Commencement

Now that commencement season is here, I’m reminded of some of my favorite quotations on the handing out of credentials.  I think of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, who once announced “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” Bradbury would have been a great commencement speaker.

Even better than the Bradbury quote, though, is the script of the movie version of The Wizard of Oz, in the scene in which the Scarecrow gets a brain:

Wizard: Why, anybody can have a brain. That's a very mediocre commodity.

Every pusillanimous creature that crawls on the earth or slinks through slimy seas has a brain!

Back where I come from we have universities seats of great learning, where men go to become great thinkers.

When they come out, they think deep thoughts with no more brains than you have.

But they have one thing you haven't got: A diploma!

Therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Universitatus Committeeatum E Pluribus Unum I hereby confer upon you the honorary degree of Th.D.

Scarecrow: "Th.D."?

Wizard: Yeah, that's "Doctor of Thinkology."

I am not really a disbeliever in higher education and I do think it is possible to get an education in universities and colleges, as long as a student wants to learn and not just get a degree and ignores or avoids the courses of propaganda and preaching. Possible, but not necessary to get that Thinkology certificate.

Contemporary Scholarship

Sociology graduate student Nathan Jurgenson, writing in Inside Higher Ed, makes the argument that academics must make their ideas available and accessible to the public.  He maintains that they must try to communicate more widely in order to make more understandable and relevant to a wider range of people. I tend to agree with him, but not just because this can expand the influence of the putative experts.

I'm frequently called upon to review article and book manuscripts for journals and publishers, and I often wish that the writers would make their work understandable and relevant to a highly specific public: me. Writing is a reflection of thinking and when the writing is unclear, chances are that the thoughts behind the writing are unclear. Most of the articles and books in the social sciences (and, I think, in the humanities) are so clumsily written and badly argued that no one who isn't professionally obligated to read them would do so. Too often, when I can make sense of them, I find few real ideas lurking in the dense prose and statistical manipulations.

The problem with academic writing, I think, goes much deeper than its tendency to be a closed conversation in cloistered circles. The experts often really have nothing to say.

You Can't Say That

Is Black Studies a legitimate academic discipline? This seems like a question one should be able to ask, and a question that different people would answer in different ways.  Naomi Schaefer Riley, formerly a blogger on the Chronicle of Higher Education website, recently learned that this is one of the many questions that simply cannot be asked today, at least not unless you are prepared to answer it in the prescribed fashion.  Admittedly, Riley did express herself strongly, characterizing dissertation topics in this field as "a collection of left-wing victimization claptrap." But she was, after all, writing an opinion piece and this characterization did accurately summarize her opinion of recent scholarship in Black Studies.

Riley's expression of her views turned out to be pretty mild, compared to the reactions of comments and other bloggers on CHE's "Brainstorm" blog. The academic tumult spilled over into other media.  Well, those who disagreed with her had just as much right to voice their views, however vehemently, as she had to voice hers. The big problem was that Ms. Riley experienced more than unpopularity and name-calling. She was fired.

After initially trying to characterize Ms. Riley's post as an "invitation to debate," CHE editor Liz McMillen backed down and said that Riley's blogging did not meet the publication's "basic editorial standards for reporting and fairness in opinion articles." Those "standards" seem to mean not taking unpopular positions, and they did not prohibit another blogger on the same site from publishing bathroom wall-type doggerel personally attacking Riley.

As an outlet for ideas in higher education, I'm afraid CHE has given new insight into the climate of contemporary universities and colleges.  These are not places for free and open inquiry. Stifling conformity, maintained by mandatory outrage, is the order of the day. 

A Kinder, Gentler Soviet Experiment?

We know that Joseph Stalin ordered the murders of millions of people, but in a few individual cases his responsibility remains unclear. He probably had Sergei Kirov killed in order in order to create a pretext for the purges of the 1930s. He also might have been behind the death of the writer Maxim Gorky. Now, Russian historian Lev Lurie is giving new life to long-standing speculations that Stalin had Lenin poisoned, according to an article by Jacob Heilbrunn in The National Interest.

This possibility leads Heilbrunn to wonder what might have happened if Lenin had survived long enough to pass on the leadership of the USSR to someone less psychopathic than the "Great Architect of Communism." "Might the Soviet experiment, as it was known," Heilbrunn asks, "have turned out differently in the event of Lenin's ruling the Soviet Union for several more decades? Could he have made a go of the enterprise? Would Trotsky and Bukharin have been promoted rather than Stalin, and would a kinder, gentler Soviet Union have emerged?"

One of the problems with alternative history is that there is simply no way of knowing how things would have turned out if events had followed a different path. The USSR under Trotsky or Bukharin could conceivably have resulted in a less brutal regime. But the danger in this sort of speculation is that it leads us to the conclusion that persecution and mass murder were not consequences of the Communist system per se, but of a single individual who perverted the system.

While we don't have an alternative Soviet Union to serve as a basis of comparison, though, we do have other Communist states, including the short-lived regime of Bela Kun in Hungary, China under Mao, and Fidel Castro's Cuba. These have all been cases of highly repressive regimes and China, an "experiment" on the scale of the Soviet one, is perhaps the nation that comes closest to the USSR (and Nazi Germany, a different kind of "experiment") in sheer numbers of human beings eliminated. As Heilbrunn notes, responding to his own question, "[t]he preponderance of the evidence suggests that communist regimes based on Leninist principles quickly devolved into totalitarian societies."

Totalitarianism derives from the logic of social revolution. The complete reorganization of relations among people requires a program of unlimited coercion carried out by political agents. A social revolution, in other words, necessitates subordinating all connections among human beings to the dictates of planning by governmental bureaucracy. Stalin managed to prevail in the bureaucratic struggle for supremacy by agreeing to serve in the then unglamorous office of general secretary, which enabled him to fill positions with his collaborators. Both his ruthlessness and his organizational skills suited him to the intense bureaucratic competition of an environment in which political power was everything.  Stalin didn't simply happen to grab control. He triumphed in the Bolshevik setting because he was so well adapted to it. 

Genealogy in the Era of Diversity

My grandfather used to enjoy driving around the back roads of Louisiana. When he’d see some old folks sitting on rocking chairs out on their porch, he’d often pull over to chat.  The most common topic of conversation was: who were your parents and who are your kin? Since almost everyone was related (often in multiple ways), this was how they worked out exactly how they were connected to each other. My grandfather had memorized an elaborate ancestral tree, and this type of knowledge was pretty widespread among the older people, so he and his new contacts could generally end up classifying each other as cousins.

For all his detailed command of our family history, a few of his claims in this area always seemed to me vague and speculative. In particular, he used to assure me that we were “part Choctaw.” This was not entirely implausible. There are still a few Choctaw left in my ancestral region on the northeastern side of Lake Ponchartrain and there were more a couple of hundred years ago. But although my grandfather could recite a long list of fathers and mothers going back to the first arrival in this country in the seventeenth century, he never could identify that Choctaw forbear precisely. I always thought that he might, on occasions, allow his love of a good story to interfere with strict adherence to the truth. At any rate, if we do have any Amerindian background, I’m sure that any genetic traces have been lost in the larger pool of inheritance, and I certainly retain no cultural traits from our putative Choctaw heritage.

Recently, I’ve been reminded of my grandfather's genealogical expertise and occasional genealogical creativity by the Elizabeth Warren affair. Ms. Warren is the blonde-haired, blue-eyed Democratic candidate for the Senate seat in Massachusetts. In the course of her campaign against Republican Scott Brown, it has become public knowledge that Harvard University, where she taught law, formerly listed her as a “minority” on the basis of her supposed Native American ancestry, as did the American Association of Law Schools from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s.

It is not clear that dubious ethnic claims played a part in Warren’s hiring by Harvard or that the misleading official identification originated with her, although it is hard for me to see where Harvard or the AALS would have obtained this information, if not from her. I also think that she might have corrected the AALS description before it ran for a decade. But rather than level accusations of fraud against Ms. Warren, I’d rather consider this as an instance of the absurdity of the “diversity” ideology that encourages selective interpretations of ancestry. For all I know, Harvard and the AALS may well define “Native American” as anyone with a pre-Columbian ancestor, in which case a Nordic-looking woman with no tribal connections could well be a “minority.” I’d guess that the university and the association have no clear definition of who falls within a category, so that she’s probably in the clear. The bigger problem is the desperate institutional effort to classify as many people as “minorities” as possible in order to increase diversity ratings.

My own children, in addition to their Louisiana background, are also half-Filipino. I usually tell them not to list themselves on applications as “Asian” because being Asian is generally more of a disadvantage than being white in systems of selection by racial and ethnic categories. If they're looking to fit into the diversity slots, they could conceivably use their mother’s maiden name and claim to be “Hispanic-surnamed." Or maybe they could just be Choctaw. In today’s world, genealogy has many more uses than just making connections with your kinfolk.

Totalitarianism Revived

In an article in World Affairs, Alan Johnson asks how Communism could be making a comeback among a cadre of intellectuals after the ideology's history of misery and mass murder during the twentieth century. Johnson maintains that the new Communists have little interest in history, which explains their ability to overlook the atrocities of Stalinism and Maoism. They also, in his view, have no clear plan for the future. The appeal of Communism, he argues, lies in Communists' identification of all the problems of modern society as interlinked and systemic. If "the system," as it currently exists, is the source of all problems, then the answer to all problems must be to have a revolution that will completely replace the system with some new state of affairs.

I suppose we are fortunate that most of the new Communists Johnson names are abstruse theorists unlikely to have any impact outside of seminar rooms.  But this "systemic" perspective is clearly an instance of what the sociologist Gideon Sjoberg approvingly called the "countersystem" approach in the social sciences, looking at current reality as an interlinked web of "social problems" and imagining a completely different organization of human relations. This, I would argue, was precisely why Communism always became totalitarian whenever its adherents achieved power: because they treated human societies not as products of history or as living associations among human beings, but as abstract patterns to be totally redesigned by planners of a new system.  

Taking a Stand

An article in Inside Higher Ed poses the question of whether college faculties should vote to take institutional stands on public issues. The publication reports the events at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota, where the faculty voted 24-7 in favor of a resolution opposing a proposed amendment to the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage. As the article discusses, this is an instance of a continuing debate on the rights and responsibilities of educational organizations regarding public issues.

One of those who argued against institutions taking positions cited the 1967 report of the Kalven Committee on the University's Role in Political and Social Action, one of my own favorite documents. Under the chairmanship of Harry Kalven, this University of Chicago faculty committee came to the conclusion that teaching and scholarship, the legitimate purposes of higher education, could be fostered only by allowing all individuals to think for themselves.  Kalven's committee wrote that "there is no mechanism by which it [the university] can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favor a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues." In the case of William Mitchell College, it is perfectly legitimate for most or even all of those at the college to decide they are against the amendment, to voice this opinion publicly, and to campaign for their chosen position. But when they vote on it as an organizational resolution, they impose the majority opinion as a standard of political correctness.

"Taking a stand" sounds bold, but there is nothing courageous about proclaiming popular ideas to be official policy.  If anything, expressing institutional approval for those who think the "right" way  creates an environment in which cowardice and conformity thrive.  In saying this, I'm not suggesting that our colleges are somehow above politics or that higher education should be unconcerned with the issues of our day.  But those issues are best addressed when we respect the rights of individuals to think for themselves. And our colleges show that respect when they strive for institutional neutrality in social and political controversies.