraq, posed as two separate questions by the pollsters, the percentages work out a bit differently: 20.4% of Bush voters cite terrorism or Iraq as their primary reason for voting for Bush, compared to 12.95% of Kerry voters. Morality is the primary issue for 17.6% of Bush voters, 3.96% of Kerry voters. Check out Pejmanesque and The Volokh Conspiracy also.

UPDATE: Washington Times columnist Clarence Page has some additional stats:

"But a closer look at Election Day exit polls indicates the reputed rise in social conservatism may be a false media-generated perception. The exit polls conducted nationally by research companies Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International showed "moral values" with 22 percent, beat "economy and jobs" (20 percent), "terrorism" (19 percent) and "Iraq" (15 percent) as the issue of greatest importance to voters. The Pew Research Center found similar results with a post-election poll of 1,209 voters. But when Pew offered a wider range of choices, "moral values" fell to only 14 percent, behind "Iraq" (25 percent) and ahead of "jobs and the economy" (12 percent) and "terrorism" (9 percent.)
The biggest category turned out to be "other," which included such options as "honesty" and dislike off Bush or Kerry, although if you combine Iraq and terrorism (36 percent) the way the Bush campaign constantly did, they beat every other category."

Bush Voters are either Stupid or Evil

2004-11-04T13:42:00.000-06:00

If it wasn't so infuriating I'd be laughing...

I'm a member of an academic listserv, and for the past 2 days there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the outcome of the election. Take a gander: I've copied representative posts below, with names and instutional affiliations omitted. Each entry is a separate post; one or two are by the same posters, but for the most part they were written by different individuals.

my attitude is MAKE THEM PAY - time to find some political groups that are going to help me fight Bush's expected initiatives on 1) no help with healthcare for the poor (guess who, women) 2) end of legal abortion 3) end of hopes for same-sex marriage 4) increase of gap between poor and rich via such things as permanent tax cuts for the rich 5) home land nazicurity.....

I think it was pretty appropriate that I was lecturing on the fourteenth century and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse this morning.

Unfortunately, there are people in academe who voted for Bush...some of my best friends did, and it is hard to believe that they ignored that something known as the enlightenment actually took place a few centuries ago.

For some very-well educated people in this country and for many not so well-lettered, reason pales when facing revelation. The war in Irak is for them a holy war, Bush said it, it is a "crusade"...

For the poor people of this country, I feel very sorry. They will get infinitely poorer in the next four years. For Bush and his followers in his administration, the future looks great: there is plenty of money coming their way soon.

I agree with [the poster who wrote "MAKE THEM PAY"]- raise the bar-- if they want to promote a radically conservative, fascistic, fundamental Christian agenda, then we should array forces on the left with an equal amount of passion and deliberation. Push the hot topics-- if they want to tell us how to live, let us respond as adamantly...The new civil war...

I am stunned, and sick. I hadn't wanted to believe this administration could so thoroughly disguise its record and its agenda to so many people. I finally understand how people of good will in Germany must have felt in the 1930's: do we get out while the getting is still good, or do we stay and fight this evisceration of democracy?

And selfishly I'm thinking that if we stay and fight, and lose, we'll all be tarred with the same shameful brush. The triumphalist rhetoric occludes the fact that there ever even was significant dissent.

It's the 8 year-old son factor that weighs heaviest on my mind right now considering last night. In all seriousness, what advice can anyone give for those of us who really, truly are considering leaving the country, if not to protect our scholarship and sanity, then at least to protect our children who will be 18 in another ten years? I agree with the various motions to become more active in a variety of different organizations and fight this thing, but I cannot help but wonder, will we be reaching the people who most need to be swayed?

For instance, I do know people in the midwest and other areas who probably voted for Bush. Clearly, a good number of people did vote for Bush (just perhaps not very many on this list!). . . . They [Democrats] clearly have the academic vote, but what can we do to help them reconnect with people other than our colleagues, who are probably already of like minds? [Name omitted], I think you are right that there are people (probably not most of us) who are really going to suffer -- and a good number of them probably were responsible for putting him in the seat for 4 more years, as well as strengthening the republican presence in the house and senate.

Although I speak from a big blue state, we have gubernatorial evidence that even in California, their message is persuasive to many people.

This is what it must feel like to live in Italy under Berlusconi or Austria with Schroeder. My only consolation is that they will overreach, soon. My greatest fear is how many people will die in the process.

You voice my sentiments and fears very well, [name omitted]. I would like to think there is some hope in education, which we all engage in as part of our professional lives. But trying to impress upon the young women on this campus (in a VERY red state) that their lives and those of their daughters would be seriously limited by voting for Bush has been extremely difficult, if not impossible. One more reason why feminist teaching and WS programs need to keep happening. I think about the nation like an addict... nothing will change until we hit bottom and there's nowhere else to turn. For me, we're there. But this is obviously not the case with half of the electorate.

The vote was a 51/49 split. Not to mention the multitudes that didn't vote. But the fact that the turnout was so much higher than previously and gave these results is demoralizing. Worse, Congress went further right too, and we are about to lose the Supreme Court, what's left of it. Looks like we are about to get Scalia as Chief ... -- no I will never bring myself to call him a "justice." Having said all that, I think what [name omitted] has said is exactly right. We will just have to keep fighting and educating people. The biggest single cause here as I see it is the disinformation and manipulations of the mass media. People aren't informed, and I say that in full knowledge that much of that 51% don't want to know, and that a whole lot has already happened that is staring them right in the face. What more overreaching do they require? A lot, apparently. The exit polls had a lot of people citing "values." If they could see the carnage being wrought in Iraq, or in a different form on their own poor compatriots, I don't think we would have had these numbers. <>But exile is not an option for most of us. Stand and fight.

First, a few facts: There is no reason to be depressed. We are back where we were a few days ago, very little has changed. There are no more red staters now than there were a week ago. You did not just wake up in another country. Those whose agenda we fear most managed to move from 49% approval to 51% approval, largely by using homosexuals as boogeymen. They are unlikely to be able to repeat this turnout, unless they somehow find a way to ban gay marriage ... again?

The big picture: Tuesday was the high water mark of our aristocracy's cynical exploitation of a largely rural cargo cult.

Suggestion: Be the backlash.

The continuing struggle: We are right to fear that the right will use this 'mandate' to justify escalating the kulturkampf (here's one example: http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bennett200411031109.asp )

Know your enemy: There are shifts within the right that you might not know about. Moderates are losing out to extremists, and the latter's policies are awash in red ink and blood. Their anencephalic policies are no more likely to succeed in the real world than they were a week ago. Their fantasy world may make for a formidable political machine, but its alienation from hard facts is crippling to policy. Consider this:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1022-01.htm

Divide and conquer: There are divisions among those for whom 'feminist' is a dirty word. Do not make the mistake of the recently re-elected one, i.e., driving different enemies together because you failed to distinguish between them. Reach out to moderates, while making sure that the most risible extremes of the culture warriors are known far and wide. If they want to chant their loyalty oaths or sing 'Let the Eagle Soar,' just make sure there's a camera pointed at them. Shame is a powerful weapon.

(If you can speak to bread-and-butter issues in a frightening world while your opponent is speaking in tongues, then you are the sober alternative. Everyone's on a political stage right now, so find a part to play.)

It's not like you have an option: We have no choice but to make the most of our present situation, and I think the best way for the values of civilized people to triumph is to give the lunatics just enough rope to hang themselves (while trying to prevent any lasting damage to society, e.g., SCOTUS). It takes little leverage to sicken most of America with the antics of these extremists.

So: don't give up, and have the sense to pick your battles. Forge communities, frame messages, don't give up.

This was the overwhelming tenor of the list through yesterday and this morning. I was extremely tempted to post myself, but I'm in a vulnerable position professionally--I'm an untenured assistant professor, and one of my dissertation committee members is on this list (in fact, this person is the author of one of the posts I've listed above). What I wanted to say was this:

In light of [listmember's] call for community--not just among liberals but among all Americans--I have a few comments I'd like to make.

First, I am truly dismayed by the rampant condescension evident on this list towards Middle America. Poor gullible Heartlanders (not to mention conservative minorities)--they're too stupid to know what's good for them. We, of course, with our degrees and academic posts, are far wiser, and impervious to manipulative rhetoric. I'm sure that if we make sure to teach all our students good critical thinking skills, they'll all end up with politics just like ours.

Of course, this attitude doesn't seem to be limited to condescension towards the population of 30 out of 50 states--one poster implied her colleagues who voted for Bush are stuck in the Dark Ages. Even on a list such as this one, I have no doubt that there are at least a few members who voted for Bush (not that they'd necessarily feel comfortable joining this conversation, with its current tenor). Let us remember that this community also includes those who consider themselves feminist as well as (gasp! horror!) Republican. If we are to reach out to others, we must not deeply insult them in the process, or indulge ourselves in derogatory remarks when we think they're not listening.

Fortunately, a few brave souls who posted this afternoon suggested that there may be members of the list who don't share the assumptions informing the discussion so far, and who might feel silenced. I am heartened in particular by this poster, who is responding to another's claim that liberals are a more heterogenous group by nature and thus more "respectful (i.e., less intrusive) about others' beliefs."

I have found this thread to be interesting, to say the least... this contribution especially so. On the one hand, the writer recognizes the heterogeneity of liberals, and yet many of those contributors to this thread fail to recognize the extremes of heterogeneity among its members, seemingly equating "feminism" with "liberalism." I am heartened by those contributors espousing communication as a means to fostering community, and yet several entries seem to silence dissention and/or debate by assuming a certain homogeneity in the audience. I, too, am frustrated with the current political scene -- with the political headway of the religious conservative extremists -- but I am equally disheartened by the rancor of the liberal extremists as well. As an independent voter, more conservative than some yet more liberal than others, I find less and less to admire from those on either side of the fence as I watch them move farther and farther away from each other. I think a surprising number of people would agree with me, if my conversations both in academia and outside are any indication (if I had a nickel for every time I heard the statement, "I don't like either candidate, but I can't NOT vote" or even "so I won't vote"...). How can we, as a nation, reach out to each other and find some common ground? How can we foster community when we refuse to listen to those who don't agree with us, when we neglect to work together toward solutions? How can we move forward when we are so busy moving apart? My great fear is that this country will continue widening its great divide, and the threat to our future will not be from without but rather from within.

You go, W. H.

I'll have a few more things to add later, but I've got a stack of midterms to grade...

Is this illegal?

2004-11-01T18:58:00.000-06:00

Drudge links to a story from Newsday, which I know is not the most unbiased of sources (though it's written by an AP reporter, so don't the two biases cancel out?), but if this is true, shouldn't someone be taken to task to this?

The Dems are pulling out a boatload of dirty tricks, and the MSM has been campaigning for Kerry all day, from what I've seen on CNN, MSNBC, and CNBC. And God knows they won't report on this, though Schwarzkopf himself is said to be aware of the scam and to have contact the DNC about it.

Who the hell is going to be held responsible for all this? Heads need to roll, and people need to be in jail--some of them for pulling shit on behalf of the Republicans, but most of them for pulling shit on behalf of the Democrats.

Whoever wins, something needs to be done to clean up the electoral process in this country. Tomorrow's going to be an ugly day, and I don't expect it to get any better after that.

My Dell Horror Story

2004-11-01T13:57:00.000-06:00

So, last year I bought a Dell Inspiron 8600, using a special increase in my Stafford Loan money that the government will grant once in your academic career for the purchase of a computer.

The computer cost around $2,000, but it was worth it to me because I needed a laptop, and I had been told such wonderful things about Dell.

The computer shipped to me one year and two weeks ago today. I did not buy the extended warranty, because it cost another couple of hundred dollars and I couldn't afford it. Thus I had a one-year warranty on the computer.

For the last couple of weeks, I have had problems with turning the computer on--it "wouldn't post" is the description the tech guy at Dell gave me. Yesterday, it wouldn't turn on at all, even after going through the whole "remove the battery," "unplug the computer" rigamarole.

After an online chat with Dell, it was determined that the motherboard had gone bad. The cost to me: $700.

I was on the phone this morning with Dell for about three hours, and their final word was to tell me that it was just too bad, and that the warranty was now expired, and that I could either fork over the $700 for the new motherboard or take a hike. I tried reasoning with them, and tried explaining that it was ridiculous that my computer had lasted only a year, and that though my computer had shipped from Dell on the 16th of October, 2003, it hadn't actually arrived until sometime around October 27th, so we were really talking about a matter of four days over the year warranty.

I wound up talking to five different people this morning, and the answer was always the same: your warranty is expired. Not so amusingly, I looked over the prices of the new Dell laptops, and find that they now come standard with 3-4 year warranties.

So, this is my manifesto against Dell, and given what I've been reading in the bulletin board discussions on Dell's own site, I am not alone in being sold a complete piece of shit and then being screwed over by Dell's service department.

I would imagine I'm also not alone in assuming that a computer should last longer than a year, and that this extended warranty crap is something that really needs addressing. A company should be forced to stand behind their product, particularly in instances of complete failure. I mean, really, this is like having the drive train of an automobile go out in the first year.

I would really appreciate it if my readers would pass this along and think twice before going with Dell. If I had known then what I know now--both in terms of my own experience and those I've read online--I would have gone with another manufacturer.

Dell will only stand behind its product if you pay them to stand behind it (unless they have to recall a product that catches fire, like the AC cords for earlier model Inspirons).

Don't buy a Dell.

A little less drivel in the world.

2004-10-10T14:55:00.000-05:00

Apparently, Jacques Derrida has passed away. Doubtless there will be mourning in the hallowed halls of academia, where Derrida is adored for giving literary critics permission to say whatever the hell they want about a "text" without having to worry about whether or not (1) it makes any sense and (2) it is in any way supported by the text being studied. Wonderful stuff, deconstruction.

So, we've gotten rid of Foucault, Said, and Derrida. I wish I could have a human response to their passing, but I just can't seem to muster one. I have a hard time mourning the passing of people as destructive as this bunch, and besides, they've worked so hard to rob us of our essential humanity, it would actually be a slight to their memory to have a human response.

Unfortunately, their acolytes are still alive and kicking, and we'll probably see some over-the-top obituaries explaining to the unwashed masses how terribly, terribly important Derrida was.

Perhaps the blogosphere can devote some of its collective energy to desconstructing these. After all, it's what Derrida would have wanted, isn't it?

Presidential Debate II

2004-10-09T20:47:00.000-05:00

I find it amusing to watch the Democrats trying to spin a defeat into a victory after almost two years of trying to spin American victories into defeats.

I was forced to endure an hour of CNN at the gym this afternoon, and found the amount of spin simply amazing. The Repulicans were willing to concede a draw, but the Democrats did everything they could to insist upon complete victory for Kerry.

In other news, I've been asked to start blogging more frequently, and to talk about my experiences teaching at this new university. I will make an effort to do so. It's hard to blog about my current job, though, without providing specifics that might prove damning.

And I still need to address being a lower middle class student pursuing a Ph.D. in English literature. I've written up a draft, but had to set it aside for a few weeks.

But--the dissertation is completed and only the defense remains. This may result in more blogging activity. God knows I have plenty to say; I just don't want to make it too easy to figure out who I am.

Textbook Bias, Parts III & IV

2004-09-09T22:08:00.000-05:00

Since I've been remiss in posting here--both because of teaching duties and because Blogger has been a royal pain in the ass lately--I'll post two subsections of the left-center-right section from the Giannetti book.

Chutry from Wordherders didn't see the bias in the last excerpt--I think that once I have posted the whole thing, it will perhaps become more obvious. There is a value judgment being made here.

So:

Relative Versus Absolute

People on the left believe that we ought to be flexible in our judgments, capable of adjusting to the specifics of each case. Children are characteristically raised in a permissive environment and encouraged in self-expression, as in My Life as a Dog. Moral values are merely social conventions, not eternal verities. Issues of right and wrong must be placed in a social context, including any mitigating circumstances, before we can judge them fairly.

Rightists are more absolute in judging human behavior. Children are expected to be disciplined, respectful, and obedient to their elders. Right and wrong are fairly clear-cut and ought to be evaluated according to a strict code of conduct, as in Pinocchio. Violations of moral principles ought to be punished to maintain law and order and to set an example for others.

Is it really necessary for me to fisk this in order to reveal the bias? Do I really need to point out the difference between saying "people on the left" and "rightists"? Between the kindly leftist being decribed above versus the punitive and inflexible person on the right? Christ--this passage drips with bias.

The next one is more subtle, and at least calls leftists "leftists":

Secular Versus Religious

Leftists believe that religion, like sex, is a private matter and should not be the concern of governments. Some left-wingers are atheists or agnostics, although some of the most famous have been members of the clergy, like the leaders of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Most leftists are humanists. Religious skeptics frequently invoke the authority of science to refute traditional religious beliefs. Others are openly critical of organized religion, which they view as simply another social institution with a set of economic interests to protect, as in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Leftists who are religious tend to be attracted to "progressive" denominations, which are more democratically organized than authoritarian or hierarchical religions.

Rightists accord religion a privileged status, as in The Virgin Spring. Some authoritarian societies decree an official faith for all their citizens, and nonbelievers are sometimes treated as second-class citizens, if they are tolerated at all. The clergy enjoy a prestigious status and are respected as moral arbiters. Piety is regarded as a sigh of superior virtue and spirituality.

The left is consistently described in positive terms, and is equated with freedom and liberty. The right is consistently associated with authoritarianism.

The excesses of the left--those that have resulted in societies like the former Soviet Union, North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam--are ignored. The excesses of the right are on full display, and the right is described almost exclusively in negative terms.

This is biased.

Textbook Bias, Part II

2004-09-05T22:49:00.000-05:00

First of all, I know I really need to get to blogging on the experience of being a lower middle class student in a Ph.D. program in English, finally starting the conversation with J.V.C. we talked about almost a month ago. That requires careful thought, though, and posting some quotations from a terribly written textbook doesn't.

So, without further adieu, here's "Environment Versus Heredity."

Leftists believe that human behavior is learned and can be changed by proper environmental incentives. Antisocial behavior is largely the result of poverty, prejudice, lack of education, and low social status rather than human nature or lack of character, as in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.

Rightists believe that character is largely inborn and genetically inherited. Hence the emphasis of many right-wingers on lineage and the advantage of coming from "a good family," as in Late Spring and Late Autumn. In some Asian societies especially, ancestor worship is common.

First of all, Giannetti obviously knows nothing about cognitive and evolutionary psychology, and hasn't a clue really about the subjects he's decided he is somehow qualified to pontificate upon.

But beyond that, this passage reads like a parody of something a leftist would say (though this joker is apparently serious). And a stupid leftist at that, given that both positions are a gross oversimplification of what we might expect to hear from the left and the right on this issue. And the right is represented by the fascist point of view, as is so common in leftist accounts of what the right thinks.

Yet we can see that the position of the left offers hope. Everything can be fixed if we just adopt their view of human nature, and look upon human beings as blank canvases upon which to paint the picture we want to see.

Why does that sound so familiar? Oh, yeah. Mao said something almost exactly like that, didn't he? Well, that certainly worked out well.

Textbook Bias, Part I

2004-09-04T18:15:00.000-05:00

This is the first in a series of excerpts from Understanding Movies, 10th edition, by Louis Giannetti (Prentice Hall, 2005). The book was left in my office by its previous occupant, and I was flipping through it during office hours.

It was quite interesting until I got to the chapter on ideology, particularly the section on the "Left-Center-Right" model. Giannetti breaks the discussion down into sub-sections, and I'll be reproducing one a day here for your perusal.

The first section is entitled "Democratic Versus Hierarchical."

"Leftists tend to emphasize the similarities among people. [Hah!] We all eat about the same amount of food, breathe the same amount of air. Likewise, leftists believe that a society's resources should be distributed in roughly equal portions, as is implied in The Human Condition and Pixote. Authority figures are merely skilled managers and not intrinsically superior to the people they are responsible to. Important institutions should be publicly owned. In some societies, all basic industries such as banking, utilities, health, and education are operated for the equal benefit of all citizens. The emphasis is on the collective, the communal."

"Rightists emphasize the differences among people, insisting that the best and the brightest are entitled to a larger share of power and the economic pie than less productive workers, as is implied in Henry V. Authority should be respected. Social institutions are guided by strong leaders, not the rank-and-file or even average citizens. Most insititutions should be privately owned, with profit as the main incentive to productivity. The emphasis is on the individual and an elite managerial class."

Frankly, while I was expecting some sort of bias from someone in the ultra-left enclave which is film studies, this shocked the hell out of me. This bias is so blatant I really can't understand how Prentice-Hall let this book go to press.

And it's inaccurate. I particularly object to the idea that the left emphasizes similarities while the right emphasizes differences. The identity politics of the modern left and the desire among the right to avoid the sort of Balkanization this has caused should be reason enough to at least question this ridiculous blanket statement made by Giannetti.

This is just a taste of things to come, though. There are nine sub-sections in the "Left-Center-Right" section of the ideology chapter. Next up is one that should garner some comments from Rose (and maybe we can get someone from Butterflies and Wheels over here): "Environment Versus Heredity."

An update of sorts.

2004-08-22T00:35:00.000-05:00

Since I'm going on a full month since I last updated this blog, I figure I should post something.

The move took up most of the end of July and on through the middle of August. We've only been in our new home for a week now, and there is still a great deal of organizing left to be done. At the same time, I have less than a month to submit a completed draft of the dissertation to my advisor, and while it's almost finished, what little is left to do is some of the hardest work of all: getting the whole thing to come together as a unified whole. The next three weeks will be some of the busiest of my academic career.

The new term starts next week, and I have already attended some meetings for the Freshman Indoctrination course, meetings which confirmed my fears that the course was designed primarily with an ideological agenda in mind. It's amazing what people will say when they assume they are in a room filled with like-minded comrades. I am definitely expected to use this course as a means by which to "liberate" my students from the conservative thought of their parents. For some reason, it is assumed that all students have conservative parents, and that their high school cirriculum was likewise conservative. Frankly, I'd love to know which high schools are still presenting a positive reading of Christopher Columbus. According to many of the teachers in the room, he remains a hero in most American history textbooks. Uh-huh.

I can tell that the coming term will provide a great deal of blog-fodder, as J.V.C. over at J.V.C. Comments has pointed out.

Also, a preview of things to come. J.V.C. and I have agreed to have a blog-to-blog discussion on what it was like to be a lower-middle-class student in the humanities. We're both of the opinion that our distaste for theory and the far-left are in part the result of our respective upbringings. For my part, I would also like to bring up what I have perceived as definite classism amongst my "colleagues." We'll probably start this in a week or so. I'm not sure who will be firing off the first salvo. I'll be working on a draft of my initial comments on the issue over the course of the next week, but will definitely have a few things to say next week about Freshman Indoctrination 101.

Oh, yes, I know "liberals" like this.

2004-07-28T03:00:00.000-05:00

This Onion "opinion" column is hillarious.

I'll try to write something more substantial soon. The dissertation is close to being finished, but moving time is fast upon me. Excuses, excuses, I know.

Okay, My Brain's Really Tired--Dammit!

2004-07-21T01:41:00.000-05:00

Just accidentally erased the rest of my post--d'oh! I'll try to recreate it, but of course it won't be as brilliant as the original (ahem).

There's been an interesting discussion over at Asymmetrical Information about bias in bookstore displays. One thing I'd like to reiterate here: One doesn't need to subscribe to any conservative conspiracy theory to notice and find objectionable the ideological imbalance evident in many bookstore displays of political titles. I don't think there's some sinister plot afoot to influence consumer politics and nudge them ever further left; what does disturb me, though, is that for the people who typically arrange such displays (usually no higher than assistant manager types, sometimes just a general employee--what we're talking about here is not the freestanding cardboard display units sent by publishers for new releases that are expected to be a big hit, but display tables created by whoever happens to be in charge of a section--I worked in both independent and chain bookstores for seven-odd years, so I do know somewhat whereof I speak) it doesn't seem to occur to them that they might want to choose titles that represent a range of ideological perspectives. This not only makes good business sense--those who share one perspective might want to check out the opposition, if only to muster counterarguments, while others might buy books to help bolster their own positions--it also represents the kind of intellectual integrity that I expect from those in an industry that at least partially claims to promote thoughtful inquiry and the broadening of horizons. Or maybe I'm just naive. But check out the comments on Jane Galt's blog and make up your own mind.

My Brain is Tired

2004-07-21T01:38:00.000-05:00

In response to some gentle prodding from Photon Courier, I'll take a break from packing, calorie-counting (amazing how much time a diet takes up when you do it right), and frantic dissertating (three weeks left to complete a working draft--eep!)and post a bit of something, just so everyone knows Winston and I aren't dead.

If I ever have kids (an event that becomes more doubtful as the years pass and financial security for me and my husband is still elusive), I want them to go to the Trinity School. Their curriculum is essentially based on the trivium and the quadrivium, the medieval concept of the liberal arts: music, history, mathematics, science, literature, art, and language. Hell, I wish I had gone to this school.

Being Forced to Teach Ehrenreich: A Plea for Help

2004-07-12T13:56:00.000-05:00

First, my apologies for not having blogged since the end of May. Finishing the dissertation is providing me with just about all of the writing practice I need, and since my dissertation is so far afield of the things I write about as "Winston" (since I am engaging in traditional literary criticism), most of what I am reading does not feed into blog entries that the general public would necessarily find interesting.

But, as the summer fades away, I am being forced more and more to think about the job I have taken for the 2004-2005 academic year, the poorly paid adjunct position I mentioned a couple of months back.

While I object strongly to the fact that I will be making about twenty cents on the dollar to an assistant professor, I object even more strongly to the fact that I am being required to teach this university's version of the infamous freshman indoctrination course, and that I have absolutely no freedom to choose what texts I will be teaching in my own class--it is all decided by committee.

As you may imagine, the reading list is chock full of left-wing favorites. Much of it is multicultural (a good 1/3 of the works are by African-Americans, about the concerns of African-Americans), some of it good, much of it further evidence of affirmative action in the canon.

One book really bothers me, though, and that is Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickle and Dimed. First, I am bothered because of Ehrenreich's blantant socialism and the fact that having students read this book--particularly since there is nothing else on the reading list to balance it out--may constitute an endorsement of Ehrenreich's position. Second I am bothered because she is really no kinder to the working class than their employers are, and has indeed profited from them to an even greater extent than their employers; she is, in all respects, a limousine liberal, and as someone who comes from a working class family, I find the attitude of the limousine liberal extremely abhorrent. Finally, I am bothered by the fact that her book contains glaring inaccuracies as well as simply solutions that do not take into account the complexity of the problem she wishes to solve; the institution at which I am employed and other institutions which use this book as part of their initial indoctrination efforts generally fail to address these concerns in their lesson plans.

So what has been keeping me up nights as of late (and God bless Ambien) is a deep concern with how I'm going to go about "teaching" this book.

Beyond the social, political, and economic concerns I have with the book is the simple fact that this university has assigned one arm-chair economist to teach a book by another arm-chair economist. This fact alone gives me ethical hives. Ehrenreich is an investigative reporter, and her book reveals her knowledge of economics to be both impoverish and ideologically conditioned. I took micro- and macro-economics as an undergrad, but that was at least fifteen years ago; since then, my exposure to economics has been a daily reading of The Wall Street Journal and that's about it. And even in the Journal, it's not like I'm reading it cover-to-cover.

Ethically, I'm required to give myself a crash-course in economics--which I'm going to try to do--but that's really no substitute for actual training in the field, and I do have a lot of other things on my plate right now.

So I want to ask you all for help, and I'd appreciate if other bloggers would mention my plea on their own blogs, to try and attract as much advice as possible. If you've taught this book before (and you've taught it critically--lockstep leftists needn't reply), I'd like to hear about it. If you have suggestions as to how I might make myself more knowledgeable before teaching this book--including reading recommendations--please let me know. And if you just want to tell me how you think you'd handle this situation, I'd love to hear that as well.

One last thing--it had occured to me that I might use my own situation as a teaching tool. While I'm not getting paid hourly, my yearly "salary" is at the minimum wage level, and I'm obviously helping the university and the department to balance their budgets. And I have no benefits. Yet here I am teaching a book about how evil the business world is, and how underpaid its employees are, as if the ivory tower is somehow better and in a position to pass judgment. I find that a little ironic.

Memorial Day

2004-05-31T02:39:00.000-05:00

Not having an especially high tolerance for violence, nevertheless I decided that this Memorial Day I would watch some films and documentaries on World War II. I honestly can't remember how much I learned about WWII history in highschool, and I never had the chance during my undergraduate years to take a class that discussed either WW in any depth. It's inspired me to learn more; I've started reading John Keegan's The First World War, since so much of WWII finds its antecedents there, and then I plan to move on to Keegan's book on the second WW.

Over the last week or so, I've watched Midway, The Desert Fox, In Harm's Way (which I can't say I recommend--very superficial), and The Longest Day. I'm particularly interested in films made during or immediately after the war--if anyone has any recommendations, please send them my way. I've seen a few documentaries, one on the attempted assasination of Hitler that reenacted the attempt, demonstrating that but for a few small unexpected contingencies the attempt would have worked, and one on the Japanese attempt to build a railway line through Burma that resulted in thousands of Allied prisoner of war deaths as well as three times as many native Burmese and Malaysian deaths; unfortunately, I don't recall what stations aired these, though it must have been either PBS or Discovery, since Winston and I can't afford anything other than basic cable at the moment.

The upshot of all of this is that I have a deep and profound admiration for those who gave their lives for freedom, including those like Rommel who recognized the futility of the war and made the ultimate sacrifice to try and stop it, for the sake of all peoples. How anyone can have the despicable audacity to compare any foibles of American leadership to Nazism...I have no words...

Reuters, Elton John, and American Idol

2004-05-27T14:07:00.000-05:00

First of all, let me state categorically that I do not watch American Idol. I'm not a much a fan of reality TV, though I have confessed to watching The Simple Life here and elsewhere.

Apparently there was some controversy over the voting off of a black, woman singer, either last week or the week before. Charges of racism, either against the American public or against Fox for somehow rigging the vote were quickly leveled.

One such charge was leveled by Elton John, apparently an American Idol fan, understandable given the absolute pop crap he's produced over the years.

Here's the Reuters headline from last week, carried over Yahoo! this morning because in the end, a black woman DID win the contest. I'll fisk it a bit at a time.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - British Rock star Elton John, a guest judge this month on the U.S. talent hunt TV series "American Idol," said on Tuesday that he found the voting by the national viewing audience "incredibly racist."

John, who heard the wannabe pop stars perform his songs during an appearance on the FOX TV show, added his voice to a chorus of dissent that followed last week's shock exit of black vocalist Jennifer Hudson, considered one of the top talents among those vying for a recording contract.

"The three people I was really impressed with, and they just happened to be black, young female singers, and they all seem to be landing in the bottom three," said John, commenting on the tally in which the lowest vote-getter is eliminated.

"They have great voices. The fact that they're constantly in the bottom three -- and I don't want to set myself up here -- but I find it incredibly racist," John said at a news conference promoting his Radio City Music Hall concert backed by an orchestra of students from London's Royal Academy of Music and The Juilliard School of New York.

Okay, so these singers are good because John says they're good, and because John says they're good, they belong in the top three, not the bottom three. Because they are all black, racism can be the only possible explanation, and, since John comes from a country where race relations are terrible, he must know what he's talking about, eh? How many "Pakis" would win on British Idol?

But I'm just being snippy. The fact is, there are other possible explanations for why one black woman was voted off, and for why the three black divas were in the bottom three. One might be that people are simply tired of black divas. I know I am. Nothing racist--there's a lot of pop music I'm tired of, primarily because once the music industry gets on a kick, they are determined to make us listen to the same, vapid crap until we just can't stand it anymore. How many Whitney Houston clones can we be forced to endure? Because honestly, there hasn't been a substantial change in the sound of the black diva since Whitney Houston.

Another explanation could be that this is rigged. But for racism? Bullshit. If it is rigged, it's rigged to make it more suspenseful. One of the bottom three did wind up winning, and the whole thing made for better television because she was the underdog.

Finally, the whole thing dismisses the fact that a black man won last year. Am I to take it that unless a black wins American Idol each year that we have a racist situation? Because that seems to be what Elton John is suggesting. Perhaps Mr. John should just shut the hell up. Maybe he'll get lucky and another famous blonde woman will die so he can resurrect his career with yet another rewrite of "Candle in the Wind" instead of trying to get attention by making ill-advised political comments.

The show often gets more than 20 million people voting.

The other two singers grouped in the bottom three of the seven remaining "American Idol" finalists last week were black divas La Toya London and Fantasia Barrino.

The results moved show host Ryan Seacrest to remind viewers that the series was a talent hunt and not a popularity contest.

"America, don't forget you have to vote for the talent," Seacrest said before closing the show. "You cannot let talent like this slip through the cracks."

Yes, even the host believes America is racist, and makes a veiled comment on the air admonishing the American public to vote talent, not skin color. Well, dipshit, looks like they did. Perhaps voting the woman off last week was so that this Fantasia woman would have a clearer shot? But, no, that explanation wouldn't fit with the preconceived theory of American racism, would it?

FOX Television declined to comment.

And now we come to my favorite parts. It is always necessary to bash Fox, and always necessary to write articles that contain the suggestion that some evil, conservative (because all racists are conservative, of course) plot is somehow either being engineered or facilitated by Fox.

Black crooner Ruben Studdard won the top prize last year.

Thanks for reminding us. Perhaps you could have mentioned this earlier in the article, or at least before the Fox crap, so that readers could make a clear connection between John's bullshit allegations and the truth of last year's contest.

FOX Television is part of the Fox Entertainment Group Inc., controlled by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. Ltd.

And my favorite line of all. Is this information even necessary to the article? Why is it here? I'll give me readers three guesses.

More on Liberal "Preaching"

2004-05-20T14:22:00.000-05:00

I remarked a couple of days ago that it seemed to me that most liberals--or rather leftists, as they aren't actually liberal--will take any opportunity to preach their message, inflecting pretty much anything and everything with their ideology. My subject then was the classroom, specifically, the composition classroom. My subject today is the PBS show Colonial House, which I happened to catch an episode or two of on Tuesday night.

The premise seemed an interesting one, and the beginning of the show, when the "governor" laid down the law, made me think I would be watching a show where people were going to live just as they had three centuries or so ago. It promised to be both educational and entertaining, as viewers would learn about life in a Puritan settlement, and watching inhabitants of the twenty-first century try to conform to seventeenth-century standards would make for an interesting few hours of television.

Wrong.

Within the first fifteen minutes, the lefties they had brought into the community staged a revolt, refusing to attend Sabbath and preaching their ideology to whatever camera was willing to listen. Their particular brand of pluralism and non-community had infected the community within a matter of a week or two, and at this point the experiment is pretty much dead. One woman and her husband spent Sabbath swimming naked in a nearby lake, and preached their brand of enlightenment to the camera, belittling Christianity and demonizing the past with each word. They were joined the following week by others, and the "governor" was finally forced to make concessions that would never have been made in the seventeenth century. Amusingly, Michelle Rossi-Voorhees, the nude swimmer, believes that she would have staged the same sort of revolt in the seventeenth century, seemingly unaware that she would not have been exposed to the sorts of radical ideology she spouts so freely were she to have been born centuries ago, and would likely have been a believer just like the "sheep" she was surrounded by. The evangelical atheist simply hadn't been invented yet, genius. But, of course, I don't expect people like Michelle Rossi-Voorhees to have a sense of history--or at least one unwarped by ideology--because the facts of history are unnecessary to their ideological program. So long as we know their version of history, all is well.

We also get to hear from Carolyn Heinz, who is in reality a professor of anthropology from California, who pretends to be the preacher's wife. After the Sabbath revolt is successful, she stages her own little feminist coup and refuses to wear a head-covering. Later, she joins the cast member who seemingly cannot stop saying the word "fuck" in raiding the colony's liquor supply.

In the end, what we are given is a show that is quite unsympathetic to the past, particularly the Christian elements of that past, which should not be surprising coming from a television station whose program Frontline will be devoted this week to what looks like a fright-fest regarding Bush's Christianity--electioneering, anyone? We certainly know what Bill Moyers' opinion of Republicans is, after his end of the world predictions following the 2002 elections.

Frankly, Colonial House reminds me of my Eighteenth-Century British Literature seminar. We spent the entire term judging the past by the standards of the present, and the self-righteous, leftist atheists in the class (a description which includes the professor) became more insufferable with each class meeting. Colonial House is being used as a vehicle for the propagation of a particular ideology, yet another instance of the left finding themselves unable to deliver infotainment without a heavy-handed political message.

Public Broadcasting System my ass.

The College Board List

2004-05-16T15:05:00.000-05:00

Not going through this list and indicating what I have read is apparently not an option for a blogger working in the field of literature. Hmmm. If I've counted correctly, I've only read 59. Well, 59 1/4 if you count Swann's Way. Perhaps once I've finished my dissertation I'll actually have time to read literature again. Still, I'll never read the Faulkner or the Joyce. I can handle short stories from both authors--I actually like most of Dubliners--but their novels just don't do anything for me. I tried several times to read Absalom, Absalom for an American novel course, but finally gave it up; it was boring, and since the professor only insisted that students use 4 out of the 5 assigned novels for each exam . . . I probably won't pick up the Woolf again, either. I started that at the end of one summer, and never picked it up again when I abandoned it to read what was assigned.

The ones I've read are italicized.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante – Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays [quite a few, actually]
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man [numerous attempts]
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni – Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales [everything, actually]
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way [in this middle of this one right now]
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass [I’ve read around in it]
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse [one attempt]
Wright, Richard - Native Son

What Liberal University? (Part II)

2004-05-15T12:51:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I suggested that the assumptions made by my fellow instructor and her students about the media inevitably led to making the self-same assumptions about the university: if the CEO of a corporation that owns a major media outlet is conservative--or even pro-business--then that bias is going to trickle down into the newsroom and make itself felt in the broadcasts we watch. In the scenarios they imagine, this is usually accomplished by edicts from the top telling the reporters what they can and cannot report on, what sort of spin to give any given issue, etc.

Anyone with half a brain can see that this doesn't happen. While there may be stories here and there regarding a parent company that one of the suits might have problems with, the general tenor of the news--with the exception of Fox--is liberal left. This is certain true of the big three and their anchors, and it's been true of the local news in pretty much every city I've ever watched the news in.

Given the liberal left biases of schools of journalism, this should hardly be a surprise. Journalism, like my own field, is pretty self-selecting when it comes to political bent, and, unlike my own field, it's a hell of a lot harder to hide your politics in journalism. A student of my wife's was in the journalism program at my current university. He was black and conservative, a deadly combination for his white, liberal instructors. He was actually given an "F" on an assignment in which he argued against an increase in state taxes; his instructor told him point-blank that there was no logical argument against an increase in taxes. His support of Bush garnered him similar criticism. He had a few conservative colleagues, but for the most part, he was surrounded by students who thought just as their instructors did. Eventually, he transferred to another university.

But, back to yesterday's posting.

The fact of the matter is that the instructor in the classroom after me and the Director of Composition are both leftists, and they do use the classroom and the composition program as a platform for their own politics. I've given you a couple of examples of the instructor's behavior, and will also add that they watched a video on the riots in Seattle told exclusively from the rioters' perspective. As for the Director, the textbooks we are allowed to choose from are ones which approach the favorite topics of the left--race, class, gender, the environment, etc.--and the essays included either present the left perspective to the exclusion of all others, or, if a perspective from the right is included, the editors of the textbook make their disagreement with the ideas in the essay quite clear.

We were told by the Director at a meeting back in 2000 that it was perfectly acceptable to use our classrooms to talk about the election, particularly given the crisis we would face if the election went the wrong way. This last Fall, I walked out on the meeting when the Director began discussing how we might best discuss Iraq in our classrooms, and how to handle it when students disagreed with the enlightened opinion we were providing them.

The leads me to present two theories regarding the Alterman book and the ideas my colleague was presenting in her class.

The first is that liberals assume that a media owned by big business must necessarily present a conservative perspective because liberals--or, more accurately, leftists--when placed in a position where the can pursue their political program, will inevitably do so. The accusation of conservative bias is there precisely because liberals cannot imagine not taking advantage of a position of power and using it to further their political goals.

From my own observations, such a theory makes sense. I have taught, over the years, at many, many institutions with many different instructors. There has almost always been a direct correlation between how vocally liberal an instructor was and the extent to which that instructor used his or her class as a political platform. Vocally conservative instructors (the few I've actually met), generally did their best to keep their classrooms politically neutral, preferring to assign topics that would not delve into politics, or choosing textbooks that were as balanced as possible (hard to do, given that these textbooks are almost always edited by liberals). I'm not saying this is always true; but there is a pattern.

My second theory is that liberals accuse the media of a conservative bias in order in order to divert the public's attention from the truth of the media's liberal bias. This theory is shared by many who have taken issue with Alterman's book, and it does make sense. Certainly, Fox News provides more than enough examples to make a case for conservative bias, and those who are already sympathetic to the liberal cause are often willing to take a small set of examples (the Washington Times is also touted out, and sometimes the WSJ) and accept that they are representative of the whole. They will also cite a single conservative columnist on the editorial page as evidence that the paper itself has no bias, ignoring the fact that the remainder of the paper--particularly the highly editorialized front page--is biased to the left.

The second theory requires that the left engage in a deliberate attempt to trick. The first is a bit more charitable, as it assumes that their reaction to this issue is predicated on their own experience of the world and their own philosophy.

Either way, they are a deluded bunch. Yet they remain in charge of the humanities and social sciences, and they have a tremendous effect on the thought processes of the 18-22 year old camp.

I have an idea for trying to change this, though I have no idea what the feasibility of this idea is, and it is, in the end, a bit self-serving. I'll get to this later . . .

What Liberal University?

2004-05-14T15:09:00.000-05:00

So today I'm packing my bags and getting ready to leave my classroom after teaching, and the instructor's class after mine is preparing for a presentation on Alterman's What Liberal Media? (no link--he doesn't deserve one), a presentation which seemed to rest on the argument that since big businesses own media corporations, then the media must be biased in a conservative direction.

First of all, this proceeds on the erroneous assumption that all business people are conservative, and that all companies lean to the right, an assumption which hardly explains the large donations to the Kerry campaign made by several big businesses (though not by the Heinz Corporation, curiously enough--what do they know that we don't?).

Second, it assumes that if a media group is owned by a conservative, then the information presented must be have a conservative bias. Of course, if we proceed on this sort of assumption, then we must also proceed on the assumption that the leftist who teaches the course after mine must necessarily be teaching her course from a leftist bias, and that our whole program must be biased towards the left, since the Director of Composition is as left as left can be, but we'll leave that alone for now.

What really irritates me is that there was no actual examination of the content of the news--merely a bunch of fancy graphs showing which company owns which media outlets and then a conclusion that these graphs have somehow proven conservative bias. The whole process of finding evidence for an argument has been bypassed, and no link between the CEO and the newsroom established. I would think a few choice clips from Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings would be enough to at least call the conclusion into question, if not to refute it entirely.

This is what passes for critical thinking in our composition program. This is what parents are paying for their children to learn.

My New Status, Fall 2004

2004-05-13T15:46:00.000-05:00

As cryptically as possible, I would like to update my readers (those who are still around, given my poor performance as a blogger as of late) as to my status in the academy and my possible plans for the future.

Starting in the Fall of 2004, I will become what is known in the profession as a "trailing spouse". My wife, who is also an academic, was successful on the job market this year, and I will be rejoining the ranks of the invisible adjuncts, whose ranks I left back in the Fall of 1999 to pursue my Ph.D. in English literature. I will be teaching the same number of classes as she, though making about 20% of what she will be making. Because of this, the tone of this blog will likely change come Fall.

This will be particularly true given the fact that as an adjunct, I will have zero control over the content of the courses I will be teaching, both freshman composition and introduction to literature. The freshman composition course has been designed in such a way as to deliver the leftist academic message to all students enrolled (the entire student population), and I will obviously have some problems with that; my class will likely be an exercise in exposing and tearing down ideological thinking, rather than one designed to get students to parrot the party line in papers which demonstrate little or no critical thinking abilities.

The up side of all of this is that I will have plenty of fodder for the blog. This term has proven particularly dry in terms of blogging material, as I have completely abandoned my university's guidelines in teaching my composition course and gone my own way, forcing students to tackle large and untimely philosophical issues rather than bitch and whine about current events. I have also become increasingly disassociated from the place, as my affiliation with it is quickly coming to an end; and, as the majority of graduate students admitted in the last three years have increasingly self-identified according to their political approach to literature rather than the literary era they have come to study, I have little or nothing in common with most of them. My main point of contact with my current univiersty is the almost finished dissertation, and I doubt if anyone wants me to blog on that. Besides, to do so would likely reveal my identity to anyone who looked into who's writing in my current area of study.

However, I have taken the adjunct position solely out of financial need, and do not see myself renewing the contract (should an offer even be extended) beyond the first year. We have discussed returning to the job market with the Ph.D.s in hand, to see if we have any more luck that way, but we will not be making that decision until September or October. For my part, I plan to spend the 2004-2005 academic year writing and sending out articles like a madman, and hope that by Fall of 2005 my CV will be a bit longer and more worthy of notice among hiring committees (at present, I have only two publications on it).

Yet my experience on the job market this year, and the stories I have heard from others--successful and unsuccessful job seekers--leads me to wonder what sort of success I can hope to find, given the fact that my work is at odds with conventional wisdom in the humanities and social sciences, and has been known to provoke the ire of audiences at conferences. That I do not "do theory" is pretty obvious, and that I lean towards the right is something that can be easily discovered through a few well-considered questions.

As the spouse of a faculty member, I have the option to enroll in courses at my wife's university free of charge. I have given serious consideration to the following options: (1) Law school, specifically, international law and (2) Cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

For someone trained in English, the move to law is pretty much a no-brainer. I have no idea how I would do on the LSAT, though my GRE scores (the general scores, not the subject test) were pretty high. Yet I have spent years in a field that does not require the sort of rigorous study that law does; I think the GRE is the last real examination I took, back in 1998. I'm not sure how much those skills have atrophied.

Cognitive psychology and neuroscience offer the same challenges, with the additional problem that I have not taken a science course since 1989. I have obviously been doing some work in this field, but it is as an amateur, and I have no idea whether or not I would be able to keep up with the professionals, nor what sorts of undergraduate training I would need in order to gain entrance into a graduate program.

These decisions need to made rather soon, as I need to determine where my energies would be best directed. I am in my mid-thirties, and if I'm going to make a career change that requires additional years of my life to embark upon, I need to get started right away.

Oh, and I'm not really willing to go the Erin O'Connor route. I taught at a private high school for three years, and that was enough for me. As for a public high school, there's no way I could sit through the bullshit credential courses. I took a few as an undergraduate, and learned almost immediately why entering college freshman are so ill-prepared for their classes. You don't make dioramas in a literature class; you write essays.

A new look, and comments are open.

2004-05-13T13:04:00.000-05:00

Looks like Blogger has finally finished their long promised upgrade. There were several new templates, and I liked this blue one. Unfortunately, the new template didn't bring my old links with it, so I'm in the process of reconstructing them. I should have written all the info down (or saved the old template in MS Word), but it didn't occur to me to do so. So, with the push of a single button . . .

One advantage (or possibly disadvantage, if people decide to be asses) to the new Blogger is that comments are now integrated into the actual program, so, given that I no longer need to host comments from a different location, I had might as well turn them on. We'll see how they work--if things stay reasonably civil, I'll leave them up. If things get nasty, I'll likely turn them off.

More Michael Moore

2004-05-12T23:06:00.000-05:00

As I packed my bag and got ready to leave the classroom today, the composition instructor who teaches in the room after me started setting up a video to show her class.

Whose rotund figure graced the screen? Michael Moore's.

I can't tell which is stretched further--his "truth" or the skin around his stomach.

He was, of course, being used as a credible source of information.

No, no. No liberal bias in the academy.

Bad blogger. Bad! Bad!

2004-04-27T23:32:00.000-05:00

Sigh. More than twenty days since last I blogged. Dissertating (is that a verb?) has now become a full-time job. Oh, I will finish it; but this last chapter and a half is kicking my ass. I need that one last inspirational book to cross my desk and help push me to the finish line. I think I found it; $40 on Advanced Book Exchange.

We're working on a unit on utopias in my composition course, and I decided to introduce the question of biological determinants of self versus sociological determinants. I have several students who refuse to acknowledge that there are any biological determinants of self, though when I sit down to talk with them, they obviously do believe that there are biological determinants. But, once I call them on it, they backpedal and try to wriggle their way out of the ramifications of their comments.

I started discussing anti-depressants with a student, and she admitted that they did have an effect on depression, and from there we moved to talking about serotonin and such.

When I pointed out that the efficacy of drugs like Wellbutrin was evidence in support of biological determinants of human behavior, she started talking about depression as being a "creation" of the drug industry, a la Foucault, and condemned doctors for over-prescribing the drugs. I certainly agree with her on that count, but I also know many people for whom these drugs have been a lifesaver--literally.

The whole conversation went like this.

And it wasn't just with her. There were other students in the office as well, and we kept getting to the point where I needed to point out the ramifications of their thinking, and the reaction--across the board--was to deny those ramifications and let a predetermined ideological position take over.

They are supported in this, of course, by many of their home departments--sociology, anthropology--basically the bulk of the humanities and social sciences. And they refuse to consider ideas outside their home disciplines, even to the point of denying that these positions exist at all. Or, turning the positions into straw men, maintaining that the sciences still subscribe to Skinnerism.

If I had comments, I'd open them up. But I'm open to suggestions as to how to deal with this. Their minds are closed to ideas outside the humanities and social sciences. Their minds are closed to the ramifications of their own words--to the ramifications of the things they've observed through the simple act of living.

How do you deprogram students and get them to think outside the carefully constructed ideological box the modern university constructs for them?

The email address, as always, is in the sidebar.

An Update on the "Theory Question" and the Academic Job Interview

2004-04-05T01:05:00.000-05:00

A colleague recently informed me about a string of job candidates for a position in the English department at a prestigious West Coast university being rejected because of the dreaded theory question, the one the academic left insists does not exist.

Several candidates were in touch with one another at a graduate student conference (after all had gotten jobs elsewhere, and were willing to talk about the job search experience with some candor), and each told the others the same story--a job interview that ended when the theory question was answered "improperly", i.e. the candidate expressed reservations about theory.

The position did not advertise for someone who was a theorist, but was presented as a traditional, era-designated position.

Doubtless, this will be dismissed as mere heresay. But I trust the person from whom I received the information--someone I'm not about to out because a first-year assistant professor is just as vulnerable as a grad student--and the story is in keeping with other anecdotal evidence.

Frankly, there's a part of me that would like to make it a legal requirement that these interviews--which are often only a few steps removed from an interrogation--be taped, so that there is a record for all parties involved.

As for my own progress on the job market, that's something I'll address when I feel more comfortable divulging details that might allow a hostile audience to discern my identity, particularly after some recent experiences in the world of academia that have left me a bit unnerved. For now, I'll merely say that I will not be living in the same state come August.

Whose government is sliding into fascism, again?

2004-03-20T16:52:00.000-06:00

Because something like this incident sounds like the stories the EU tells about the U.S.

Methinks the EU needs to remove the mote from its own eye.

FactCheck.org--Tempering My Praise

2004-03-18T12:50:00.000-06:00

Looking at FactCheck.org again today, I have to temper my praise from Monday a bit. They've begun the practice of undercutting their criticism of Kerry with criticism of Bush in the same article. For example, in the most recent one, they verify that Kerry actually did vote no on a appropriations bill to send $87 million to the troops in Iraq to shore up their defenses, etc. But they can't leave it at verifying the fact; instead, they must tell us that the extra $87 million wouldn't have been needed had Bush provided enough in the way of supplies (particularly armor) in the first place.

Certainly Bush has made some misjudgments about what was/is needed in Iraq. But when the need was discovered, he made an effort to rectify his earlier misjudgment. Kerry played politics and voted to deny necessary aid, and then tried to divert attention away from his actions by blaming Bush.

As for Kerry's vote to authorize the President's use of force, only the most disingenous would argue that that didn't really mean that he voted in favor of the Iraq war.

Really, anyone who says they didn't realize that voting to authorize the use of force meant that there was a strong possibility Bush would actually use that force has no business pursuing the presidency. World leaders, I would think, should be able to read the intentions of other world leaders, particularly when they telegraph them as much as Bush does.

Their CPB connections are starting to show--subtly, of course, but that's the way the liberal media works, so they can deny bias at a later date and your average reader/viewer, unfamiliar with rhetorical manipulation, will believe them.

I try to get back to blogging about education soon. I don't have much to say about it right now, save that I cannot believe the grades my students received on the objective portion of their latest exam. How many times do you have to repeat something to a college student before it sinks in?

FactCheck.org

2004-03-15T14:47:00.000-06:00

You may or may not have noticed that a few weeks ago I quietly slipped a new link into the sidebar, for a website called FactCheck.org, a site which checks on the "facts" contained in political ads and holds them up to the real facts.

It's being run out of the Anneberg CPB Foundation, which made me skeptical, because anything connection with PBS has been tainted in my opinion, but they appear to be pretty even-handed in what they choose to tackle, and even--dare I say it, lest I resurrection the lie of the conservative media--a little harder on the Kerry campaign and those asshats over at MoveOn.org than they are on Bush. I see this as being a result of the fact that the Bush ads aren't playing as fast and loose with the truth as the Kerry ads are, and aren't just blatantly lying and manipulating like the weasels at MoveOn.org who need to pull their collective heads out of their collective leftists asses.

Did I mention I hate MoveOn.org?

Anyway, they seem to update every couple of days (more often than yours truly), and they're worth a look.

I'd take a moment to blog on that country full of Neville Chamberlains we call Spain, but in a few years, when the new series of state mandated history textbooks in Europe see this weekend as the beginning of the glorious revolution (praise Allah), won't there be egg on my face.

Conservatives in Academia Post Over at Asymmetrical Information

2004-03-09T22:03:00.000-06:00

Jane Galt has an excellent post on the lack of conservatives in academia over at Asymmetrical Information. She does a nice job of breaking down the cause and effect aspect of the problem.

As for the lack of proof one commentator complains about, I think that the rapidly growing number of conservative academic blogs, most of which complain about this problem, are beginning to constitute proof enough, not to mention the Duke statistics and the studies conducted by Horowitz and company.

However, I do agree with the commentator who argues that the problem should not be identified as the lack of conservatives in academia but rather the preponderance of a leftist point-of-view (I can't really call them liberals--sorry, but what I see isn't liberalism). It's not that there aren't conservatives in academia, it's that in the humanities and social sciences at least, one political point-of-view dominates all others.

Most academics in the humanities and the social sciences--and when I say most, in my personal experience this is something like 90% (1) are against the war in Iraq; (2) consider Bush to have illegally seized the presidency; (3) are for abortion on demand; (4) oppose the death penalty; (5) are agnostic or atheist; (6) are in favor of affirmative action; (7) are in favor of redistributing income through the use of a progressive tax structure (though I know quite as few who are in the favor of the Nader/Green Party limit of $30,000 a year income for all); (8) are in favor of gay marriage; (9) belief Western culture to be responsible for many of the world's ills; (10) consider the authority of the U.N. to be ethically "weightier" than that of the United States.

I could go on, but I think you all get the picture. The prevailing point-of-view on almost any issue you could raise is left.

But it doesn't stop there. There is also the attitude--sometimes expressed overtly, as in the Duke Philosophy Department Chair, but more often subtly--that other points-of-view are unenlightened, whether they be conservative, neoconservative, libertarian, or what have you.

The problem is that leftism is all too often taught as dogma. Other points-of-view are misguided at best, evil and wrong at worst.

Sure, let's let 14 year olds vote.

2004-03-08T21:57:00.000-06:00

Unbelievable. California lawmakers want to extend the vote to children as young as 14.

The AP writer doesn't tell us what political party these "representatives" belong to, but we are told that Republicans don't like it.

How much you wanna bet these are Democrat lawmakers behind this? Most kids in the 14-18 group would likely vote Democrat, particularly with all their empty promises regarding education and utopia in general. What better way to increase the number of Democratic voters (besides extending the franchise to illegal aliens, that is)?

After years of teaching college (and a few teaching high school), it seems to me it would be a wiser move to raise the voting age to 21, or even 30--at least until after you've outgrown the urge to pierce body parts other than the ear lobe. The argument that "the Internet, cellular phones, multichannel television and a diverse society makes today's teens better informed than their predecessors" is ridiculous on the face of it. Sure, teens have access to a wealth of information, but what information are they actually accessing? Total Request Live on MTV and video clips of Paris Hilton?

Honestly--watch a few segments of "Jaywalking" on The Tonight Show and you'll want to rescind a lot of people's voting rights. The sad thing is that your average college freshman is only slightly better informed in political matters than the people Leno is poking fun at--just teach a composition class if you don't believe me.

The Terrorist Teachers' Union

2004-02-24T18:32:00.000-06:00

A poor choice of words, to be sure, but anyone who denies that the teachers' unions have held this nation's educational system hostage for the last few decades is either a fool or in the union's pocket.

And if we required every public official who spoke his or her mind to the offense of someone else to resign, we'd wind up with a John Kerry in every public office.

Of course, I find much of what Kerry says offensive, but no one's listening to me.

I found Lou Dobb's report on CNN today amusing--he followed up the Paige story with a report on the failings of the American education system. Connection, anyone?

One man's fiction is another man's reality.

2004-02-20T01:16:00.000-06:00

I’ve been a bad blogger. I can only plead dissertation.

My bedtime reading--to clear all the scholarship out the brain so it will shut down for the night--for the last week or two has been a book called Death and Restoration, by Iain Pears, who many readers may be more familiar with from An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio. He’s also written an interesting series of mysteries featuring an art dealer/professor named Jonathan Argyll and his girlfriend/fiancee, Flavia di Stefano, who works for the art theft division of the Rome police department. They’re well done, for what the are, which is enjoyable mysteries for those who know a bit about the arts and humanities and who are interested in learning more. Slightly less challenging than Arturo Perez-Reverte, but every bit as enjoyable.

I bring this up because one, they’re worth a read, particularly for bedtime and on the EFX machine. But I also came across a passage in Death and Restoration that perfectly captures the problems in higher education, both those brought on by the ridiculous business model we have had forced upon us by administration and those brought on by the empty, leftist pedagogical practices still in vogue in most of the institutions I’ve had the “pleasure” of teaching in. I’m going to quote the two pages in question in full.

And from there the book moves back into the main story. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find this a succinct summation of two of the biggest problems facing academic reform today.

Of course, this may speak more to me than to you, because I find myself this term in the position of delivering old-fashioned lectures at the front of a “smart” classroom, competing for attention with the movie screen and the equipment that command the center of the room.

Liberal Bias in the Media

2004-02-11T21:31:00.000-06:00

Oh, my God! ABC News admits it! Here's the link.

Noindoctrination.org gets some press at The Chronicle of Higher Ed.

2004-02-09T01:10:00.000-06:00

At Photoncourier, David Foster comments on a December Chronicle article on the watchdog site Noindoctrination.org. This site provides a forum for students who experience bias in the classroom, as Mr. Foster describes below:

What most of the students seem to be objecting to is not just having to listen to a lengthy exposition of the professor's own political views (sometimes relating only vaguely if at all to the stated subject of the class), but to instances of completely one-sided presentation, refusal to present alternative viewpoints when requested, and in some cases a professor's unwillingness to hear opposing views expressed in discussion...indeed, several students report that professors actually became quite angry at the expression of dissenting views.

Though some commentors in the Chronicle article express concern that students might be exaggerating or taking advantage of the anonymity offered by the site to distribute unfair comments, it's important to note that the site takes pains to minimize this sort of thing. As they explain on their FAQ page,

NoIndoctrination.org does not accept all postings. Merely disagreeing with a professor's opinion or ideology does not constitute "indoctrination." We screen and check each posting, and we contact the student poster before any posting goes online. When appropriate, we may ask the student to send us corroborating material such as required readings or syllabi. As soon as a posting goes online, NoIndoctrination.org attempts to notify professors and administrators. They are invited and encouraged to submit a rebuttal posting. These rebuttals, when submitted, are placed directly beneath the student posting, and postings with a rebuttal are so marked. Students know professors have an opportunity to refute any specifics, and we hope this will encourage them to be sincere and honest in posting their opinions.

More students need to know about this site. The only thing that will effect change is pressure from students and parents.

Foster brings up another, tangential issue in this post, one that concerns me particularly as a teacher of argumentative writing:

The Chronicle discussion also surfaced another issue. Increasingly, people don't feel that an opinion is something that has to be based on logical argument and defended against other logical arguments--it's "just the way I feel and you don't have any right to challenge that." This trend is connected to other trends in our society, from the excessive worship of "self-esteem" to the pseudo-psychological programs on daytime TV. It is also tied up with the whole notion of cultural relativism--if there is no ground for criticizing the actions or beliefs of people from another culture, then there soon is no ground for criticizing the beliefs of another person (since we all, to some degree, have different patterns of cultural background). Nothing is left but "I think this way and you think that way"..no way to exists find a common ground. On campus, this view seems increasingly common among both students and professors.

Foster's analysis strikes me as spot-on. This type of non-logical, feelings-based argument is practiced in the majority of the composition classes at my institution; I'm one of a mere handful (out of 75 or so) who teaches logic at all. I could say plenty more about this (and probably will, at a later date), but since I need to finish preparing for said class at 8:00AM tomorrow . . .

The Philosophy of Religion

2004-02-08T14:41:00.000-06:00

University Diaries surprised me this morning. I’ve been reading that blog for about a month now, often enjoying it, sometimes not really caring that much about the subject matter, but never disagreeing with it as strongly as I do with this morning’s blog.

This morning’s University Diaries talks about the recent FIRE case regarding Dr. James Tuttle, a professor of moral philosophy (notice the emboldened word moral—there, I’ve done it again) who is in the process of being shown the door by his dean and his department chair for mentioning his Catholic beliefs, both verbally (which garnered student criticism) and then on his syllabus, as a “warning” regarding the belief system he was bringing with him into the field of (again with the bold) moral philosophy.

After a brief introduction to the problem (with no link to the actual article on the FIRE website), Professor Soltan concludes:

Well, of course the college should stop bothering this fellow (it’s been messing with his course selection and that sort of thing). But those of us who care about the intellectual integrity of the humanities classroom should find him bothersome.

Huh? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Last time I checked, there was a long and strong intellectual tradition within the Catholic Church, and a hell of a lot of moral philosophy being written. But let’s move on.

The particular course in question, again, is Introduction to Philosophy. American undergraduates coming to a course of this type early in their career are liable to know next to nothing about the topic. Do you think it’s a good idea for their first reading in the subject to be an affirmation on their syllabus of “Catholic Christian” (somewhat confusing, that) faith on the part of the instructor? Why should my initiation into the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Plotinus, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hegel, Kant, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein be a rather baffling profession of faith from the person who is supposed to be leading me dispassionately through this history of thought? What is the point of this personal profession at this place and time?

Why is “Catholic Christian” in scare quotes? And why is that confusing? Christianity is composed a number of different sects, each interpreting Christian doctrine in a different manner. Professor Tuttle is simply clarifying what kind of Christian he is. There is a great deal of difference between the Catholics and the Baptists, and don’t even get me started on the Mormons, who also consider themselves Christian. The scare quotes are simply disingenuous.

As for that list of people covered in an Introduction to Philosophy course, let me add a couple of names. How about Augustine and Aquinas? Boethius? William of Ockham? At least three of those philosophers were “Catholic Christians,” and the fourth may have been, though the Consolatio gives us no indication one way or the other.

Professor Tuttle, presumably, agrees with at least some of the moral positions taken by these philosophers, and as a student, I think that would be nice to know up front, because it’s going to color his reading of the other texts being studied and, given the fact that I see no indication that he is unfair in his teaching or grading practices, that coloring is itself a valid topic for discussion in a philosophy course. His reading of Plato, particularly if they look at the Timeaus, might be affected by the fact that he espouses these later philosophers and their desire to see in the Timeaus a prefiguring of the creation story from Genesis. Certainly his reading of Plotinus runs a good chance of being affected by Augustine, and his reading of Aristotle might be affected by Aquinas’s reading. (It was Aquinas, after all, who was primarily responsible for reintroducing Aristotle into Western thought.) One philosopher’s reading of another philosopher is, after all, part of the philosophical discourse.

The professor’s confession expresses the following to me: “Please be aware that I’m incapable of any degree of objectivity in regard to the subject matter at hand. Please also be aware that my moral superiority to the secular thinkers on our reading list needs to be established at the outset.” Does the professor intend for me to read his confession in this way? Who knows. But all I see in these sentences is a narcissistic need to display one’s piety to an audience.

The first sentence, were Tuttle to have actually included it on his syllabus, I have no problem with. None of us is capable of real objectivity, though we should of course strive to be as objective as possible when presenting material in classroom. Since we have no evidence regarding how the materials in Professor Tuttle’s class are presented—save for a whiny complaint by a student, which, given my experiences with the trendy atheism currently in vogue on college campuses, I am given to dismiss—coming to such a conclusion is premature. The idea of judging a professor on the basis of a single student’s word is indicative of the ridiculous amount of power the modern university has invested in the student. My advice to this student would be to sit down, shut up and try to learn something, even if it’s coming from someone who religious beliefs differ from your own. Christianity is as legitimate a part of the philosophical tradition as Wittgenstein (who, along with Derrida, owes a hell of a lot to the early Augustine’s writings on the nature of language).

The second sentence serves only to reveal Professor Soltan's biases. I have no problem with Tuttle believing himself to be morally superior than the philosophers he is reading. I consider myself morally superior to most of my colleagues, because I don’t use my classroom as an ideological indoctrination camp. But that’s another rant altogether. Tuttle is teaching a philosophy course, and it seems to me that what his disclaimer is actually saying is “My belief that the moral systems developed by Christianity are superior to those developed by secular philosophy needs to be established at the outset,” I’m not sure why it would be an issue. He prefers one system over the others; show me a philosophy professor who doesn’t. But it’s nice to know this up front. You know that he’s going to go easy on his analysis of the Christian philosophers, and you know he’s going to stick it to the rest. If anything, this is an opportunity for the student in question—and all of Tuttle’s students—to challenge him on any number of things, making both student and teacher engage with the material in a much deeper way than the lecture & take notes format.

It would be nice if the pomos were to make this sort of admission. Every single pomo professor I’ve had felt himself/herself to be morally superior to the writers we were reading—or at least the white, male writers—and their courses were an exercise in moral critique. Of course, it was never put this way, but in essence, this is what was done in the classroom. If any of these professors had provided an honest disclaimer, perhaps the tenor of the classroom would have been different, and I would have learned something more than the “fact” that all were racist, sexist, classist pigs who cared nothing for the environment.

And finally -- “please be aware of where I am coming from”? Why the hell do I, your student, need to be aware of anything about you? (And please be aware that ‘sixties cliches make me barf.) If I cared about your origins I would have looked for a course titled “Professor Tuttle’s Origins.” As it is, I’m given to believe that the thought of Martin Heidegger has a stronger claim on my attention than the religious history of James Tuttle.

This last paragraph is just a bit silly. Why should a student need to know anything about a professor? I think what Professor Soltan has to say in the rest of her blog about Professor Tuttle has made that perfectly clear. Because our opinions on the subject matter entrusted to us matter. This is particularly true in philosophy, given that we continue to work within the philosophical paradigm provided by Plato, in which the philosopher lives his or her philosophy.

As for Heidegger, it’s pretty important to know about his Nazism. If you’re planning to turn to Heidegger as a source of moral philosophy, you might want to think twice once you’re aware of what he condoned.

Finally, there is no indication that Tuttle’s Catholicism has seriously affected his presentation of the course materials (the complaints of a single student for whom the very mention of Catholicism is threatening notwithstanding), and there is no indication that his personal beliefs are affecting his ability to fairly assess his students’ work and progress.

Quite frankly, the idea that we should treat this any differently than a philosophy professor who professes a preference for Aristotle over Plato is beyond me.

A New Title That's Come to Our Attention

2004-02-08T03:11:00.000-06:00

Just ran across Graham Good's Humanism Betrayed. See an exerpt via Vestige.

Still looking for sensible criticism . . .

2004-02-07T15:23:00.000-06:00

I've been receiving a couple of emails on this topic a week, usually with one or two titles apiece. Often times, one respondant winds up repeating the same titles recommended by another respondant. I think I have something like ten titles now, in addition to the ones I posted last month.

I know there's more stuff out there.

What I'm going to do is open the call for suggestions to criticism that is author or era specific. I'll start a new section of the bibliography that lists criticism by author or by era--meaning the traditional eras a student would have encountered in survey courses a few decades ago.

If you can provide it, complete bibliographic information (as well as telling me where to categorize it, if the title doesn't make it clear) would speed up the process.

For my own current work, I'm looking in particular for sensible criticism on narrative and narratology.

Inane Literary Politics and Intellectual Intolerance Driving Away Good Scholars . . .

2004-02-04T21:31:00.000-06:00

. . . like my friend, whose story may be found below. Halfway through her first year in the graduate program of a major public university on the Left Coast, she has decided to leave. While a number of factors contributed to her decision--the prospect of a hard five-to-seven year slog trying to live off a teaching fellow's pittance, only to face the incredibly shrinking job market--she says that "the biggest factor is by far the political nonsense":

Notice that no one ever responded to my friend's questioning the inherent "American phallogocentrism" of wanting to know the story of one's own history.

It's truly a shame that this should happen. I'd like to try and convince her to stick it out, because our field desperately needs people with common sense and the guts to use it, but I know what she faces. She tells me that the faculty in her area of specialization--contemporary literature--are particularly guilty of theoretical nonsense as described above, and trying to find a dissertation advisor amenable to the kinds of projects she's interested in (cognitive approaches to literature, for example, which resist social-constructionist arguments) would be difficult.

I'm curious to know how common experiences such as hers are. If you have a story you'd like to share, please email me (Julia).

Trickle Down Economics in the Academy?

2004-01-31T16:52:00.000-06:00

I was reading through an interesting blog on Academic Superstars over at Butterflies and Wheels, which includes a comment by Scott McLemee, referencing an article he wrote on the subject for the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years back. I was particularly struck by the remarks of Stanley Fish on the subject of "Academostars":

Stanley Fish challenges the common belief that academic stars' salaries are paid for at the expense of the professorial proletariat. "At every level of the university there are cash reserves ... which are, in effect, slush funds," he tells the Review in an interview conducted while Mr. Williams drove him from St. Louis to Columbia, Mo. These rich financial deposits cannot be extracted to meet the demands of long-term faculty members, however; only the arrival of academic celebrities can persuade administrations to tap into the slush funds. "Ironically," he notes, "if you succeed in hiring people who are considered stars, the material conditions of your own working life will eventually, if not immediately improve."

This sounds suspiciously like Reaganomics to me, an economic theory I would assume 99% of professors in the humanities vehemently disagree with. Apparently, bringing someone like Fish into your department and paying him at least 2-3 times the amount his colleagues are making for doing far less work is going to help the whole department. And because this money will only be used by adminstrators to pay the ridiculous salaries of superstars, we had might as well accept that fact and pay Fish whatever ungodly sum he is "earning". We should not, apparently, issue a call for reform so that people receive equal pay for equal work. How capitalist of Mr. Fish.

To be fair, Fish may have a point: his presence in an English department may draw starry-eyed grad students into the department and increase funding for more useless graduate seminars on esoteric topics that will prove of little or no use to anyone teaching at most universities. In this respect, the "material conditions" of the other professors in the department may be improved somewhat (though the graduate students and adjuncts will still be teaching the same thankless classes for the same poverty-level wages).

But Fish will still be making 2-3 times what his colleagues do for far less work (most academic superstars teach one course a year, generally a graduate or senior seminar with a small enrollment). Very little of that privileged status will be trickling down to his colleagues.

Reuters Headlines

2004-01-29T11:22:00.000-06:00

Is the following sentence required to appear in one form or another in every Reuters story regarding Iraq?

"The United States and Britain cited Iraq's possession of chemical and biological arms as their main reason for invading the country in March and toppling Saddam. But no such weapons have so far come to light despite intensive searches."

A New Academic(ish) Blog

2004-01-25T16:09:00.000-06:00

I am informed of a new academic blog, written by a graduate student of English at the University of Oregon who is brave enough to actually identify herself to the world (unlike yours truly, who's still hoping to find himself in that lucky 40%).

Rose Nuñez's blog The Naive Humanist, promises to be well worth a few minutes of your daily blog reading time. She's in the process of incorporating a comments function into the blog, and is hoping that there will be some real discussion as her blog grows.

In her initial posting, she describes her purpose:

What I want to do instead is go for rambling walks across the fields that drew me to graduate school in the first place, and invite a few talkative folks to come along and keep the conversation alive. As outspoken as I've become over the years, I still find that I'm reluctant to express my evolving conservative viewpoint in papers and in seminars. In part that's because my viewpoint is evolving, and sometimes I'm walking on ground that shifts even as I speak and discover what I actually think. But I'm also reluctant to express my views in class because I've watched, again and again, as grown, educated, supposedly tolerant and pluralistic men and women shut down the conversation when someone asks tough questions about the prevailing ideology.

That sounds a pretty accurate description of graduate school to me, and a pretty accurate description of the difficulties inherent in carrying on a "conversation" with the ideologues that make up far too large a portion of the "intelligensia".

Check it out. Her take on the Fruits of the Sexual Revolution is also worth a read.

Bush Bashing at GQ

2004-01-21T23:36:00.000-06:00

The last issue of my GQ subscription--a magazine I have subscribed to for over a decade--arrived in the mail today. I will not be resubscribing. And yes, I appreciate the irony of an academic--particularly a graduate student--subscribing to a magazine in which about 90% of the items featured I cannot afford.

Yes, this is terribly off-topic, and I am going to rant a bit.

The long-time editor of GQ, Art Cooper, stepped down in the middle of 2003, just before his death. GQ took a hard left when its new editor, Jim Nelson, took over the reigns for Mr. Cooper. (It also turned into a twenty-something magazine--an early twenty-something magazine, but that's something to bitch about elsewhere. If you haven't checked out GQ lately, you might be surprised to find out that Conde Nast has decided to publish Details twice a month. Is anyone with a real job going to wear the clothes featured in this magazine?)

In the current issue, Jim Nelson uses his letter from the editor to Bush bash--calling him "President George W. Orwell" and accusing the president of Inner Party-style speeches. Mr. Nelson should, I think, visit a college campus if he wants to see an Orwellian society in action. The once enjoyable GQ List at the end of the magazine is also devoted to Bush bashing, featuring a series of campaign buttons that make the magazine's partisan position quite clear. In the interview with Tina Fey, from Saturday Night Live, the interviewer makes an attempt to solicit a negative opinion about Bush, but while Fey calls Bush both "cocky" and a "dullard," she also calls him "well-intentioned," which the interviewer appears not to know what to do with. (As a sidenote-- I've always found Tina Fey's commentary on "Weekend Update" to be fair and funny.)

This is not the first time this has happened. While I have thrown out the bulk of the issues that I have received since Nelson became the editor (after having saved at least seven years worth, currently in the garage), I recall at least two other interviews with actresses that have asked for an opinion about Bush, generally attempting to solicit a negative comment. In the other two interviews, the attempt was successful, and readers were treated to a mini anti-Bush rant. It would hardly be surprising were GQ to decide to interview Gwyneth Paltrow next month. (Where exactly is this jingoism Gwyneth complains about?)

This month's issue also sports an unflattering comic about Governor Schwarznegger, as well as an "expose" on Iraq.

I'm not exactly sure why a men's fashion magazine has decided that it was necessary to take a partisan position, and I'm not sure how taking such a blatantly offensive partisan position is "gentlemanly." One would expect a gentleman's discussion of politics to be a bit less abrasive. So much for etiquette.

I'm also not sure how the magazine's almost Maxim-like attitude towards casual sex is "gentlemanly." Lots more T&A in the "new" GQ, and lots of suggestions of casual relationships with women in the photos, which have so very, very little to do with fashion.

"Sensible" Literary Criticism: A Bibliography in Progress

2004-01-20T23:38:00.000-06:00

Well, the emails came in for about a week, and then trickled down to nothing. Obviously, given how short the list below is, I need more suggestions.

I've included most of what people suggested in their emails; I made an attempt to find either an in-print edition or the information of the last known printing. For most of the shorter pieces of pre-twentieth century criticism I've relied on the Hazard Adams anthology. If you can suggest better places to find these pieces, please let me know.

A few people who just suggested authors will not find their suggestions included below. Please send me references to particular works. If the critic in question is an essayist, give me an idea of where the essays might be found. If I have to look it all up myself, it will take me a lot longer to get the information into the bibliography.

I've also not yet included works of criticism regarding a single author. I'd like to categorize those under the author they are about, but I'll hold off on this until there are several books to include under each author. Shakespeare will likely appear first.

If you have any suggestions regarding categories, let me know. I realize I have made some "controversial" decisions here, like putting all of the cognitive psychologists under twenty-first century criticism, because they mark a departure with post-1960s Theory influence criticism. This is a rather arbitrary decision, particularly as these works date mainly from the 1990s. I've also decided to give those who are mainly writing against Theory their own section. Frankly, I'm not sure who's technically a New Critic and who isn't anymore. It's been awhile since the last theory class.

So, here's a working draft. I'm still taking suggestions, and will be taking suggestions for some time to come.

Also, if you think it would be helpful to make the titles of the works in print into Amazon links, I can incorporate this into the next "edition."

PRE-TWENTIETH CENTURY CRITICISM

Arnold, Matthew. “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” In Critical Theory Since Plato, second edition, ed. Hazard Adams, 592-602. Heinle, 1992. (In Print)

Boccacio, Giovanni. Life of Dante. Trans. F. G. Nichols and J. G. Nichols. Hesperus Press, 2002. (In Print)

Critical Theory Since Plato, second edition. Ed. Hazard Adams. Heinle, 1992. (In Print)

Eliot, George. Selected Critical Writings. Ed. Rosemary Ashton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. (In Print)

Horace (Quintas Horatius Flaccus). "Art of Poetry." In Critical Theory Since Plato, second edition, ed. Hazard Adams, 67-74. Heinle, 1992. (In Print)

James, Henry. Literary Criticism, Vols. 1 & 2. Ed. Leon Edel. Library of America, 1984. (In Print)

Johnson, Samuel. The Lives of the English Poets. (OOP)

Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c.1100-c.1375: The Commentary Tradition, revised edition. Ed. A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott. Oxford University Press, 1988/2000. (In Print--U.K. Only)

Sidney, Sir Philip. "An Apology for Poetry." In Critical Theory Since Plato, second edition, ed. Hazard Adams, 142-162. Heinle, 1992. (In Print)

Wilde, Oscar. The Artist as Critic: Critical Writing of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Richard Ellmann. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. (In Print)

TWENTIETH CENTURY CRITICISM THROUGH 1960

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953. (In Print)

Bahktin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. (In Print)

Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harvest Books, 1956. (In Print)

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism (updated edition). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957/2000. (In Print)

Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Penguin, 1923/1991. (In Print)

The New Criticism

Empson, William. 7 Types of Ambiguity. New Directions Publishing, 1966. (In Print)

Richards, I. A. Practical Criticism. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924. (In Print: Routledge, 2001)

Winters, Ivor. The Function of Criticism. Denver CO: Alan Swallow, 1957. (OOP)

TWENTIETH CENTURY CRITICISM SINCE 1960

After Poststructuralism: Interdisciplinarity and Literary Theory. Ed. Nancy Easterlin and Barbara Riebling. Northwestern University Press, 1993 (In Print)

Argyros, Alexander. A Blessed Rage for Order: Deconstruction, Evolution, and Chaos. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. (In Print)

Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. (In Print)

Bloom, Harold. A Map of Misreading, second edition. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 2003.

Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994. (In Print)

Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Univeristy of California Press, 1990. (In Print)

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press, 1983. (In Print)

Booth, Wayne. The Rhetoric of Irony. University of Chicago Press, 1975. (In Print)

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1969. (In Print)

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method. University of California Press, 1978. (In Print)

Girard, Rene. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literature. Trans. Yvonne Freccero. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. (In Print)

Girard, Rene. To Double Business Bound : Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. (In Print)

Kermode, Frank. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative. Harvard University Press, 1980. (In Print)

Kermode, Frank. Pieces of My Mind : Essays and Criticism 1958-2002. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003.

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. (In Print)

Kepnes, Steven. The Text as Thou. Indiana University Press, 1992. (In Print)

Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature. Ed. Peter Conradi. New York: Penguin, 1999. (In Print)

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CRITICISM

Cognitive and Evolutionary Psychology

Livingston, Paisley. Literary Knowledge: Humanistic Inquiry and the Philosophy of Science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. (In Print)

Storey, Robert. Mimesis and the Human Animal. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996. (In Print)

Turner, Frederick. Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science. New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1985. (In Print, University of Virginia Press, 1992)

Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.

CONTRA-THEORY

Cunningham, Valentine. Reading After Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001. (In Print)

Ellis, John. Against Deconstruction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. (In Print)

Ellis, John. Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. (In Print)

Hilfer, Tony. The New Hegemony in Literary Studies: Contradictions in Theory. Northwestern University Press, 2003. (In Print)

Patai, Daphne and Noretta Koertge. Professing Feminism: Education and Indoctrination in Women's Studies. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. (In Print)

Graduate Student Attrition and the Question of Blame

2004-01-16T23:34:00.000-06:00

So, graduate student attrition rates are the topic du jour in the blogosphere. I’ve spent the better part of an hour navigating from site to site, reading a lot of opinions. Some excellent criticism has been made, but there are also some seriously sour grapes out there.

Let me address the excellent criticism first. I’ve been complaining about the number of students allowed into the program at my present institution pretty much since the year after my arrival, when a decision was made to more than double the number of admissions from the year before. I assume that this was done in part because the number of undergraduate admissions had gone up, and somebody had to teach all those additional sections of freshman composition. The professors in the department have never really discussed it. That they realize the necessity of a large pool of graduate students to guarantee (1) that they are allowed to continue to teach—or rather moderate, since very few seem to do more than preside over graduate student presentations—and (2) that they not have to teach the dreaded freshman composition is quite clear. I confess myself guilty of the second desire—I never want to teach freshman composition again—ever. As far as teaching graduate seminars, I would be happy not to teach graduate students at all, but if I do land a job at a school with a graduate program, you can be damned sure I will be teaching the class, not listening the students deliver presentations on things they are not yet expert on. Just today, I was asked by an undergraduate class to lecture rather than having them work on questions in groups—that, I was reminded, was why they had chosen to come to class that day: to have the expert guide them through the text. I had simply wanted to give them a break from listening to me drone on, but that was not what they wanted. So, I lectured.

Yes, the institution, from the individual professor to the department straight up to the university administration, is to blame for this problem. I find John Bruce’s (I always want to say Jack Bruce, but he’s the bassist from Cream) suggestion that a class-action lawsuit be filed an attractive one. Graduate school, at least in the humanities and social sciences, is a bit of a scam. But most of us know it’s a scam, and we seek admission willingly. Those who are not aware of this are woefully uninformed. Unlike a fellow blogger, I would instead use the phrase caveat emptor. Here comes the conservative side of my personality: it’s the individual’s responsibility to find out what he or she is actually purchasing. I entered the Ph.D. program realizing that I was (1) allowing myself to be exploited as cheap labor for the English department, and (2) that what I was purchasing was about a 40% chance of getting a tenure-track job in my field (I believe that is the current percentage—I have not checked in a couple of years). I also knew more than enough ABDs to realize that many people—through the fault of their program, their committee, or through their own fault—never completed their dissertation. From this point-of-view, suing the university is like suing McDonald’s because you’re overweight.

Yet I’m still enough of a lefty to want justice to be done in this instance, regardless of the fact that people are stupid enough—and I include myself in this—to purchase the lottery ticket which is graduate school. A severe house-cleaning, perhaps. But I’m not so sure about the lawsuit.

Yet there is a fact that remains unstated in a number of these blogs and the comments sections. In increasing the number of graduate students admitted, the quality of the graduate student also drops. That has been true at the institution I am currently attending, it is true at the institution where I pursued my MA, and it was true at the schools I taught at when I was an adjunct. To provide a more-or-less objective example, the qualification exam pass rate at my current institution has dropped considerably in the years I have been here.

Let me provide a brief description of the exam, so it is clear what I am talking about. The qualification exam is a three-part essay exam. There is a section on British literature up through 1789, British literature from 1789, and American literature. The exam reading list has undergone only small variations in the time I have been here, and is thus well-known to students from the day they begin the program. While some professors have added their own little obscure favorite texts to the list, it is surprising canonical. I would think any well-prepared undergraduate—and certainly someone who had gotten high enough GRE to gain admission—should have little trouble passing the test, and spending some time with the non-canonical works should pretty much guarantee a passing score.

In the past, one or at most two students may have failed a single section of the exam each year, but in recent years, this number has risen. The exam itself hasn’t changed—the same questions, with only minor modifications, have been asked since at least four years before I arrived. They are very broad—as you may imagine—and don’t require much in the way of secondary criticism. Basically, you just use a selection of the works you read to illustrate some major point. It’s not particularly difficult, unless you’ve come into the program poorly prepared.

And poorly prepared these new admissions are. So poorly prepared that after much whining and crying about how difficult the exam was, a group of students managed to have the exam changed from being administered in a single day to be administered over two days; having to write three essays in the course of a single day was too anxiety inducing for these new students. Shockingly—at least to me—whining actually had the effect of making the test easier.

The quality of student work in seminars has also dropped. This is the origin of one of my gripes about theory. I’ve taken courses with people who basically write the same paper for every seminar they take, merely changing the primary text or texts being examined. These students appear to have mastered the construction of a single reading, and then apply it with a few variations to any book they pick up. As students of British and American literature, they really don’t measure up, as they know very little about British and American literature. I would not hire them to teach survey courses, for example. You need to know something about the historical context in which a piece of literature was written and the continuity—or lack thereof—that exists between the various eras of British and American literature. This is the knowledge base of our profession. Without this knowledge base, the granting of a degree—even a BA, to my way of thinking—is taking part in a lie.

The point of all the blogging over the last few days seems to be the placement of blame. I’m not sure this is as simple as some would have it. Yes, universities and departments are guilty of using graduate students to meet their budgets and of demonstrating a considerable lack of concern for their future success. I have seen this at my own institution, but I have been very lucky in this respect. I would not trade my dissertation advisor for the greatest scholar in my field, and the rest of my committee, though often busier with things other than my dissertation than I would like, is genuinely concerned with my success and my future as a scholar. Yes, they profit from my labor, in that they are not required to teach composition, but they put in their dues the same as I, and are quite sympathetic to what a complete pain in the ass teaching composition is.

But, in my experience, there are those who leave graduate school because they are not cut out to be graduate students. Grand success as an undergraduate does not guarantee success as a graduate student. This is particularly true, in my experience, of people who attended small liberal arts colleges. Graduate school requires you to be a self-starter—it requires you to take a great deal of responsibility for your own education. You are, after all, at least 22 years old by the time you enter graduate school. Expecting to have someone hold your hand—even your advisor—strikes me as rather childish. This is not your advisor’s job. If you’re not prepared to take this degree of responsibility—professionally or emotionally—chances are you are going to wind up as a negative statistic in the 50% attrition rate. Good Lord—if you expect to be allowed to teach courses in your field—literature courses, not composition courses—then you had better have some idea of how to prepare yourself to stand up in front of students and display expertise.

Obviously, my above response largely avoids the question of theory, and the asinine assumption of many professors that graduate students must engage in theory, even those who prefer to be students of literature instead. Certainly we must be familiar with theory; contrary to the opinions of foolish ideologues elsewhere, I have mastered theory. I spent several years enamored of it, before discovering its many, many flaws. Like it or not, graduate students are required to understand theory. I have no problem with this. I simply think that a class in theory should also contain a strong critique of theory. But, like it or not, it is a part of literary studies, the same as Philip Sidney’s “An Apology for Poetry,” or other works people dread being required to read. If you are student of literature, then you should be required to understand the history of literary criticism, even those schools of criticism that strike you as idiotic.

But, I do agree with those who complain that they should not be forced to adopt a theoretical stance that they do not agree with, or, indeed, any theoretical stance. It is sad that many good students of literature have been driven out of programs because they refuse to adopt theory, and even sadder that many professors and graduate students have simply accepted it as fact that no good student of literature will not adopt a theoretical position. This is ideological totalitarianism, and its practicers need to be admonished. If admonishment does not cure the problem, these professors need to be dismissed from their positions. Graduate students unable to master the primary subject matter of their field—in this case, literature—should be required to do so.

In any case, the present situation is, for many reasons, unacceptable. But I refuse to feel sorry for all those who have decided to leave their graduate programs.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2004-01-15T23:48:00.000-06:00

“Every revolutionary ends by becoming either an oppressor or a heretic.” –Albert Camus

A month or so ago, Winston very kindly caved in to my pestering him about letting me blog on his site and now, finally, I will stop dithering and get about it.

Like Winston, I have found my way to a critique of theory and the academy from the inside out. During my MA program, I was deeply enamored of theory, particularly feminist and gender theory. In my particular field of literature, theory hadn’t yet made quite as many inroads, and there was still the perception of a “good old boys” club that resisted young feminist scholars such as myself. The fact that I never actually personally encountered any such resistance, despite interacting with a number of well-established, older male scholars who would have been considered members of said club, should probably have been a tip-off for me to question that perception a little more closely. At any rate, my MA thesis “brilliantly” interwove gender performativity and Occitan poetics, and I felt confident that my future work would continue along these lines.

What changed? One incident that stands out in my mind was in a graduate pedagogy class, early in the first term of my PhD. In a discussion about gender and authority in the classroom, in which most participants nodded sagely at the claim that gender (that is, being female—men don’t have gender) inherently and negatively affects an instructor’s authority, I had the audacity to protest that personal demeanor might have something to do with it as well. (I still believe this. In the seven years I’ve been teaching, only once have I had any kind of authority issues, and that was with female students who objected that I wasn’t “touchy-feely” enough.). The response I received shocked the hell out of me—one would have thought I had just asserted that rape victims have it coming. The sheer irony that I had been judged an anti-feminist reactionary left me bemused at first, then thoughtful, and finally disturbed. I began to question my identification as a feminist, because I found many of the positions advocated even by supposedly mainstream organizations such as NOW to be deeply problematic. Issues concerning gender are still important to me—more important, in some ways—and in the end I decided to reclaim my feminist identification in the tradition of equity feminism exemplified by the likes of Christina Hoff Sommers and Tammy Bruce.

So that's a bit about me and where I'm coming from. Stay tuned...

Standardized Testing, College Admissions

2004-01-15T22:33:00.000-06:00

Kimberly Swygert, as usual, provides an insightful critique of an open letter to Governor Jeb Bush in the Jupiter Courier regarding the FCAT test, a high school exit exam that requires a student to have mastered 10th-grade material in order to graduate.

I'm not going to reproduce her analysis here; I'll only comment that she's right on the mark.

Instead, I'd like to speak as the college adjunct (yes, I was an adjunct for a number of years before returning for the Ph.D.) who had to teach a community college "composition" class that was three levels below Freshman Composition.

Yes, I taught a composition class in which I was required to begin with parts of speech, move on to writing basic and then complex sentences, move to the paragraph, and then finish--if possible--with a 3-5 paragraph essay. This was done in an 18 week semester, so I spent about three weeks on parts of speech, and several students failed quiz after quiz on things as simple as nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates. I actually resorted to Schoolhouse Rock cartoons to try and get them to memorize the songs and, hopefully, the content. A failed effort, though; by the fourth week of class, we had gone from 30 students to 14. Most of the students who dropped the course were performing in the 10th to the 40th percentile.

All of my students were high school graduates. I'm not saying they graduated with a 4.0, but they were in possession of diplomas. I know this because we discussed it. They were in no way prepared to attend college, so the college was forced to offer not only four semesters of remedial English but several semesters of remedial math. Many students were enrolled in both remedial English and math, and were going to be in junior college for at least an extra year trying to get themselves up to the junior college level.

The universities I taught in were slightly better, having only two levels of composition below the freshman level. The lowest level started with the paragraph, instead of parts of speech and sentences, but many instructors found it necessary to go over these materials anyway, as students were clueless. At the university level, all students--in my class and in everyone else's--were in possession of a high school diploma. Transfer students from junior colleges were required to take the remedial courses there. (And I break a PC rule by using the word "remedial." We were not allowed to refer to the classes as "remedial.")

Andrea Johnson, the writer of this open letter to Governor Bush, seems to think that this is a perfectly acceptable situation, though she never addresses the consequences of her recommendations. So long as students do not feel bad about themselves, everything is okay. Pass them along, provide a sense of self-esteem--false though it is. Why earn something when the system can be tricked into giving it?

Standards are necessary, Andrea. And, unfortunately, we cannot trust teachers to assign appropriate grades to students. The ESL situation I described last month is indicative of this. This student had passed Freshman Composition; mine was the second of a two-semester sequence. Whoever passed this student was guilty of massive grade inflation. On a standardized test, this student would have scored at best in the 30th percentile, and would have been required to repeat Freshman Composition. This might have had the benefit of convincing this student--early enough for it to have made a difference--that his language skills were way under par, and that he needed to do something about it. Instead, he is a graduating senior and he cannot communicate in the English language. We'll probably wind up giving him a degree anyway, and sending him back to China. After all, if we were to hold him to some objective standard, we might stigmatize him and make him feel he hadn't done a good job in school. Which is, of course, precisely the reality, both for him and for 12th graders who cannot perform at the 10th grade level.

An excellent analysis of the leftist university, yesterday and today.

2004-01-15T15:44:00.000-06:00

Let me first state that in linking to FrontPage Magazine, I do not wish to be lumped in with Horowitz's particular brand of Neoconservatism. Obviously, I agree with a great deal of what Horowitz and company have to say on the subject of education, but there are other matters on which I do not agree. I also question the presence of Ann Coulter, whom I find as ideologically blinded as those from the left she is critiquing.

Simply put, I don't want my linking to this article to engender a whole host of erroneous assumptions about me and my politics.

That said, here is an excellent article by a Professor of English in the University of Oregon's Honors College (which I have found, through a quick snoop through Oregon's website, means she is not directly connected to the English Department itself). She was a graduate student there in the late 60s, and speaks of her experience then and now. It is quite illuminating.

The article can be found here.

This is just too funny.

2004-01-15T00:36:00.000-06:00

This made me laugh even harder than watching The Simple Life.

Guilty . . . not exactly pleasures . . .

2004-01-14T22:43:00.000-06:00

I'm watching The Simple Life. I've watched The Simple Life for the last three weeks. Why am I watching The Simple Life?

Let me make it perfectly clear: I do not find either Paris Hilton or Nicole Ritchie even slightly attractive. Eye candy is not the reason. My wife is just as horrified and mesmerized as I am. We are disturbed--deeply--yet we keep watching.

Our horror is not a puritanical reaction. We've grown quite immune to Paris Hilton's ass-crack (which is all crack and no ass). It's in part a rather lefty reaction, actually. But that's only a part of it.

Is this the train wreck phenomenon?

They are currently arguing about what to do with the fur of a small animal they just killed in their big, blue, oh-so-redneck pickup. And I'm vaguely sad it won't be on again next week.

Reasoning with Leftist Anger and Hate

2004-01-13T19:02:00.000-06:00

Adam Kotsko, self-professed leftist, has decided that it is his mission to decide whether or not I am an acceptable candidate for a tenure-track position. Let’s take a look at his reasons:

He appears to have nothing but contempt for the vast majority of literary scholars, so it's unclear why he would want to work for them. If I went to a job interview virtually anywhere and let it slip that I think the way my potential employers do things is absolutely corrupt and stupid and that I would spend my career fighting to radically reshape the entire enterprise, then I wouldn't expect to get any bonus points. Winston would also do well to note that many of the currently hegemonic discourses in literary theory started out as embattled minorities who thought the entire scholarly enterprise was fundamentally flawed and, given his tone, he would do well to admit that if people like him were in ascendancy, they would treat leftists the exact same way. Except, of course, that the conservatives would be justified in excluding those who disagree with them, because conservative ideals are justified by knowledge, real knowledge:

Human beings have not evolved to live in Marxist regimes. We are competitive creatures, and we work for rewards. Take a hard look at why the Soviet Union was not able to compete with the United States during the Cold War.

Okay, let’s take this apart bit by bit, remembering that Adam has already expressed agreement with the current order of things in his disputations regarding "sensible" criticism both on his own site and on LitSkunk. First of all, it is wrong of me to want to radically reshape the way things are currently done in English departments, but it was apparently okay for the Left to radically reshape English departments decades ago, since Adam has no problem living and working under the current hegemony. By Adam's reasoning, it is only correct to dissent if you are a Leftist dissenting against the right. I’m not sure how exactly Adam has arrived at this nifty bit of logic, but there is it.

Adam then reveals his true fear: if people like me—read, evil right-wingers—were to gain ascendancy in English departments, people like him would suffer. He may be correct—certainly I would advocate some house-cleaning, and I would want the professoriate to be a little more rigorous with itself in terms of thinking. I don’t think such a demand is unreasonable, because they are paid to be rigorous thinkers, no? All I’m asking for is professors to actually teach students to read literature, at least as step one, instead of starting with the Leftist readings and leaving any other possibilities out of their syllabus. I’m also asking that the pomos take the last 35-40 years of scientific advancement in the area of the human sciences into account when formulating their theories. Saussurean-derived theories need to be “interrogated,” to use one of their favorite terms, in light of what we now know about how the brain produces language.

Why are you so scared to let this interrogation happen? Because you know that current theoretical practice will have to be radically revised? But isn’t such radical revision our responsibility? Aren't we supposed to revise our ideas in light of new knowledge?

Apparently not, for you would have me and others like me refused jobs on the basis of our disagreement with the current hegemony. So you basically admit that it is acceptable--indeed preferable--to have a department of ideological clones, and that they are justified in making certain that no one who thinks differently ever infiltrates the department. Would you feel the same way about a hiring committee from a more traditionalist department who turned away candidates who practiced theory? Is this sort of political discrimination then justified so that everyone can get along and think the same thoughts? What exactly are you saying? Because it sounds to me like you're simply affirming that my fears are justified. You appear to want postmodern philosophy to remain in place, unquestioned and undisturbed, forever.

As for my remark about Marxist regimes. First of all, I did NOT say that human beings evolved to be capitalists--I said that we evolved to be competitive. It’s part of the survival mechanism. You might think about reading a little science to find out some things before spouting the ideology. Marxism runs contrary to human nature—the nasty little drives that make us human prevent us from adopting such a system without some sort of totalitarian state forcing it upon us. Try looking outside the ivory tower and into the real world sometime. You might see how Marxism operates.

Adam goes on to try and find alternate explanations for the end of the Cold War:

Yeah, the U.S. was in terrific economic condition during the Great Depression. You might want to talk to my dad, sometime. He could tell you some great stories about how well off the U.S. was.

Interestingly, you bring up Stalin’s purges. Now why exactly did Stalin find it necessary to purge a large portion of the Soviet population? Oh, yeah. BECAUSE THEY REFUSED TO FOLLOW COMMUNISM. They weren’t willing to give up private property and the rewards that came with competitiveness, so Stalin branded them enemies of the State and got rid of them.

The U.S. might also have outdistanced the Soviet Union because people had real, human motives to succeed in their endeavors. The U.S.S.R. used the stick method, while the U.S. used the carrot. People were allowed to pursue personal success while also pursuing success for their country. They also knew that they could experiment and fail without getting sent to the Gulag. Ideological curbs on the pursuit of knowledge were far less in the United States--despite all the accusations of McCarthyism--than they were in the Soviet Union. Knowledge that didn't fit into the Marxist picture--like Bakhtin, for example--was eradicated, and the person responsible punished. (Readers should notice here the similarity between the ideological hegemony Adam admits exists in today's academy and the ideological hegemony of the Soviet Union. Why aren't there many new ideas in the humanities these days?)

As for Cuba, don’t even get me started. I know former Cubans. I’d like to see your privileged self down there living under Castro for awhile. I hope you’re not homosexual. Castro’s not big on homosexuality. You might also take a look at the disparity between the way Castro and his cronies live and the way the rest of Cuba lives. If the U.S. embargo is the cause of Cuba's poverty, why aren't Castro and his buddies poor? And if they're such good Marxists, then why aren't they distributing the wealth they have evenly throughout the populace. Oh, yeah. BECAUSE CASTRO IS A TOTALITARIAN DICTATOR.

And, once more, I did NOT say people evolved to be capitalists. Stop putting words in my mouth. Find out a little something about human evolution, which, as a member of the left, I assume you pay lip service to. This is NOT a “politically motivated fabrication.” It’s simply a fact of human biology. It’s not a pretty fact, but there it is. And yes, the difference IS that I’m correct. I have a set of biological facts on my side, proven through the use of scientific method, and you have ideology. I’m not knocking the impetus behind some of this ideology—I’d like a utopia just the same as anyone—but I am knocking the lack of scientific fact, indeed the fact that much of these ideologies fly in the face of scientific fact, necessitating totalitarianism in order to get individual human beings to obey. I'm also knocking the violence necessary to create the utopia.

Finally, Adam goes on to attack Conservative English Major, presumably because I have linked to him:

Meanwhile, not everyone has arrived at their conclusions through the scientific method: the Conservative English Major, a blog-friend of Winston's, has up a number of posts (his/her permalinks seem to be broken at the moment) about "how the strident left-wingism [sic] of the academy can force moderate students to the right." To give some more detail:

The fact that my fellow grad students and my instructors constantly make comparisons between Bush as Hitler, loudly wish he would die, and refuse to see anything he can do in a positive light - this attitude pushes me even further in my support of Bush. Instead of being a slightly disaffected supporter who would critique some of his policies, I find myself reacting to my fellows [sic] extremism and becoming a fairly staunch supporter.

Amazing! Now the liberals are to blame ... for the fact that this person's a conservative! It appears that if the liberals keep it up, there will be no more liberals left, because Lord knows that no one hates anger more than a conservative. The Fox News-viewing American people, accustomed as they are to cool-headed, moderate commentary, will be instinctively turned off by anger -- I mean, I guess that could be true, if we set aside the fact that the contemporary conservative movement is built entirely on anger.

Well, sorry my friend, but when confronted with extremist thought, people often find themselves pushed in the opposite direction. You begin to get tired of the unquestioned assumptions and the writing off of the bulk of the American populace as “fat, lazy, and stupid,” as your charming friend Steve puts it, and you start to question those assumptions yourself. Just like your heroes were put off by the dictatorial nature of New Criticism, so are some of us put off by the dictatorial nature of the current regime. Human beings, for better or for worse, tend to be reactionary.

Finally, Adam concludes:

And I am its child. I can relate to these guys more than I'd like to admit -- I know the suffocation of hearing the same thing over and over and over from absolutely everyone, and I have often succumbed to the temptation of embracing a new position simply because it's different. More to the point, I have often succumbed to the temptation of placing myself in a situation in which I know it will be very easy to sustain this feeling of novelty, of being the only one standing up for truth, of being the noble gadfly. Some of us, apparently, enjoy this feeling of being perpetually out of place -- some of us enjoy anger.

Hopefully, at least some of us will outgrow that.

Yes, Adam. Hopefully you will outgrow your current phase, a phase of leftism apparently brought on by the anger of the right, if I'm reading you correctly. But I thought that one political extreme couldn't drive a person to move towards the other extreme? Oh, I forgot. I guess you've invoked the double-standard again.

As for embracing a more conservative point-of-view because it is a novelty, think again. That's not what I'm saying, and that's not what Conservative English Major is saying, either. The academy is extreme, and extremism rarely holds up under logical scrutiny. I've come to my current position slowly and carefully. This isn't some sort of Goth phase I'm going through here, but more than a decade's experience as a professional in academia causing me to rethink former positions in the light of overwhelming evidence. As for the political, well, I've always gravitated toward what is now called "classical liberalism," and that's definitely not the liberalism practiced in either the academy or in the Democratic Party. Having seen the dangers of the current regime in the academy, I've decided that a change is in order.

And Adam? One last thing. Just because you and your friend Steve evince contempt for the thinker as well as the thought, please do not assume the same of me. I have a number of leftist friends, including several who know exactly what I think about politics, the academy, etc. While I may think some of their ideas are ridiculous, I am able to get along with the person behind the ideas. In fact, there are even a few I enjoy arguing with, and they with me. Were I hired by a theory-ridden department, I'd like to think I could develop some of the same relationships--agree to disagree, but always hoping of course that I could make a difference.

You might look back through the passages you've quoted from my blog. The tone there is concerned, but it's not angry. Your tone, on the other hand, is angry and condescending. "Real" science? What are the scare quotes supposed to mean, exactly?

But, I'm not out to start a blog war. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time, but you have unfairly characterized me and my position, so I felt it necessary to respond.

Teaching MoveOn.org Propaganda in Class

2004-01-13T14:38:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine from my M.A. days, who is working on her Ph.D. at an institution that will remain nameless, forwarded me an email from her composition teachers' listserv in which one of the MFA candidates tells her fellow instructors that she has placed the film "Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War," produced by MoveOn.org, on reserve so that teachers in the program can show it in class. She also directs her fellow instructors to the website truthuncovered.com.

This person is supposed to be teaching composition, and, in the program in which both she and my informant teach, she is supposed to be teaching argumentation and critical thinking. Instead, she is presenting students with MoveOn's propaganda as if it were an unbiased source of information, presumably to counter the "bias" of the mainstream media.

I am told this is common practice in this university's composition program, and that both MoveOn and Michael Moore are regularly used as unbiased sources of information in courses, showing up with frightening regularity on instructor syllabus.

My informant feels that she cannot raise an objection to this issue, because instructors in her program were essentially given permission to do this by the composition director during their pre-academic year meeting, when ways of approaching the Iraq War that were obviously designed to teach against the Iraq War were discussed with them. Also, since the contracts of grad student teachers at her institution are renewed on a year-to-year basis, she fears losing her job, and thus her ability to continue her degree.

This is a sad state of affairs. Critical thinking skills are, to my mind, the most important skill we can help students to develop in their four years with us. This person, and apparently, the bulk of the program in which she teaches, has abandoned the teaching of critical thinking skills in order to indoctrinate. We can only hope that students, realizing that they are the focus of an attempt to brainwash, develop critical thinking skills on their own as the result of said attempt.

This is hilarious.

2004-01-12T00:39:00.000-06:00

But sad. Shouldn't it disturb the practicers of this sort of criticism that this sort of thing can be created and that the titles it generates, while occasionally off the mark--due more to the programs inability to make individual distinctions between literary input--oh, wait, many practicers of this criticism cannot make this distinction either . . . Anyway, the titles is generates sound pretty much like the crap on the program of pretty much any literary conference I've ever attended.

Thanks to Joanne Jacobs for this little gem.

Critical Categories, Some Clarification

2004-01-11T15:10:00.000-06:00

First of all, thanks to those of you who have responded so far. Keep the responses coming--the list is still quite short, and I know there's more stuff out there that I'm unaware of, particularly in the post-1960 category.

I want to clarify what I mean by "sensible," and while I don't have time right now to answer in full the debate that has occured here and here, I will be posting a lengthy reply/statement sometime this week. As you may have guessed, the term has begun.

When I say "sensible," I am talking primarily about criticism that can be used as a tool--that presents a methology for reading literature (or any text) that can be used by the reader without the necessity of adopting a particular ideology or adopting wholesale the subjective viewpoint of the critic (as so many Foucauldians do). Yes, yes, everything is ideology. Go ahead and blog on that. I'll still be here. What it should be grounded in is knowledge. Real knowledge. Not politically motivated fabrications, like radical social constructionism, but real knowledge. Hence my interest in cognitive psychology. Leftist nonsense notwithstanding, cognitive psychology has gained real knowledge about the human mind--the way it thinks, the way it produces language, and so forth--that demolishes a great deal of postmodern philosophy. In the past, philosophy has been required to reformulate itself as the human race (not just Western culture) has gained new knowledge; for some reason, the pomos think they are exempt from this, because they have "problematized the (Western) discourse of science." Uh-huh. Galileo's on the phone, Pope Pomo. Sooner or later, you'll need to acknowledge that the earth does revolve around the sun, and perhaps issue an apology.

But, I get ahead of myself. More on this later this week.

I'm trying to organize this list of criticism, to develop some categories so people unfamiliar with criticism can also use the bibliography. For example, I've divided the 20th century into pre- and post-1960s criticism. In the pre-1960s category, I've put most of what people have suggested into two sub-categories: New Criticism and Russian Formalism. But there's other stuff I'm not sure what to do with. Auerbach's Mimesis, for example.

It's even more difficult in the post-1960s. Bloom's Anxiety of Influence. What exactly do we call a work like this? In some ways, it takes an intertextual approach, but what exactly do we call it? Perhaps we need to create a new list of categories--sensible categories--for criticism that doesn't fall into the schools defined largely by ideology and/or identity politics.

Perhaps I obsess too much over categories. I could simply leave it at the very broad categories, but I want the list to be user friendly. I've also considered soliciting annotations, to help guide potential readers to works that will help them to formulate their own ideas, rather than adopting someone else's viewpoint wholesale, as so many theoretical readings do (and as I've already remarked above--but I'd like to hammer this point home). I'm definitely NOT looking for things to "apply" to literature; I'm looking for knowledge that readers can bring with them and use to unpack the text, or to create a dialogue with it. A Bloom-inspired monologue is no more the act of an individual reader (unless it's Bloom) than a Foucault-inspired monologue.

So, email me with more suggestions for the list of works itself, category suggestions, and annotations, if you feel like taking the time. Email address, as always, is to the right.

"Sensible" Literary Criticism

2004-01-09T23:51:00.000-06:00

After yesterday's blog, and a couple of rather successful lectures in class trying to demonstrate to undergraduates the value of literature in and of itself, I've started thinking about trying to develop a comprehensive list of works of literary criticism--even theory--that are "sensible."

Now, if you're reading this blog, you have had one of two reactions to the word "sensible." Either you know instinctively what I'm talking about, and can think of several works that you, too, consider "sensible," or you are going to respond on your own blog by "problematizing" or "interrogating" my use of the word "sensible." I'm interested in the responses of the first group. I could care less what the second group has to say, and could probably write your responses for you, if I were so inclined.

When I say sensible literary criticism, I don't mean works that examine a particular author or work, but broader theories of reading--methodologies, if we want to avoid the term theory--that can help a reader to formulate an ethical practice of reading and also to become a better, closer reader.

I'll start the list with a few suggestions of my own. My email address is to the right--please email me with further suggestions. If those of you with blogs of your own--particularly blogs that get read more than my own--will publicize my call for titles, I will start a file and eventually publish it here on the blog. At some point in the future (read, after the dissertation), when I move this blog to its own host, I'll give the bibliography its own web page.

This is important work, I think. We need not only to acknowledge the exemplary works of literary criticism and theory from the past, but push for the inclusion of contemporary works of criticism in the so-called canon of theory (the one canon that seems never to get questioned). There are works out there that argue for approaches to literature that have been largely ignored. The works advocating an evolutionary/cognitive psychological approach to literature and the arts that I've posted links to on the sidebar are examples of such works.

More contemporary works such as these, as well as a comprehensive list of works that question the foundations of the dominant paradigm, are desperately needed as a counter-balance in courses that purport to teach literary theory and methodology. If we can create a resource for students and teachers to learn about these works, we will have performed an important function.

A few examples:

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism
I.A. Richards's Practical Criticism
Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending
Steven Kepnes's The Text as Thou
Frederick Turner's Natural Classicism
William Empson's 7 Types of Ambiguity
Mikhail Bakhtin's The Dialogic Imagination
Valentine Cunningham's Reading After Theory
Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence

and of course the works of literary criticism in the sidebar. Much of what is included in Hazard Adams's Critical Theory Since Plato (at least the older edition I have) would also go on this list. But I'm particularly interested in post-1960s criticism, which the Adams is short on.

I await your input.

New Blogs, Ethical Reading Practices

2004-01-08T22:47:00.000-06:00

Two new blogs in the blogosphere have come to my attention: University Diaries (which actually predates my own blog by a week or two) and LitSkunk. Both make for interesting reading, and have certainly proven thought provoking for me. Each has served, in its own way, to remind me of why I do this—the reasons I decided to enter this profession in the first place. Thanks.

I am reminded that the political response to the politics of the academy, though sometimes necessary, can also serve to steer us away from the job of carefully reading literature that has been entrusted to us. The predominance of theory in our profession is a problem, but not merely because it has served to politicize the classroom.

What too many practitioners of theory forget is that an individual, human being wrote the “text” being studied. I read an interesting book by Steven Kepnes entitled The Text as Thou, which uses Martin Buber’s I and Thou model of human relationships as the basis for a practice of reading. I’m not going to recap the book’s contents here (I am slightly busy dissertating, after all), but I think that the ethical relationship it requires the reader to establish with the text—remembering that the author is a Thou whose essential human identity must be respected—is one that we as a profession would do well to adopt.

It is a constant source of amazement to me that in a profession where postcolonialism holds such sway that the “colonization” of a literary work is not only permissible but commonplace. Rather than the voice of an individual mind with something to say, the literary work becomes an opportunity to further the agenda of the reader. Rather than engaging in a dialogue with the author, theory allows readers to engage in a monologue all their own. How many “readers” are there amongst those of us who read literature for a living who produce time and again the same basic reading of any work they happen to read? For how many readers is the text always about “X”, or always about “Y”? And what about the ridiculous “absence as presence” position, in which a text that doesn’t address “X” can be said to speak about “X” because it avoids speaking of “X”?

Is this an ethical reading practice? “X” may be the interest of the reader, but it’s most definitely not what the author is writing about. Conversation between author and reader grinds to an immediate halt. This shows a singular lack of respect for the fact that the author has something to say, and labored intensively in the attempt to communicate it. Don’t we have an ethical obligation to listen? To try and understand what the writer is trying to communicate? A Thou wrote the words on the page; dead or alive, the author deserves to be listened to.

No doubt the theorists will find this position naïve, uncritical, or worse, old-fashioned. Putting ethics above politics is frowned upon in our profession. Judith Butler’s essay in The Turn to Ethics is extremely revelatory of the current attitude toward ethical concerns amongst scholars of the humanities.

Like the American culture academia so regularly condemns, we are poor listeners, unable to hear what is being said to us over the sound of our voice. Thankfully, some of us are trying harder to listen to what literature has to say to us.

Finally, an update.

2004-01-06T18:27:00.000-06:00

After a long absence here—visiting family, attending MLA, dissertating, and preparing to teach a new class this term kept me quite busy—I should comment briefly upon the MLA interviewing experience. I cannot comment upon any of the panels, since I did not attend. Even those few panels I would have been interested in attending would have been excruciating to sit through, given my state of perpetual anxiety about taking what in some ways amounted to mini-orals exams.

I’ll start by addressing the theory question. It did come up, but not in the way I expected. Apparently, some of my letters of recommendation made it clear to hiring committees that I was no fan of theory. I was not exactly required to defend my position, but I was asked by more than one interviewer to confirm that I was not entirely opposed to theory in all circumstances. I fell back on those modern theorists whose ideas I do not find too blinded by leftist politics, and managed to rescue myself, I think.

As for the interviews themselves, I’m avoiding commenting on them too much. I’m just superstitious enough to want to avoid jinxing myself. Supposedly, I will know by the end of January whether I have any campus visits. I’ll post something more on the whole process then.

As for the conference, the entries in other blogs about dark clothing and severe glasses is dead-on. It was amusing walking around San Diego incognito (jeans, a sweat shirt, and tennis shoes, when not interviewing) and playing “spot the academics”. There is also the “soft bag” phenomenon, which was pointed out to me by “Julia.” Academics seem to favor the same sorts of soft leather “briefcases” to carry papers, books, etc. Business people, on the other hand, seem to favor the hard-shell briefcase. Admittedly, I cannot find a hard-shell briefcase that will hold a laptop, scores of student papers, and a Norton Anthology—actually, I’ve even had trouble finding a soft leather bag with this capacity. But, I digress.

I should also point out the one academic fashion faux pas that I have always found most irritating: men’s shoes. Buck shoes are perfectly appropriate to wear with khakis and other less formal pants, but not with suits. I can’t count the number of men I saw wearing perfectly acceptable suits whose effect was destroyed by the poor choice of shoes.

Academic males: buy at least one pair of dress shoes!!

Also, men’s dress shirts. Oxford, button-down collar shirts are acceptable with khakis, etc., but they are not suit shirts. Invest in a couple of nice dress shirts to wear with your suit and tie.

Perhaps academic males should start reading GQ. It has become insufferably leftist since the previous editor passed, and there are swipes at Bush at least twice in each issue. You can have your politics reified and learn how to dress at the same time.

As for women’s clothing, I pay a little less attention, because I don’t wear it myself. What seems most needed is a little variation. Dark pantsuits, chunky shoes, the ubiquitous glasses—a little individuality would be nice, though the woman who wore the skirt made out of men’s ties mentioned in Erin O’Connor’s blog is taking it a bit too far.

Hmm. Maybe I should change my nom-de-plume to Mr. Blackwell.

Apparently, the Wordherders are a group mind?

2003-12-25T01:18:00.000-06:00

Ah, I see. After hunting around a bit more at the Wordherders website (and hearing from a reader who is more familiar with the uni-mind nature of the Wordherders), I see that George H. Williams and his commentators are all part of the "collective." How wonderfully Marxist of them. And as you go from one Wordherder's blog to the next, you see that they all comment on each others' blogs like the incestuous group they obviously are. And I see that Mr. Williams has helped Mr. Berube to fix his broken blog. What appears to be a united front of diverse academics is actually just the Wordherder collective.

Resistance, apparently, is futile.

How terribly, terribly silly.

Apparently, I'm paranoid.

2003-12-24T20:51:00.000-06:00

George H. Williams, over at Wordherders, objects to the contents of my posting on the theory question in MLA interviews. While I understand Williams’s position, I think perhaps his own politics and his personal experiences with MLA interviews have blinded him to the fact that others might have somewhat different experiences.

Methinks "Winston" doth protest too much. I seriously doubt anything like this will happen. I had seven job interviews the year I was hired for this job. No one asked me a theory question, "dreaded" or otherwise. Instead, I was asked about my research, my teaching, and a little about the administrative work I did as a graduate student. The committees that expressed the most interest in me were from departments that had faculty who did work similar to mine. In my case that meant, mostly, book history and humanities computing. On one of my campus visits I did mention Judith Butler once, in the context of something completely unrelated to my dissertation on eighteenth-century Methodism, but aside from that, I can't think of a single situation in which I felt I was being tested regarding my politics.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that most hiring committees don't care if you name-drop theorists or not. But they'd like to know that you're keeping up with the latest developments in your field, and if the only scholars you mention as influential were born in the 19th century, you're not likely to make that impression.

First of all, I’m not saying this is going to happen—I simply worry about the ensuing conversation if it does happen. Plenty of people I have talked to about interviewing at MLA have said they’ve run into the dreaded theory question. Some departments simply want people who do theory because they consider it “sexy.” Even in the MLA job list there were plenty of job listings specifically targeting post-colonial Victorianists, or feminist medievalists, or some other combination of era and theoretical bent. The theory question is out there; you are evidently lucky not to have encountered it. It’s also possible that your politics are enough in line with those of most of the people in the humanities that you fail to notice they are being questioned. You’re quicker to notice these things when you disagree with the people asking the questions than you are when you agree with them.

As for keeping up with the latest developments, those developments fall along two tracks, at least in my field. I keep up with the serious, textual scholarship, but I really don’t care what someone is doing with their application of theorist A to my chosen field. You fail to acknowledge the fact that those with the power to hire are also those with the power to choose what exactly constitutes “the latest developments.” It’s not like this is science, where the discovery of a new theory actually means something in the real world. For example, Edward Said has not invalidated I. A. Richards. I don’t understand why people in the humanities can’t get this. Copernicus and Galileo discovering that the earth revolves around the sun is a fact that must completely change the face of science. Foucault’s History of Sexuality is an interpretation. One is falsifiable, the other is not.

For that matter, Judith Butler’s theories of gender performativity often fly in the face of scientific fact. Perhaps some of these “recent developments” in the humanities don’t deserve the status they’ve been accorded.

Williams’s post generated a few comments, to which I would also like to respond.

Chuck, one of Williams’s readers comments,

I'm not sure whose argument this supports, but wouldn't this committee likely (though not necessarily) have read the writing sample that the interviewee mailed out? The writing sample seems to be the more likely site where one's politics will be recognized. I've been interviewed 4-5 times now, and no one has asked me a "theory" question that directly.

Ah, but they don’t all ask for a writing sample at this stage. I’m not sure that any of the schools I’m interviewing for have seen a writing sample yet. All they’ve seen in my CV and letter.

Then, in a second comment, Chuck states,

Hmmm...after reading "Winston's" blog, I have even more reservations about his position. I think it's important to keep in mind that hundreds of capable applicants with fantastic credentials (and from all political positions) will be unable to get the tenure-track jobs they want this year....Or maybe when I go into interviews, I should just use the secret leftist handshake...

Uh-huh. And lots of those not getting jobs are people who haven’t bought into the theory game. The really big jobs seem to go only to those playing the theory game.

I’m so glad conservative academics have given the left a chance to ridicule their fellow human beings. I can only hope that you didn’t buy into Hillary’s vast right-wing conspiracy crap, because that would seem to indicate that you’re just as paranoid as you accuse us of being.

There is prejudice against conservatism amongst academics. I’m not positing some vast left-wing conspiracy, I’m just saying that this sort of thing happens, and those of us who lean to the right of center worry about it. Perhaps you could show a little of that compassion the left is supposed to be so famous for.

Another reader, Matt K., states,

Of course there are exceptions and excesses, but in general departments are looking for three things at an MLA interview (and even more so during a campus visit): who's the smartest person in the candidate pool, is the person we think the smartest also a strong bet to negotiate the tenure process (in other words, you may be brilliant but if you can't commit words to paper in a productive manner you're not going to get hired), and is this a person we can stand to be around for at least the next six years. I think the notion of overtly political, let alone theoretical litmus tests are much overstated; that said, academics are people too (though some over at Invisible Adjunct would disagree) and it should come as no surprise, particularly in small departments or small towns, that academics want to work with folks they find agreeable and with whom they might have something besides a PhD in common.

So committees and departments are looking for someone they can stand to be around for at least six years, eh? And when the majority of the department is left, often far left (in real world, not academic, terms)? Are they going to be able to stand someone who supports the Bush Administration and its policies in the Middle East for six years? Someone who doesn’t support Affirmative Action? Someone who thinks Judith Butler is a fool? Think about what you’ve said. I know for a fact that at the institution I am presently at, there is no way in hell they’d knowingly hire a conservative. There is, in fact, not a single conservative in our English department, which has at least 25 professors. Not one.

Finally, I'll quote a comment from Jason:

It's also, frankly, peculiar--or, perhaps more precisely, an index of over-the-top convervative paranoia--to think that one's theoretical interests reliably index either one's attitudes toward the literary tradition *or* real-world politics.

Whatever. See my above comments on “the vast right-wing conspiracy” and the ability of those on the left to only see problems that affect them.

You name me a conservative who agrees with Said. Or Foucault for that matter. The fact of the matter is, much of modern theory is politically inflected. It’s difficult—if not impossible—to buy into the theory without buying into the politics.

You’re correct in saying (in a part of the comment not quoted above) that not all theory is so revealing of one’s politics. Bakhtin, for instance, is embraced by those on either side of the political fence, and I happen to like a great deal of what he has to say. But he’s not nearly as “sexy” as the more vehemently left theorists are, particularly since the 2000 election.

You can disagree with me, but you haven’t walked in my shoes. It's really amazing how many academics on the left can cite their own personal experience and the experiences of others like themselves and allow them to speak for all and sundry. So much for respecting the Other. My experience has not been your experience. Quit trying to invalidate my experience.

"You say you want a revolution . . ."

2003-12-23T02:32:00.000-06:00

A reader with more time on his hands that I have (obviously, he's not interviewing at MLA, and will be enjoying his Christmas holiday) has looked up the participants of the MLA panel on labor and found some interesting information. Three of the four panelists on “The Labor Theory of Culture” panel are members of the “Red Critique" or the "Red Collective,” a group which, in their own words, was

Formed on the occasion of the one hundred and fiftieth year of the publication of The Manifesto of The Communist Party, the RED COLLECTIVE is an international cadre of revolutionary Marxists committed to class struggle and producing class consciousness across national boundaries by means of a "ruthless critique of everything existing" under the regime of capital and wage labor. One of the goals of the RED COLLECTIVE is to produce critique-al knowledges that guide all wage laborers in their unyielding struggles to end private ownership of the means of production and usher in international communism.

So what we have at the MLA is the intellectual subsidization of a group of radical communists, who, unable to understand that history has proven Marxism a flawed and failed philosophy, continue to push for a communist revolution against the “evils” of capitalism. I’m not sure what the most disturbing part of all of this is. The stupidity of the participants, in clinging to a failed philosophy? The implicit backing by the MLA of a radical group whose final goal is the destruction of the United States as we know it? Or the failure of the MLA to provide a conference in which panelists actually present on matters having to do with language and literature?

My reader comments on the cute “critique-al knowledges” bit. He wonders what it might portend. Cynically, I suspect it’s just a bit of Derridean-derived nonsense, as in the recent Chronicle article ridiculing the MLA conference.

He provides some more quotations from the "Red Collective/Red Critique" website:

THE RED CRITIQUE is now more than ever before, a necessary task because, given the almost complete monopoly of the publishing practices by the ruling class and its surrogates in the knowledge industry, what is represented as the space of transformation is no longer distinguishable from the strategies of appeasement, reconciliation by negotiations and the pragmatic compromises of the North-Atlantic bourgeois left.

I would hope my last posting would serve to deflate this little leftist illusion: the media (which includes the publishing industry), in this country and others, leans far leftward. Perhaps not far enough for our radical friends, however, for whom anything short of revolution reeks of compromise. Thank God for the real radicals, who deliver papers at the MLA conference and publish manifestos on their website. “Viva la revolucion!”

These “intellectuals” have apparently forgotten the lessons learned from the twentieth century experiences with Marxism. Totalitarianism, anyone? Human beings have not evolved to live in Marxist regimes. We are competitive creatures, and we work for rewards. Take a hard look at why the Soviet Union was not able to compete with the United States during the Cold War. I suggest reading Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism. It’s always nice for budding little communists to read an account of someone who actually lived under a communist regime. Milan Kundera’s The Joke might also help these little Bolsheviks understand that their utopic visions of a Marxist state are just that—visions.

I’ll leave today’s posting with a few quotes from some friends of the Red Critique. We’ll start with Uncle Karl:

“The alteration of men on a mass scale is necessary.”

Of course such alteration is necessary. The only way human beings can exist in a Marxist state is through such alteration. We would have to be something other than human in order to live as Marx would have us. I’m sure the Red Critique would say that Marx would have us be something “better” than human. I’m not going to debate this here. What I want to stress is that Marx would have us be something other than what we are. The question is, what are we to do with those who cannot “rise” to Marx’s expectations? Oh, right. Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Castro, Il Jong and the rest have answered that question. We eliminate them.

Maxim Gorky wrote, “The working classes are to Lenin what materials are to the metallurgist.”

Ah, so even the laborers are just there to forward the aims of the revolution? Does this mean that Marxism might be guilty of seeking to manipulate the minds of the working class in order to forward its own aims? In order to consolidate its hold on power? Certainly not! The realities in Cuba, China, and North Korea serve to reveal that . . . oh, yeah. They serve to reveal that Gorky understands a fundamental truth of human nature that serves to demonstrate the evil of Marx—human beings are cogs in the machine, far more than they were in the industrial revolution Marx was so emphatically against (and with which Engels was intimately involved--an involvement that lined Uncle Karl's pockets).

Mao Zedong (a hero for our foolish friends, who learned nothing from Julia Kristeva’s experiences in Red China), said

“It is on a blank page that the most beautiful poems are written.”

Our friend Mao was speaking of human beings. If Marxism is to succeed, human beings must be a blank slate upon which to work; human nature, in a biological sense, must be rejected if the individual is to cede his or her will to the State. The Marxist utopia cannot exist if things like greed, desire, and selfishness are part of the human genome. The utopia can only be achieved if these are socially learned behaviors which can be weeded out of society. Is this the road our professoriate wants us to take?

There are, of course, only two ways to implement this weeding process. I’ll let you all figure out what those are.
(I should also add that I'd like to thank Steven Pinker for pointing out many of these Marxist quotations in his book, The Blank Slate, which has a Amazon.com link in the right sidebar.)

MLA Interviews and the Theory Question

2003-12-18T23:09:00.000-06:00

As anyone in academia will immediately understand, I have been thinking about the MLA interviews pretty much around the clock. The question I am most concerned with is the dreaded Theory question. Obviously, I’m not a big fan of theory. Oh, it has its uses. I would never debate the use of postmodern theory to understand, say, the postmodern novel, the same way I would use existententialist philosophy to read something like Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place". But I’m not so sure about using postmodern theory with Homer or Chaucer. It might produce an interesting reading—or utter B.S.—but it often has little to do with what either Homer or Chaucer set out to do. It’s historically irresponsible, and places the critic over the author in determining the text’s meaning. A typical move for the inflated egos in our profession, but one which shows little or no respect for the mind that produced the work being studied.

At any rate, I don’t mean this to become a tirade against theory.

What I mean this to be is an important question regarding the theory question at MLA interviews.

According to “the rules,” potential employers aren’t supposed to be able to ask you about your politics. But, given the highly politicized nature of theory, how can the theory question not constitute a question about politics? If I start talking about I. A. Richards’s influence on my work, I reveal myself as a literary conservative. And if I talk about A. C. Bradley’s influence on my reading of Shakespeare, I think that makes me a literary paleo-conservative. Whereas if I mention Foucault, or Said, or Derrida, I’m a fellow traveler. In many ways, the answer to the theory question reveals the candidate’s politics, or at least the candidate’s politics in terms of literary scholarship (though the two generally go hand-in-hand, in my experience).

Does the theory question constitute a political litmus test? I know it will in my case. I can either lie, and pretend to espouse a highly politicized way of looking at texts that, in many cases, runs counter to everything we know about reality and the human mind (yes, I prefer the answers of science, not the empty hypothesizing of postmodernism), or I can tell the truth, and probably blow my chances of getting most of the jobs I’ve been called to interview for. (My C.V. plays it cagey, by the way.)

One reader tells me of a job he lost by telling the committee of his fondness for Northrop Frye, an indication of his literary conservatism indeed. I imagine he got the same look that I received when I complained to the director of composition at my current institution that there were only heavily left-leaning readers on the approved list of textbooks. “Ah, an evil Bush-voting bastard.”

No Liberal Media?

2003-12-18T18:02:00.000-06:00

A reader sent me this link. This is quite unbelievable. The quotes appear to be real and undoctored; for some there is even video footage (you'll need a fast connection to view).

Check it out:

Media Research, Notable Quotables 2003

Some of these examples are just blatantly biased, but the ones that scare me are the ones that subtly inject bias into what purports to be straightforward reporting.

We did a unit on this in my composition class the quarter, after students started citing talking heads as sources of "credible" information. And yes, before any lefties complain, by talking heads I mean some of the rabidly conservative bozos on Fox as well. Partisanship is partisanship, and news is news. It seems all the twain do anymore is meet, unfortunately. This explains why your average college freshman can't tell the difference between a news piece and an editorial.

And why is it that Al Gore thinks the news media is a conservative fifth column?

the Madness of "Literary" studies in Academia

2003-12-18T00:20:00.000-06:00

Time for another look at some MLA panels and papers. I received an email from a reader who says he never even looks at the program anymore, because he has borderline high blood pressure. Well, so do I, actually, and I'm drinking a five shot latte right now, so if all of a sudden I pull a Castle Arrrgghh, you'll know why.

Here's a nice one to start with:

Session 600: The Labor Theory of Culture

1. "Merely Reading: Cultural Criticism as Erasure of Labor," Robert Faivre, Adirondack Community College
2. "Family Labor: Caring for Capitalism," Julie P. Torrant, SUNY Albany
3. "Eating Empire: Labor and New Maps of Consumption," Amrohini J. Sahay, SUNY Stony Brook
4. "'Ground Zero' and the Geography of Labor," Kimberly DeFazio, SUNY Stony Brook

There's really only one thing I can say about this panel--what does this have to do with the study of language and literature? Are these people in literature departments? Why is this a panel at the MLA?

Here's a nice one, boiling over with anti-American sentiment:

Session 618: The New Patriotism: What's Literature Got to Do With It? (My answer: not much)

1. "Patriot Games: Globilization, the Transnational, and Cultural Citizenship," Ramon Saldivar, Stanford University
2. "Writing the Self: Reading United States Imperialism," Cynthia Ann Young, University of Southern California
3. "Patriot entre acts," Alisa Solomon, Baruch College, CUNY
4. "Patriotism, Inc.," David C. Lloyd, Scripps College

Sigh. The imperial, war-mongering United States, forcing people around the world to watch our movies and television programs and wear Levis. I seemed to have missed the panel on the imperialism of fundamentalist Islam. Can someone direct me to the session number?

I remember driving home once from a mini-conference with three other academics in the car. We passed a house that was flying the American flag and had some red, white, and blue streamers hanging from the window sills. On the drive in, one of my fellow academics said, "Oh my God, will you look at that?" On the way back, she snorted and said "Can you believe that?" or something to that effect. I was finally compelled to remind her that the day before had been Memorial Day. You could hear her mind backpedalling. But her response was something like "Still . . ." (This was Memorial Day of 2002, by the way.)

I'd like to drop kick some of these people into the heart of Saudi Arabia. I'm sure they'd be very, very happy to return to the United States.

Oh, and again, what does this have to do with language and literature? Hmm. I'm going to have to set up a macro for that question.

Ah, here's one that's just blatantly political. Nothing to do with literature or language at all.

Session 704: From the Rosenburgs to Mumia Abu Jamal: Writing Against the Death Penalty

1. "Race, Rape and the Death Penality," Lillian S. Robinson, Concordia University
2. "Not in My Name," Helen Margaret Cooper, SUNY Stony Brook
3. "Mumia Re(de)constructed: On Derrida and the Death Penality," David Brenner, Kent State University

First of all, here's a nice link for the friends of Mumia: danielfaulkner.com. Read and understand the lies you have foolishly swallowed for two decades now. As for the Rosenburgs, these panelists might want to look into the Venona Documents. Not everyone sentenced to death is innocent of the charges brought against them, kiddies. Oh, and once again, what does this have to do with language and literature (to be asked in a tired voice)?

Too much of this program reads like a political rally. Isn't there some other venue for this sort of thing?

Anyway, that's it for the MLA program. This has just made me tired and sad.

Welcome a New Blogger to Winston's Diary

2003-12-15T23:32:00.000-06:00

I'd like to extend a warm welcome to someone I hope will become a regular guest blogger here at Winston's Diary--a close friend of mine who will be going by the screenname "Julia." She has promised not to betray me to O'Brien, and I have promised the same. I'm reasonably sure our friendship can withstand even Room 101.

I'll be blogging a bit less over the next couple of weeks. I have landed a few interviews at MLA, and am dissertating like a madman. I also have to finish my grades and deal with the ESL/plagiarism case I discussed below.

Anyway, I hope you will all welcome Julia to Winston's Diary. I've put a link to her email address underneath my own.

ESL Woes

2003-12-13T23:28:00.000-06:00

I don't want to be too specific in this posting, as I am referring to a real student and a real case here.

I've taught at a number of colleges and universities, and the problems I've had with ESL students have been the same everywhere. Quite simply, universities in the United States do very little to assure that international students have mastered the English language adequately enough to be able to attend courses in English and understand what they are being taught. This seems to me a tremendous disservice to these students, even if they are planning to return to their native countries and never speak a word of English again in their lives (which has been the case for at least three of my own students).

I have had, quite literally, students who could not understand me when I asked them to join a group to work on study questions regarding an essay the class had read. I have had students whom I have asked to see me regarding problems with their writing (I generally ask students to write something in class during the first week, whether it's a composition class or a literature class) not understand what it was I was asking them to do.

Whatever their major is, they cannot be understanding the content of the class, if it is being delivered in English. How much are they really learning?

And when they turn in papers, how much are they actually writing themselves? This term, not for the first time and probably not for the last, I have discovered an ESL student who is having a "tutor" translate his papers for him from his native language into English. Since this is a composition class, the work of the course is being done by someone else. And from questioning the student, it has become clear that it isn't just the language that is being translated, but the phrasing of the essays as well--while some core ideas in the paper may actually belong to the student, the expression of them and the sophistication of that expression belong to someone else.

Obviously, this is a plagiarism issue, but that's not my point. This student has been robbed of part of his education because of the language barrier that exists between him and his professors. Why is this allowed to persist?

I place the blame on two factors.

The first is the greed of the American university system. This student and others like him are paying a premium price to attend public universities in the United States. They are provided with ESL classes that are, frankly, a joke. Every student passes these classes, and is "mainstreamed" as soon as possible. The university doesn't want to slow them down too much, because they might decide that a U.S. education isn't worth it. So they wind up in classes they are linguistically unprepared for. And no one really seems to care. I have actually been instructed at several places to use a different standard to grade these students. Pass them along, give them their piece of paper, collect their extra tuition. There is a serious ethical problem here.

But from the other side of the political fence (sort of) there are those who make the acquisition of the English language a political issue. It is not our place, I have actually been told, to force English upon these students. So when too big a deal is made out of the under-performance of ESL students in English classes, the post-colonialists pop out of the woodwork and start lamenting the terrible conditions in these students' home countries that have forced them to come to the U.S. to seek a "quality" education and that we should not practice linguistic imperialism in forcing these students to learn the English language and possibly lose their culture in so doing. We must respect the "linguistic choices" of these students, and read the papers they submit to us for their ideas alone, regardless of whether those ideas are truly being communicated.

But, regardless of which side you decide to listen to, you wind up with students with whom you cannot communicate.

Isn't this robbing them of at least part of the quality education they came here for in the first place?

I would appreciate thoughts on this matter, regardless of whether you agree with my assessment of the causes or not. How do we solve this problem?

Money from Nigeria

2003-12-10T12:42:00.000-06:00

My "Winston Smith" email account has been active for a total of five days, I believe, and those generous Nigerians (although sometimes they're from Rwanda) wanting to deposit money in my bank account have already discovered it.

Are there reports of anyone actually falling for this scam? I guess some people must, or they wouldn't keep trying.

Pushing Me Rightwards

2003-12-09T23:32:00.000-06:00

Conservative English Major makes some interesting points in his recent blog about the ability of the academy to push moderates further to the right.

I'll provide a little history about myself. I was first able to vote in a presidential election in 1988. I voted for Dukakis. In 1992, I voted for Clinton.

By 1996, I had changed my tune somewhat, and voted for Dole. This was not so much a rightward turn as it was a vote against Clinton. There were simply too many questions about his character, questions of character that were, in my opinion, relevant to his position as POTUS. I was also put off by the poltically motivated reaction of those on the left to questions regarding Clinton's character, particularly among feminists who were forced to turn a blind eye to Clinton's own behavior, though they had come out so strongly against Clarence Thomas only a few years prior. I guess I was beginning to see the double-standard in action.

Being surrounded by the left--I was an adjunct in the Fall of 1996--I was given a front-row seat from which to watch the double-standard in action. This made me start to question pretty much everything that was going on in the humanities, and I began to see the huge disparity between what people preached and what they actually practiced. The department's resident Marxist, for example, lived in a palatial home in an extremely wealthy beach community. The resident feminist--of the Steinem variety--moved from one abusive relationship to another, and seemed to take out her frustration against the men in her life on the dead, 18th century men whom she studied. She also "empowered" herself by occasionally sleeping with students.

This was also about the time that I started noticing the myopia problem. The resident Marxist was a fine reader of texts, but all the readings were essentially the same. That was fine when we were talking about the depiction of the labor movement in William Dean Howells, but didn't always work well with other texts. There was also the little matter of the practice of Marxism in the real world, and the things that were being learned in the wake of the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Surely, as an intellectual, he would adjust some of his beliefs given the new knowledge that was being obtained? No, he would not. And was it proper of him to teach only one way of looking at literature in introductory courses? Wasn't the beauty of the new paradigm in literary studies supposed to be the multiplicity of meanings that could be found in a text. The imposition of a single reading onto all texts was not what this whole project was supposed to be about.

I had also learned a great deal of theory by this point, and while I had not yet completely abandoned theoretical approaches to literature--the paper I used to get into the Ph.D. program, for example, remains theoretically grounded--I was beginning to see how the penchant of theory for deconstructing the socially constructed fabric of the world around it allowed it to be hoisted on its own petard. Nothing, it seemed to me, was more socially constructed than theory itself. It was a way of looking at the world that had no real basis in common sense--at least the variety that is practiced outside of the academy--but one which the community had agreed to accept as reality. It was also about this time that the Sokal hoax took place, and I could not understand why the basic response to it was to simply ignore it. Serious doubt had been cast upon theory--how could this be ignored? The hoax had been successfully perpetrated.

But, I stray from the rightward push. Sort of. It was this ability to ignore any and all information that didn't fit with theory that started pushing me, not rightward exactly, but away from the left. I began to see the left as more insidious than the right, because right-wing wackos are easily spotted and generally identified as such by the mainstream media. Left-wing wackos are far more clever at hiding the extent of their extremism, and too often get a free pass from the media, because they are seen as being progressive.

Then came the 2000 election. The blinding hatred for Bush I was witness to on campus was enough to make me very cautious about the left. Like the Conservative English Major, I do not agree with all of Mr. Bush's policies; I would actually rather have seen McCain get the Republican nomination. I also do not like Al Gore. Like Clinton, he's just too much of a political animal. I just don't trust him, because I don't think you can really know who he is or what he is about. Today's endorsement of Dean, for example, is problematic, and smacks of political calculation.

At any rate, it was the behavior of my colleagues in the crisis following the election that finally pushed me over the edge. It should be obvious to any observer that both Gore and Bush played the system as best they could in order to claim victory in the election. I personally felt that Gore's methods were a little more underhanded than Bush's, but part of that is my own perception of Gore as having felt like he was entitled to the presidency. Regardless, both men pulled out all the stops in trying to win, as might well be expected.

In academia, however, Bush was an evil bastard who was trying to steal the election from Gore. There was no other way to read it, and nothing that Gore did was questionable in any way. This sort of blindly partisan thinking, and the continued references--even up to today--to a stolen election, Governor (not President) Bush, the Selectident, etc. made it impossible for me to maintain continued respect for the majority of my colleagues as critical thinkers, able to see through the rhetoric of partisanship to a more objective account of the situation.

So, from being a left-leaning moderate, I moved to being a right-leaning moderate. The blind hatred of the left pushed me away.

I am not a right-wing wacko, despite the accusations of others. For example, I support the right of a woman to choose, but I believe that the choice must be made while the fetus is still a conglomeration of cells. (I make exceptions, of course, if the physical health of the mother is endangered). I don't think that a compromise position on abortion should be so hard to hammer out, and I would gladly add say $100-$150 to my yearly tax bill if it guaranteed every woman immediate access to a morning-after pill. I would also happily see someone who murdered a doctor who performed abortions sent to death row. (Yes, I am for capital punishment.)

I also think that the current distribution of wealth is uneven and unfair, though I think that the Green Party's idea of everyone making $30,000 is ridiculous. A brain surgeon should make more than a burger-flipper, but perhaps we could reduce the ratio a bit, so that the brain surgeon is still rewarded for both the importance of the work and the difficulties involved in becoming a brain surgeon, but also so that the burger flipper makes enough money to live on (by which I mean the burger flipper can afford the necessities of life, plus some extras).

Simply put, I abhor extremists. I paraphrase my favorite pop-culture icon: "You've always been one for logic. I'm one for rushing in where angels fear to tread. Reality . . . lies someone in between."

A correction.

2003-12-09T03:48:00.000-06:00

Mr. Berube is correct in stating on his website that he did not call anyone stupid at Joanne Jacob's website. That was not a lie on my part, as Mr. Berube accuses, but a mistake. The "Michael" posting over at Joanne Jacobs was doing such a good job of posting for Mr. Berube that some seemed to be responding to him as if he were Berube. When Berube personally emailed me this morning, responding to the same conversation that was taking place in the comments section, I put 2 and 2 together. Unfortunately, this time they did not add up to 4. I also proceeded on the assumption that since Berube is generally in the habit of calling into question the intelligence of anyone who disagrees with him (see his portrayal of Eric Rasmussen's comments as "ignorant" on his blog entry on me), that the comments on Jacob's website could reasonably be concluded to be his. But, you know what happens when you assume. Joanne Jacobs has since informed me that the "Michael" posting over there is definitely not Berube, or at least not posting from his email address.

For that mistake, I apologize.

I have corrected the post below, to merely reference his repugnant attitude both in the email correspondence I have seen posted on various sites and his arrogant demeanor in his email to me. I would have left the mistake as is--unlike the fictional Winston, I do not work for the Ministry of Truth--but I do not wish anyone reading the post for the first time to share in my mistake and wrongly condemn Berube for a remark that was not his own.

Michael Berube

2003-12-08T14:59:00.000-06:00

Having posted a couple of replies to a post over at Joanne Jacobs, I am now the "distinguished" recipient of an email from Mr. Berube. Having asked where he finds all the time for not only posting on his own blog but responding on others and well as emailing the bloggers themselves, I received this response:

Good question! Here are a few of the things I've written in the past six months-- on Don DeLillo, Colson Whitehead, Helen Keller, Paul Berman, Western Civ courses, aesthetics and cultural studies. There's more, but this will have to do for now. (The Berman and Keller reviews appeared this summer; everything else is forthcoming.) When you finish 'em, let me know if you want a look at my seven entries for the "New Keywords" project or my reply to Stanley Hauerwas on disability and Christianity. Enjoy! I've got to get back to teaching literature, and today I have two important committee meetings. Best, Michael Bérubé

All the essays mentioned in the email were sent along as MSWord attachments for my perusal. Is Mr. Berube really so pathetic that he needs to seek my approval this way? Am I supposed to be wowed by his prolific pen? (Though if all of these essays are of the same quality as the one published in the Chronicle, wowed would not be the word for it.)

As for the content of Mr. Berube's writing, Don DeLillo and Colson Whitehead appear to be appropriate topics for a professor of English to be writing about.

My reponse to Mr. Berube was:

Generally speaking, I have found that the people who demonstrate the greatest degree of arrogance are those who feel most insecure in their positions.

You must feel pretty damned insecure.

Mr. Berube is perhaps the most arrogant professor of English I have ever encountered, and that's saying something, because I've met some of the ones generally considered at the top of their game when it comes to arrogance.

Given his rather unprofessional behavior and his level of discourse--his emails and posts on his own site have not been particularly professorial--I suggest that readers contact the Paterno Family or whoever it is that runs the endowment fund paying Mr. Berube's salary and let them know what kind of person their money is paying for.

And this is all I have to say about or to Michael Berube.

Center for Consumer Freedom

2003-12-07T00:19:00.000-06:00

These are some really good ad campaigns. Some of the QuickTime files work just fine, but a couple have no sound, and I cannot find a plug-in via the Quick Time site to fix the problem. Still, I'd love to see some of these on primetime television, as opposed to the onslaught of NARAL commericals that I was forced to endure during the whole partial-birth abortion debate. Can you say "slippery slope fallacy"?

Center for Consumer Freedom

Not Without My Daughter

2003-12-06T21:34:00.000-06:00

I've received some very nice well-wishes via email over the last day or so, thanks mainly to the link to my blog posted by Erin O'Connor, to whom I am extremely grateful.

One email in particular was of interest, and actually inspired me to include a link in the sidebar to Amazon's page for the book Choosing the Right College.

This reader writes:

It's been 30 years since college, and since it was mostly engineering or science I rarely saw the raving lunatics. But I have sent two daughters to college and one came back so far left that she is currently a lobbyist for FCNL in DC (this is after getting a math engineering degree). Where would she be if she took poly sci?

What parents and students alike need to understand is that far too many in academia reason using the following syllogism:

(A) The job of a university instructor is to enlighten students and broaden their minds.
(B) "Liberal" thinking is the mark of an enlightened and broadened mind.
Therefore, the job of a university instructor is to instruct students in "liberal" thinking.

There are some problems with this syllogism. First off, although the syllogism may be valid, reasoning is not sound--the second premise is flawed, and for two reasons. The first reason is that the word liberal has undergone a dramatic transformation on the college campus since the 1960s. Liberalism is no longer classical liberalism, but radical leftism. But it is presented as classical liberalism--i.e., open-mindedness. So we have equivocation in the second premise, because liberal means one thing to a large portion of the population, but something altogether different when coming from the mouths of most members of the academy.

The second problem is that even classically liberal thinkers are not necessarily possessed of enlightened and broadened minds. There are certainly times when a conservative position is the mark of an enlightened and broadened mind, as most of the laws commonly accepted by all but those on the fringes of society demonstrate.

One would think that in the hallowed halls of higher learning, that such sloppy logic would never survive, but it actually flourishes. I have many colleagues who not only subscribe to this logic, but make it a deliberate point to try and rid their students of any vestiges of conservative or even moderate thinking that may have been instilled in them by their parents. Given that most of my immediate colleagues are graduate students, this is not surprising. Many of them are chronologically very close to their own teenage/young adult rebellious phase, and hope to inspire their students to follow in their footsteps, rejecting the traditional values of their parents in favor of the radical values of the youth culture to which they have subscribed.

And, since many professors are still reliving their own rebellious years--since academia doesn't require that one really take on the responsibilities of adulthood--it's not as if undergraduates are being discouraged from their rather mindless rebellion by the professors they encounter when they start taking upper-division courses. Often they are simply taught new ways in which to express their rebellious tendencies.

If I were a parent sending my child off to college, I would first make sure to pick a four-year college where there were no graduate students. This would not only insure that someone with a Ph.D. was teaching my child in every class, but it would keep my child's mind away from the radical notions that too many graduate students have embraced. Also, having taught at a number of institutions, I have found that where there are no graduate students, the professors actually seem to grow up a little more than they do where they are surrounded by graduate students whom they feel they need to impress with their radicalness.

Finally, if your daughter had taken poly sci, maybe she would be a little wiser in her politics than she is having picked up her politics from her peers and from professors who have no business pontificating on politics when it isn't even their field. That's not to say that poly sci isn't ridiculously left; but maybe she would have encountered some conservative or moderate political ideas as she was forced to master the material.

The reader closes the email by asking

Anyway great blog. Anything I can do to help wake up the masses to what 'higher education' (scare quotes intentional) is all about?

Yes. Tell anyone and everyone about your experiences. Be as thorough in explaining them as possible, and be certain to provide concrete examples of what you're talking about. Perhaps when these stories have reached a critical mass (a nod of the head to Erin O'Connor), the preponderance of the evidence will necessitate that something be done.

We are obviously in the midst of a conservative swing in this country. While I do not agree with everything the conservatives would like to do (I would not, for example, send my child to Bob Jones University, because I'm not in favor of that kind of brainwashing, either), it is possible that part of this swing will include taking notice of what this country's universities have turned into.

But we need to be vocal in our dissent.

Marxist Leninist Assimilation

2003-12-06T03:03:00.000-06:00

Because I have to go to the MLA conference this year for potential job interviews, I thought I would take the time to complain about the ridiculousness of the panels that appear in the conference program, which showed up at the door a couple of months ago. Yes, parents, your tax and tuition dollars pay for professors and graduate students to deliver papers on these panels.

Granted, it's not all bad. But most of it is. I'll be posting on this occasionally between now and December 27th, the day of doom. (Yes, the conference is right after Christmas, because Christmas and family are, after all, constructs of western patriarchy. No need to spend time with loved ones during the holidays. Of course, if Derrida is there, they'll all be with their loved one.)

Example #1:

War and the University, arranged by the Radical Causus in English and the Modern Languages

Paper #1: "Imperial Classroom: Ideology and the Antiwar Struggle" by Anthony D. Dawahare at California State University, Northridge and Krista L. Walter at Pasadena City College
Paper #2: "What Can We Learn from the Teens, Thirties, Fifties? Campus Protests, Rebellion, Committment Then and Now" by Grover C. Furr at Montclair State University
Paper #3: "The 'Berkeley Mafia' in Peter Dale Scott's Coming to Jakarta: A Faculty Investigates Itself" by David Gewanter at Georgetown University

Now I haven't read the Scott poem that is the subject of the third paper--and I guess we should be proud that at least one paper on this panel has something to do with language and literature--but I have read about it, and it sounds like a typical, self-important, academic leftist work. The rest of the panel just boggles my mind. I'm not sure what to make of that first title. I would like to think that it means what it would mean if I were presenting the paper--that "imperialistic" professors are using the classroom to further their own antiwar struggle. I have grown cynical enough to doubt this, but I remain hopeful. The second paper, by Grover Furr, is what it seems to be. I've seen Furr's website, and it's pretty safe to say that he'll be taking about how to use the classroom for the purposes of "liberal enlightenment."

Example #2:

Speech, Politics, and Social Reality

I'll just cut straight to paper #3: "The Linguistic Uninhibition of George W. Bush," by Allan Metcalf of MacMurray College. Again, I'm feeling pretty cynical about the possibility that this is going to somehow present the president in a positive light. And is this sort of thing really what we expect professors to be doing? Finding complex ways to say "Bush talk stupid"? Sigh.

Example #3:

From the panel on Globalization and Gender, "Pop Nation and Strange Angels: The Extra-Ordinary Materiality of Japanese Girl Culture," by Katherine M. Mezur, from U.C. Berserkeley. I actually find this offensive, and not just because someone who teaches theater and dance is presenting a pop-culture paper about Japanese girls buying Hello Kitty backpacks. This sort of "scholarship" merely perpetuates stereotypes and divides people up into racially/culturally based groups. No doubt it celebrates this new identity it has created for Japanese girls. This is imperialism, folks. Elite Western scholar from Berserkeley defines the identity of Japanese girls.

There's also a panel on "Rethinking Kristeva." Hopefully, these panelists and their audience will recall that Kristeva rethought Marxism after her 1970s trip to China.

And here's a paper called "The Phrenology of Telling: Facing the 'Enemy.'" Now why does it seem so appropriate to me that if someone at the MLA is going to talk about science, it's going to be phrenology?

And, speaking of science, it amazes me that there are so many panels that talk about the body, but that the mere suggestion that our bodies--i.e. our genetic makeup--might have a part in determining our identity is anathema. Why do so many people in the humanities and social sciences insist on adhering to the discredited doctrine of the blank slate, worshipping fools like Judith Butler who insist that gender is mere performance? I'd like to see someone slip some large doses of testosterone into Butler and see whether or not her performance is altered. And, if biochemistry has nothing to do with who we are, why are so many of my colleagues on anti-depressants? Are they willing to admit that serotonin isn't a cultural construction?

Finally, I'll just make this comment on the Lacan panel--how come so many of the psychology professors and graduate students I've spoken to have never heard of Lacan? And how come those who have generally snort at the mention of his name?

That's all I can take tonight. I should be calming down in preparation for bed, rather than building up my ire.

Rigging a court case?

2003-12-05T15:46:00.000-06:00

Why do I have to resort to conservative news outlets in order to find out about this sort of thing?

Ted Kennedy and NAACP President Conspire to Rig Sixth Circuit Court Affirmative Action Case?

And again here: CFIF.org

Nothing on CNN about this. Nothing at the New York Times. Apparently, the only important Ted Kennedy news is his vehement opposition to the Medicare prescription drug bill. Too bad Mary Jo Kopechne wasn't given the chance to get old enough to be the recipient of Ted's largess.

Of course, the larger question is, what the hell is it with the leftist elite that they simply cannot get it through their heads that most Americans are not in favor of affirmative action and that it is fundamentally unjust?

I could, of course, start in on Sandra Day O'Connor, but I think I'll leave it at that.

No, there's no political bias in the academy.

2003-12-05T01:20:00.000-06:00

While surfing through various university websites looking at course catalogs--trying to write that "personal" letter of application--I came across the following little dandy on the UCLA English Department website.

English 109: The American Political Novel
This class examines a range of texts that explicitly engage political issues and that were, in some cases, written to intervene directly in ongoing political debates. The assigned readings will range chronologically from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)--perhaps the most influential political novel ever published in the United States--to E. L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel (1971) and Alice Walker's Meridian (1976). Although the books covered in the course raise many important topics, we will focus primarily upon three: race and the legacy of slavery, gender and sexism, and the American Left.

Apparently, the only American political novels out there are written from the perspective of the left. I would have thought that something like Philip Roth's The Human Stain, given the forthcoming film (or has it already been released?) and the fact that it deals with the politics of the academy, would have been a fine addition to a course of the American political novel. Of course, as that novel explicitly condemns the same sort of thinking that seems to be behind the creation of this course, I guess that might be a bit embarrassing to the professor.

I should have stopped reading at that point, and realized that I didn't really want to join the UCLA English department. But today's course catalog is really like a train wreck. Here was the next entry:

English 118: Reading Film Noir and the "Neo Noir"
This course examines the film noir genre and the literature from which it has traditionally been derived, the American detective novel. The syllabus includes classic pairings such as Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep and the 1946 film adaptation directed by Howard Hawks. In addition, the class looks at the post 1980's trend of neo-noir novels and films that recast the noir tradition in contemporary cultural terrain, exploring dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality. Examples include Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress and the 1995 film adaptation directed by Carl Franklin as well as James Ellroy's L.A. Confidential and the 1997 film adaptation directed by Curtis Hansen.

And there we go again. The holy triumvirate of race, class, and gender, with sexuality added to the mix. More novels read through the lens of leftist politics. I've read all three of these novels, and I seem to recall that they were far more dense that this reductive approach makes them out to be. And aren't things like setting (what we now call "issues of place," since the word "setting" might somehow resurrect the ogre of New Criticism) important in these novels? L.A. Confidential? Being taught at UCLA? And Phillip Marlowe is character of such depth, for all his stereotypicalness. Do literature classes even study the elements of literature anymore? There's more going on in The Big Sleep than naked pictures of Carmen Sternwood.

But wait! There's more:

English 177: The Myth of the American Adam and the Post-WWII Novel
When R. W. B. Lewis published his influential The American Adam in 1955, his thesis that the transplanted European functioned as a New-World Adam and the American wilderness as his Eden provided a mythic framework in which to read what the Academy then considered the American canon. In this class, we will investigate the relevancy of that mythos in a postwar era characterized by an increasingly more urban and ethnically diverse experience of America. Particular attention will be paid to novels from minority traditions that question the racial, gender, and historical underpinnings of this myth of the American wilderness. Readings will include Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, Thomas Pynchon's Vineland, Toni Morrison's The Song of Solomon, Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima, and Karen Tei Yamashita's Tropic of Orange.

And again, we get two of the three holy lenses: race and gender. Also nice to see that "what the Academy then considered the American canon" has changed to reflect the need of canonical affirmative action. The quality of a work, it would seem, is relatively unimportant; what is important is that it either (A) talk about the themes of race, class and gender, or (B) can be forced to talk about these themes, either through the completely assinine "absence as presence" argument (by which critics allow themselves to say whatever they want to say about a work, whether the work (or should I say text supports the reading or not. I once listened to someone tell me that the film The Unforgiven was all about Native Americans precisely because they weren't depcited in the film, proceeding on the assumption that all Westerns must address the subject of Native Americans or be guilty of deliberately avoiding the subject. And why is there always a Toni Morrison book in these types of courses? Of course, the nice thing about Morrison is that you only ever read one of her books, because once you've read one . . . Kind of like taking a course at UCLA, it would seem.

So, three out of four variable topic courses for UCLA undergrads are about race, class, and gender. The fourth, entitled "Assembling California," doesn't provide enough of a description to tell, but the title of the course alone indicates to this recovering user of theory (or, perhaps more accurately, user--not reader--of literature) that the same cultural constructivist nonsense that underpins the other three courses will underpin this one. I'm not certain that "variable" is the correct term to be using here. A more honest course catalog would just say "Leftist Content Courses" and at least let students know what they were signing up for.

Out of the other twelve courses on offer for undergrads in the Fall, 2003 schedule, five explicitly focus on matters of race, rather than matters of literature:

English 189.3: Interracial Romance in African American and Asian American Literature
This course focuses on biracialism, passing and interracial romance in African American and Asian American fiction.

English 189.4: Theaters of Race
Seminar discussing dramatic literature and performances by African Americans, Chicanos, Asian Americans and Native Americans. The emphasis will be on contemporary solo performance and on works exploring race in conjunction with issues of gender and sexuality.

English 190: The 1992 Los Angeles "Riots" Reconsidered
This course examines the Los Angeles riots from multicultural and interdisciplinary perspectives. We will look at the event and its aftermath through the visual media, fiction, and nonfiction. Special emphasis will be placed on the interracial dynamics of African Americans and Asian Americans.

English M197A: What is the Blackness of Blackness? Constructions of "Race" and "Difference" in African American Literature
This course looks at a range of African American fiction and literary essays from the 1980s and 1990s that explore what Herman Gray has called "blackness as a sign." Rather than assuming black identity or community to be a stable given, texts such as Danzy Senna's Caucasia, A.J. Verdelle's The Good Negress and Hilton Al's The Women depict characters and personae who negotiate relationships to black identities and black communities through differences such as "race mixture," "black English" and "queer sexuality." The course will examine what Gray has called "various positions and claims on blackness" through creative texts as well as critical theory by writers such as Stuart Hall and Adrian Piper.

English M197C: Race, Memory, and Technology in Asian American Literature and Culture
This course will survey a selection of Asian American memoirs, novels, films, and stage performances, paying particular attention to the representation of media and popular culture within these works. How does incorporation into a media-saturated public sphere signal entry into normative American citizenship for Asian Americans? How does the global flow of media alter the terrain upon which Asian Americans make their claims? In this course, we will read several contemporary memoirs of famous/infamous Asian Americans (e.g., Wen Ho Lee, Margaret Cho) alongside recent fictions produced by Asian American novelists and filmmakers (e.g., Chang Rae Lee, Ruth Ozeki, Rea Tajiri). We will be examining these works in terms of their concepts of power, agency, social justice, as well as in terms of their portraits of the boundaries of bodies and body politics mediated by technology.

Do the voters in California know that this is the kind of nonsense their tax dollars are supporting? Actually, they probably don't. And neither do most of the undergrads who would be signing up for this course, from what I've seen. I know how to read these course descriptions, after years of taking the types of courses they describe. I know that they indicate that the class will be taught from a particular political point of view, and that many of them will likely attempt to alienate students from the wider culture around them by trying to convince them of its inherent evil. But students walk into these courses blind, and many of them come to believe that this is what literary studies is all about. Few learn how to closely read literature or to appreciate the fact that they are having a conversation with someone when they read a book, a poem, or a play. Instead, they learn the method of the monologue of the critic.

I think I've found a few places where Arnold can cut the budget--fire the professors who are being paid to teach these courses. What in God's name does any of this have to do with the study of literature? And these are undergraduate courses. Who teaches undergrads the reading skills they need at this highly overrated university?