363. Higher Education: The Great Shift (3)

In earlier posts in this sequence the problem for the old professor in the History Department was to find the right response to the young professor in the African-American Studies Department marching in the same robes he was wearing, and, oh my, carrying the same title he carried, displaying his name and courses in the same catalog, and, God help him, having an office in the same building covered with the same ivy.  Those things all signified to the world the professor's reliability as a source of knowledge.  Now here was this fellow from African-American Studies signaling equal reliability.

His was the hot way to see the shift in priorities in our universities, from knowledge to goodness, and it would be heated more by his vision of goodness taking over department after department as the Great Shift proceeded, reducing reliability.  The cool way would have been to see an "ought" acquiring the status of an "is."  With all the rights and privileges.  And without the work, the hard, nearly fruitless work, that analytic philosophers had put into it. 

Hot or cold though, the outside world can't dismiss these objections, or laugh at them ("Horrors, my pure institution is being polluted by goodness"), or ask that they end ("Come on, marcher, accept the peace that you see, acknowledge the Great Shift, and get on with your work").  Though any colleague can doubt what the marcher sees in African-American Studies, advocacy, no colleague can doubt what he believes about advocacy, that it makes knowledge less reliable.

And, not yet pointed out in this sequence of posts, knowledge has to be reliable if we're to solve our problems.  The world goes to the university with its problems.  Advocacy is an impediment in solving them.  Objectivity (see my note if you question the word) is necessary, and clears the way to their solution, the best solution.

The belief in objectivity is established in Western schools and supported, though intuitively and more slowly, outside them.  In the School of Hard Knocks we learn that to solve a practical problem we've got to start with realistic pictures of what's making the problem and what's keeping us from solving it.  Unrealistic pictures lead to bad solutions and painful knocks. 

That lesson has been driven home so deeply that you'd think we'd never forget it.  But we do forget it.  And here's where the "good" comes in.  It's so attractive, and the "bad" so repellent," that when either one appears, in a large enough and dramatic enough frame, it just drives down the importance of realistic pictures.

The pinch comes when a realistic picture causes harm.  Good people are wounded by it.  It's bad to harm good people.  People who do so are bad people.  A problem solver has to choose between doing harm, and appearing to be a bad person, and solving the problem.

Unfortunately the example I want to cite, recommended by its urgency, is the problem of poor performance by blacks in our schools.   It cries for solution.  But the solving leaves a field full of wounded, entered as soon as you start to explore conjectures —as problem-solvers must.  Explore the conjecture that something in black culture is an obstacle to the education of blacks, though, or to the aspirations necessary to their education, and you wound.  Bring in the black family and you wound more.  Mention absentee fathers, still more.  In just stating the problem, treating black aspiration and performance as a problem, you wound.

Knowers ignore wounds to others.  Strivers for good can't ignore them, because they're immediately and palpably bad. The consequences of a shift from knowing to striving in our universities leap out at us: solutions to problems become less reliable.  In the case before us we white strivers know, as immediately and surely as any strivers ever knew, where the wounding takes place: in the hearts of people we have wounded, again and again.  Put us in a university and we have to ignore that.  Put us in a university where the priority has shifted from knowing to striving and we don't have to ignore it.

The shift to good may be well justified (and I have shown how in Post 356) but we do, under the standards of knowing left to us, have to recognize the cost of the shift: that professors in the university lose their advantage in gaining the most reliable knowledge and their university loses its position as prime helper to the world in solving its problems.

Note: If you believe that "objective" makes too strong a claim you may substitute "impartial" or "disinterested."  Intention to earn the compliment in those words will accomplish all that's necessary here.

362. Higher Education: The Great Shift (2)

We left the last post with a Professor of African-American Studies and a Professor of History walking in the procession at the Commencement ceremony of a College of Liberal Arts, but not in perfect harmony.  According to what had been argued, with one the first priority was the achievement of something that could be named variously — justice, equality, recognition —but which I named simply "good."  With the other the first priority was "knowledge."  One professor I named "knower" and the other "striver."

Those names take us to the deepest source of disharmony, seen in what the gown means to the history professor: a declaration that the wearer is as careful as possible about what he professes to know.  The Professor of History knows that the Professor of African-American Studies, though he may be very careful, will have a limit on his care.  He has not removed the last impediment to knowledge, partiality.

There are too many opportunities for misunderstanding here for any blogger to deal with but I can at least issue a couple of warnings.  First, do not think of personal relations.  The two professors in the procession might get along fine.  The history professor might well be happy to see his standards suspended for the sake of a good cause.  The African-American Studies professor might well recognize that his is a temporary position, and that when certain goals are reached all can return to the academic norm.  

On the other hand there might be personal conflict.  The Professor of History might see the African-American Studies professor's presence as an intrusion, and have learnedly depreciative ways to describe it, this suddenly dominating presence of goodness.  He could, for example, see it as Matthew Arnold would, the victory of Hebraism, the thirst for righteousness, over Hellenism, the thirst for understanding.  He could see in that the defeat of the Enlightenment, an understanding based on science.  He could further see, in the victory of Hebraism, the victory of Christian love over pagan power, making it the defeat of unsentimental power.  He's facing, oh my, the victory of the passions over the reason.  There goes the centuries-old priority.  But even if he sees the other professor's presence, wearily, as just another triumph of the muddling world over the clarifying academy, the history professor has plenty he can be resentful about.  And we here have to ignore all his resentments because we see something more deeply founded.

Before we get to it, though, a second warning: do not take the word "knower" to mean that the professor of Professor of History knows more than the Professor of African-American Studies.  He may know less.  "Knower" and "striver" signify only a priority, what takes precedence.  When the chips are down the professor of African-American Studies, like those who chose him for his position, will opt for the good his people, through his department, are striving for.  If it were otherwise those who chose him would have been willing to include their study in the liberal curriculum.  (Yes, acceptance of that statement depends on the meaning you give "liberal" but that's beyond our fussiness here.)

The deepest ground for objection is that claims for goodness can never be as strongly supported as claims for knowledge.  The Western claim for knowledge, the claim for the tradition descending from Socrates, the claim that gives the wearer of the robe authority and prestige, is by now about as strongly supported as a claim can be (see Post 356).  There is nowhere in sight a claim that can come close to it. 

And that gives the marchers in a Liberal Arts Commencement exercise their deepest objection to the presence of a professor of African-American Studies, or Women's Studies, or any program with a different priority.  The authority and prestige gained in their way, with deep support, has been acquired by marchers with much less deep support.  But wearing the same robe.

361. Quit Complaining, Educated Americans

Oh, what a blow supporters of this man, this foul-mouth, this abuser of women, this voice of low desires, this barbarian, this enemy of culture and civilization, oh what a blow his under-educated supporters have, with their acceptance of this voice from the gutter, delivered to decency.  (Do I exaggerate?  Listen: "I did try and fuck her. She was married....I moved on her like a bitch. I couldn't get there and she was married. And all of a sudden I see her. She's now got the big phoney tits....I just start kissing [women]. It's like a magnet.  Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.")  Educated Americans say, "Their ignorant support of this is a blow to civilized decorum, to any hope that these under-educated people might aspire to anything higher, that they might want to be educated as we are, that they might even, if we might say this out loud, emulate us.  Has the desire for cultural betterment been extinguished in America?" So ask the educated.

And so answers a reader of their middle- and high-browed journals:  "No, it can't be extinguished.  It has already been extinguished in your magazines.  They did it when they accepted, and respectfully reviewed, and never said a word against, popular work with words from the gutter."  (Does he  exaggerate?  Listen:  "I don't fuck with you?/ You little stupid ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you/  You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you."  By, among others, the award-winning Kanye West.)

360. Higher Education: The Great Shift (1)

I would say that in the 73 years that I have been observing higher education in this country nothing has changed more profoundly than our primary goal.  Where it once was knowledge it is now goodness.

In my university, as in many others, it began with the installation of African-American Studies as an academic department.  The aim was to reduce the injustice done to blacks.  Incorporation of such studies into one of the traditional divisions of  liberal education — here that would have been sociology or cultural anthropology or history — would not, it was thought, reduce it enough.  Reducing injustice is good. 

Since this is a sensitive subject I want to say that there is nothing arch in my use of the word "good" here.   I really mean "good," mean it as Greek philosophers meant it, and I think it is the right word for what those who moved universities to establish these and Women's Studies programs were striving for and, in varying degrees, achieved.

At the time it was clear to some but not to all that one cannot do this and still remain within the academic tradition. The origins of that tradition, and its difference from other traditions, are best exhibited by Socrates' activity.  In Plato's dialogue Euthyphro, for example, the title character is presented striving, and helping people strive, for a prime Athenian virtue, piety.  Questioning by Socrates shows, however, that he knows very little about piety, barely enough to keep the concept of it together.  Readers, students, come away believing that it is best to know before you strive. Knowledge takes precedence over goodness.

That's the signature belief of the heirs of Socrates, college professors.  When they go into the world they show it in their signature advice: "Look before you leap."  When that advice was given at my university it got, for years, at least a bored respect.  Then in the sixties we heirs got a surprise.  Say "look before you leap" at a rally, sit down gravely, and a student gets up and says, "and look, and look, and look."  Urgent goodness takes precedence over knowledge.

This change eased the establishment of AAS and Women's Studies programs, which made harmonious appearances in the catalog.  But the disharmony remained.  I have to guess at this, since I am way out of touch, but when I now see an AAS course titled "History of Injustice" I can't imagine an introduction examining the concept of "justice."  I can imagine Socrates questioning this striver for justice as he questioned the striver for piety.

There are occasions, like when aid to escaped slaves, or ratification of the 13th Amendment, was in question in Northern states, when the tradition of goodness, coming to us mainly through our religion and saying "Leap, leap," is strong enough to win out over the tradition of knowledge, and make us professors glad it did.  I think the strike at San Francisco State in 1968, when affirmative action and formation of Black Studies were in question, was one if those occasions — though the happiness of many professors may have had more to do with simply gaining civil peace.

The question I am pressing here can be seen as a fussy-professor question: "With which victories am I free to be glad and with which am I not free?"  I think that a professor who fusses enough has to answer, "I am free to be glad about victories out in the world; I am not free to be glad about victories in universities."  That means he (or she) can be glad about affirmative action laws but can't be glad about African-American Studies programs.  That may be an "academic" conclusion, but it translates into a consequential vote at the faculty senate.

In the faculty senate votes of those days you could see coming the goodness-ruled university of the future.  The rule that started in the catalog went on into codes of behavior for extra-curricular activities and social events, codes of dress (as for costume-wearers at Halloween), and codes of speech for meetings and conferences, even classrooms.  And like all dominant rule this rule, though recognized as moral and generally approved, produced its tyrants, making it resented (see Post 340 on disciplinary actions at Harvard), and its busybodies, making it laughed at (see Post  319 on the excesses of "political correctness").

Both the resentment and the laughter can be dismissed as accompaniments of every movement to the good, but beneath them was a dissonance not so easily dismissed. 

Some of my readers must have felt it.  How about in the Commencement procession?  On one side of you is a professor of African-American Studies who, as you've reasoned it out, is there because what she is striving for is a good that must, even in a traditionally neutral institution, be supported.  Though she is much of the time a knower, and in much of her activity passes on knowledge as rigorously obtained as any in the procession, she is there because she is a striver, and able to help strivers.

On the other side of you is a Professor of History, a knower in the strict academic tradition — meaning coming straight from Socrates through Plato's Academy and the liberally educating Renaissance schools to today's liberal arts colleges.   He fits right into this traditionally neutral institution.

What do you feel, there between them?  Suppose the Professor of History feels resentment, and you sense it.  What are your thoughts?

[Since this, I see, is going to be too much for one post I'll have to leave it there.  To be resumed.]

359. Hillary's Big Fault, Perfectly Illustrated

Instead of responding in the moment, as a human being alert to the conversation would do, Hillary goes into her preparation book and delivers boiler plate.  The opening of last night's debate is a perfect example.

The first question was one of the most inviting softballs I've ever seen, coming in big and fat and ready to be knocked out of the park.  It framed the essential Trump vulnerability, exposed dramatically in the preceding two days by the 2005 groping-women tape.  The audience was sure to be heated up.  The question came from a black woman.

QUESTION: Thank you, and good evening. The last debate could have been rated as MA, mature audiences, per TV parental guidelines. Knowing that educators assign viewing the presidential debates as students’ homework, do you feel you’re modeling appropriate and positive behavior for today’s youth?

CLINTON: Well, thank you. Are you a teacher? Yes, I think that that’s a very good question, because I’ve heard from lots of teachers and parents about some of their concerns about some of the things that are being said and done in this campaign.

And I think it is very important for us to make clear to our children that our country really is great because we’re good. And we are going to respect one another, lift each other up. We are going to be looking for ways to celebrate our diversity, and we are going to try to reach out to every boy and girl, as well as every adult, to bring them in to working on behalf of our country.

I have a very positive and optimistic view about what we can do together. That’s why the slogan of my campaign is “Stronger Together,” because I think if we work together, if we overcome the divisiveness that sometimes sets Americans against one another, and instead we make some big goals — and I’ve set forth some big goals, getting the economy to work for everyone, not just those at the top, making sure that we have the best education system from preschool through college and making it affordable, and so much else.

If we set those goals and we go together to try to achieve them, there’s nothing in my opinion that America can’t do. So that’s why I hope that we will come together in this campaign. Obviously, I’m hoping to earn your vote, I’m hoping to be elected in November, and I can promise you, I will work with every American.

I want to be the president for all Americans, regardless of your political beliefs, where you come from, what you look like, your religion. I want us to heal our country and bring it together because that’s, I think, the best way for us to get the future that our children and our grandchildren deserve.

Trump is not so dumb that he doesn't know just what to do with that:

TRUMP: Well, I actually agree with that. I agree with everything she said. I began this campaign because I was so tired of seeing such foolish things happen to our country. This is a great country. This is a great land. I’ve gotten to know the people of the country over the last year-and-a-half that I’ve been doing this as a politician. I cannot believe I’m saying that about myself, but I guess I have been a politician.

But have you been "modeling appropriate and positive behavior for today’s youth?"  Still tingling in the audience's ears will be Trump's voice telling TV host Billy Bush that to succeed with women all you have to do, if you're a star like him, is "grab 'em by the pussy."  Clinton can present herself as a model of fidelity and decorum in a spouse.  She is way up there on the heights of American ideals, he is down in the dirty depths.

Not a chance.  That's alertness to the human moment.  She's off in the world of well-organized ideas, and has found, under What to Say if This Subject Comes Up, the one closest to Eternal Truths for Americans. The way is open for Trump —probably unable to believe his luck — to join her on the high ground.

358. How hard it is to point to the Scandinavians.

Have you checked the latest Scandinavian success?  According to The Economist (9-24-16) Norway has made itself securely, deeply rich.  Receiving the kind of windfall that geology gives some countries — Nigeria, Venezuela, Libya, Iraq, for example — these ex-Vikings, postponing satisfaction, planning for the future, ensuring public education, protecting themselves against bad leadership, being fair to everybody, socked their yearly oil revenue into a fund that is now worth $882 billion and producing more revenue than the oil. 

Scandinavians are such great examples, the ants to the world's grasshoppers.  But they're not always easy to point to, not by everybody, and certainly not by me.

I start with the handicap of a Swedish name.  My finger will have the marks of ethnic pride on it.   A slight weight, maybe an imagined weight, but still a weight.  Not there if my name were Capucci.

More distinct is the weight of my Christian upbringing.  Materially wealthy people are not supposed to be examples.  They're not laying up treasures in heaven.  They can't get through the eye of a needle.  I should, with the rest of my Sunday School class, be pointing at Albert Schweitzer.

More widely shared is the weight, in democracies like ours, of the common man's disapproval.  Or, more often, the disapproval of his spokesmen, seeking political weight.  I on point am an elitist, one who fails to recognize that all men are equal.  If I point at one people I can't imply that they are better than other people.  Here my finger has at least the weight of risk, and the need for explanation, and possibly a forced admission on it.

The weight on the Christian gets heavier when he adds to his implication that his wealth shows his goodness the implication that if other people were smart they'd be rich too.   He's an elitist loaded with pride.  That's what the editorial writer for the Boston Globe was when he took up the question (9-18-15) of why Massachusetts was so wealthy. "Because we've got a lot of smart people," he freely answered.  A Christian democrat from the Midwest can only look on with envy.

 We live in an age when disapproval of this kind of thing is on trigger, with telescopic sights.  At the University of California, among other universities, "America is the land of opportunity," is a locution faculty should avoid (Washington Post, 6-16-15).  It apparently implies, at what must be about three removes, "If your people were as good and smart as my people they wouldn't be doing so poorly."  A microaggression.  Here I feel a negligible weight,

There are other weights on my arm, but most interesting is that of cultural imperialism theory. "Cultural imperialism," according to its theorists, "is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture" and it can take the form of "an attitude, a formal policy, or military action."  The theory was widely employed in cultural studies, which was developed mainly in English departments, and for a time, including my own, it enjoyed high prestige there.  High enough, anyway, for me to feel its weight.

I see more clearly now why it shouldn't have.  Cultural imperialism theory was so deeply flawed  that it shouldn't have tipped the scale anywhere.

 The flaw appeared (or would have, if I'd been more alert) right away in its self-designation, which introduced a reproach word, "imperialism," into an objective formulation.  And this introduction produced a conceptual wreck.  How did one distinguish "cultural imperialism" from "cultural acquisition"? How did one tell victims from rational choosers of the good life?  There was no room for Macedonians around Socrates' table, acquiring a superior culture.  Alexander the Great became a victim, conquered by Aristotle.

So that was a temporary weight I can now blow off.  I blow without a quaver since in all my expanded post-retirement reading I have yet to see evidence of any consequences of the theory of cultural imperialism in the world of affairs.  Nobody in a position to get things done pays any attention to it. 

So where does that leave my finger?  We've got to have some kind pointing.  How will the unnoticing ever notice, and profit, unless somebody points?   I'm the one here.  So, whatever my Nordicity, my Christianity, my elitism, I stand up before the less successful cultures of the world and say, "Look, look, you grasshoppers of the world, over there at the Norwegians.  What a culture!  What values!  What a terrific example!"

357. Hillary's Comeback if Trump Brings up Sex Scandals

 Do you find yourself supplying comebacks to Hillary Clinton?  Every time your mind idles?  Here's the one I hit on in case Trump, as he's just warned, brings up sex scandals in the Clinton family:  "Mr. Trump, I have been a loyal, faithful wife of one man for forty-one  years, and when someone who has been accused by his first wife of having an affair, and divorced by her, and married and divorced again, and married again, talks to me about behavior in a marriage, I'm simply not going to listen.  I'm fed up and I think the American people are fed up."