346. How Trump Turned White Eggheads into Black Rappers

"Egghead" is, leaving out its derogatory coloring, a word for "a person who is highly academic or studious" and that person is "often a professor or the protégé of a professor."  

If "egghead" fit me and my colleagues who taught English Composition it meant keeping your writing unified and coherent and choosing specific words over vague words.  In argumentative compositions it emphatically meant avoiding violations of logic.  If anything like a Donald Trump speech appeared before us it would have gotten a flat F.

Now it appears that many of our white male protégés and even a few of our colleagues are telling pollsters, by word or, more likely, by anonymously clicking a button, that they intend to vote for Donald Trump.

It's the great unexplainable of our academic lives, and nobody inside or outside of academia has been much help.  In the public forums I follow there are plenty of explanations for the less-educated men's behavior but none, zero, for the well-educated men's.

When you're hard up for explanations you explore the outer reaches and, spurred on by polls showing Trump gaining ground, I have thought harder and harder about what it might be in me and my colleagues that would allow an entry by somebody like Trump.  And the only thing I found is almost too outré to report: hatred of self-contradiction, the archetypical fault of the bad mind all teachers, but especially Composition and logic teachers, are trying to turn into the good mind.

"Impossible!" you say.  I do too.  Who is more full of contradictions than Donald Trump?  You'd have to find a pretty objectionable case to compete with his case.

To accept the one I found you'll have to accept, I'm afraid, my explanation of the action of Drew Faust, president of Harvard, in denying scholarships and team captaincies to any student (she was obviously pointing at men) who joined a single-sex club: that it was a blow in the war between the sexes (Post 340) in which she held all the moral weapons.  She and her fellows in the enlightened world were right every time they spoke about patriarchy.  A white man had about as much power in moral suasion as a bare-fisted pagan had in combat with a Roman soldier.  Indeed, what women ruled at that point amounted to a moral empire.

I see frustration, and internal pressure building up.  Testosterone maybe.  And a man can't stand up and argue it away.  Not in a public arena where every spectator understands moral power, and knows who has it.  Furthermore, if he's an academic he's already got his reason, three-quarters on the side of the feminists, keeping the lid on.  Yet he's still a male and can't help feeling those defeats as blows, lashes on a poor pagan's back.  With not a cry from him.

Finally, the salt in the wound, he senses that Drew Faust knows her power and her position atop a moral and intellectual empire.  She's just doing this to rub in her sex's victory.

 But that, too, had to go without complaint in a Christian culture, where there's no credible objection to the kind of power she is employing, the power of the persecuted, the weak, the long-victimized.  Who can object to power when it's used to hold a Christian to his obligation to love?  There can't even be internal objection.  

Except that objection to contradiction.  And when the cause of contradiction, that core fault of the bad mind, is love, a passion, it represents (oh Milton) exactly what would take all mankind (in Adam) down: the victory of the passions over the reason.  This kind of moral correctness is simply uncontrolled love.  It's sentimentality, emotion without intelligence.

And where did the eggheads see this contradiction?  In those employing Drew Faust's kind of power and working next to her, in race relations.  They were rebuking white men for language they freely accepted coming from black men.  The N-word for blacks, the B-word for women, outrageous in a white mouth, was OK in a black mouth.  "I ain't fucking with you, you bitch" lets the rapper, because his race is the victimized race, go on to greater success while, in the middle of paragraphs of hedging and contextualizing, "there are issues of intrinsic differences of aptitude" [between men and women in science and engineering], gets the white man removed from his position (as president of Harvard, and Faust's predecessor — the justice of which removal I'm not questioning here).

The egghead has been living with these burrs in his underwear, correctness burrs, this last one the worst, for years now.  And he hasn't been able to cry out.  Then he sees a place that's not public and where frustration and outrage don't have to be suppressed, a polling booth.  There he will, as the surveys show, fill in the circle for Donald Trump.  He will be saying to Drew Faust, who's name is to him now legion,

I ain't fuckin' with you

You little, you little dumb ass bitch, I ain't fuckin' with you

I got a million trillion things I'd rather fuckin' do

Than to be fuckin' with you.

340. Harvard's President and the War Between the Sexes

Punish university students for joining a private club?  That's a very big restriction of freedom.  How can President Drew Faust propose to do it at Harvard?  (See Post 339.)

It would have to be that joining one of those single-sex clubs will do harm to the university, to other students, or to the student's own education. That's all a university can be permitted to protect, and protection is, if we're still guided by John Stuart Mill, the only motive any of us is allowed as a justification for restricting freedom.

I have tried and tried and I am simply unable to see how joining one of these clubs  can harm the university or any of its students.  President Faust must have harm to the student's own education in mind.  Here that would clearly be education in acceptable ways to treat and speak of groups outside the longtime dominant group, white males.  For those who adhered to the old, unacceptable ways it would be re-education.

So Faust is conducting the proper business of schools, and Mill allows for it in the exception he makes for children and barbarians.  Such people have to be civilized and we give schoolteachers the power to restrict liberty until it's accomplished.  That's legitimate power.

Claim it for the president of Harvard, though, and I have to say wait a dog-boned minute.  Her restriction of the liberty of these students is justified, according to Mill, only if they're children or barbarians.  Is she taking Harvard men to be barbarians?  Possible case.  Children?  No, no, none at all.

Well, maybe she's abandoning Mill (as a guide; there's no question that in law Harvard can do what it wants to here).  Abandoning Mill in this manner, though some have done it, would at this point be very hard.  You can't remove in a day the support for the arguments (including hers) for liberty and tolerance we've been making all these years.  Not unilaterally, anyway.  I doubt that President Faust would do that, or want to.  Even if she hadn't noticed her slip from university president back to high-school principal. 

Puzzle over it long enough, cut through the sociological language, and maybe it will come to you, as it came to me: her actions are explained easily if you just see them as moves in a war.  With an enemy, and emotions, and all the escalations and descents and temptations that Clausewitz speaks of.  Here it's the old war between the sexes, and whether there was a peace or whether there was an armistice, she broke it.  And for the most common of reasons: one side goes past equality, the old maintainer of armistices, into preponderance of power, and is tempted to use it while they have it.  A few warrior types succumb to the temptation and boom, there goes the armistice.

Do you doubt that there's a war between the sexes?  Well, there's "The Wife of Bath's Tale" waiting for you to read, if you haven't already.  Or James Thurber's cartoons.  Do you think the weak don't build up resentment, and want revenge? There's Nietzsche, loaded, waiting for you.  And if you think the powerless who become powerful won't become intoxicated and play the old game you might try going back to your Foucault and reading again what he has to say about power, this time inverting it.

Taking it further, do you think that academics, searchers for truth, playing the power game (if they play it at all), wouldn't play to the crowd?  Do you think seekers of justice, the most pure, the women, wouldn't?  Adjust the frame on your Drew Faust picture.  You're at Harvard, the big arena.  Every articulate feminist will be watching.  In goes the sword, into the hump, between the horns.  Down goes the bull.  Give her an ear, comrades.

As you might guess, my juices are flowing.  But hell, didn't she start it?  Did she think no man would notice that denying scholarships and team captaincies to men who joined those clubs was a retributive act?  That men would just bear it?  That drawing pay from an Ivy League school made them wimps?  Forever?

I know the replies available to her, the big one being that the decorum and decency taught in lower schools have always been taught and enforced, though less directly, in colleges.  Once it was the D and D of Victorian times, now it's a different D and D.  Maybe better.  Maybe it's progress, which won't take place unless college presidents get behind it.  You can criticize it as "enforcing virtue the way the Puritans did" but the majority has always wanted to establish its kind of virtue.  By the test of what's allowed in mainstream publications the virtue called by its resisters "political correctness" now has majority backing.  It's the decorum and decency of our time.  It's what schools should encourage and if necessary enforce.  "I'm at Harvard and I'm enforcing it," can be her counterthrust.

I feel the weight behind it.  "Political correctness" keeps ethnic prejudice from getting started, and (the great lesson taught us by the Nazis) letting it start is a very dangerous thing to do.  She gets no resistance here.  Agreement and rejoicing rather.  (See my Post 319).

So I've got an irresistible opponent — until she locates herself, at Harvard.  There's where our quarrel is, over what kind of teaching and enforcing is justified at the university level.  And I am accusing her of taking us down in level to the high school and back in time to the nineteenth century. 

You punish one student in order to deter others, making them fear violation.  That's the way you spread virtue through a class of unruly boys in sixth-grade, in the room or out on the playground, where I have happily remembered barbarians being punished by enlightened women in the thirties, women, carriers of a higher civilization (Post 311).  The boys feared detention, in a corner, being deprived of bats and balls for a day.

What do the men of Harvard fear?  Look closely.  It's ridicule, satire, bites of wit from the more sophisticated, the cooler.  Nothing like the rod in the classroom, but a chiller here.  Just being thought uncool by the really cool.  Though it's incomprehensible at lower levels it's what the societies we consider most advanced, most enlightened, have counted on.  What men in a high civilization fear most is being put in a Dunciad, a Molière play, an Orwell novel.  On the local level a piece in the humor magazine or on the student op-ed, will do the job.  Satire and ridicule have worked well at this level for years.  But Drew Faust doesn't trust them.

I do, so my challenge is,  "Let our Popes and Swifts and Addisons do what your fiats do, Ms. Faust.  Trust them."  And my counter thrust: feel some fear yourself.  Beware a Juvenal, an Aristophanes.  In America beware a Holmes who decapitates moral bullies. The more you tremble at what you might find on Comedy Central the better you illustrate the superior force of educated disapproval.  Nobody is going to fire you, or deprive you of a grant.  That's not necessary at this level.

How do you avoid such cuts? By trusting the intelligence and sensitivity, the civilization, of your students, President Faust.  At the level of education they have already reached.  Even the men.