naturally, it’s slated for demolition
September 10, 2015 7:18 AM Subscribe
This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. Why We Should Fear University, Inc.
Some thoughts:
-Huh, it seems weird for an article ostensibly critical of the corporatistic takeover of universities to frame that as "taming," which strongly implies they were out of control before
-Over the past two decades, financial crises notwithstanding, the American university writ large has undergone a radical physical expansion and renovation, bringing more and more campuses into line with grand architectural visions. That’s precisely why I love the garden: It’s one of the last little wild places left at Purdue. Naturally, it’s slated for demolition.
"Wild"? He is aware, I assume, that gardens are necessarily the opposite of "wild"?
- Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.
This essay is taking a weird turn; that the author seems not to understand the difference between the flattering but vacuous homogeneity of the corporate production of culture and authoritarian nation-states is not an encouraging sign
-Which is why, whenever the conversation inevitably turns to campus political culture these days, I think of the garden. It has become fashionable to argue that leftist language policing has mingled with the service vision of higher education — where students are the customers and professors their servants — to curtail the free expression of ideas that most see as the natural purpose of higher education.
Ah. Finally we get to the actual point of the essay. This isn't a complaint about the corporate takeover of universities at all -- he conflates neoliberalism with government bureaucracy, which is a strong sign that he's arguing a peculiar angle here -- he's arguing that we need to preserve what's "wild" on campus, which is (apparently) saying awful things about women, minorities, and other marginalized groups without fear of any negative reaction.
This whole thing seems like an exercise in bad-faith misdirection and confused, deliberately weasely sophism which enables it to begin as an observation of one real and hugely problematic trend and conclude as a silly complaint about an imaginary one.
posted by clockzero at 7:41 AM on September 10, 2015 [44 favorites]
-Huh, it seems weird for an article ostensibly critical of the corporatistic takeover of universities to frame that as "taming," which strongly implies they were out of control before
-Over the past two decades, financial crises notwithstanding, the American university writ large has undergone a radical physical expansion and renovation, bringing more and more campuses into line with grand architectural visions. That’s precisely why I love the garden: It’s one of the last little wild places left at Purdue. Naturally, it’s slated for demolition.
"Wild"? He is aware, I assume, that gardens are necessarily the opposite of "wild"?
- Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.
This essay is taking a weird turn; that the author seems not to understand the difference between the flattering but vacuous homogeneity of the corporate production of culture and authoritarian nation-states is not an encouraging sign
-Which is why, whenever the conversation inevitably turns to campus political culture these days, I think of the garden. It has become fashionable to argue that leftist language policing has mingled with the service vision of higher education — where students are the customers and professors their servants — to curtail the free expression of ideas that most see as the natural purpose of higher education.
Ah. Finally we get to the actual point of the essay. This isn't a complaint about the corporate takeover of universities at all -- he conflates neoliberalism with government bureaucracy, which is a strong sign that he's arguing a peculiar angle here -- he's arguing that we need to preserve what's "wild" on campus, which is (apparently) saying awful things about women, minorities, and other marginalized groups without fear of any negative reaction.
This whole thing seems like an exercise in bad-faith misdirection and confused, deliberately weasely sophism which enables it to begin as an observation of one real and hugely problematic trend and conclude as a silly complaint about an imaginary one.
posted by clockzero at 7:41 AM on September 10, 2015 [44 favorites]
Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense
I think that sentence says something rather prescient, though...
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
I think that sentence says something rather prescient, though...
posted by Annika Cicada at 7:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
Oh look, it's by Freddie deBoer. Suddenly why those pretzels of logic exist suddenly makes sense.
I'll just post Sady Doyle's wonderful takedown of the man at Tiger Beatdown as rebuttal.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [24 favorites]
I'll just post Sady Doyle's wonderful takedown of the man at Tiger Beatdown as rebuttal.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [24 favorites]
I'll just post Sady Doyle's wonderful takedown of the man at Tiger Beatdown as rebuttal.
THAT WAS THE SAME FREDDIE?!
joey-lawrence-whoa.gif
posted by clavicle at 8:13 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
THAT WAS THE SAME FREDDIE?!
joey-lawrence-whoa.gif
posted by clavicle at 8:13 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
this guy suddenly seems a bit daft. putting it politely.
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:31 AM on September 10, 2015
posted by Annika Cicada at 8:31 AM on September 10, 2015
Freddie's ability to find gullible patrons should be the first line in the "Skills" section of his CV.
posted by aaronetc at 8:40 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by aaronetc at 8:40 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Freddie "feminism is the real oppression here uwu" DeBoer
posted by Avenger at 8:48 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
posted by Avenger at 8:48 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
Conservative politicians are gutting public education, making higher education essentially unreachable for the lower class and extremely difficult to afford for the middle class. Their friends in business are funding both public and private education from ages 5 to 21+ in such a way as to make education itself just another industry, complete with corporate fealty and middle managers that care more about the brand than the teachers workers or students consumers. So who's to blame?
Obviously it must be The Left, what with their trigger warnings and whining about Title IX and suspiciously justice-oriented activism.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [21 favorites]
Obviously it must be The Left, what with their trigger warnings and whining about Title IX and suspiciously justice-oriented activism.
posted by zombieflanders at 8:57 AM on September 10, 2015 [21 favorites]
There's a pretty unhealthy dialectic at work here. Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning, which can be dismissed with one liners, or references to FDB being a white man and therefore in no position to speak, or wall-of-text STFU Boners LOL!11!, a la Tiger Beatdown, because We Are All Good People Fighting the Good Fight, and furthermore we are so tired and depressed by the latest round of internet outrage, and believe me, we could make a decent critique if we wanted, but meanwhile take this big wall of nope expressed in the language of a three-year-old as a mark of our theoretical sophistication and leftist bona fides. Go educate yourself.
Meanwhile, FDB gets to point out that dismissing people based on essential categories of being is Pretty Damn Reactionary, and just the kind of thing the Left has spent decades fighting when that kind of sentiment is expressed by the right, and so the whole damn dialectic starts up again.
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [39 favorites]
Meanwhile, FDB gets to point out that dismissing people based on essential categories of being is Pretty Damn Reactionary, and just the kind of thing the Left has spent decades fighting when that kind of sentiment is expressed by the right, and so the whole damn dialectic starts up again.
posted by Sonny Jim at 9:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [39 favorites]
Do they have a factory somewhere with huffy white guys chained to desks, pulping these things out once a week? I got about a third of the way in, saw where it was going, and skimmed the rest. There's perhaps an argument to being worried about the increasingly corporate nature of higher ed, but this is not that argument.
posted by codacorolla at 9:05 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by codacorolla at 9:05 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
Everything Sonny Jim just said. This thread has been astoundingly ungenerous, seemingly on the basis of long-running, decades-old inter-left Internet feuds. I would venture that many people did not bother to read it. The point that is being made here has almost nothing to do with what is being said in response. Not great, Metafilter. I'm sorry I posted it; I really didn't expect the discussion to be this bad.
posted by gerryblog at 9:07 AM on September 10, 2015 [20 favorites]
posted by gerryblog at 9:07 AM on September 10, 2015 [20 favorites]
Interesting. This essay conflates two separate issues in a strange way.
1) Corporatization of universities
2) New rules to reduce sexual harassment/racism/other prejudice.
1) does cause all sorts of problems, from the increasing number and pay of administrators to the stupid crap like "all websites must use our New Official Logo that we spent stupid amounts of money to design". Oh and "we're going with the cheapest provider of really crappy internal software, because we only care about price and not about the needs of our faculty, students, and researchers." That behavior makes sense from a corporation caring about its brand image and its bottom line, but not from a university whose mission is to pursue and disseminate new knowledge.
2) Here, racism, sexism, harassment of any kind, all prevent the university from accomplishing its mission of pursuing and disseminating new knowledge (or at the least reduces how much of this it can do).
Why? Well, if the university space excludes people, then they can't get educated, and they can't contribute to future knowledge either. If the university treats either students or educators who are there with prejudice-- or enables them to be treated with thus-- then the university can't succeed at its primary mission.
Of course, it's also the case that a corporation won't do as well if it insists on racist/sexist/etc treatment of its workers+customers. But the corporatization of the university isn't what's driving the wish to reduce harassment.
Now, are rules from on high (especially as sent out by a coporatized university) the best way to reduce harassment and prejudice? We discussed this already in the thread on codes of conduct for conventions. The rules themselves are not enough, and bad rule sets are possible, but they are a place to start.
posted by nat at 9:08 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
1) Corporatization of universities
2) New rules to reduce sexual harassment/racism/other prejudice.
1) does cause all sorts of problems, from the increasing number and pay of administrators to the stupid crap like "all websites must use our New Official Logo that we spent stupid amounts of money to design". Oh and "we're going with the cheapest provider of really crappy internal software, because we only care about price and not about the needs of our faculty, students, and researchers." That behavior makes sense from a corporation caring about its brand image and its bottom line, but not from a university whose mission is to pursue and disseminate new knowledge.
2) Here, racism, sexism, harassment of any kind, all prevent the university from accomplishing its mission of pursuing and disseminating new knowledge (or at the least reduces how much of this it can do).
Why? Well, if the university space excludes people, then they can't get educated, and they can't contribute to future knowledge either. If the university treats either students or educators who are there with prejudice-- or enables them to be treated with thus-- then the university can't succeed at its primary mission.
Of course, it's also the case that a corporation won't do as well if it insists on racist/sexist/etc treatment of its workers+customers. But the corporatization of the university isn't what's driving the wish to reduce harassment.
Now, are rules from on high (especially as sent out by a coporatized university) the best way to reduce harassment and prejudice? We discussed this already in the thread on codes of conduct for conventions. The rules themselves are not enough, and bad rule sets are possible, but they are a place to start.
posted by nat at 9:08 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning,
Well, when an individual makes masculinist sea lioning his oeuvre, it's hard not to make that jump.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:09 AM on September 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
Well, when an individual makes masculinist sea lioning his oeuvre, it's hard not to make that jump.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:09 AM on September 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
There exists a real concern with "political correctness gone wild" on university campuses, as there has been for at least 25 years.
I don't know if millennials are more sensitive to real or perceived transgressions of speech codes than the first generations to have their communications scrutinized by university bureaucrats, but they certainly have more methods of communicating their outrage such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. And university is definitely a good place for 18-22 year olds to get fired up over something minor that won't mean anything in a couple of weeks - however, it becomes a greater problem when minor disagreements get shunted to the administration for adjudication.
posted by theorique at 9:10 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
I don't know if millennials are more sensitive to real or perceived transgressions of speech codes than the first generations to have their communications scrutinized by university bureaucrats, but they certainly have more methods of communicating their outrage such as Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and so forth. And university is definitely a good place for 18-22 year olds to get fired up over something minor that won't mean anything in a couple of weeks - however, it becomes a greater problem when minor disagreements get shunted to the administration for adjudication.
posted by theorique at 9:10 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Conservative politicians are gutting public education, making higher education essentially unreachable for the lower class and extremely difficult to afford for the middle class. Their friends in business are funding both public and private education from ages 5 to 21+ in such a way as to make education itself just another industry, complete with corporate fealty and middle managers that care more about the brand than the teachers workers or students consumers. So who's to blame?
Obviously it must be The Left, what with their trigger warnings and whining about Title IX and suspiciously justice-oriented activism.
Here, have this much better article by William Deresiewicz: The Neoliberal Arts, Harpers
Obviously it must be The Left, what with their trigger warnings and whining about Title IX and suspiciously justice-oriented activism.
Here, have this much better article by William Deresiewicz: The Neoliberal Arts, Harpers
But we no longer have youth as it was imagined by modernity. Now we have youth as it was imagined by postmodernity — in other words, by neoliberalism. Students rarely get the chance to question and reflect anymore — not about their own lives, and certainly not about the world. Modernity understood itself as a condition of constant flux, which is why the historical mission of youth in every generation was to imagine a way forward to a different state. But moving forward to a different state is a possibility that neoliberalism excludes. Neoliberalism believes that we have reached the end of history, a steady-state condition of free-market capitalism that will go on replicating itself forever. The historical mission of youth is no longer desirable or even conceivable. The world is not going to change, so we don’t need young people to imagine how it might.posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:10 AM on September 10, 2015 [18 favorites]
There exists a real concern with "political correctness gone wild" on university campuses, as there has been for at least 25 years.
As yet, that concern has yet to materialize in anything concrete, seeing as how as problems with education (and higher education in particular) can be at all attributed to political correctness, wild or otherwise.
university is definitely a good place for 18-22 year olds to get fired up over something minor that won't mean anything in a couple of weeks
Right...sexual assault, bigotry, the industrialization of their education. Y'know, all that minor stuff that doesn't mean anything.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:16 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]
As yet, that concern has yet to materialize in anything concrete, seeing as how as problems with education (and higher education in particular) can be at all attributed to political correctness, wild or otherwise.
university is definitely a good place for 18-22 year olds to get fired up over something minor that won't mean anything in a couple of weeks
Right...sexual assault, bigotry, the industrialization of their education. Y'know, all that minor stuff that doesn't mean anything.
posted by zombieflanders at 9:16 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]
Sonny Jim we need a new "tl;dr" that says "don't respect author, didn't read."
posted by resurrexit at 9:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by resurrexit at 9:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
Here, have this much better article by William Deresiewicz: The Neoliberal Arts, Harpers
Can I hit him over the head with a copy of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Because the reason that the commercial has become so predominant at colleges is because having an actualized soul doesn't exactly put food in your tummy.
Besides, any article that unironicly references David Brooks in a positive manner is not, by definition, a "good article".
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:21 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Can I hit him over the head with a copy of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Because the reason that the commercial has become so predominant at colleges is because having an actualized soul doesn't exactly put food in your tummy.
Besides, any article that unironicly references David Brooks in a positive manner is not, by definition, a "good article".
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:21 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
I read the article. I had no idea who the author was or why he was conflating corporatism of the university (a huge problem) with trigger warnings (not actually a problem).
(Then I read the Tiger Beatdown article, and I laughed really hard.)
posted by hydropsyche at 9:24 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
(Then I read the Tiger Beatdown article, and I laughed really hard.)
posted by hydropsyche at 9:24 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
When I saw the first graf about all the woeful empty buildings at Purdue, I knew I had read this guy before:
One Year of Emptiness at the Krach Leadership Center
I didn't know about all of his other leanings. But I re-read this piece just now and came across this choice section:
"Better yet, why not a system of five federal universities, built on a foundation of efficient, teaching-focused education, use of full-time faculty, utilitarian amenities, and a tuition of $0? Get the big ed donors involved. Invoke the spirit of public education. Get some federal money in there. Spend it wisely. Keep room and board low by building dorms the way they used to be built."
In other words, slash funding for education in the guise of "getting some federal money in there," re-organize higher education on brutal neoliberal principles, and make students live in dangerous crap boarding-room dorm-slums? Sounds like a terrific solution to me!
"Every day, there are fewer who remember what campus once was, or would want to fight for it."
What was it once? He never makes that distinction clear at all.
Sonny Jim: Go educate yourself.
And of course a peremptory dismissal like that, bookended by one-liner snark, does nothing to fuel the dialectic of which you speak ......
resurrexit: Sonny Jim we need a new "tl;dr" that says "don't respect author, didn't read."
I read it, and I've read other stuff he's written, and just because I don't respect him doesn't mean I haven't read him; actually quite the opposite.
posted by blucevalo at 9:25 AM on September 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
One Year of Emptiness at the Krach Leadership Center
I didn't know about all of his other leanings. But I re-read this piece just now and came across this choice section:
"Better yet, why not a system of five federal universities, built on a foundation of efficient, teaching-focused education, use of full-time faculty, utilitarian amenities, and a tuition of $0? Get the big ed donors involved. Invoke the spirit of public education. Get some federal money in there. Spend it wisely. Keep room and board low by building dorms the way they used to be built."
In other words, slash funding for education in the guise of "getting some federal money in there," re-organize higher education on brutal neoliberal principles, and make students live in dangerous crap boarding-room dorm-slums? Sounds like a terrific solution to me!
"Every day, there are fewer who remember what campus once was, or would want to fight for it."
What was it once? He never makes that distinction clear at all.
Sonny Jim: Go educate yourself.
And of course a peremptory dismissal like that, bookended by one-liner snark, does nothing to fuel the dialectic of which you speak ......
resurrexit: Sonny Jim we need a new "tl;dr" that says "don't respect author, didn't read."
I read it, and I've read other stuff he's written, and just because I don't respect him doesn't mean I haven't read him; actually quite the opposite.
posted by blucevalo at 9:25 AM on September 10, 2015 [7 favorites]
he's arguing that we need to preserve what's "wild" on campus, which is (apparently) saying awful things about women, minorities, and other marginalized groups without fear of any negative reaction.
No, he's not: he's arguing that the corporate-minded administration has coopted student activists to use them against the academics (and generally make for a squeaky clean reputation ala a good corp), while ignoring the true dangers to women and marginalised groups (like fraternities and party-culture, which they tacitly promote). His only criticism of the left - in this piece - is that they concentrate on small issues (like violence in Ovid) in spaces they can have an influence in, because they can do nothing about the real dangers on campus (actual sexual assaults, as opposed to described sexual assaults).
I don't know who De Boer is, but I actually read the whole article (and we are talking about THIS article), and it's far from a racist, sexist screed. Sometimes the unwillingness of the left to accept thoughtful criticism makes me ashamed to be a leftist.
posted by jb at 9:33 AM on September 10, 2015 [18 favorites]
No, he's not: he's arguing that the corporate-minded administration has coopted student activists to use them against the academics (and generally make for a squeaky clean reputation ala a good corp), while ignoring the true dangers to women and marginalised groups (like fraternities and party-culture, which they tacitly promote). His only criticism of the left - in this piece - is that they concentrate on small issues (like violence in Ovid) in spaces they can have an influence in, because they can do nothing about the real dangers on campus (actual sexual assaults, as opposed to described sexual assaults).
I don't know who De Boer is, but I actually read the whole article (and we are talking about THIS article), and it's far from a racist, sexist screed. Sometimes the unwillingness of the left to accept thoughtful criticism makes me ashamed to be a leftist.
posted by jb at 9:33 AM on September 10, 2015 [18 favorites]
Also, this line:
Students rarely get the chance to question and reflect anymore — not about their own lives, and certainly not about the world.
is a load of grade A bullshit. All of the various ideas routinely dismissed as "political correctness" are all about reflection and questioning one's life and the world!
Just because we're not getting the same answers that the Very Serious People got doesn't mean there isn't any questioning going on. Far from it, in fact.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
Students rarely get the chance to question and reflect anymore — not about their own lives, and certainly not about the world.
is a load of grade A bullshit. All of the various ideas routinely dismissed as "political correctness" are all about reflection and questioning one's life and the world!
Just because we're not getting the same answers that the Very Serious People got doesn't mean there isn't any questioning going on. Far from it, in fact.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:35 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
Sonny Jim >
There's a pretty unhealthy dialectic at work here. Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning, which can be dismissed with one liners, or references to FDB being a white man and therefore in no position to speak, or wall-of-text STFU Boners LOL!11!, a la Tiger Beatdown, because We Are All Good People Fighting the Good Fight, and furthermore we are so tired and depressed by the latest round of internet outrage, and believe me, we could make a decent critique if we wanted, but meanwhile take this big wall of nope expressed in the language of a three-year-old as a mark of our theoretical sophistication and leftist bona fides. Go educate yourself.
Please keep in mind that this thread is about the linked article, not about the author per se. Are there any examples of this ostensibly-automatic interpretation in this thread, about the linked article?
posted by clockzero at 9:35 AM on September 10, 2015
There's a pretty unhealthy dialectic at work here. Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning, which can be dismissed with one liners, or references to FDB being a white man and therefore in no position to speak, or wall-of-text STFU Boners LOL!11!, a la Tiger Beatdown, because We Are All Good People Fighting the Good Fight, and furthermore we are so tired and depressed by the latest round of internet outrage, and believe me, we could make a decent critique if we wanted, but meanwhile take this big wall of nope expressed in the language of a three-year-old as a mark of our theoretical sophistication and leftist bona fides. Go educate yourself.
Please keep in mind that this thread is about the linked article, not about the author per se. Are there any examples of this ostensibly-automatic interpretation in this thread, about the linked article?
posted by clockzero at 9:35 AM on September 10, 2015
I heard one time someone took a good thing too far.
And I wondered ... what if that happened a lot?
Makes u think.
posted by nom de poop at 9:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
And I wondered ... what if that happened a lot?
Makes u think.
posted by nom de poop at 9:37 AM on September 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
why he was conflating corporatism of the university (a huge problem) with trigger warnings (not actually a problem)
The argument is that the growth of content warnings (as policy rather than as pedagogy) is in alignment with the other pressures seeking to turn the university into a smooth, frictionless consumer experience with happy customers, compliant workers, and ever-expanding, ever-more-empowered administration. It's all part of the same general flattening: it's just that this part aligns with the academic left's other goals.
It's certainly an argument people can disagree with but it deserves better than what it's gotten here.
All of the various ideas routinely dismissed as "political correctness" are all about reflection and questioning one's life and the world!
I'm pretty politically correct in my own life and in my own classes, and use content warnings as pedagogy. But I'm opposed to any attempt to universalize them as policy, because it's obvious to me that radical academics are joyfully forging the weapons that will be used to fire them a few years from now. Loathed minorities (like leftist academics) really shouldn't encourage the expansion of censorious norms that bring down harsh punishment on those who step outside mainstream norms.
posted by gerryblog at 9:40 AM on September 10, 2015 [15 favorites]
The argument is that the growth of content warnings (as policy rather than as pedagogy) is in alignment with the other pressures seeking to turn the university into a smooth, frictionless consumer experience with happy customers, compliant workers, and ever-expanding, ever-more-empowered administration. It's all part of the same general flattening: it's just that this part aligns with the academic left's other goals.
It's certainly an argument people can disagree with but it deserves better than what it's gotten here.
All of the various ideas routinely dismissed as "political correctness" are all about reflection and questioning one's life and the world!
I'm pretty politically correct in my own life and in my own classes, and use content warnings as pedagogy. But I'm opposed to any attempt to universalize them as policy, because it's obvious to me that radical academics are joyfully forging the weapons that will be used to fire them a few years from now. Loathed minorities (like leftist academics) really shouldn't encourage the expansion of censorious norms that bring down harsh punishment on those who step outside mainstream norms.
posted by gerryblog at 9:40 AM on September 10, 2015 [15 favorites]
There're several good points to be made about increasingly administration heavy universities, tuition increases that outpace inflation, cultures of surveillance and overweening governance, corporate "partnerships" that serve as siphons of loan money to the private sectors more than anything and the increasing worthlessness of degrees but DeBoer is too blinded by his own agenda to do the topic justice.
Title IX is for the most part good, its just toxic systems that abuse it so calling it out is fairly silly when the rest of the system is fairly apparent and generally uncontroversial. Most importantly it has little to no bearing on corporatism.
Anyhow, as a (reluctant) participant observer in this milieu I'll be rather disappointed if all we can find to discuss here is the fecal typology of the author.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 9:41 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Title IX is for the most part good, its just toxic systems that abuse it so calling it out is fairly silly when the rest of the system is fairly apparent and generally uncontroversial. Most importantly it has little to no bearing on corporatism.
Anyhow, as a (reluctant) participant observer in this milieu I'll be rather disappointed if all we can find to discuss here is the fecal typology of the author.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 9:41 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Are there any examples of this ostensibly-automatic interpretation in this thread, about the linked article?
4th comment, and passim.
posted by gerryblog at 9:42 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
4th comment, and passim.
posted by gerryblog at 9:42 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Mod note: Folks, please drop the metacommentary about "this thread is bad" vs "no it isn't"? If folks want to have a good discussion about what you find interesting in the article, go ahead and do that.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:43 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:43 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
No, he's not: he's arguing that the corporate-minded administration has coopted student activists to use them against the academics (and generally make for a squeaky clean reputation ala a good corp), while ignoring the true dangers to women and marginalised groups (like fraternities and party-culture, which they tacitly promote). His only criticism of the left - in this piece - is that they concentrate on small issues (like violence in Ovid) in spaces they can have an influence in, because they can do nothing about the real dangers on campus (actual sexual assaults, as opposed to described sexual assaults).
Except that despite what Freddie thinks, academia is not without its sins as well, nor are these activists quiet about those areas that he claims that don't get brought up by them. It's just that when they do speak out about frat rape culture, their concerns are routinely mocked as disproportionate and prudish.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
Except that despite what Freddie thinks, academia is not without its sins as well, nor are these activists quiet about those areas that he claims that don't get brought up by them. It's just that when they do speak out about frat rape culture, their concerns are routinely mocked as disproportionate and prudish.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:46 AM on September 10, 2015 [5 favorites]
Loathed minorities (like leftist academics) really shouldn't encourage the expansion of censorious norms that bring down harsh punishment on those who step outside mainstream norms.
Except who is being harshly punished? The only example he gives is Laura Kipnis, and his account of what happened is pretty different from the account of those who brought the complaint against her.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:50 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
Except who is being harshly punished? The only example he gives is Laura Kipnis, and his account of what happened is pretty different from the account of those who brought the complaint against her.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:50 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
And, also, obviously, Kipnis was not punished for anything ultimately.
posted by hydropsyche at 9:50 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by hydropsyche at 9:50 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
Also, notably absent from my comment: the degree to which MBAs have replaced diverse faculty moving into (or sharing in) administration in the past ten years in my institution is astounding to me. This comes concomitant to efforts by the administration to defang the faculty senate (we're told this must be done to drum up the private donors we need to deal with unending cuts).
Yet the cash hasn't come no matter how much blood we spill on the austerities tree.
I wish I could find a less sheisty employer, but these folks are the least sheisty in town so far as I can tell.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 9:53 AM on September 10, 2015
Yet the cash hasn't come no matter how much blood we spill on the austerities tree.
I wish I could find a less sheisty employer, but these folks are the least sheisty in town so far as I can tell.
posted by Matt Oneiros at 9:53 AM on September 10, 2015
he's arguing that we need to preserve what's "wild" on campus, which is (apparently) saying awful things about women, minorities, and other marginalized groups without fear of any negative reaction.
No, he's not: he's arguing that the corporate-minded administration has coopted student activists to use them against the academics (and generally make for a squeaky clean reputation ala a good corp), while ignoring the true dangers to women and marginalised groups (like fraternities and party-culture, which they tacitly promote). His only criticism of the left - in this piece - is that they concentrate on small issues (like violence in Ovid) in spaces they can have an influence in, because they can do nothing about the real dangers on campus (actual sexual assaults, as opposed to described sexual assaults).
I don't see him making that argument anywhere in this piece; but in fairness, if there is an actual argument here, it's hard to see it. For example, he claims:
I wish that committed student activists would recognize that the administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends. I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators.
but he also believes that
When we identify students as the real threat to intellectual freedom on campus, we’re almost always looking in the wrong place.
and that
The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries.
So students are not the problem, except when they "almost collude" with administrators, and Title IX is being misused by "administrative and governmental functionaries," even though its use is pretty carefully defined in law and despite the fact that the "functionaries" aren't the ones bringing complaints.
I think the essay is a big mess, frankly, in the sense that it's difficult to suss out what is really meant due to conflicting and ambiguous claims, but I absolutely do not see him railing against anything that's specific to the ruthless profit-oriented logic that's pervaded academia, nor claiming that administrations have co-opted student activists. If anything, he does seem to think that they're in cahoots to stymie instructors, but when his complaint seems to boil down to the claim that trigger warnings are a total drag, it's hard to care or take it very seriously.
posted by clockzero at 9:54 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]
No, he's not: he's arguing that the corporate-minded administration has coopted student activists to use them against the academics (and generally make for a squeaky clean reputation ala a good corp), while ignoring the true dangers to women and marginalised groups (like fraternities and party-culture, which they tacitly promote). His only criticism of the left - in this piece - is that they concentrate on small issues (like violence in Ovid) in spaces they can have an influence in, because they can do nothing about the real dangers on campus (actual sexual assaults, as opposed to described sexual assaults).
I don't see him making that argument anywhere in this piece; but in fairness, if there is an actual argument here, it's hard to see it. For example, he claims:
I wish that committed student activists would recognize that the administrators who run their universities, no matter how convenient a recipient of their appeals, are not their friends. I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators.
but he also believes that
When we identify students as the real threat to intellectual freedom on campus, we’re almost always looking in the wrong place.
and that
The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries.
So students are not the problem, except when they "almost collude" with administrators, and Title IX is being misused by "administrative and governmental functionaries," even though its use is pretty carefully defined in law and despite the fact that the "functionaries" aren't the ones bringing complaints.
I think the essay is a big mess, frankly, in the sense that it's difficult to suss out what is really meant due to conflicting and ambiguous claims, but I absolutely do not see him railing against anything that's specific to the ruthless profit-oriented logic that's pervaded academia, nor claiming that administrations have co-opted student activists. If anything, he does seem to think that they're in cahoots to stymie instructors, but when his complaint seems to boil down to the claim that trigger warnings are a total drag, it's hard to care or take it very seriously.
posted by clockzero at 9:54 AM on September 10, 2015 [9 favorites]
Also, I want to just focus in more closely on this particularly thoughtless claim:
I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators.
He's alluding to a past in which the law was not on the side of people who had complaints about unequal treatment, but he seems inexplicably oblivious to the fact that the passage of Title IX, itself, is part of that legacy. It's either really disingenuous or embarrassingly daft to effectively say that people should avoid using legislative and legal victories to advance their interests because things were so much better when they were struggling to be taken seriously.
posted by clockzero at 10:00 AM on September 10, 2015 [17 favorites]
I want these bright, passionate students to remember that the best legacy of student activism lies in shaking up administrators, not in making appeals to them. At its worst, this tendency results in something like collusion between activists and administrators.
He's alluding to a past in which the law was not on the side of people who had complaints about unequal treatment, but he seems inexplicably oblivious to the fact that the passage of Title IX, itself, is part of that legacy. It's either really disingenuous or embarrassingly daft to effectively say that people should avoid using legislative and legal victories to advance their interests because things were so much better when they were struggling to be taken seriously.
posted by clockzero at 10:00 AM on September 10, 2015 [17 favorites]
There's a pretty unhealthy dialectic at work here. Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning, which can be dismissed with one liners, or references to FDB being a white man and therefore in no position to speak, or wall-of-text STFU Boners LOL!11!
de Boer has poisoned the well by appointing himself the Senior Leftist Czar of Brow-Beating SJWs with Slippery Slope Arguments. Authors develop reputations when they write tendentious pieces with obvious leaps of logic, and the notion that we ought not to consider the author's reputation is absurd. I'm sure everyone who's ever complained about someone else dismissing an article based on a byline has their own authors they have lost confidence in for the same reasons.
clockzero above does good work illustrating where Freddie's sleight-of-hand is in this piece, and there is no shortage of criticism of many of his past attempts to turn his ostensible fellow travelers on the left into the real enemies of open debate. You can see him trying to inoculate himself against these charges in his blog post announcing the NYT piece -- he declares:
posted by tonycpsu at 10:03 AM on September 10, 2015 [11 favorites]
de Boer has poisoned the well by appointing himself the Senior Leftist Czar of Brow-Beating SJWs with Slippery Slope Arguments. Authors develop reputations when they write tendentious pieces with obvious leaps of logic, and the notion that we ought not to consider the author's reputation is absurd. I'm sure everyone who's ever complained about someone else dismissing an article based on a byline has their own authors they have lost confidence in for the same reasons.
clockzero above does good work illustrating where Freddie's sleight-of-hand is in this piece, and there is no shortage of criticism of many of his past attempts to turn his ostensible fellow travelers on the left into the real enemies of open debate. You can see him trying to inoculate himself against these charges in his blog post announcing the NYT piece -- he declares:
This piece comes from a left-wing perspective. It absolves left-wing activists from a long series of complaints and criticisms of them. More importantly, it identifies a structural, economic reason for a social change, rather than a moral, cultural, or personality-driven reason. That is an inherently left-wing perspective.Note the careful attempt to constrain what "left-wing" means here -- pay no attention to the many places in the piece where he puts the blame on campus activists. Once he's declared his argument to be the Magnetic North of Leftism, he can simply declare anyone who disagrees with his argument as being tools of the capialist overlords. This is not the first time he's done this, and the notion that we ought to ignore his reputation for doing this even as he repeats the same strategy with a larger platform is absurd.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:03 AM on September 10, 2015 [11 favorites]
Mod note: A couple comments deleted; let's not continue the meta-fight please, and also if you find yourself saying that students today are thin-skinned wimps and it's hard to be a straight white man, reconsider whether that's adding anything.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 10:04 AM on September 10, 2015 [8 favorites]
OK, let's stipulate that deBoer has a pretty awful reputation for picking fights with other leftists, then taking the fallout from those fights as evidence of the contemporary left's shallowness and failure to engage in reasoned debate (with him, at any rate), thus engendering more fights. It is so stipulated.
But this essay, with an editor's hand suppressing his worst tendencies, is pretty good. This passage gets to the heart of his argument (emphasis added):
The problem with that line of argument, however, is that it's mostly negative; it doesn't say what activists should be doing instead. Should they be organizing more (but isn't that what they're doing already)? Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between activists and administrators must be wholly adversarial, precluding any kind of alliance of convenience. Lastly, as others have pointed out, while there might be some overlap between the trigger warning/Title IX/safe space debate and the neoliberalization of the university debate, deBoer seems to treat them as if they're identical.
Overall, it's not a bad essay. Unfortunately, I suspect deBoer will squander any goodwill for him it might generate.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:12 AM on September 10, 2015 [19 favorites]
But this essay, with an editor's hand suppressing his worst tendencies, is pretty good. This passage gets to the heart of his argument (emphasis added):
Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.What deBoer is saying, I think, is that those who would press for better treatment of women, LGBTQs, and persons of color on campus should think twice about relying on the heavy hand of university administrators to enforce such treatment, since their interests are not the same as those of the activists. You can draw a connection here to the argument in leftist circles against what's known as carceral feminism, or relying on the criminal justice system as currently constituted to protect the rights of women. That is, you can't expect institutions as deeply compromised as the contemporary university or the contemporary police to act in the best interests of marginalized populations. (Something I think many leftists would agree with in a different context.)
The problem with that line of argument, however, is that it's mostly negative; it doesn't say what activists should be doing instead. Should they be organizing more (but isn't that what they're doing already)? Moreover, it suggests that the relationship between activists and administrators must be wholly adversarial, precluding any kind of alliance of convenience. Lastly, as others have pointed out, while there might be some overlap between the trigger warning/Title IX/safe space debate and the neoliberalization of the university debate, deBoer seems to treat them as if they're identical.
Overall, it's not a bad essay. Unfortunately, I suspect deBoer will squander any goodwill for him it might generate.
posted by Cash4Lead at 10:12 AM on September 10, 2015 [19 favorites]
I think the essay is a big mess, frankly, in the sense that it's difficult to suss out what is really meant due to conflicting and ambiguous claims, but I absolutely do not see him railing against anything that's specific to the ruthless profit-oriented logic that's pervaded academia, nor claiming that administrations have co-opted student activists.
Yeah, I was flippant in my first comment, but this is pretty much the point I was making. He spends so much time complaining about the University, Inc. from his article's title, but never actually articulates who they are or what factors led to this. Falling back on the reliable boogeyman of political correctness to bolster this point as an example of What's Wrong With Learning Today is what ended up muddying what could have been a good discussion about the influence of corporate culture on the politics of education.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:18 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
Yeah, I was flippant in my first comment, but this is pretty much the point I was making. He spends so much time complaining about the University, Inc. from his article's title, but never actually articulates who they are or what factors led to this. Falling back on the reliable boogeyman of political correctness to bolster this point as an example of What's Wrong With Learning Today is what ended up muddying what could have been a good discussion about the influence of corporate culture on the politics of education.
posted by zombieflanders at 10:18 AM on September 10, 2015 [1 favorite]
I have nothing to add to the political correctness issue in the piece that hasn't already been said above.
I do think that the corporatization of the U is a problem. I'm wondering if the simplest way to start fixing that is to encourage the use of "full time professor: full time administrator" (FTP:FTA) ratio as a metric when evaluating institutions, the same way we already rely on student:teacher ratios as an important, informative metric for school choice and quality.
If the FTP:FTA ratio actually ever becomes a thing, I'll be proud! But I'm not holding my breath.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
I do think that the corporatization of the U is a problem. I'm wondering if the simplest way to start fixing that is to encourage the use of "full time professor: full time administrator" (FTP:FTA) ratio as a metric when evaluating institutions, the same way we already rely on student:teacher ratios as an important, informative metric for school choice and quality.
If the FTP:FTA ratio actually ever becomes a thing, I'll be proud! But I'm not holding my breath.
posted by caution live frogs at 10:20 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
Can I hit him over the head with a copy of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? Because the reason that the commercial has become so predominant at colleges is because having an actualized soul doesn't exactly put food in your tummy.
I'd much rather talk about Deresiewicz and neoliberalism.
So one of the big questions I have is why a "college education" got pushed down the hierarchy of needs, to be required for most if not all white-collar labor. I think it's a combination of factors: the increasing technologization of production, the big push after WWII with the GI Bill and the view of a college education as the ticket to a middle-class life, the ability of employers to use a B.S. or B.A. as a screening tool, and more.
John Cassidy, What's the real value of higher education?, New Yorker:
I'd much rather talk about Deresiewicz and neoliberalism.
So one of the big questions I have is why a "college education" got pushed down the hierarchy of needs, to be required for most if not all white-collar labor. I think it's a combination of factors: the increasing technologization of production, the big push after WWII with the GI Bill and the view of a college education as the ticket to a middle-class life, the ability of employers to use a B.S. or B.A. as a screening tool, and more.
John Cassidy, What's the real value of higher education?, New Yorker:
No idea has had more influence on education policy than the notion that colleges teach their students specific, marketable skills, which they can use to get a good job. Economists refer to this as the “human capital” theory of education, and for the past twenty or thirty years it has gone largely unchallenged. If you’ve completed a two-year associate’s degree, you’ve got more “human capital” than a high-school graduate. And if you’ve completed a four-year bachelor’s degree you’ve got more “human capital” than someone who attended a community college. Once you enter the labor market, the theory says, you will be rewarded with a better job, brighter career prospects, and higher wages.posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:23 AM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
I suspect deBoer will squander any goodwill for him it might generate.
And I think all of the weaknesses you called out in your penultimate paragraph do that without any need to look into his back catalog of leftier-than-thou hectoring.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:27 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
And I think all of the weaknesses you called out in your penultimate paragraph do that without any need to look into his back catalog of leftier-than-thou hectoring.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:27 AM on September 10, 2015 [3 favorites]
What deBoer is saying, I think, is that those who would press for better treatment of women, LGBTQs, and persons of color on campus should think twice about relying on the heavy hand of university administrators to enforce such treatment, since their interests are not the same as those of the activists.
And I would say that that is stupid, and ahistorical, because those women, LGBTQ-identified people, and persons of color have the law on their side to a degree they never did before, and who if not university personnel is supposed to oversee the actual administration of that law in specific cases? Isn't it kind of incredibly condescending to say that activists shouldn't avail themselves of their relatively-new equality under the law by noting that the people who might field any Title IX complaints also have other interests which don't align with...something or other?
If you're representing his argument accurately, it sounds like he's suggesting that student activists should be wary of availing themselves of their legal rights because there are other institutional problems, which is a complete non-sequitur.
posted by clockzero at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2015 [13 favorites]
And I would say that that is stupid, and ahistorical, because those women, LGBTQ-identified people, and persons of color have the law on their side to a degree they never did before, and who if not university personnel is supposed to oversee the actual administration of that law in specific cases? Isn't it kind of incredibly condescending to say that activists shouldn't avail themselves of their relatively-new equality under the law by noting that the people who might field any Title IX complaints also have other interests which don't align with...something or other?
If you're representing his argument accurately, it sounds like he's suggesting that student activists should be wary of availing themselves of their legal rights because there are other institutional problems, which is a complete non-sequitur.
posted by clockzero at 10:33 AM on September 10, 2015 [13 favorites]
why he was conflating corporatism of the university (a huge problem) with trigger warnings (not actually a problem)
The argument is that the growth of content warnings (as policy rather than as pedagogy) is in alignment with the other pressures seeking to turn the university into a smooth, frictionless consumer experience with happy customers, compliant workers, and ever-expanding, ever-more-empowered administration.
You mean, like this, from blucevalo's link:
"Better yet, why not a system of five federal universities, built on a foundation of efficient, teaching-focused education, use of full-time faculty, utilitarian amenities, and a tuition of $0? Get the big ed donors involved. Invoke the spirit of public education. Get some federal money in there. Spend it wisely. Keep room and board low by building dorms the way they used to be built."
posted by chainsofreedom at 10:36 AM on September 10, 2015
The argument is that the growth of content warnings (as policy rather than as pedagogy) is in alignment with the other pressures seeking to turn the university into a smooth, frictionless consumer experience with happy customers, compliant workers, and ever-expanding, ever-more-empowered administration.
You mean, like this, from blucevalo's link:
"Better yet, why not a system of five federal universities, built on a foundation of efficient, teaching-focused education, use of full-time faculty, utilitarian amenities, and a tuition of $0? Get the big ed donors involved. Invoke the spirit of public education. Get some federal money in there. Spend it wisely. Keep room and board low by building dorms the way they used to be built."
posted by chainsofreedom at 10:36 AM on September 10, 2015
is the way Title IX is used on campuses the ideal, intended use of the law? are there ways of invoking it without relying on a bevy of now-justified middle managers? are there other ways for student activists to protest structural racism?
I feel like there are a lot of critically important but completely unanswered questions in this position piece. like, you can see the blueprint of his essay pretty easily: disinfect the sort of toxic discourse about 'oversensitive students' by claiming that the real infection is the co-option of student activism by neoliberal structures. I think that's great. but his essay doesn't really give you any of the steps from A to B to C. he kind of just says things, meanders back to his main point, says more things, and then there's no solution. like, I feel like he's criticizing the really superficial 'diversity' narrative that university admins put out but aren't effective but he doesn't actually go there. it also sounds like he's ignoring the pragmatic middleground that Title IX is? like, I would love to live in a utopia too, dude, but here we are
I dunno. I feel like the essay was a mess but his intentions were at least in the right place. I could be reading him with too much good faith but I'd rather that than dismiss him based on some kind of presumed malice
posted by runt at 11:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
I feel like there are a lot of critically important but completely unanswered questions in this position piece. like, you can see the blueprint of his essay pretty easily: disinfect the sort of toxic discourse about 'oversensitive students' by claiming that the real infection is the co-option of student activism by neoliberal structures. I think that's great. but his essay doesn't really give you any of the steps from A to B to C. he kind of just says things, meanders back to his main point, says more things, and then there's no solution. like, I feel like he's criticizing the really superficial 'diversity' narrative that university admins put out but aren't effective but he doesn't actually go there. it also sounds like he's ignoring the pragmatic middleground that Title IX is? like, I would love to live in a utopia too, dude, but here we are
I dunno. I feel like the essay was a mess but his intentions were at least in the right place. I could be reading him with too much good faith but I'd rather that than dismiss him based on some kind of presumed malice
posted by runt at 11:36 AM on September 10, 2015 [4 favorites]
There's a pretty unhealthy dialectic at work here. Everything FDB writes is now automatically interpreted as masculinist sea lioning, which can be dismissed with one liners
I don't always think that dude is wrong about stuff, in whatever iteration of "liberal" vs. "left" we happen to be on - but being familiar with what he writes now and not having seen the Tiger Beatdown exchange before, it's hard to read it without recontextualizing certain parts of his schtick in a severly unflattering way. It was five years ago but - did he ever own up to being in the wrong?
posted by atoxyl at 11:45 AM on September 10, 2015
I don't always think that dude is wrong about stuff, in whatever iteration of "liberal" vs. "left" we happen to be on - but being familiar with what he writes now and not having seen the Tiger Beatdown exchange before, it's hard to read it without recontextualizing certain parts of his schtick in a severly unflattering way. It was five years ago but - did he ever own up to being in the wrong?
posted by atoxyl at 11:45 AM on September 10, 2015
The thing that's missing from any of these claims about whether Title IX is being misused or whether political-correctness is going "too far" is data. If protections for women and minorities have any teeth whatsoever, you should be able to find a few anecdotes of those protections being abused. The question is whether those anecdotes outweigh the good those protections are doing otherwise. I've seen no evidence that the scales have actually tipped in the wrong direction.
posted by straight at 12:52 PM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
posted by straight at 12:52 PM on September 10, 2015 [6 favorites]
That essay frustrated the fuck out of me. The corporate takeover of academia is real, and it is cataclysmic. It deserves real, serious attention, and this is not a serious article. This is some jackass who has hangups about "political correctness," which is seriously pretty fucking trivial in the grand scheme of things, and wants to seem relevant by tying that to the forces that really threaten the American educational system. I am sorry that he feels that he has to censor himself by not saying offensive things to students, but I'm worried that we're not going to have a philosophy department in a few years, because the new president of my university believes that liberal arts departments should be able to justify their existence in monetary terms. In his world, if you aren't bringing in grant money, you probably shouldn't exist, and there's not a lot of grant money for the humanities. I'm worried that all our financial aid is going to go to rich kids, because the data shows that rich kids are more likely to be drawn to a school by a generous financial aid package, while poor kids will take out any amount of debt to go to the school closest to home. If you see financial aid as a recruitment tool, rather than a way to make college affordable to the people who need it the most, than it makes sense to give it to the wealthy, so that's what we're going to do. And the New York Times isn't going to cover any of that stuff, because they published this dreck and now they think they've covered the corporate takeover of the university. It makes me seethe.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:02 PM on September 10, 2015 [10 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:02 PM on September 10, 2015 [10 favorites]
This essay is a standard PC-lament that would not be out-of-place in 1988. I'm happy to pretend I don't know the author, but the idea that we are supposed to judge the piece independent of our knowledge of authorial context is ridiculous and anti-intellectual. But in any case, context is unnecessary here, because the essay damns itself.
The core idea is that if the left ever succeeds in gaining any form of legal power, we should condemn it, because that's only allowing themselves to be coopted by the man. Because Title IX can (allegedly) be misused, therefore we should be wary not just of it, but of all examples where the marginalized have gained even a modicum of legal or campus power. The alternative is unarticulated of course -- a wild garden sounds nice, but what that means cannot be articulated, because he is not offering an alternative, but rather condemning actual legal power gained by those to his left. One alternative is removing that power, but he can't go so far as to say (or perhaps think) that. The other alternative is some utopia so radically different that to halt legal action in favor of it is, for all intents and purposes, to end any real change in our lifetimes.
Textual evidence:
Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision... Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.
This is the key early move. We all kind of agree, but presenting the corporatism of the university as a totalizing force that is nearly finished is essential set-up, because then any actual formalized power (such as Title IX) will be tainted as part of the "one-party state" that we already agreed the university has become.
Next we move to garden-variety PC complaint. Note that the most common form of PC complaint is not to simply decry the left, but to grant that both sides are at fault. Of course, the only people who bother with this are those that are mainly targeting the left, since no one writing an essay decrying the abuses of white men in power throws in a few asides about how the PC police are also flawed.
In April, student activists at the University of Michigan temporarily shut down a screening of "American Sniper." Critics saw students unwilling to be exposed to points of view that they disagree with; defenders saw members of a campus community rallying against Islamophobia and the celebration of war.
This rhetorical structure inherently sets up both sides as roughly comparable if not equivalent. He of course resists saying where the answer truly lies, but the implication is somewhere in between. This again is a standard move of the privileged centrist, who takes it for granted that both sides are similar and that we all know the answer is somewhere in between.
In May, students at Columbia called for trigger warnings on Ovid’s "Metamorphoses" for its depiction of rape and assault. Critics saw sensitivity taken to the point of inanity; defenders saw students righteously invested in the content of the courses for which they are paying. With its rigid dichotomies and teams mentality, the usual discussion of campus intellectual culture seems to reflect all of our worst political debates and has little to offer anyone who isn’t already a dedicated partisan.
Here too, the idea that one side could be right is almost inconceivable. But instead of making the explicit centrist argument, the argument is made implicitly via casual ad hominem like "dedicated partisan."
Defenders of the current state of campus politics are right to combat the insulting presumption that today’s undergraduates are oversensitive and incurious, correctly insisting that many of our college students are smart and committed to the fair exchange of ideas.
Some students aren't oversensitive and incurious!
But these defenders ignore the very real threat that student activism poses to intellectual and political freedom on campus, which is the firmament of academic inquiry.
This is as succinct a summary of the core PC complaint as exists. It is as inherently right-wing today as it was in the 80s and 90s, and is almost entirely unchanged. Asking for increased sensitivity and sympathy is not just misguided (which is taken for granted), but a threat to the very foundations of academia.
Critics are right to note that there is an unhealthy sensitivity to perceived offense on campus, a sense of ambient incrimination that does more to pre-empt potentially unpopular ideas than to punish the ones that are actually expressed. Yet those critics are strangely quiet about the structural racism and sexism, and other forms of inequality, that shape life on the average college campus.
Note that the second sentence here doesn't actually lead into an extended critique of "those critics." It sounds like both-sides-do-it, but the vast bulk of the attention here is to the aspects they are "right" about ("an unhealthy sensistivity to perceived offense" ["perceived"!]), not to their strange quietness.
In any case, now that the standard center-right attack on the PC campus left has been established, we can move on to the heart of the argument:
The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless.
So the first step is tar the entire idea of legal power with the notion that all legal power can be misused or appropriated by those in power. Therefore what? Therefore nothing -- no altenerative is presented, but the implication is clear: better off without it. And furthermore, by (falsely) presenting this as an argument from the left, the suggestion is that you have been coopted by the man if you actually gain legal power. Fight the power! Give it up!
What is so pernicious about this, and center-right anti-PCism more generally, is how it repeatedly, calmly, and blithly refuses to actually present an alternative. It is conservative in the sense that it opposes change, but of the special centrist flavor that fails to acknowledge or even realize its reactionary-ism, even to itself.
And now we return to the central idea:
Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.
The implication is clear. If a corporation does it, it must be wrong. Since universities are total corporations, if they adopt your preferred policy, it must be wrong. If you (oh white male reader) find sexual harassment training annoying, why that just confirms that is in the service of corporate interests, which of course can never (via activist-led pressure, say) be aligned with leftwing interests. So to achieve power is to be coopted. He's like a left-wing mole who isn't even bothering to hide it. No power achieved is legitmate, so shouldn't we all stop trying?
It’s hard to blame people within a system — particularly people so young — who take advantage of structures they’ve been told exist to help them. The problem is that these structures exist for the institutions themselves, and thus the erosion of political freedom is ultimately a consequence of the institutions.
The same argument again, with a little bit of condescension toward the young thrown in.
Yes, students get to dictate increasingly elaborate and punitive speech codes that some of them prefer. But what could be more corporate or bureaucratic than the increasingly tight control on language and culture in the workplace?
And now a right-wing corporate control of language has become inconceivable. Decades of corporatism down the memory hole.
Professors, meanwhile, cling for dear life, trying merely to preserve whatever tenure track they can, prevented by academic culture, a lack of coordination and interdepartmental resentments from rallying together as labor activists.
PC is killing the university job market! Now we know the cause at last.
If so, students will have to be the ones who lead the way, not by making appeals to institutions that will never truly serve their needs but by creating a new, human — as opposed to corporate — campus politics.
And with that he returns to his garden -- a metaphor almost as literally "get off my lawn" as you can get.
posted by chortly at 5:22 PM on September 10, 2015 [13 favorites]
The core idea is that if the left ever succeeds in gaining any form of legal power, we should condemn it, because that's only allowing themselves to be coopted by the man. Because Title IX can (allegedly) be misused, therefore we should be wary not just of it, but of all examples where the marginalized have gained even a modicum of legal or campus power. The alternative is unarticulated of course -- a wild garden sounds nice, but what that means cannot be articulated, because he is not offering an alternative, but rather condemning actual legal power gained by those to his left. One alternative is removing that power, but he can't go so far as to say (or perhaps think) that. The other alternative is some utopia so radically different that to halt legal action in favor of it is, for all intents and purposes, to end any real change in our lifetimes.
Textual evidence:
Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision... Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.
This is the key early move. We all kind of agree, but presenting the corporatism of the university as a totalizing force that is nearly finished is essential set-up, because then any actual formalized power (such as Title IX) will be tainted as part of the "one-party state" that we already agreed the university has become.
Next we move to garden-variety PC complaint. Note that the most common form of PC complaint is not to simply decry the left, but to grant that both sides are at fault. Of course, the only people who bother with this are those that are mainly targeting the left, since no one writing an essay decrying the abuses of white men in power throws in a few asides about how the PC police are also flawed.
In April, student activists at the University of Michigan temporarily shut down a screening of "American Sniper." Critics saw students unwilling to be exposed to points of view that they disagree with; defenders saw members of a campus community rallying against Islamophobia and the celebration of war.
This rhetorical structure inherently sets up both sides as roughly comparable if not equivalent. He of course resists saying where the answer truly lies, but the implication is somewhere in between. This again is a standard move of the privileged centrist, who takes it for granted that both sides are similar and that we all know the answer is somewhere in between.
In May, students at Columbia called for trigger warnings on Ovid’s "Metamorphoses" for its depiction of rape and assault. Critics saw sensitivity taken to the point of inanity; defenders saw students righteously invested in the content of the courses for which they are paying. With its rigid dichotomies and teams mentality, the usual discussion of campus intellectual culture seems to reflect all of our worst political debates and has little to offer anyone who isn’t already a dedicated partisan.
Here too, the idea that one side could be right is almost inconceivable. But instead of making the explicit centrist argument, the argument is made implicitly via casual ad hominem like "dedicated partisan."
Defenders of the current state of campus politics are right to combat the insulting presumption that today’s undergraduates are oversensitive and incurious, correctly insisting that many of our college students are smart and committed to the fair exchange of ideas.
Some students aren't oversensitive and incurious!
But these defenders ignore the very real threat that student activism poses to intellectual and political freedom on campus, which is the firmament of academic inquiry.
This is as succinct a summary of the core PC complaint as exists. It is as inherently right-wing today as it was in the 80s and 90s, and is almost entirely unchanged. Asking for increased sensitivity and sympathy is not just misguided (which is taken for granted), but a threat to the very foundations of academia.
Critics are right to note that there is an unhealthy sensitivity to perceived offense on campus, a sense of ambient incrimination that does more to pre-empt potentially unpopular ideas than to punish the ones that are actually expressed. Yet those critics are strangely quiet about the structural racism and sexism, and other forms of inequality, that shape life on the average college campus.
Note that the second sentence here doesn't actually lead into an extended critique of "those critics." It sounds like both-sides-do-it, but the vast bulk of the attention here is to the aspects they are "right" about ("an unhealthy sensistivity to perceived offense" ["perceived"!]), not to their strange quietness.
In any case, now that the standard center-right attack on the PC campus left has been established, we can move on to the heart of the argument:
The Kipnis affair was extreme, but it demonstrates the double-edged sword that is Title IX. The law, designed to enforce gender equality on campus, grants members of campus communities broad latitude in charging gender discrimination and mandates formal response from universities. The law can be a powerful tool for justice, but like all tools, it can be misused — especially as it ends up wielded by administrative and governmental functionaries. In this way, it becomes an instrument of power, not of the powerless.
So the first step is tar the entire idea of legal power with the notion that all legal power can be misused or appropriated by those in power. Therefore what? Therefore nothing -- no altenerative is presented, but the implication is clear: better off without it. And furthermore, by (falsely) presenting this as an argument from the left, the suggestion is that you have been coopted by the man if you actually gain legal power. Fight the power! Give it up!
What is so pernicious about this, and center-right anti-PCism more generally, is how it repeatedly, calmly, and blithly refuses to actually present an alternative. It is conservative in the sense that it opposes change, but of the special centrist flavor that fails to acknowledge or even realize its reactionary-ism, even to itself.
And now we return to the central idea:
Rather than painting student activists as censors — trying to dictate who has the right to say what and when — we should instead see them as trapped in a corporate architecture of managing offense. Have you ever been to corporate sexual harassment training? If you have, you may have been struck by how little such events have to do with preventing sexual harassment as a matter of moral necessity and how much they have to do with protecting whatever institution is mandating it. Of course, sexual harassment is a real and vexing problem, not merely on campus but in all kinds of organizations, and the urge to oppose it through policy is a noble one. But corporate entities serve corporate interests, not those of the individuals within them, and so these efforts are often designed to spare the institutions from legal liability rather than protect the individuals who would be harmed by sexual harassment. Indeed, this is the very lifeblood of corporatism: creating systems and procedures that sacrifice the needs of humans to the needs of institutions.
The implication is clear. If a corporation does it, it must be wrong. Since universities are total corporations, if they adopt your preferred policy, it must be wrong. If you (oh white male reader) find sexual harassment training annoying, why that just confirms that is in the service of corporate interests, which of course can never (via activist-led pressure, say) be aligned with leftwing interests. So to achieve power is to be coopted. He's like a left-wing mole who isn't even bothering to hide it. No power achieved is legitmate, so shouldn't we all stop trying?
It’s hard to blame people within a system — particularly people so young — who take advantage of structures they’ve been told exist to help them. The problem is that these structures exist for the institutions themselves, and thus the erosion of political freedom is ultimately a consequence of the institutions.
The same argument again, with a little bit of condescension toward the young thrown in.
Yes, students get to dictate increasingly elaborate and punitive speech codes that some of them prefer. But what could be more corporate or bureaucratic than the increasingly tight control on language and culture in the workplace?
And now a right-wing corporate control of language has become inconceivable. Decades of corporatism down the memory hole.
Professors, meanwhile, cling for dear life, trying merely to preserve whatever tenure track they can, prevented by academic culture, a lack of coordination and interdepartmental resentments from rallying together as labor activists.
PC is killing the university job market! Now we know the cause at last.
If so, students will have to be the ones who lead the way, not by making appeals to institutions that will never truly serve their needs but by creating a new, human — as opposed to corporate — campus politics.
And with that he returns to his garden -- a metaphor almost as literally "get off my lawn" as you can get.
posted by chortly at 5:22 PM on September 10, 2015 [13 favorites]
Aaron Bady and deBoer are having a spat on Twitter right now.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:04 AM on September 14, 2015
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 10:04 AM on September 14, 2015
Jesus. Is there a Twitter version of "root for injuries"?
I actually do think it's dirty pool to lift a single quote from a piece divorced of context and not provide a link to the piece so people can read it in context. Bady deserves to be criticized for that.
However, de Boer's insistence that nobody he's corresponded with thinks he's blaming students is unverifiable, and even if it were verifiable, isn't a sufficient defense to the charge that he is putting much of the blame on them. There are other readers, some in this thread, who do feel that he's blaming students, or at the very least accusing them of being aligned with University, Inc. when it comes to enforcing policy around trigger warnings, banning particular speakers or movie showings from campus, etc.
Now, it's possible that none of those folks has reached out directly to de Boer (his comments section is closed, FWIW), but since Bady is bringing that position to his attention, he does have an obligation to engage that position even if he thinks Bady's the only person on the planet who read the piece that way, but instead, he finds it easier to work the refs and repeat his "nobody who's talked to me believes I was saying that" defense ad nauseum. Freddie himself complained about this kind of dodge in regards to people who throw the straw man flag, now he's using it. Any port in a tweetstorm, I suppose.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:29 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
I actually do think it's dirty pool to lift a single quote from a piece divorced of context and not provide a link to the piece so people can read it in context. Bady deserves to be criticized for that.
However, de Boer's insistence that nobody he's corresponded with thinks he's blaming students is unverifiable, and even if it were verifiable, isn't a sufficient defense to the charge that he is putting much of the blame on them. There are other readers, some in this thread, who do feel that he's blaming students, or at the very least accusing them of being aligned with University, Inc. when it comes to enforcing policy around trigger warnings, banning particular speakers or movie showings from campus, etc.
Now, it's possible that none of those folks has reached out directly to de Boer (his comments section is closed, FWIW), but since Bady is bringing that position to his attention, he does have an obligation to engage that position even if he thinks Bady's the only person on the planet who read the piece that way, but instead, he finds it easier to work the refs and repeat his "nobody who's talked to me believes I was saying that" defense ad nauseum. Freddie himself complained about this kind of dodge in regards to people who throw the straw man flag, now he's using it. Any port in a tweetstorm, I suppose.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:29 AM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
However, de Boer's insistence that nobody he's corresponded with thinks he's blaming students is unverifiable, and even if it were verifiable, isn't a sufficient defense to the charge that he is putting much of the blame on them. There are other readers, some in this thread, who do feel that he's blaming students, or at the very least accusing them of being aligned with University, Inc. when it comes to enforcing policy around trigger warnings, banning particular speakers or movie showings from campus, etc.
Yeah, I think it is not too strained to say the piece assigns some blame to student activists, even though it does go out of its way absolve them.
But the quote almost reverses the emphasis of the piece. In the paragraph it comes from, it is both preceded and followed by defenses of those activists.
posted by grobstein at 11:26 AM on September 14, 2015
Yeah, I think it is not too strained to say the piece assigns some blame to student activists, even though it does go out of its way absolve them.
But the quote almost reverses the emphasis of the piece. In the paragraph it comes from, it is both preceded and followed by defenses of those activists.
posted by grobstein at 11:26 AM on September 14, 2015
de Boer gets bent out of shape imagining that Bady is claiming he blames students for the problem, when the stupid thing Bady is rolling his eyes at is the article's actual claim that Politically Correct Student Complaints Gone Mad are a big threat to academic freedom, (which is dumb regardless of whether de Boer claims students are actually the source of this imagined problem).
posted by straight at 3:08 PM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by straight at 3:08 PM on September 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
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