Why you should be careful handling confidential files.
I’m especially interested in reading the comments on the files made by professors evaluating the applications. Maybe this will help get across the point that arbitrary, clearly “political” filters for hiring aren’t exactly a new thing in academia, that there was no arcadian golden age where objective, balanced, apolitical philosopher-kings welcomed the broadest range of intellectual diversity and social identity?
I’m putting the finishing touches on my syllabus for next semester’s History of Play and Leisure, just trying to find one or two more perfect or unusual readings to round out a few of the weeks. (And then I need to make a final cut, as I’ve loaded up some weeks excessively, as is my typical practice on a syllabus draft.)
Anyway, on the week devoted to post-1800 historical associations between childhood and play, I’ve got some very good secondary literature, but I’m trying to think if there’s an absolutely perfect memoir (short or long) or older novel that is centrally focused on play in childhood. I can think of a ton of evocative chapters or portions of famous books, but I’m not coming up with a single one that’s really thematically zeroed in on play and games. I’m thinking of showing the movie “Hope and Glory”, though.
Actually, any memoir of games, play, etc. that’s especially good would be useful.
Other things I’m still foodling with:
Renaissance/early modern leisure, play, games, entertainment
Medieval tournaments/jousting
Contemplative practices and leisure (was thinking Thoreau’s Walden, but older historical material would be useful)
19th and early 20th Century histories of hobbies or hobby cultures
Histories of drinking culture in non-Western societies besides Africa (got plenty of European/American stuff, and plenty of Africanist scholarship)
If there’s two things I’ve come to dislike equally, it’s bad fantasies with dragon characters (cough Eragon) and bad speculative fiction that recreates Horatio Hornblower or other Napoleonic-era stories (cough David Weber). So I really thought there was no way I could possibly enjoy Naomi Novik’s Temeraire novels, which are about Napoleonic-era dragons and their riders.
When I finally did give the series a try, I was really surprised at how entertaining the books are. It’s a real credit to Novik that she takes themes that have become hideously cliched and somehow still makes them work as entertaining genre fiction.
However, I found it kind of difficult to bend my head around some of the twists in the latest book, Empire of Ivory. I was really pleased to see the series take off into early 19th Century Africa, something that seemed possible after the prominent mention of the Atlantic slave trade and abolitionism in the previous volume. But the way Novik plays out the story introduces a strange asymmetry into her alternate fantasy-history, one that illustrates nicely why historians writing counterfactuals tend to give the “grand narratives” of modern history a wide pass in favor of dealing with battles and specific episodes.
The first two books in the series stay fairly tightly focused on a conventionally Napoleonic scenario with dragons added in. England’s military power is still primarily naval, Napoleon’s strength is in his army. England’s society is very much as it is normally pictured in fictions about the late 18th Century, with the interesting twist that the officers in the dragon-based Aerial Corps are sexually egalitarian and far looser in their manners and practices than the rest of the gentry. (This isn’t as imitative of McCaffrey’s Pernese weyrs as it sounds.)
By the third book of the series, we learn that there is an Atlantic slave trade, and that Wilberforce and others (including the estranged family of the series’ lead character) are engaged in trying to abolish it. We’ve also seen a detailed look at China, where the dragons are much more respectfully integrated into human social hierarchies as intelligent beings in their own right, which in turn gives the main dragon character, Temeraire, some new ideas about equality that he intends to take home to England. There’s a fairly extended glimpse of the Ottoman Empire and its dragons as well, in which they’re mostly portrayed as part of the closed social world of the Ottoman court. We get a look at Central Europe as well, which is pretty much the Central Europe of the Napoleonic era with dragons and a few flourishes added.
However, some things are already becoming confusing about the alternate history that Novik is sketching out. Namely, where are the slaves taken in the Atlantic slave trade going to? There aren’t European colonies in the Americas: it’s specifically mentioned that American societies with their own dragons prevented European attempts at conquest. There doesn’t seem to be a widespread presence of African slaves doing labor within Europe itself. It could be that there are still colonies in the Caribbean and various eastern Atlantic islands, but it’s not very clear.
This is where a comprehensive counterfactual like these novels starts to become like a game of pick-up sticks: pull too hard on one thing and everything begins to collapse in a way that simply saying “it’s fantasy” can’t quite save it. Not only is it hard to see how there could be an Atlantic slave trade without extensive European involvement in the Americas, it’s hard to see why Novik’s Britain and France are so recognizably “normal” to the Napoleonic genre. Why does Britain have such a large navy, if not for the Atlantic economy? Was there a French Revolution before Napoleon? If so, why does Temeraire have to go all the way to China and Africa to encounter a radical discourse about the equality of thinking beings? (I was almost thinking the fourth volume of this series would set Temeraire up as a part of the Scottish Enlightenment. I grant you it wouldn’t exactly be a thrill-a-minute scenario to have a dragon just hanging around with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke or Jeremy Bentham, but a historian can dream.)
When Novik takes the characters off to South Africa in search of a cure for a dragon plague that has infected most of Britain’s Aerial Corps in the fourth volume, things get a bit more off-kilter. The interior of the continent is thought by the European characters to be inhabited by dangerous “ferals”, dragons without human companions, who kill any explorer or traveller. But when they find a mushroom that cures the plague, they run into a powerful African society that is pretty an even partnership between dragons and humans, with the dragons imagined as ancestral spirits by their human compatriots. I was really confused when the African characters had names drawn from all over southern African history with a major settlement right at Victoria Falls until I skipped to the end, where Novik sets out some details of her alternate history. She posits a dragon-human “Sotho-Tswana Empire” that stretches over most of interior southern Africa. It apparently doesn’t go any further than present-day central Zambia as the Sotho-Tswana characters refer to a Lunda character as an enemy (and a slave trader).
This is fine, though the significant historical divergence required to create this alternate history is somehow very asymmetrical to the very “normal” history of Western Europe in the books. Where it gets weird is when the powerful Sotho-Tswana decide to strike back against the Atlantic slave trade (in part because the British characters bring an emancipated slave woman who is working with the abolitionists along with them, and she turns out to have been taken from the Sotho-Tswana). This is already kind of a significant shift, because southern Africa was the one major region of the continent that was relatively insulated from the Atlantic slave trade, and the precolonial Lunda state had almost nothing to do with the slave trade. The Sotho-Tswana attack and destroy the British settlement at Cape Town as retaliation for the slave trade. So far so good. Then they attack Portuguese settlements in Angola and Congo and destroy those. Still plausible.
Then they attack Cape Coast Castle in West Africa and destroy that. Presumably if they can do that, they destroy any other West Africa slave-trading ports, though others go unmentioned.
Now I have a problem. Novik has tried so hard to make one region of Africa to have a historically concrete character, but to do it, she makes the rest into blank darkness. The only thing we hear is that the states of West Africa, whatever they are, neither impeded the Sotho-Tswana attacks nor did they contest the Atlantic slave trade.
Now, this is a series in which the main human and dragon characters have flown from China to the Ottoman Empire to Prussia and thence back to England. Long flights aren’t implausible for these dragons. But that was an epic journey that took up much of the third book, and was filled with logistical and political challenges. Suddenly we’ve got a force of African dragons who just take off from the area around Victoria Falls and fly all the way to West Africa in force, impeded by nothing in between, and then demolish European ports. This raises tons of questions. Why were Europeans able to establish slave-trading in the first place? Why did it take the Sotho-Tswana a century or more to retaliate? If the Lunda Empire is a slave-trading state with sufficient power (apparently) to resist the Sotho-Tswana, then how is it that the Sotho-Tswana are able to just fly happily right over their territory on their way to West Africa? What about the historic states of West Africa? None of them have dragons, and all of them accepted the slave trade? Does Novik have any idea how far away Cape Coast Castle is from Victoria Falls, by the way? If the Sotho-Tswana can fly to Cape Coast Castle, they sure as hell can fly to Arabia, Turkey, India, and Western Europe. Why didn’t they before now?
This is always a problem with alternate history, whether it stays close to human reality or interjects major fantasy elements. The more consistent its alternative vision gets, the less recognizable to history as we know it, and therefore the expositionary burden on the author grows and grows. But keeping some things very tightly fixed on history as we know it and allowing other things to shift fancifully is equally messy. It shows just how hard it is to rewrite our imagination of history in a truly globalized or open manner. Even in fantasy, it’s tough to provincialize Europe.
Over at the Comics Curmudgeon, they like to hate the comic strip Funky Winkerbean. I share their sentiments, mostly, and for the same reason, namely that the creator seems so unrelievedly grim in his sensibility since he initially aged the strip past being a fairly ordinary whimsical life-style strip. Characters are alcoholics, they get wounded in war, they suffer all sorts of pain and loss. I wouldn’t mind the drawn-out death of one character from cancer if that was set against a strip that was doing other things with and to its characters.
But I’m kind of interested at the latest turn in the strip since the creator, Tom Batiuk, is for the second time allowing time to pass and his characters to age and change, something that most serial forms of popular culture avoid because of the problems it creates for an ongoing work. I’m interested in part because he’s done something truly weird, and I wonder a bit if he realizes just how weird it is. Following the death of his character Lisa from cancer, he’s aged everyone ten years. But the thing is that Lisa died right now, in 2007. I don’t think that’s been explicit in the last month of strips (no headstone, the character was cremated) but one of the other characters has been stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. Batiuk might get away with saying that “ten years ahead” takes us to 2012 rather than 2017, but it’s not right now, at any rate.
So now we’ve got a weirdly science-fictional strip posing as a soap opera on the comics pages. The characters of Funky Winkerbean now live in a world where there is (or has been) a President Clinton or Giuliani or Obama. Where we’ve bombed or not bombed Iran. Where the shows on TV are all different. And so on. I’m kind of wondering how he’s going to write himself out of this situation when he gets around to the character who was in the military–or whether he’s going to embrace it and run with it.
With some trepidation, I venture a few thoughts on the controversy over residence-hall programs at the University of Delaware. Trepidation because the kind of position I take on these issues is increasingly wearisome to hold given the polarization in online discussions of academia. I wish I could write in a looser, more enjoyably idiosyncratic, more compelling way about these questions like Oso Raro, but I’ve made my rhetorical bed and I’m stuck with it.
Before I try to stick any kind of proportionality or nuance into the discussion, one thing should be clear: the program at Delaware as described in the press is just plain wrong, and that’s even if the press description is exaggerated or out of context in some respect. Even if the content of the program weren’t simple-minded and reductive (which it is), doing it as a mandatory institutional program in residence-halls is a big mistake. I’m not sure there’s anything that’s appropriate to that context beyond making sure people know how to evacuate in a fire and communicating basic institutional safety policies (such as no fire sources in rooms). The moment you mandate that all students receive safe-sex tutorials or drug and alcohol abuse prevention training, you’ve exposed the institution to in loco parentis, and where’s that going to stop? Moreover, if you’re going to ennumerate the “rights and responsibilities” of people living in university housing, you’ve got to include much more forcefully that you have the right to think whatever you want–including to question some of the precepts and approaches of diversity training. (The document does say you have the choice to “stand up for yourself and others and speak up for what you believe has value”, but in context, that seems to mean only that you are encouraged to defend an active commitment to diversity.)
But ok. How to move beyond simple sputtering outrage at the supposed dominance of political correctness, leftist academics or whatever boogeyman is the label of choice in this round of postings? The first bit of proportionality I’d interject is to look at the source of some simple-minded kinds of political and institutional misbehavior. In this case, I’m guessing that activist students are at least part of where this program is coming from, probably working with a residential administrator or dean who has a hard time thinking beyond dogma.
I’m going to be a bit condescending here, but students are students, and they make mistakes because they’re still learning, whether they’re left-wing activists or intensely single-minded premeds. That’s what they are in college to do. Residential colleges sell themselves precisely on the point that some learning takes place outside of the classroom through extracurricular activities, social life and so on. Students with strong political or philosophical views naturally turn to their own educational institution to explore how to make those views real or powerful or transformative. Americans who were in the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s couldn’t do much to directly touch South Africa, so we tried to figure out how to mobilize our own institutions to touch South Africa, however indirectly. I have to admit, looking back, that many of us understood very little about how divestment might concretely function, or about the costs and risks we were asking our institutions to incur. But partly I got a better understanding of both of those things by being involved, an understanding I don’t think I could have gotten just by studying in a classroom. I learned about a lot of the shortcomings of activism by being active.
In other cases, some of these kinds of commitments come from individual faculty or administrators that I wouldn’t hesitate to call simple-minded hacks. (That, readers of this blog might recall, was my first and primary comment on Ward Churchill: whatever else the guy was or did, he was a third-rate hack.)
The valid issue in that case is then, “Why allow such extensive access to institutional programs and policy to either inexperienced activists or hacks, then?” Yup, that’s an issue, and it’s well worth exploring a bit more.
In many such cases, it’s not that political projects coming from a group of activist students or from a few activist administrators or faculty members are deeply shared in a consensual way by a large majority of institutional actors and thus become institutional projects by general acclaim. It’s more that the autonomy and decentralization of academic life which most of us cherish creates a complicated burden when it comes to blocking somebody else’s pet obsessions or commitments.
Suppose I see a group of students campaigning to get the institution to commit to some political objective that I think is unwise or simplistic in some respect. I don’t quite want to rise to block that on the grounds that anything and everything which is “political” is wrong because that can lead to some truly silly conclusions. I’m interested in the political commitments of the Free Culture movement–but quite beyond that movement’s specific views, it seems obvious to me that intellectual property policy, open-source publishing and so on are intimately relevant to the everyday business of scholars, librarians, and teachers. I’m not wild about some of the rhetoric and unexamined premises associated with demands for universities to have sustainability policies, but it would be silly to rule all of that out of bounds because it’s “political”–environmental sustainability might turn out to lead to some good economic outcomes for an institution, like reducing energy usage, but it’s also a legitimate claim on some level about what an institution can or should do in the world. Hell, devoting a big proportion of a college curriculum to studying “the Great Books” is political in some fashion. You can’t oppose a political argument about institutional politics on the grounds that you yourself are too fastidious to ever be political, because it won’t take long before you’re hoist on the same petard.
So I’d have to take any case of activist demand as it comes. Now what? Well, if it’s students, I honestly don’t want to spend my life running around squashing any student political project I have a disagreement with. That’s not my job. In fact, it’s the opposite of my job: it’s being an anti-teacher, an authoritarian, misusing my power. If it’s a hack on the faculty or the administration? In self-interested terms, I honestly have to weigh whether it’s worth tangling with the person openly, about what kinds of hassles that person can visit upon me in retaliation.
In either case, there’s also a question of the consequence of being a crusader on every single issue where some other institutional actor has what I think is a bad idea. It’s one thing to block or criticize a proposal for institutionalization of a political project when it crosses my desk naturally: when faculty are asked by central administration for feedback, when it comes to the floor of a general meeting, when I’m sitting in a committee devoted to a particular kind of issue, when students or colleagues ask my opinion, when it’s an issue that’s known to be near and dear to my heart because of my specialized areas of knowledge. Or just when I have the time and the energy to compose a blog post, which has a very gentle impact on most issues. For example, some years back, some students here wanted an Ethnic Studies program. I thought (and still think) that was a bad idea for some very simple, non-political reasons (duplication of programs, greater demands on already over-extended faculty, no resources for new faculty lines, weakness of our institutional model for interdisciplinary programs) and some “political” reasons as well (I simply think Ethnic Studies is a bad way to organize the study of many very important and legitimate topics). This was a case where it made sense for me to be in the conversation because what I do was directly relevant to what the students wanted to do.
If you insist on being actively involved every single time someone else in your institution is doing something objectionable, you will almost certainly devolve into being a crank and an asshole. You can’t do that and not become tendentious and self-absorbed, that kind of omnipresent involvement is intrinsically narcissistic. At some point, it inevitably is going to affect how well you do the job that you’ve been hired to do, because there are only so many hours in the day. If you’re always at committee meetings, protest gatherings, scribbling furious emails, poking into dark corners with a cattle prod, then you’re not in the classroom or the library or the lab.
What some people settle for is splitting the difference: being furious at everything but not having the time to be involved with changing any outcomes through direct time-consuming involvement in deliberative process, through painstaking efforts to persuade others. When you arrive at that point, you have no hope to change any outcome whether you’re coming to meetings or not, because you’ve got no persuasive tools left to you. You started by rolling your eyes derisively in a wholly justifiable way at the excesses of others (probably in concert with the majority of your colleagues) but now you’re the one everyone rolls their eyes at. You’re not connected to anything, not sympathetic to anybody else’s projects, not discriminate in what fights you pick or when you pick them. You’ve got nothing left to help you judge when the stakes are high and when they’re low: your institutional profile is “junkyard dog”, biting and howling at everything.
So sometimes dumb ideas and fringe political visions are going to become institutional projects because the sensible middle is mutually and simultaneously trying to avoid being drawn into this kind of indiscriminate misanthropy. Sometimes hacks and sweetly well-meaning but naive activists are actually pretty savvy about this aspect of institutional life, and know how to muscle something in under the radar, how to keep from triggering a major deliberative process where they’ll get blocked.
That’s one context to keep in mind. Another is that some ideas only become wrong when they’re simplistically truncated so that they can become institutional programs and policies, but that the precursor concepts, ideas and insights are something else entirely. And also that some institutional projects may eventually take a wrong turn on some smaller point, but are basically well-meaning, serious attempts to deal with genuine issues and problems. Diversity is a real question, in many ways, and it’s worth thinking about how to institutionally work towards it.
For example, with the Delaware residential life program, there’s nothing wrong per se with asking straights when they first realized their orientation or when they came out as straights. That is, nothing wrong if that’s a sly or mischievious aside in a personal conversation about sexuality, or a subversive question directed at a public figure who is intensely anti-gay, or as a way in an intellectual discussion about the history of sexuality to illustrate what the ten-dollar word “heteronormativity” actually means. Turning the question into a set part of a pseudo-mandatory workshop (there’s some confusion at Delaware about how strongly students are encouraged to attend) takes everything valuable out of it. It turns something sly into dogma.
Or take the assertion in one of the training documents for the Delaware workshops that all white Americans are racists because they are socialized to a racial identity associated with privilege. Put it that way and it’s crude. Put it in a workshop as an assertion of empirical fact as opposed to a tendentious argument with a pile of priors a hundred miles high sitting on it and you’ve just sailed off the edge of stupid. In part precisely because accusations of racism are taken more seriously in early 21st Century American life than they were in 1960, you can’t casually scale from a general description of the consequences of a social identity to a highly personalized accusation unless you want those accused to treat the idea of racism as trivially generalized and meaningless.
But there are complex questions and debates to be explored about how historically-produced identities structure everyday psychological experience, social organization, and so on. There is an interesting scholarly literature on the history of whiteness. And so on. Part of the problem for me is that some of the people who react negatively to something like this program at Delaware act as if the deeper, more complex, more interesting scholarly debates and discussions are equally risible and discardable, but somehow we never really get around to that kind of conversation. We get stuck with the hacks and the polemicists. We talk endlessly, oh so endlessly, about Ward Churchill etcetera. We never get to the really deep literature on Native American history that might come to some vaguely similar moral conclusions as Churchill but in much more subtle and nuanced ways. We don’t get to talk about David Roediger or Noel Ignatieff on whiteness, or a huge complex well-researched literature on the history of racial identity in the United States as a whole.
When I say talk, I mean it. I don’t agree necessarily with Roediger and Ignatieff, particularly in terms of the way they read off the history of whiteness to a contemporary political praxis. I tend to come at a lot of the history of identity and the politics connected to that history the way that Anthony Appiah does in some of his recent work, as a skeptic. But Appiah’s work is a million miles away from quick dismissals of “political correctness” that are meant to encompass both superficial institutional projects and detailed monographs written in good faith and with serious craft. At some point, if we’re going to still have anything resembling scholarship left in the smoking ruins of culture war, some of the critics need to stir themselves and respond like scholars to tough, nuanced, challenging work rather than continuously dwell on how the hacks have been parasitically turning that work into slogans and screeds.
Margaret Soltan has a nice post on the overuse of quotation marks, including a pointer to a website dedicated to stomping out this phenomenon.
I wouldn’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, though. When I think about the way I inattentively put quotation marks into my own prose, I’m aware of several underlying reasons for doing so beyond actually quoting the words of an author or speaker. Some of them are at least conditionally valid.
First is what Soltan describes as the straightforwardlly ironic quotation mark. I think sometimes this is a compact way to be snarky or dismissive that has the added advantage of being plausibly deniable. If I want to mock or undercut someone, it may be excessive, pretentious and self-important to devote several meticulous sentences to a sober criticism of that person’s behavior when the punctuation equivalent of rolling my eyes derisively is available. The problem is that this technique is overused, or used when the situation demands a more serious treatment. Also, some people accidentally make a phrase or title ironic with misused quotation marks when they didn’t mean to.
Second is the classic postmodernist use of quotation marks to bracket off a concept or idea that can’t be easily dispensed with but that the author doesn’t want to use normatively. This technique became horribly overused for a while, and eventually became both a substitute for making genuine arguments and a way to avoid having to admit that some of the attack on such concepts was failing to understand just why they couldn’t be easily dispensed with (e.g., because many of them remain genuinely useful). But there is still a real question here. Suppose I write an essay talking about why the concept of Africa is a major problem for historians because once you’re talking about the continent before 1750, Africa (I almost put it in quotes right there and then) isn’t an accurate or useful way to describe the diversity of societies on the continent, that it is empirically inaccurate. This isn’t just some generic concern with social constructions: before 1750, societies south of the Sahara didn’t see themselves as sharing a common identity, they didn’t really have any strong shared institutions or practices that linked them all together, they weren’t geographically linked, and so on. Once I finish that essay, I almost have to put “Africa” in quotation marks. Or I have to explain in a fairly sophisticated way why and how present usage trumps the actuality of history and therefore we should just go ahead and organize the study of pre-1750 African history as such even when it’s really not empirically accurate to do so.
There’s a variant on this kind of bracketing and that’s when I want to remind readers continuously that I’m using an offensive or troubling word because the discourse I’m writing about uses it, but that I absolutely don’t want my readers to take my use to be normative. If I’m writing about British imperial sources in 1920s Africa, I’m going to have to talk about “the natives” at times because my sources do. But I don’t want to write something like, “District officers in southern Africa talked regularly about the native problem”. Without quotes around “the native problem”, you could get the impression that this is how I think. It’s not a direct quote of a specific text, but a collective quote of an entire species of texts. There isn’t a simple phrase I can translate that into that doesn’t require bracketed quotation marks because the concept itself is rooted in some specific historical way of talking. I could say, “District officers in southern Africa struggled with the contradictions of modern liberalism and imperial control, with seeing Africans as both human subjects and racial inferiors, with irresolvable questions about what the ultimate purpose of empire in Africa really was.” That begins to explain what was meant in past usage by “the native problem”, but if I’ve got to have that full phrase in play every single time I want to refer to the concept of “the native problem”, I’m going to have a very long essay before I’m done. The problem is of course that academics and other authors begin to bracket off virtually every word and phrase as a preemptive strike against anyone who might take offense.
Third is a related usage. I find I tend to want to put phrases in quotations when I want it to be clear that I’m referring to a common usage that is particular to some smaller discursive community of writers and speakers. Take the term social construction above. My impulse to bracket that is almost irresistable because I want it to be clear that I’m using it as a reference to a particular scholarly conversation at the same time that I want to communicate that this post is itself not directly within that conversation. I think this is the major impulse that produces the most usage of quotation marks in prose, and the worst misuses and overuses. For example, some writers bracket off everyday phrases. Or some writers bracket off phrases that they mean to use directly, in complete agreement with the phrase and within an appropriate context of its unbracketed usage. For example, if I’m at a conference of game scholars and we’re all talking about virtual worlds, it’s stupid to bracket the term. If I’m writing an essay for a general audience about counterfactuals in history and I happen to mention that “virtual worlds” are novel way to explore counterfactuals, the quote may be appropriate because I want to call attention to the term and acknowledge its novelty in this context for my readers, the extent to which the phrase is indigenous to some other conversation or context. The only mistake from that point on is if I put the term inside quotation marks from that point forward for the rest of the essay.
I’ll be in Washington DC tomorrow for a talk to alumni on virtual worlds. See you there, Swatties.
I kept meaning to put this essay up over the summer, but I, uh, got distracted. Did I say that I wasn’t kidding about the title of this blog? Anyway, this is a talk I gave at the the Research Libraries Group Programs Meeting this past summer. I was toying with rewriting it to be slightly more formal, as this was written to be spoken aloud, but I’ve decided to leave it as is.
I really like this quote from Break Through at Kevin Drum’s site. So yet another book that I’d better read.
Here’s the quote that Drum pulls out of Chapter 7 of the book:
From Break Through, courtesy of Kevin Drum: “In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.”.
I can’t think of a better way to sum up why I reject the proposition that the way to fight unfair or malevolent attacks on the academy (or anything I value) is to out-shrill the shrill, out-swear the profane, out-simplify the simple-minded.
Oh god, not “politics in the classroom” again. All I can tell you for sure after reading Paul Sracic’s essay is that the way he comes at this perennial issue is by advising professors to be boring, grey robots in the classroom, little information vendors who beep and boop and spit out narrowly constrained answers to questions when asked and otherwise go ahead with their preplanned lectures. The excluded middles here between Sracic’s tightly controlled pedagogy and some raving stream-of-consciousness political activist who punishes students for disagreements and spouts nonsense about his every whimsical thought are wider than the Grand Canyon. Teaching well requires that you be both human and humane. You have to be humble and embrace the range of students you’ll encounter–but you also need to be unafraid of yourself, as unselfconscious a performer as you can be. You have to respect what you know and what you don’t know–but also be willing to guide students to knowledge that’s beyond your own direct reach. You have to help the wisdom to use knowledge grow, and that doesn’t come from knowledge itself. Teaching is art: Sracic talks about it like it’s about filling out an Excel spreadsheet.
