addendum

Speaking of the dangers valuing abstract knowledge over tacit knowledge, this American Life broadcast Two Steps Back (275) recounts how standardization efforts have frustrated a successful public school teacher's ability to teach.

(This American Life contains some very interesting programs. They're interesting enough that I'm actually willing to up to put up with Ira Glass and general NPR smugness in order to listen to them.)

an ethic for knowledge

The notions of 'scientific' detachment and objectivity in ethics research appear illusory at best, a betrayal of both our respondents and ourselves, at worst. Yet, if all truth is subjective and shared meanings are impossible, are we wasting our time as scholars, conducting studies to satisfy our own selfish pleasure in the discovery of the particular-- with no hope of finding something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine? If that is the case, shouldn't we perhaps move on to a more productive line of work-- writing fiction or making widgets?

~ Jeanne Liedtka from her article "Exploring Ethical Issues Using Personal Interviews" published in Business Ethics Quarterly Vol. 2 (1992)

Something of value to say to those who inhabit the world we examine. If I ever do become a serious researcher, that's what I hope I can do. I want to contribute to knowledge (knowledge with a lowercase k), that helps people better understand their lives. Otherwise, I might as well just knit socks, because we all know there is much weariness in the making of many books.

In any case, I finish my class on Thursday. I promise that I will post ten gazillion blog entries after that. Then again, knowing my incredible powers of concentration, I will probably post ten gazillion blog entries before my final proposal is due.

of making many books

Of making many books there is no end, and much study wearies the body.

~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

Today’s elite educational institutions often seem more intent on churning out more books (publish or perish as they say), than teaching students how to become good citizens. So it was refreshing for me to stumble upon this blog entry. Below is an excerpt from sociologist Monte Bute's column in the American Sociological Association's official newsletter, written in 2004. His blog, entitled Backstage Sociologist, is worth following.

An outsider to the disciplinary canon, Alfred Schutz, developed a sociology of knowledge that poses an alternative to this elitist paradigm of practice. He distinguished between scholarship aimed at the “expert” and scholarship directed to the “well-informed citizen.” American sociologists once saw the well-informed citizen as their primary audience. Conversely, the disciplinary elite today sees fellow experts as their only audience.

How do we restore sovereignty to that large majority of sociologists who toil under a more populist paradigm of practice but remain second-class citizens within the profession? The state professional association is one important venue. As an apprentice to the craft, I found congenial homes, first in Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM), and later in the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA).

I was welcomed by colleagues who refused to be constrained by the “expert” model but were engaged in scholarships of integration, application, and teaching. I was mentored by master teachers who prided themselves in conducting three to five sections of undergraduate classes each semester, devoted to developing a sociological perspective in students who may never take another course in the discipline. These folks practiced service the old-fashioned way; a “good citizen” took on those often-thankless tasks on campus and in the community that needed doing.

~

Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.

~ Proverbs 22:6

internet links from a brainwashed radical

To prove that my blog hasn’t just turned into one long rant based on my indoctrination from my "radical" “leftist” “progressive” “post-Marxist” “feminist” Penn class, I thought I’d try to amalgamate some other links and thoughts of interest. In order to remain true to shameless self-promotion, I’ve also provided links to past blog entries relating to these topics. I guess in an ideal world, I would post a follow-up blog entry tying in the article. But we all know this isn't an ideal world...

For those of you who left comments on my last blog post, I haven’t had the opportunity to reply yet, because you both posed thought-provoking questions and I need to think a bit more before replying. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

Ideology vs. Money. In China, the latter speaks the louder word.

Ted Stevens was not re-elected. What a relief. Otherwise, the Penn maintenance guy would lose his faith in America: “If a convicted felon can be elected into the Senate, why can’t a felon in jail vote?”

Sick and tired of ethics in America? Just as we may no longer believe in neoliberalism in economics, we’re perhaps also in need of a change in the field of ethics:

We don’t need microfinance. We need sweatshops. I’m only half kidding. But Oxfam’s Uttaran in some ways manages to get the best of microfinance and manages to approximate more formal employment.

Michael Lewis, the writer of Liar’s Poker, comments on his experience and on events and people leading up today’s Wall Street mess.

I criticized WalMart in my last entry. Jonathan has redirected me to an article that argues to the contrary. I hope to post a response at some point.

Sometimes, I just want to make something beautiful, but it certainly tries my patience. Here's my half-finished quilt top:


I manage to look supremely uncool on my bike with my pant leg retainers, mismatched mittens, and Eco vegan sneakers. Practicality trumps narcissism. I definitely do not follow these instructions. Apparently, there are plenty of others who manage to bike fashionably. Though sometimes, in looking at their footwear, I wonder if they will soon remove themselves from the gene pool.


Incharacter.org runs a feature on forgiveness. Notably, Ten Greatest Moments in Forgiveness History highlights the extraordinary forgiveness exhibited by the Amish community after the school shooting.

If you’ve ever read C.S.Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet, you might understand the theory that the seven books of the Chronicles of Narnia proxy atrological symbolism of the planets. A review on the book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the ¬Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward

Single Young Male (SYM). Single Young Female (SYF). The dating scene turns Darwinian (the end result of Sex and the City). It makes me really glad that I’m married. Young Married Couple (YMC) I suppose. Some notable quotables from the dating article:
“I am not going to hitch my wagon to a woman . . . who is more into her abs, thighs, triceps, and plastic surgery. A woman who seems to have forgotten that she did graduate high school and that it’s time to act accordingly.” “Maybe we turn to video games not because we are trying to run away from the responsibilities of a ‘grown-up life’ but because they are a better companion than some disease-ridden bar tramp who is only after money and a free ride.” “Men are finally waking up to the ever-present fact that traditional marriage, or a committed relationship, with its accompanying socially imposed requirements of being wallets with legs for women, is an empty and meaningless drudgery.”

From Orion Magazine: Why are corporations treated as individuals and not nature?
“In particular, we should examine the fact that, in the eyes of the law, corporations are considered people and entitled to civil rights. We often forget that corporations are only a few centuries old and have been continually evolving since their inception. Imagine what could be done if we changed the fiduciary responsibilities of directors to include obligations not only to profitability but also to the whole natural world, and if we imposed collective personal liability on corporate managers and stockholders to restore any damage that they cause to natural communities.”
Corporations are treated as individuals as a result of the 1886 Supreme Court case Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad Company in what some would argue is actually the most significant Supreme Court case in the US.

Find out how many earths would be required to support the human population if everyone lived the same lifestyle as you.

The game of monopoly provides an explanation for today’s economic crisis. While we need to fundamentally reform our economy, so that it is no longer a casino for speculation but an arena for responsible production of goods and services, we still need banks and financing. While many banks loaned with only an eye for increasing short-term profit, there are many subprime mortgage lenders who did it responsably.

As this financial crisis has forced us to question whether or not buying a house is always a wise financial decision for the poor, this economist questions whether accumulating savings is a good idea.

And oh, what shall I do now that the elections are over? Unfortunately, I forgot to save the links to all the articles I found interesting. I did find myself frequently crying the week after his win whenever I read anything about his historic election. Symbolically, Obama’s win has meant a lot, we have yet to see what it will mean practically.

In retrospect, some of the articles above are rather “lefty” or “progressive”. I guess I can’t help it. So I wonder if I think this way because of the class I am taking now, or whether I have always thought this way and this class has merely given more concrete words and frameworks to express it. I suspect the latter, given that I wasn't indoctrinated by my Wharton or economics classes, but it's always important to question how we form our opinions. How much of our thoughts are truly our own and how much are they influenced by what we hear and read and the people we hang out with? And how much of our common sense and knowledge as a society as a whole is influenced by the way the academy produces and frames research?

On a similar note, I also have noticed that my husband and I (or perhaps to use more PC terminology, my "partner" and I) have experienced a convergence of opinions in recent years. Do we have similar opinions because we started dating and got married? Or, did the similar opinions make us attracted to each other in the first place? Chicken and the egg.

simulating knowledge (2)

knowledge is not knowing

If today’s institutions of higher education are the factories for the “production of knowledge,”* then the assembly lines are lined with hunched over graduate students and junior faculty, managed over by tenured professors, journal publications and academic deans. Conferences, papers, books and other publications roll off the conveyor belt into this nebulous expanse known as “knowledge”.

The research, or perhaps more precisely, the knowledge produced, is not a result of some objective process, but a product of a certain set of assumptions, procedures and methodologies that are generally accepted by the said management of the university assembly line. That is not to say that none of the research is valid, but that it is subject to assumptions and processes particular to its academic field—generally accepted principles for how to conduct research and come up with conclusions.

Likewise, the knowledge produced within the walls of the ivory tower, is not necessarily more relevant, more important or more valuable than our own “knowing” as individuals. It is easy to get caught up in the abstractions of statistics, theories and categories to the extent that they become more real than the world they were supposed to study.

Case in point in these two excerpts. Excerpt one comes from Jane Jacobs Life and Death of Great American Cities, where she recounts the recounts the then prevalent urban planning mindset of privileging park space:

When I saw the North End again in 1959, I was amazed at the change. Dozens and dozens of buildings had been rehabilitated. Instead of mattresses against the windows there were Venetian blinds and glimpses of fresh paint…

But I could not imagine where the money had come from for the rehabilitation, because it is almost impossible today to get any appreciable mortgage money in districts of American cities that are not either high-rent or else imitations of suburbs. TO find out, I called a Boston planner I know.

“Why in the world are you down in the North End?” he said. “Money? Why, no money or work has gone into the North End. Nothings’ going on down there. Eventually, yes, but not yet. That’s slum!”

“It doesn’t look like a slum to me,” I said.

“Why, that’s the worst slum in the city. It has two hundred and seventy-five dwelling units to the net acre! I hate to admit we have anything like that in Boston, but it’s a fact.”

“Do you have any other figures on it?” I asked.

“Yes, funny thing. It has among the lowest delinquency, disease and infant mortality rates in the city. It also has the lowest ratios of rent to income in the city. Boy, are those people getting bargains. Let’ see… the death rate is low, 8.8 per thousand, against the average city rate of 11.2. The TB death rate is low, less than 1 per ten thousand, can’t understand it, it’s lower even than Brookline’s. In the old days the North End used to be the city’s worst spot for tuberculosis, but all that has changed. Well, they must be strong people. Of course it’s a terrible slum.”

“You should have more slums like this, “ I said, “Don’t tell me there are plans to wipe this out. You ought to be down here learning as much as you can from it.”

“I know how you feel, I often go down there myself just to walk around the streets and feel that wonderful, cheerful street life. Say, what you ought to do, you ought to come back and go down in the summer if you think it’s fun now. You’d be crazy about it in the summer. But of course, we have to rebuild it eventually. We’ve got to get those people off the streets.”

Here was a curious thing. My friend’s instincts told him that North End was a good place, and his social statistics confirmed it. But everything he had learned as a physical planner about what was good for people and good for city neighborhoods, everything that made him an expert, told him that North End had to be a bad place.

This other excerpt comes from C.S. Lewis’s novel That Hideous Strength, recounting the mind of a sociologist:

..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of things that are not seen.



* Though this I suspect is changing with the growing role of the internet. In fact, Wikipedia is still bookmarked as TRUTH on my internet toolbar.
** For awhile, I think I was doing pretty well on writing entries that weren’t entirely based on quotes. I guess I’m finally breaking that streak now. It’s hard to say things when you keep finding people who write everything you would want to write, but do it much better than you ever would.

garbage dump

I’ve just returned from vacation in cool California and am returning to the humid weather of Philadelphia and my overflowing “Word Document” where I amass all the articles and quotes for this blog. So I thought I would clean my plate as I did previously before posting again (currently in the pipeline are some scribblings on the birth, adolescence and middle age of Philadelphia, crafting and consumerism, and rather reluctantly, on the topic of being Asian American, since I am technically now an American. I suppose I could consider taking topic suggestions as well).

First of all, this cartoon is incredible, though I can’t seem to remember where it is from:


A similar graph from this White Courtesy Telephone blog post also suggests the inanity of much research.


Also, on an academic note, it’s been all over the news that Peter Enns has resigned from Westminster Theological Seminary (WTS) in what appears to be a theological difference. In my completely amateur opinion, it marks WTS’ move away from academic scholarship and more as a denominational training ground. Institutions, like cities, have personality and character. They are born, they change, they age, and eventually they also will die.

There’s been more talk about the students who are receiving elite educations. An adjunct faculty writes about the spirit of entitlement that dominates Harvard University. The article has been hotly contested and debated, so if you’re interested, run some searches on it or check the additional links on aldaily.com.

So given the state of today’s academic environment, the recent passing of Russian writer Alexander Solzhentisyn should merit attention. Solzhentisyn was a bold writer who openly criticized and denounced the Russian communist regime, in particular writing about the horrors of the gulags. Articles from the Inquirer and the Economist.

It was also refreshing to see an SFMOMA exhibit on China “Half Life of a Dream”. The artwork seemed meaningful because it actually seemed to have something relevant to say – perhaps because China has more of a contradictory national narrative, than the postmodern fragmentation of the American narrative in recent years. The Philadelphia Inquirer has featured three stories spanning two decades about a Chinese woman who has now become a corporate executive. 2008, 1999, 1987.

Speaking of China, the Olympic Games are coming up. I’ve never been super into watching these competitions—and part of me is always devastated by the amount of havoc it can wreak upon a city—economically and ecologically. For the 2010 Vancouver Olympic Games, the city plans to bulldoze through a rare forest. There’s more coverage of China’s Olympic Games and the corresponding environmental and societal issues at the same site.

On the environmental note, as gas prices hike, bicycling has also finally been gaining the spotlight. There’s a useful Philadelphia Inquirer article with practical tips about bike commuting, as well as an Economist article on bicycling and its implications on street planning and safety.

My few words of advice from my on year of experiencing the indignities of commuting by bike: it is okay to wear skirts that are longer than skirt length, changing after you get to work is highly advisable, and it’s better to be slow and safe. Be respectful of motorists (e.g. don’t run red lights when they are trying to get through the intersection) but remember that you have a right to be on the road. However, if your safety is threatened (e.g. angry, aggressive driver), you may need to slow down and get off the road.

Meanwhile, I am reminded of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities with a recent Mercedes hit and run accident in the Philadelphia area. Hit and run accidents make me very angry. However, the murder of a four year old this week strikes an entirely different level of emotion, something akin to numbness.

Despite the violence in this area, Philadelphia still remains a great city to live in. Surprisingly, it is a lot safer than what one might imagine. Props to this recent college graduate who wrote for the Inquirer why he has decided to stay in Philadelphia and contribute to my continued ambivalence about the gentrification of this city.

Speaking of Philadelphia, I have been fairly satisfied with Nutter as our mayor, but that did not prevent me from feeling saddened about reading about the death of Jesus White, a homeless man who ran in the mayor primaries last year.

It’s especially striking that Jesus White worked a regular job, but still had no home. It saddens me that when the economy does well, it takes years for the minute benefits to “trickle down” to the poor. Yet when the economy suffers, the impact is felt immediately and most severely by the poor.

Speaking of policies, Barack Obama’s recent support of faith-based programs has also been on the minds of many. This Opinion article Why Obama seized the faith-based mantle by Amy Sullivan from USA Today traces the history of faith-based initiatives, something that surprisingly despite being one of Bush’s signature policies, stemmed from the Democratic party.

This other opinion article from the Baltimore Sun makes a argument against more funding for faith-based programs, but instead advocates more collaboration between religious congregations and secular nonprofit organizations. The writer’s argument is solution-oriented and forward-looking, which I appreciate, but he also assumes the necessity to professionalize care, something that I am not entirely comfortable with. While professional help may be valuable and important, we run the risk of evading responsibility ourselves, and pushing it off to a third party, outsourcing compassion if you will. While Bush’s ‘compassionate conservatism’ has not been successful, I am pretty sure that putting the burden of caring for the poor entirely on the shoulder of the government will also fail. Institutionalized compassion will not bring about transformation. (Does institutionalized care even qualify as true compassion?)

All this talk about politics makes me remember once again that I am now a U.S. citizen and will be voting in the upcoming election! Perhaps more significantly, I have almost been married to this man for 6 months.

On a lighter note, Wordle.net is quite amusing. I ended up with this for this blog:

I'm also tired.

simulated intelligence

American universities have done a decent job of churning out smart, technically astute and relatively capable individuals, but it is questionable whether they have taught us knowledge of true value-- how to understand our privilege and place in society. We’re taught to perform well on SATs and AP exams, which soon become MCATs, grad school applications and interviewing, but we’re not necessarily taught how to question the assumptions of our society, or to understand from a critical point of view, our role in the world. We’re taught how to succeed well in the system, but not taught how to question or change the system.

From the article The Disadvantages of an Elite Education quoted in my previous post:

The world that produced John Kerry and George Bush is indeed giving us our next generation of leaders. The kid who’s loading up on AP courses junior year or editing three campus publications while double-majoring, the kid whom everyone wants at their college or law school but no one wants in their classroom, the kid who doesn’t have a minute to breathe, let alone think, will soon be running a corporation or an institution or a government. She will have many achievements but little experience, great success but no vision. The disadvantage of an elite education is that it’s given us the elite we have, and the elite we’re going to have.

Not that this is anything new, famous sociologist C. Wright Mills writes of bureaucratization and the lack of big picture understanding amongst many intelligent individuals, many decades before we see its vivid instantiation in the swanky bars and clubs of New York City:

Great and rational organizations- in brief, bureaucracies- have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large has not. Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men often cannot reason about the great structures- rational and irrational – of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any ideas of the ends they serve, and there is the increasing suspicion that those at the top as well- like Tolstoy’s generals- only pretend they know. The growth of such organizations, within an increasing division of labor, sets up more and more spheres of life, work, and leisure in which reasoning is difficult or impossible. The soldier, for example, ‘carries out an entire series of functionally rational actions accurately without having any idea as to the ultimate end of this action’ (Mannheim, Man and Society) or the function of each act within the whole. Even Men of technically supreme intelligence may efficiently perform their assigned work and yet not know that it is to result in the first atom bomb.

Ortega Y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses also projected a hint of it back in the 1930s. He was referring to the masses (and Europe), but I think the description, quoted from the article At the Forest’s Edge by Anthony Daniels can apply quite well to many of today’s recent graduates of elite universities:

The picture Ortega draws of the mass man is not an attractive or flattering one, but Ortega is not a snob who simply excoriates the appalling habits and tastes of those below him in the social scale. For him, mass man is the man who has no transcendent purpose in life, who lives in an eternal present moment which he wants to make pleasurable in a gross and sensual way, who thinks that ever-increasing consumption is the end of life, who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply and who, above all, has a venomous dislike of any other way of living but his own, which he instinctively feels as a reproach. He will not recognize his betters; he is perfectly satisfied to be as he is.

Mass man accepts no fundamental limits on his own life. Any limits that he may encounter are purely technical, to be removed by future advance. He believes that life is and ought to be a kind of existential supermarket, that an infinitude of choices is always before him, in which no choice restricts or ought ever to restrict what is possible in the future. Life for mass man is not a biography, but a series of moments, each unconnected with the next, and all deprived of larger meaning or purpose.

Mass man does not have to be poor or stupid. He can be both highly paid and highly intelligent, in a narrow way, and he can also be very highly educated, or at least trained; indeed, as knowledge accumulates, and as it becomes more and more difficult for anyone to master more than the very smallest portion of human knowledge, so connected thought (of the kind of which mass man is incapable) becomes rarer and rarer. Mankind collectively knows more than ever before, says Ortega, but cultivated men grow fewer.


* I do not write this as someone who is better than and above all of this, nor do I write this as someone who claims to possess “true intelligence.” I have been frustrated with my college education at an elite institution, because it left me with a bunch of interesting questions, cocktail conversation topics, and scattered technical expertise, but no real knowledge. As a fairly recent college graduate and a Christian who is called to see the world as God sees it, I am fumbling about trying to gain some true knowledge and vision (and dare I say, wisdom?)

simulated opportunity (golden handcuffs)

on elite education, prestigious jobs and privilege

I just made a visit up to Manhattan this past weekend, and quickly find myself ushered back into the contradictory world of long work hours coupled with late nights out consisting of $50 dinners, multiple cab rides, and bar hopping.

I was saddened to find so many people who disliked their high-paying, prestigious banking and consulting jobs, but could not find the momentum to leave. Why do so many intelligent and talented people feel trapped in their jobs? (It’s so easy to end up in these jobs—the process is on campus and they give you an offer fall of senior year. It takes courage to turn down a secured job offer in exchange for the unknown).*

Is it because you have already built your life around a lifestyle that requires your current salary? Is it because all your friends make a similar salary and in order to continue living the way that you do, you can’t really take a job that pays less? (Would you be able to attend all those $100 birthday dinners? Would you be able to continue paying $1500 in rent for your apartment?)

Or is it more a matter of security and prestige? A sense that this New York finance job is a good opportunity and it would be a waste to throw it away?

For those of us who hail from immigrant families, this question becomes very real, because our parents worked so hard in order to give us good opportunities in this country. And for those of us who attended costly Ivy League or private universities, our parents have provided even further for us financially. I’ve been perceived as spoiled, because I tossed out a good opportunity in the corporate world in order to take a lower paying position at a nonprofit organization. Apparently, I couldn’t tough out the long hours and tough environment of the corporate job, so I did the irresponsible thing and quit.**

Have I thrown away my privilege? Am I not spoiled and have I not appreciated the sacrifices my family has made on my behalf? I remember the frustration of being drilled by my aunt: “So why did you quit your higher paying job to take a lower paying job? Why couldn’t you have found a job in Philadelphia that paid as much as your previous one?”

I probably still have a long ways to go to truly understand, appreciate and be grateful for the sacrifices my parents have made for me, but I do not believe that I have tossed out my privilege. In fact, it is my privilege that has given the freedom to change jobs and pursue something that I love.

In the very thought-provoking article, The Disadvantages of an Elite Education, Deresiewicz writes***:

If one of the disadvantages of an elite education is the temptation it offers to mediocrity, another is the temptation it offers to security. When parents explain why they work so hard to give their children the best possible education, they invariably say it is because of the opportunities it opens up. But what of the opportunities it shuts down? An elite education gives you the chance to be rich—which is, after all, what we’re talking about—but it takes away the chance not to be. Yet the opportunity not to be rich is one of the greatest opportunities with which young Americans have been blessed. We live in a society that is itself so wealthy that it can afford to provide a decent living to whole classes of people who in other countries exist (or in earlier times existed) on the brink of poverty or, at least, of indignity. You can live comfortably in the United States as a schoolteacher, or a community organizer, or a civil rights lawyer, or an artist—that is, by any reasonable definition of comfort. You have to live in an ordinary house instead of an apartment in Manhattan or a mansion in L.A.; you have to drive a Honda instead of a BMW or a Hummer; you have to vacation in Florida instead of Barbados or Paris, but what are such losses when set against the opportunity to do work you believe in, work you’re suited for, work you love, every day of your life?

Yet it is precisely that opportunity that an elite education takes away. How can I be a schoolteacher—wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

My parents sacrifices have afforded me a better life—one in which I have plenty and one in which I have the freedom to choose a satisfying job that will not leave me in poverty. They have brought me to a country where I don’t have to fight tooth and nail to survive. They have given me an education that puts so many resources and options at my disposal. It would have been a waste to end up trapped in a job that made me feel dead on the inside, and to end up living a life that I never wanted to live.

* Obviously, this is generalization. Some do love their jobs and stay in the field and maybe they are meant to be there, while others tough out the travel and hours in order to learn what they can and then leave after a few years to follow less traditional paths. And some have chosen to stay in the job for a few years in order to honor their parents, but then go on to do something closer to their heart. I don’t know whether these people are right or wrong, nor should I be the judge of their decisions. (I will say that I do have special respect for the latter group). I am merely speaking in defense of my own decision, and against the mentality of “Since I’ve been given this great privilege and opportunity, I guess God wants me to take it.” There is opportunity in turning down opportunity.
** There is distinction between choosing a more satisfying job vs. just being lazy and continuing to live off your parent’s income. One is responsible and the other is not.
*** In fact, I like this article so much, I think it should be required reading for anyone who has or is considering an Ivy League education.
**** For related writings on this topic, please click on “new york city” in the archive by topics section.

Notions of Oppression of the Dead White Male in Today’s “Institutions of Higher Learning”

Subverting Structures of Minority Privilege and Deconstructing Diversity

In this article, The New Learning that Failed (published in the New Criterion), Victor Davis Hanson explores (and criticizes) the reasons for the failure for academic institutions to promote the study of classics (in other words, the so-called Western canon of white male dead authors). He makes several valid assessments on the state of the humanities departments in today’s university. He touches upon the inability to recognize beauty:*

There is no vocabulary left to convey ugliness or near perfection in art or literature—at least none that is not instantly deconstructed to prejudices of race, gender, and class. In a university class, we read mostly poems without meter, rhyme, musicality, or an elevated vocabulary, and novels without heroes or protagonists or even much action; we view art that is far removed from what the eye sees or would wish to see. The result is that our students cannot recognize beautiful things around them or within themselves.

Having studied plenty of minority and post-colonial literature, there’s some really beautiful work written (of course, we never described it using that word) that is well worth studying. But that doesn’t mean that a dead white male cannot write something relevant to us today. And there are plenty of poems without meter, rhyme or musicality, and protagonist-less novels that are excellent, but that doesn’t mean the ones that have them are so antiquated that they are not worth reading.

It’s important to study the writings of dead white males (and yes, there are exceptions), because they have in large part shaped the structure and basis of our society today. If we are to understand who we are now, we need to go back and understand where we have come from. We also need to understand what relevance they might have for our current situation.

Of course, I do believe it’s important to understand other cultures and acknowledge the ways that the Western canon may have omitted them, but if that becomes our sole war cry, then we may soon lose sight of reality:

Theories of exploitation were divorced from the real world. While relatively well-off students anguished in class over perceived gender and radical oppressions, the United States remained the number-one destination of the world’s immigrants fleeing political bias, poverty, and religious intolerance. The first-generation Mexican national who ran as fast as he could from the oppression of Oaxaca, and clipped the bushes outside the tasteful faculty office, instinctively knew and appreciated the advantages of Western culture far more than did the leisured professor inside.

Feminists insisted that Harvard’s president Larry Summers must be fired for insensitive remarks regarding the under-representation of women on math faculties; elsewhere, thousands of honor killings and millions of female circumcisions transpire yearly. In Saudi Arabia, feminism is not second-guessing the remarks of a college president, but simply wanting to drive a car; on the West Bank, it is not being murdered when dating someone your father and brothers don’t like; in the Sudan, it is avoiding genital mutilation; in Iran, it is escaping stoning when accused of adultery. In contrast, Greek learning had emphasized that deeds must match words; otherwise, to paraphrase Aristotle, it is easy to be ethical in our sleep.


Language in the university has lost its connection with reality—a danger that Socrates warned about in his battles with the Sophists and we have seen in our own time with the communist attempt to remake vocabulary to further social and economic agendas. “Diversity” does not mean diverse anything, surely not differences in political thought or ethnic backgrounds, but rather a requisite number of different skin colors. A classroom with three offspring of affluent African-American professionals can be “diverse” while having children of Appalachia or impoverished immigrants from Eastern Europe is not. The “free speech” area may mean that radical pro-Palestinian groups can hand out anti-Semitic literature or Chicano activists may vandalize conservative newspapers, but it is not a place where one can talk safely and candidly about the problems of illegal immigration, or social contributors to the AIDS epidemic, or the need to calibrate affirmative action more on class than race.

…

We, in contrast, have lost all sense of proportion and simply use the self-absorbed yardstick of our own times versus all others. Thus Iraq—not the summer of 1864 or December 1950—is the worst (fill in the blanks) war, blunder, or quagmire in our history or of all time. A flippant campus slur is the most sexist thing ever heard, as if the frontier woman on the Colorado plains without electricity and with eleven sick children never had it as rough. Wounded Knee is tantamount to Okinawa, the loyalty oaths of the 1950s commensurate to the Inquisition. And why not, when the purpose of education now is not to train young minds in a method of disinterested inquiry supported by historical exempla, but to condition them to think in preordained, deductive fashion—in other words, as Sophists rather than Socratics?

We’ve prioritized these assumed values of diversity over the quality and influence of the work itself, and abstained from making value judgments about any pieces of work lest we offend someone. The academy, supposedly a place for honest intellectual inquiry and pursuit of truth, has been overrun by political correctness. As the study of literature becomes more concerned with the nitpicking about notions of gender construction in Dicken’s novels, it loses more and more of its relevance.

Then again, it’s not like this is anything new:

Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of all men the least likely acquire wisdom by doing so. We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View. The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge – to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour – this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

~ from C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters

*Of course, that’s also because we’ve assumed, that literature is a rather subjective matter, like all other things… and therefore, we can’t really say that it reveals any truth of any kind, only that it perhaps produces certain effects and reflects certain notions of prejudices and etc…

race to the top [2]

race in the academy

Just some interesting excerpts from two articles I stumbled across last week…. I don’t really have any particular responses to them right now, other than I do agree that they pose interesting questions that can’t be answered easily:

Is race just a scapegoat for the problems of society when we should actually be looking at class? Is race an excuse for us to not talk about economic inequality? Would it ever be possible to extricate class from race, as history has inexorably intertwined the two? And how does the ‘framing of the question’, the vocabulary of interpretation, the lens of analysis, or whatever you want to call it, alter our conclusions? [And perhaps also, if you could really eradicate identity politics, or racial understandings of society and history, what would that solve? By erasing race from our discourse, and insisting on avoiding it altogether, do we deny something valuable about ourselves?]

This first article in the Chronicle addresses Princeton’s new African-American studies department and discusses race in higher education:

My point, then, is that the commitment to African-American studies, like the commitment to Asian-American studies, is a commitment to describing our social problems in a way that will make all of us — teachers as well as students, alumni as well as parents — feel comfortable. It does this by racializing injustice at a moment when race is less relevant to injustice — at least to the injustice done by elite universities — in America than it has ever been. Rooks quotes Orlando Patterson as saying, "The doors are wide open for ... black middle-class kids to enter elite colleges." The relevant term here is "middle-class." African-American- and Asian-American-studies programs tell us that, from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our identity, at the very moment when, again from the standpoint of social justice, the crucial thing about us is our wealth and what the upper middle class sees on that television show is not the image of its own virtue (that's what make us comfortable), but the reverse face of its own success.

Another reason is that these programs are the places where questions about the meaning of race (and its handmaiden, culture) get raised. No assertion is more common in American intellectual life today than the insistence that race and class (and gender) are inextricably intertwined, and, in a certain sense, this is obviously true. Everybody has a household income; everybody's descended from somebody; everybody's male or female or some combination of the two. But one of the things that thinking seriously about race makes possible is not just the imbrication of race with class, but the disarticulation of class from race. We live in a society where the struggle to achieve racial equality is not the most profound of the challenges that face us. A program in African-American studies that helps us to understand not just the importance of race but its limits (not just its relevance but its irrelevance) will be well worth the money Princeton plans to spend.

This article in The Nation reviews the books The Trouble with Diversity:

The Trouble With Diversity is a bracing jeremiad, an all-out assault on the way identity in general, and race in particular, is used to organize society. It is also a thought experiment in which Michaels invites us to remove our race-tinted glasses and view the world in the class-based terms that, he argues, actually define it. For Michaels, there is no middle ground, no room for compromise: Race shoved class out of American consciousness, and he wants to reverse the situation. "We love race--we love identity--because we don't love class," he writes. The alternative is not to "love" class, since Michaels knows that class, unlike race, is distinctly unlovable. Class inspires no "National Museum of Lower-Income Americans on the Mall" in Washington, and no special holidays celebrating the culture of the poor (indeed, the "culture of poverty" is a sociological epithet); while some poor people inherit their poverty, we would all agree with Michaels that it would be perverse to think of it as their "heritage." The only area in which we are sentimental about poverty is in studies of working-class culture and literature, in which class is considered a form of identity.

Furthermore, Michaels accused contemporary champions of postidentity theory--those who envisage identity as contingent, performative and fluid--of employing the very racial essentialism they oppose. The more we emphasize culture and diversity, he scolded, the more we become mired in race. We inevitably answer the question "What should we do?" in terms of "who we are"--an appeal to racial/ethnic identity. The quest for identity is a vicious circle in which one can never escape the nineteenth-century notion of race. "For racial identity to become a project, it must turn to culture; for cultural identity to become a project, it must turn to race," he wrote.

the problem with education

Nothing coherent here since I'm not sure how I feel about the issue, but here are couple of dangling thoughts and responses to things I've been reading*:

John Derbyshire critiques educational theorists in his article "The Dream Palace of Educational Theorists" in The New English Review for making faulty assumptions about human nature, namely that we are a blank slate, on which nurture is everything, and nature is negligible.

[Do I want to believe his assertion that the course of our lives are already inscribed into our DNA? Not really, though I will admit that freedom as conceived by postmoderns, is an illusion and a farce (appropriately so, that freedom has no essence). Is then my only other option to be one of those crazy left-wing liberals who believe more government funds means social transformation? I hope not.]

A few noteworthy excerpts unrelated to John Derbyshire's main point, that take a jab at today's "education" system:

"Towering over all these lesser scams is the college racket, a vast money-swollen credentialing machine for lower-middle-class worker bees. American parents are now all resigned to the fact that they must beggar themselves to purchase college diplomas for their offspring, so that said offspring can get low-paid outsource-able office jobs, instead of having to descend to high-paid, un-outsource-able work like plumbing, carpentry, or electrical installation.**"

"Professionals have their own credentialing systems: You may have graduated law school, but you’ll still have to pass the bar exam, and so on. Then why make aspiring lawyers go to law school? Presumably for the same reason we insist on cube jockeys having bachelor’s degrees from accredited four-year colleges. Why not let them study up at home from Teaching Company DVDs, then sit for a state-refereed common exam when they feel they’re ready? Why not let lawyers learn on the job from books and as articled clerks, the way they used to? I don’t know. College-going is just an irrational thing we do, the way upper-class German men used to acquire dueling scars, the way women in imperial China had their feet bound. Griggs vs. Duke Power probably has something to do with it. Since, following that decision, employers are not permitted to test job applicants to see how intelligent they are, the employers seek a college degree as a proxy for intelligence."

It's beginning to resemble the corporation***. Creating needs that were not there before so that the organization can justify its own existence. How very cyclical (it's almost like a perpetual motion machine!) and meaningless.

* I've finally realized that if I wait until I have coherent thoughts before making a posting. I NEVER post anything. And when I do, someone always manages to refute my argument, rendering it as obsolete and useless as a undergraduate degree :)
** A good article on this very subject is Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford in the New Atlantis
*** And by corporation, I mean the EVIL CORPORATION. I have to write that in caps because I can't take myself seriously when I say that. That terms been thrown around so much I'm not sure what it means anymore.