So much quotable, but I think I will start with this:
Ridgeview unapologetically embraces a thorough immersion in American government, history, literature, and arts, as well as the related discipline of economics, which vindicates the Founding Fathers' understanding of human nature
That place is basically the "BUY GOLD COINS" of educational institutions.
What 2 said. I have a superficial positive reaction -- I like order, and decorum, and memorizing poetry, and while I myself am horrible at languages reading old books and in theory learning the languages necessary to do so sounds awesome, and so on. But the tone of the linked description of the school makes it sound like something run by the self-imagined intellectual elite of the Tea Party.
Boy, white people sure did a lot of neat stuff. Good job, us. Western civilization FTW.
Also, their science section sounds like history of science.
4.1: I'm sure you'll be shocked to see how they depict their representative student population. (I actually like that they don't show the kids' faces. But they sure look different from my girls' school.)
I read half, skimmed the rest, but I guess the most interesting thing about this is the lack of "Judeo-Christian heritage" stuff one may have expected to find here. That makes it very much not a Tea Party elite thing.
6: I don't know, stuff like In the first instance it holds that before a person can think, he must have something to think about. That something is a fact: Adam named the animals first, not thought "critically" about them. makes me think that they're just taking that for granted.
It's sort of interesting to me to think about who the audience for this page would be. Is it just to hit parents' kneejerk assumptions about liberalism and teaching to the test? Is it for people who actually pay attention to the debates in education policy? Is it a test to see if you can read the whole thing without zoning out or rolling your eyes too hard because you need to be able to tolerate it to send your kids there?
Your post wasn't too long, ogged. I read it all the way to the end. I can't say I have much to say about it, though.
Two-inch heels are fine but neon-colored sneakers aren't? Weird.
It feels like standard conservative we're-not-wussies language to me.
In related news, there is, on 42d St., an enormous* billboard attacking Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers, complete with a very harsh wanted-poster-style mugshot: "Ask Randi [something like "Why are kids so stupid and disrespectful?"]."
* It looks like it's about four stories tall, with its bottom edge about five stories above the street.
Definitely tl, but I only had to r the first section to form the opinion that the school is totally douchey. "Kids at our school actually learn basic academics and do homework, unlike the kids at those imaginary straw schools we are going to pretend are ruining America!"
In fact, the curriculum sounds exactly like St. John's, but it's being presented in such a way as to appeal to conservative fears/myths about public education.
If they want people being moral when nobody's watching, classical education methods (punishment-based) are probably the worst way to go.
Right, I'd be fine with a classical curriculum if it weren't in the service of conservatism.
Also interesting is that it's a charter school. I don't know how charters work in Colorado in terms of who's eligible and who gets accepted, but I'd just assumed it would be a regular private school.
Nothing galls conservatives more than the idea that somewhere sometime someone was being lazy.
5: For you, Thorn:
We get to know a person better by meeting his parents and his siblings. It is simply uncanny how children resemble their parents and how different children in a family may "take after" one parent more than another, in looks and in behavior, yet all have common qualities.
The "when nobody's watching" stuff is leftover hot air from the Clinton era, isn't it? I dimly recall two or three Republican responses to Clinton SOTU speeches that tried that on.
You'd think based on the whole St John's plus classics degrees thing, I'd dig this, but I had to stop reading after several paragraphs because the whole thing gave me hives. th; dr.
There was an extremely one-sided, gut-wrenching story on the local NPR today about how Texas passed a bill to close underperforming charter schools - if they fail academically and financially for three years running, then they can be shut down.
So they're shutting down a 30 year old American Youth Works school, which serves teen moms who have dropped out of high school and are trying to get their diploma. The kind of place that provides toys and play areas and rocking chairs for the babies.
Nothing galls conservatives more than the idea that somewhere sometime someone a minority was being lazy.
Fixed that for you.
"One of the school's unofficial mottos is from Aeschylus -- 'we learn by suffering.'"
From the handbook.
Two-inch heels are fine but neon-colored sneakers aren't? Weird.
Not so much--the Founding Fathers' boots all had heels.
Two-inch heels are fine but neon-colored sneakers aren't?
See 23.
Don't throw it in the "conservative hot air" box so quickly! It's a free public school, with no entrance exam. They take everyone, and are 20% minority. What I find really interesting about it is how close it comes to standard conservative hate-on-the-liberals, but how genuinely committed it seems to classical, rather than Christian, education. Latin starting in Kindergarten! All the kids learn ancient Greek! It's much more Aristotle than Jesus, but then on their Facebook page you'll also see, AEI loves us!
I didn't think charter schools were allowed to charge tuition, or that that would disqualify them from public funds, at least.
18: I saw that and almost mocked it, but they were talking about languages rather than their student body. But STILL!
A friend teaches Greek and Latin here. They start Latin in kindergarten too, then add Greek (if they want) in first grade. French can be added in high school, and Mandarin senior year. It's private, expensive, in CT, and presents itself as more or less the opposite of Ridgeview in (nearly!) all other ways too.
Wouldn't any Fort Collins school have a web page exactly like this?
@20: When conservatives start to put on their "custodians of the Great Western Tradition" costumes, I'm always reminded of the odd fact that St. Johns, which has exactly the sort of Great Books curriculum they should love, somehow fails to be a hotbed of conservatism.
The student soon learns there is no mastery without effort and no genuine effort without real reward.
Friggin' liberals, coddling children. Wait until they get to the real world. Unless they count "realizing you're a chump" as a real reward.
My first reaction was basically oudemia's at 20 (which is why I'm quoting something from the first few paragraphs), but 27 is an intriguing point.
The fascination with the despicable ideology of the slave-owning aristocrats of the classical world, revived to provide the faux-antique ideological veneer for equally despicable post-Renaissance Europeam aristocrats, is itself a problem. Fuck a classical education; the collapse of classical civilization was one of the great liberating moments of world history, and the end of the classical education in the West one of the great liberating triumphs of the 19th and 20th centuries. While still bad, it would be much better in my view if the school were Jesus-centric and they were learning Latin and Greek only to read the New Testsment and Augustine.
27: Like I said, it looks to be aiming at people who fantasize about being the conservative intellectual elite. The 'classical' rather than Christian education fits with the sort of person who thinks vulgar Biblebashers are useful idiots. Think William F. Buckley looking down his nose at some redneck Southern sheriff. Delighted to have him out there busting civil rights activist heads, but wouldn't want to have him over for dinner.
Mostly, this school inspires a sincere desire in me to have Sally's inner-city classmates demonstrate their ability to kick Ridgeway students' asses academically (admittedly, only in subjects other than Greek and Latin. While they're reading Homer, it's in translation.)
Yes to 34. We already had a knock-down drag-out fight over whether the classics should be the core of education. They lost. They're still useful, but they're not a guiding star.
Also, the city of Fort Collins is 17% minority.
See, "charter" doesn't have to mean "they take everyone" most places, as far as I can tell. And I linked to the dress code because the very first items on it are that clothing has to be gender-appropriate and pants can't be baggy. Add in conservative hairstyles (so Mara couldn't attend) and a maximum of two piercings per ear for girls, none for boys, and no other piercings or bright colors, and there seems to be a built-in bias toward wealthier and whiter kids.
I do know a lot of charter schools, including ones aimed directly at racial minority groups, have these kinds of dress policies and I'm not trying to turn this into a discussion of respectability politics, but it's kind of a thing.
Tl;dr but based on the first six paragraphs, fuck these people.
When I was in high school there was a great rebellion on the part of the tiny minority of students who were both rich and Republican when it seemed like the school was considering cutting AP European History, which was 1. basically only military history, 2. hilariously right-wing and 3. only taken by this tiny minority of students.
My new heuristic is to ignore anyone who adopts the Corinthian helmet as a symbol.
C'mon, folks, a classical education is essential. How else are kids gonna learn to stand on their desks and shout "O Captain! My Captain!"?
Maybe the commenters would like this better, my nephew tells me all the courses are taught by socialists:
The first half of the department's two-year required sequence focuses on the history of the world system from its beginnings in the fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century. The course commences with an overview of the world system at the dawn of the 21st century, using a case study of Wal-Mart as a lens into the operations of a modern multinational corporation. There is then a brief study of non-capitalist social formations in North America on the eve of European expansion, Imperial China, and medieval Europe. The course then examines"
etc
Honestly, greek pottery is covered with much more interesting logo fodder.
I will say that it seems not impossible to me that a school founded along these lines might go rogue, and turn into a decent place despite the unpleasant beliefs and intentions of the founders. If they actually have to staff it with people who can teach Greek and Latin, that might mean teachers who are more like actual Classics majors I've met, and less like the sort of nimrod who fantasizes about being Thomas Jefferson.
43: My boss's kids went there. Seems like a decent place, as ridiculously expensive private schools go.
You guys are no fun. Here's their MLK Day Facebook post, which is really quite nice, but still ends with a dig at affirmative action. I'm so curious what the students here think of the place, and what they're like as older folks, but I can't find a good testimonial.
I mean, if you're like Halford, and have no soft spot for virtue ethics, this isn't going to appeal to you at all, but it's not Tea Party dressed as ancient Greek; it's something weirder and more interesting.
Here's their MLK Day Facebook post, which is really quite nice, but still ends with a dig at affirmative action.
This is pitiably poor trolling.
Oh, come on, ogged, that's "thank goodness we Americans had Thos. Jefferson's beloved slavery to get us to our current awesomeness!" and you think it's only the last paragraph that's conservative and not previous bits like There has been a great deal written about King's moral failings to include everything from plagiarism to adultery to possessing communist sympathies? I mean, it's not JUST that, but I sure hope they teach "What, to a slave, is the Fourth of July" or something too.
This:
Newton's and Boyle's laws did not drop from the heavens, nor did Pythagoras's theorem pop out of a textbook. Rather, the means of understanding an ordered universe resulted from these thinkers' painstaking observation and reasoning about the world
Argh. Only "There has been a great deal written about King's moral failings to include everything from plagiarism to adultery to possessing communist sympathies" is quoted from the linked post.
It doesn't look weird or unfamiliar to me at all, is the thing; I may be describing it badly, but there's a very familiar asshole-conservative fantasy of being better, both smarter and more virtuous, than the seething masses through the rigor of a classical education, that this looks precisely aimed at. Victor Davis Hanson, that kind of thing. (Sally's school actually has a bit of a flavor of that in what seems to me a non-asshole kind of way -- I'm not sure if they're still doing it, it might have been phased out, but they at least used to have virtue awards voted on by the kids for the student best exemplifying a variety of virtues.)
Depending on the actual student body and the actual teaching staff, it might turn into something interestingly weird, but the intention expressed by the website is familiar and unpleasant.
47: Not to overread into poor proofreading, but among the rest of the problems with that page, they misspelled Frederick Douglass's name.
Ridgeview, after years of honoring King by teaching students about him and being accused of racism for remaining in school on this day, has bowed to the conventions of our time, and now teach our students about him in advance of the day.
I'm sure the years of resistance to observing MLK day as a holiday made the school feel welcoming to African-American parents.
I would have LOVED to go to this school.
That Founding Fathers shit is highly obnoxious, but it's not like liberals who teach kids don't do it too. Some people's brains just fall out of their heads when you mention Thomas Jefferson, and most of them teach elementary school.
I once had a long serious talk with a Jesuit prof of mine (rare at the Graduate School for Marxist Pornographers) about teaching. He asked me about my pedagogy and I talked the talk about progressive this and radical experimental student-led everything. He paused and then said, "So I guess Jonathan Swift really missed out, then."
I still think of myself as a pretty progressive educator, especially in how I design a syllabus. We discuss topics that would never make it into a conservative classroom (gay sex, West Africa in the 17th c). But I have gradually become much more like my Jesuit prof over time. I am not horrified by this school's description of itself, but it is very easy to suspect (not so subtly from the FF/AMERICA! thing) that classicism is a cover for racism. I wish it weren't so!
54: My (supa-progressive) college does not take off for MLK day.
For primary and secondary schools, though, it's conventional. It's a national holiday, and there's history of refusing to observe it as a means of communicating "Fuck that bastard". Coming from Wolf Cub U, it doesn't send that message, but in combination with the rest of the Ridgeway website, I bet it did.
I know exactly what you mean, LB; think of Josh Trevino going by Tacitus.
Anyway, I'm not convincing anyone. I thought the stuff about King's imperfections was pretty nicely handled. You have to figure that at least some of the parents at this school are true asshole conservatives, and this was a nice acknowledge-and-move-on for them. And they have the kids read the Narrative of Frederick Douglass in fifth grade.
More generally, I find this fascinating because it's not a blog post by some blowhard (however much it reads that way), it's an actual school with actual students. I want to know more!
which is really quite nice, but still ends with a dig at affirmative action
Look at what you just wrote, ogged. Anyway, that facebook post reeks of Tea Party intelligentsia. And Frederick Douglas is what Fox News calls Frederick Douglass. I may be annoyed by this because the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas is the only thing I demand students learn in my Civil War course.
Like teo and several others, I'm trying to put my finger on what differentiates this from the very valuable education it seems to be mimicking, and no doubt believes itself to be upholding.
Most here have zeroed in the school's sense of itself, and the stances, like the MLK one they can't help taking. I agree that that's it; the truly classical education, as remembered by those who had it would take no notice of these things. It's very hard now to imagine an education that oblivious, and it's possible that the memory of it that the memoirists have is usually a mirage, and there's never been a school like that.
Also obvious is that obliviousness required social assumptions that can't be made anymore. The defensiveness of this prospectus gives the game away.
I'd send my kid there if I had one. I don't like the dress code, but that's because I'd rather just see uniforms for everybody. Western Civilization FTW!
I wish that the fact that regular American public schools don't present their methods and content this way meant that they're all very integrated curricula that encourage students to creatively and intelligently engage with historical oppression and genocide while fostering curiosity about the natural world and a love of art. Maybe there are some that do. But I'm a bit sympathetic to a school that promises to teach content to students using methods other than multiple-choice testing. Except for students who have actually faced some kind of oppression themselves, none of my students come from high school saying anything useful or intelligent about systematic oppression.
I would have LOVED to go to this school.
I can see that -- it might end up being a very good place for academically inclined kids, and if it's as academically rigorous as they say it is, I bet it's pretty useless as ideological indoctrination. If the students are actually getting deeply involved in literature and so forth, while the school might be able to impose nasty politics while the kids are still there, I wouldn't be surprised if they reliably snap out of it in college.
I thought the stuff about King's imperfections was pretty nicely handled.
I dunno. I think they're trying to discredit him, given the insistence on virtue that's hammered home in the mission statement and the implication that not cheating is all that matters in the world. This is a K-12 school. Do other people's kindergartners know what adultery and plagiarism are? I mean, yes, it's nice that the Christian god will forgive black people even when they've flirted with communism, but....
I do think a lot of Black History Month activities turn into "Look at St. Martin Luther King and St. Rosa Parks!" but I think actual black kids in actual black communities get more nuance than that. My girls have definitely heard sermons at church that addressed King's imperfections in a much more respectful and insightful way than this run-down did, and I suspect that's true for many black kids. It's the white ones who are missing out on that, and I remain unconvinced that Ridgedale is the place for them to get it. Though I would probably have been happy at Ridgedale and my parents would have loved a Catholic version.
Ridgeview. Sorry. I can't write today and should just shut up. (This is going to be really awkward if I'm still this stupid when I have to teach a bunch of K-2 students about plants tonight, but being in public school means they won't even know what the Latin names mean and so I can skip that part!)
There's a whole lotta weird, convoluted thinking peppered throughout that MLK day post. It gets off to a bad start:
Without slavery, and without the personal and national traumas caused by this institution, American history would not be what it is. Without it, it is unlikely that there would have been the moral imperative for a civil rights movement.
Without that dark cloud, we would never have had this awesome silver lining!
There is a great irony in honoring King and the inroads he made by removing students from the classroom given his passion for education as a guarantor of freedom. That he would be honored by having children, including those who were once denied an education, stay home blithely ignorant not only of him, but of history entirely is peculiar indeed.
Look, giving kids a day off from school is not "removing students from the classroom." And are they implying that you can only teach kids about MLK on MLK day? So if they're out that day, the don't get to learn about him? So . . . kids never learn about the Declaration of Independence because July 4th is during the summer break?
if it's as academically rigorous as they say it is, I bet it's pretty useless as ideological indoctrination
This is the thing. I also wish that when right-wingers bash college professors, they knew this. If you're really teaching content, you *can't* indoctrinate, especially in literature.
There's a homeschooling branch that is all about getting a Classical Education. (Google 'the well-trained mind' etc.) I was wondering if this school was started by (ex) homeschoolers.
I also wish that when right-wingers bash college professors, they knew this. If you're really teaching content, you *can't* indoctrinate, especially in literature.
When right-wingers use the word "indoctrinate," they do not mean the same thing that you mean. If they've been taught something, and non-right-wing beliefs have resulted from that teaching, they have been indoctrinated.
I think 62 is right on. Most of us went to public schools, and they're fully statist, pro-American, pro-business, etc. At least this school is saying this is the indoctrination we're about.
I was wondering if this school was started by (ex) homeschoolers.
If I'm remember stuff I've skimmed, the answer is sorta kinda. It's an offshoot of the other successful charter school in Fort Collins, which was started by parents, some of whom were home schoolers.
I believe that 67 last is almost certainly false.
ogged, I'm loving your interpretive charity. Surely when they use all these dogwhistles they're just doing it for the conservative parents, and it reflects nothing of their pedagogical philosophy.
71: I tend to agree. I'd like to see some elaboration, because my impression of lit is that there's plenty of room for indoctrination because of the wide-open nature of the discipline.
73: I think the idea is that you can't actually teach content without teaching the kind of analytical tools that enable the student to independently arrive at their own conclusions.
I'm loving your interpretive charity
Heh. They're probably racist assholes! I like to cling to the belief that some people can genuinely hold some "conservative" beliefs that aren't motivated by latent racism. Where's Apo to track down the memoirs of some Ridgeview graduate?
Literature can satirize, and in that sense it can de-indoctrinate, which I think is the scariest possibility for the anxious. It can also fill the mind with vicarious experiences that one might not want one's children having, either because they are immoral or because it makes them curious about the world. Literature can make one more sensitive to moral/emotional subtleties. I don't believe that reading a bunch of novels makes someone into a good person; a quick glance at the faculty of an English department will correct that assumption. But none of these really counts as "indoctrination."
I think we can all agree that the people running this place sound like total fucking creeps. The post linked in 47 is scary not just for its content but its bizarre omniscient tone; the marketing copy on the website also suffers from the unmistakable influence if the total creep, who admittedly is just one of many subspecies of right winger.
They're probably racist assholes! I like to cling to the belief that some people can genuinely hold some "conservative" beliefs that aren't motivated by latent racism.
Seriously, the MLK page is dispositive on this point. Yes, he was flawed, and teaching about his flaws is a fine thing to do. Needing to put up a page on your website about the flaws of one particular historical figure when you don't have one, e.g., about JFK's fucking around, indicates that you've got real issues with the civil rights movement, or at least that you're being deferentially respectful to people who do.
Now, my one hope for the future getting better is that I think it's hard to indoctrinate racism through dogwhistling alone -- I think the dogwhistling only really works for people who feel free to be explicitly racist in other contexts. So the school might be run by a bunch of bigots without doing much harm to their students. But there's no question at all in my mind about the administration of the school.
"Here at Dunning Kruger Academy, you'll never have to worry that we know something you don't."
Soooo, the founding principal, who wrote what's linked in the OP, is a Townhall columnist these days. I'd say y'all win on this one.
I'd still love to find out what their graduates are like.
I'm too busy marveling at the legal filings from the woman who threw the shoe at Hillary Clinton.
Comes now, the Plaintiff, facing imminent danger and bodily harm from defendant James Holmes, I seek a restraining order from James Holmes entering my mind through subliminal messaging and causing me to be obsessed with him on a daily basis. Iam the Allison michelle ernst that came to court with a bald head and red dress. I look like g.i. jane. James Holmes also wont write me, he ignores all my letters I write him to prison. James Holmes is innocent and has been framed by the u.s. govt for new world order. I created a facebook group called "james holmes is innocent" and i can be found out there everyday rallying americans to free james holmes. James has taken over my life. I sleep, eat, and think James Holmes 24/7 and i seek a restraining order to have this james holmes mind manipulation to stop. I watched inception, so I'm fully aware of james holmes magical powers and also his neuo science studies which now james enters my head like dennis quaid in innerspace and he zooms to my heart and plays with it and forces me to care for him. James sent me naked photos of himself in a joker outfit which offends me. James Holmes wont even look at me on when he is in court and this offends me, my life and skin. James Holmes is being framed. [...]
I also seek a new red dress and clippers including toe nails.
I'm totally on board with 76. I thought 67 last was going in a different direction, along the lines of being exposed to great works of Western thought/learning close reading techniques is incompatible with indoctrination, which seems very wrong. Dethroning literature as a font of moral wisdom (as opposed to satire or imaginative expansion) is important, but places like this run-by-creeps Roman breastplate academy do the opposite.
Seriously, the MLK page line about econ and the founders is dispositive on this point, if you follow.
By the way, I probably don't need to tell you that he attended the University of Chicago.
74: My sense is that the analytical tools themselves constitute a form of indoctrination. Once you've opened someone's eyes to e.g. the nature of patriarchal oppression of women as a lens through which to view a piece of literature you've made a real change in their worldview that makes certain types of ideology basically off limits if they want to maintain a coherent worldview. I'm expressing myself clumsily because I don't really have the background to get into this in depth.
I should be clear that I don't view indoctrination per se as a bad thing. Everyone is indoctrinated by their parents and their circumstances, and one of the goals of education should be indoctrination such that the student ends up with a worldview that is consistent with the world as it actually is )as closely as possible).
Christian classical education (like the Christian fondness for debating) comes from a longing for a prescientific era of intellectual discourse.
80.1: So I guess I won't send my imaginary kid there. Oh well. Homeschooling the little bastard it is.
(of course, the MLK thing was a FB post, for the holiday, not a page on their website, so the JFK comparison doesn't really work. But still.)
84 -- I've said it before and will say it again, burn it to the ground, salt the earth where it stood.
My sense is that the analytical tools themselves constitute a form of indoctrination.
Right. If you assert that questioning is encouraged in this context, you are very clearly violating what has been a premise in the previous 18 years of conservative-religious context.
All I'm saying is that, between the link in the OP and the MLK post, I think I have a pretty good guess how the administrators of this school feel about rap music.
You know what troll I would like to accomplish? Develop a perfectly anti-classical education. Start with high modernism, eight o'clock day one, move on to Igbo funeral rituals, encourage students to learn Yup'ik or Cham, spend a few weeks teaching the kindergartners quantum entanglement and group homologies, and do your level best to make sure they don't learn a single thing about the history of France that can't be gleaned from Frantz Fanon.
I only made it three paragraphs in, as far as
And we do mean virtue, not post-modern "values," a term that implies "whatever I do, whatever my unruly passions and appetites urge on me, is okay; so don't judge me!"
I think I missed that part in Lyotard.
18 -- Yes, but as 86 points out well there are many kinds of "questioning" and text centered intellectual culture that are perfectly compatible with a right-wing anti-scientific mode. Even Goobers For God Fundamentalist Academy spends a lot of time discussing various interpretive readings of passages from the bible, talking about different Greek word origins of different verses, schooling people in modes of debate, etc. The difference is that it's in service of a worldview that most of us here dislike and that is anti-science.
I like to cling to the belief that some people can genuinely hold some "conservative" beliefs that aren't motivated by latent racism.
Why, though?
Once you've opened someone's eyes to e.g. the nature of patriarchal oppression of women as a lens through which to view a piece of literature you've made a real change in their worldview that makes certain types of ideology basically off limits if they want to maintain a coherent worldview.
I guess, but most people don't care about maintaining a coherent worldview.
And even more people do not in fact maintain a coherent worldview, whether or not they want to.
Why, though?
Because I'm genuinely sympathetic to some parts of virtue ethics, and temperamentally, I get annoyed with "Oh, there were the ancients, and now we know better." So I'd like to think there are people who share some of my annoyances with, uh, licentious culture, but not because they just hate blacks and gays and hippies.
Arguably it is not possible to maintain a coherent worldview in any strong sense. (I mean, "arguably" in that "I would aprobably argue that".)
I'm sure there are lots of examples of just those sorts of people in classical antiquity.
My students are very smart, but have nothing resembling a coherent worldview. They parrot what they think are left-wing pieties, and have basically no clue what any of them mean. I wonder if my desire to read this school's description sympathetically comes from the fact that I spend 90% of my teaching time trying to explain to my students what it would be like *not* to assume all religion is a joke, or that everything written before 1965 is white supremacist sexist crap.
101 to 99. I suspect Sifu would have more success in arguing that a coherent worldview is impossible than ogged would have in finding non-racist conservatives.
89 is far too respectful of the traditions of the classical world. Cobalt-60 is a nice, modern salt substitute.
my annoyances with, uh, licentious culture
Aristotle hated women with squeaky voices and too much makeup.
my annoyances with, uh, licentious culture
Aristotle hated women with squeaky voices and too much makeup.
And don't even ask what St. Augustine thought about vocal fry or duckface
non-racist conservatives
There's baa, but he's probably a figment of our imagination.
The selfie is to the graven image as ℵ1 is to ℵ0.
103: Don't you figure that you'd have the same problem in whatever direction regardless of the type of high school education? That is, given your students' age and maturity levels, they're going to come in with some incredibly restricted set of beliefs, and you'll doing the same amount of work expanding it wherever they start from?
In my section today I had to try and gently disabuse the right-wing student (I mean, the one I know about. There are probably others) of the notion that risk homeostasis was per se true, even if he did read about it on Gre/gory Man/kiw's blog.
My strategy was to shout that he was a traitor to the glorious people's revolution and have him dragged off to a collective farm. We'll see if it takes.
99: I feel so closed-minded saying this, but you think there's anything coherent to engage with in modern American conservatism? I'm not saying that everyone who identifies as a conservative is racist, people are, as we've all been saying, incoherent. But I'm really not seeing an anti-racist (non-homophobic, and so on) virtue-ethics political movement that describes itself as conservative and actually exists in today's political world.
If it did exist, wouldn't you think that you wouldn't need interpretative charity to identify it, because people affiliated with a movement like that would really want to differentiate themselves from racists (sexists, homophobes)?
I suspect a lot of the talk of indoctrination comes down to a different idea of what one does when one reads a book or assigns a book to be read. Every semester I have students who are surprised that I don't agree completely with the philosophers I have assigned, even when the philosophers are disagreeing with each other.
Develop a perfectly anti-classical education. Start with high modernism, eight o'clock day one, move on to Igbo funeral rituals, encourage students to learn Yup'ik or Cham, spend a few weeks teaching the kindergartners quantum entanglement and group homologies, and do your level best to make sure they don't learn a single thing about the history of France that can't be gleaned from Frantz Fanon.
Graduation requirement: student must have prepared their own pluripotent stem cells.
103 is interesting to me because my son goes there, does not fit that profile, but often describes to me a scene where many students do. He and his friends alternate between irritation and a kind of Portlandia amusement: yes, these people are absurd, but they're absurd on our side of the big cultural divides. Or rather, they're part of the landscape anywhere we're likely to feel comfortable.
What! Have we established whether or not idpspawn has had AWB as an instructor?
117: I spend a lot of time describing that sort of person the kids as "Her heart is in the right place."
you think there's anything coherent to engage with in modern American conservatism?
No.
121: So, this kind of post is you hoping but not expecting to find your ideological brethren?
118:I believe he has not; I'm sure some of his friends have, but I've never felt like asking them directly. Whenever one tells a story about an instructor I ask for a name, because it seems natural and unobtrusive then, but her name hasn't come up.
anything coherent to engage with in modern American conservatism
Best I can tell, American conservatism is now entirely reactive in the "if X is for it, then I'm against it" mold. So no, nothing to engage. Democrats should come out forcefully against people stapling their own scrotums to clipboards and watch the spectacle ensue.
Arguably it is not possible to maintain a coherent worldview in any strong sense.
I'd actually argue that conservatism would benefit by ditching any attempt to fashion a coherent worldview out of the various conservative building blocks. You want to argue that smaller government is better than bigger government? Fine. You want to argue that there is value in teaching kids Latin and Greek? Great. You think environmental regulation does more harm than good? OK. You think Christianity is better than other religions? Sure, everybody thinks that about their religion, and you've got as much right to think that way as anybody else. But when you start to think these disparate components are all pieces of a coherent whole and argue that environmental regulation is morally wrong because Jesus told the classically-educated founding fathers that big government is the greatest threat to mankind, that's when you really go off the rails, and there's no having a rational discussion with you.
It seems like you'd get a lot of what you are looking for, if you are looking for a 'conservative' interlocutor of that type, from Catholicism of the more forward-looking type.
Democrats should come out forcefully against people stapling their own scrotums to clipboards
Kinda leaves Fakir Musafar out in the cold, doesn't it?
127: If the Church is going to change, that change has to come from the laity.
There are Jesuits I love, but even they keep coming back to the Christ thing.
This post was more just fun/curiosity: isn't this almost awesome!
I do kind of agree with you on that -- like I said in 45, this seems like the kind of place that could turn interesting if it went rogue.
Feeling not just anhedonic, but without desire of any kind. Organic or due to Prozac + Welbutrin? Hard to say. Becoming a wandering Taoist sage seems more and more attractive, but I don't even desire that, really.
The 'reasonable conservatives' you seek are UMC center-left Democrats. Looking any further afield than that is a waste of time, at best.
Have there been other educational institutions founded out of spite? Wonder how they did.
A lot of us have a conservative approach to, for example, the welfare state, or public schools. Whereas "conservatives" basically take the Maoist approach that destroying something that seems to work a lot of the time, and replacing it with who knows what, cannot possibly fail. So you could think of "conservatism" that way.
I think that's my first hashtag joke ever.
134 -- Yale was more or less founded out of spite.
Have there been other educational institutions founded out of spite? Wonder how they did.
King's College, London was basically created to annoy Jeremy Bentham and the rest of the gang who started UCL, and it discovered electromagnetism and DNA (sort of).
@124: The idea of funding a massive radio advertizing campaign announcing that the nanny state liberal hippies really don't want you to drink Drano is one that I've heard on and off since at least 2003.
I'd actually argue that conservatism would benefit by ditching any attempt to fashion a coherent worldview out of the various conservative building blocks
Your old school Edmund Burke conservative was specifically against forming large-scale logical worldviews. That kind of obsessive, hubristic rationalionalizing will lead you to tear down institutions what work, but for reasons we don't understand. Better to just accept the current slate of institutions and rules on the grounds that they've worked so far, and not try to find the common denominator of truth in them.
As many have noted, we don't have that kind of cautious conservative anymore. We only have fundamentalist "tear everything down" types, who aren't really conservative at all.
I think there are certain areas in life where we know so little that the Burkean approach has to be correct. The environment. Nutrition. Education. Child rearing. A lot of stuff that is just too girly to even be on the radar of contemporary "conservatives."
basically created to annoy Jeremy Bentham
That damned stuffed shirt.
Individual mandate not to drink Drano!
142 -- Corey Robin convinced me that this view of Burke, which I'd been taught and long believed, is basically bullshit. Modern conservatism, at least since and certainly including Burke, has always been about one big thing -- doing whatever it takes, however radical, to shore up existing structures of local authority, be it in the home, workplace, or wherever, against calls for inclusion by the historically oppressed.
The exasperation many of us here have with The American Conservative is that a conservatism we can respect, even join keeps trying to break through there and keeps getting pulled back or contradicted by really silly stuff.
You get quotes or reprints from Peter Vierick or Dwight Macdonald, but you'll also get on the same page squinting and holding the head sideways to make Rand Paul seem like a serious person.
Plenty of real conservatives in our culture, but they don't call themselves that and usually vote D, as noted above.
Halford, champion of the oppressed, I recently rode in a friend's RS7. Thought you'd like to know.
Burke's influence and significance is qualified but not erased by his motives.
Harvard was founded to prevent situations like Anne Hutchinson. Which was basically about spite.
Yale was more or less founded out of spite.
Harvard was founded to prevent situations like Anne Hutchinson. Which was basically about spite.
Resolved: by the end of this thread, we will have established that entire American system of higher education was founded out of spite.
Perhaps we can carve out an exception for Heebie U.
I wouldn't be surprised if Ridgeview produced a few great revolutionaries. Emmett Grogan and Luis Bunuel were both products of a rigorously traditional Jesuit education, after all. And the Spanish tyranny's murder of Ferrer probably had a lot more to do with its downfall than his actual classes ever did.
The Univ. of Minn. cheer was created to spite Yalies.
And the Univ. of Wisc. rouser was reworded to spite the Univ. of Minn. for not choosing it.
148 -- start here and keep reading. The view of Burke as basically the champion of caution/pragmatism/if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it is basically totally wrong. Modern conservatism from the beginning was in favor of radical measures in support of reaction.
147 -- an RS7 is very very nice but I think there are like 4 of those in my building's garage, no big whoop.
What I get from that page is that the purpose of culture is to establish the standards by which we can conclusively determine that we're better than Those People. Which is plausible enough, but probably not what they were shooting for.
I guess at least one of those "basicallys" should go.
The view of Burke as basically the champion of caution/pragmatism/if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it is basically totally wrong
Well, maybe Burke really didn't think that. But someone should. Caution and pragmatism are good.
Oddly, Harvard's fight song was created to spite Harvard.
157 -- yes, absolutely. But the labeling of caution or pragmatism as particularly conservative virtues, or having much of anything to do with the modern conservative movement (where "modern" means at least post 1750) is wrong.
161: I think my use of "spite" to mean "poke mild fun at" is in keeping with the song.
The view of Burke you're presenting was understood by his great contemporary Hazlitt; there's nothing new about it. Hazlitt wrote two essays on Burke, both worth reading. One execrates him for just the reasons you suggest, the other remains enthralled by his vision and passion.
I certainly agree that the conventional view taught in many places that mentions none of this but makes him a great thinker needs to be confronted, but not everybody is coming from there.
Burke was certainly influential. The notion that he was strongly in favor of "caution" or "pragmatism" or opposed to radical measures to shore up authority (in his case, primarily feudal property owners) is wrong, and it's an important fact about the history of "conservatism" that is has always been a radically reactionary movement; the radicalism is not just some new invention of the North Carolina state legislature or something.
154.last gets it right. You've been gone from CA too long, ogged.
Perhaps. I was impressed. But I want Halford to tell me again how he lives in the hood.
I really should thank idp for making me look up Hazlitt on Burke; it led me to this essay which I'd read once but had mostly forgotten. Is there anything better? More appropriate for the current moment? I mean this is just one awesome part of many:
. More than twenty years have passed since I first did battle with the ice-cold adder-like selfishness which [Malthus] elevated into a virtue and employed for the single purpose of torturing the poor, under the pretence of reforming their morals. In all these years nothing has hurt and angered me more than the tone, to a great extent initiated, familiarized, Christianized or at least made respectable by him, adopted so often in what would be thought "good company ", towards those who are termed "the lower orders ". I cannot describe the contempt and disgust I have felt when I have witnessed the sleek, smiling, glossy, gratuitous assumption of superiority to every feeling of humanity, honesty, or principle, making part of the etiquette and moral costume of the table, and every profession of toleration or favour for " the lower orders ", that is, for the great mass of our fellow-creatures, treated as an indecorum and breach of the harmony of well-regulated society. I have felt, when witnessing this sealing of every feeling of nature under the smooth, cold, glittering varnish of pretended refinement, that I would rather see the feelings of our common nature expressed in the most naked and natural way, that the brutality of mobs is more endurable than the inhumanity of polite society, even as a bear's garden is preferable to an adder's den.
I guess I don't really get the "bear's garden" vs "adder's den" metaphor but I guess bears are cooler and more direct than adders.
166 -- I never said I worked in the hood. My building also has some guy who owns a brand new, all-white Rolls Phantom convertible with the personalized plate "NEGOT8R."
bears are cooler and more direct than adders.
But adders have cold blood and so must be cooler. But adders may in fact be less direct than bears.
I assume the bear's garden has to do with Andrew Sullivan.
Isn't a beargarden some kind of rough bar? I think? AWB would know for many reasons?
(Googling.)
It's where you went to watch bearbaiting. So, a lowclass, violent place of amusement but in Hazlitt's opinion wholesomer than coldhearted upperclass pastimes.
Hey, that solves it! I have to say that honestly I wouldn't mind watching some bearbaiting.
Bears' gardens are preferable to adders' dens because you are warm, below the storm, can't be found, etc.
Something else you might like is Albert Hirschman's The Rhetoric of Reaction. He names Burke's approach "The Perversity Thesis."
168: somebody has to neg the 'taters.
Delighted to have him out there busting civil rights activist heads, but wouldn't want to have him over for dinner.
WFB wouldn't have had the sheriff to dinner because the sheriff was in all likelihood a Democrat, not because WFB was his intellectual superior.
174: Buy you a drink, four-eyes?
I may be annoyed by this because the difference between Frederick Douglass and Stephen Douglas is the only thing I demand students learn in my Civil War course.
One was black and the other was short. The easy way to remember this is that the short one has fewer esses in his last name.
The fact remains, the sheriff was a Democrat, at the time. He died before he had to vote Republican.
Absolutely. A racist southern Civil Rights-era sheriff was almost certainly a Democrat. You betcha. Nothing truer has ever been said.
I used to be a liberal, but ever since I found out about Strom Thurmond I'm outraged by Benghazi.
following teo, oudemia, St John's; Reed changes its choice of secondary classical works for the required classes every so often; I expect reading the ones Reed *doesn't* choose might show a world consistent with modern conservatism, rather as the ones they *do* choose leave room for modern liberalism.
Tangential, while Unfogged is long on childrearing practice:
A couple of Project Gutenberg frivolous novels I've read recently have had long sections in the ?18th- to- 19th C? norm of the (rich) children being confined most of the day to the day nursery with scant supervision, doing a surprising amount of their own cooking (badly, setting things on fire) and creating their own law. And the public schools were getting less Lord-of-the-Flies ish at the same time, yesno? The popular public school novels are mostly quite late 19th c.? and are understandable if home life was either brutish or solitary. So, truly traditional Anglo-Saxon childrearing: _Flowers in the Attic_.
And the public schools were getting less Lord-of-the-Flies ish at the same time, yesno?
Yes, at least going by Lytton Strachey on Dr. Thomas Arnold.
Dr. Thomas Arnold
Git. Probably a ponce, too.
There's a tell: what does Ridgeview think of _Tom Brown's Schooldays_? How about _Locksley Hall_? Who's gone far enough to argue for the introduction of primogeniture to the US?
Per Albion's Seed primogeniture had pretty strong pull in the colonial south and I'm fairly sure has been proposed (along with the creation of a real American aristocracy) as a solution for America's ills more than once.
this is an example of the phenomenon where the existence of the Tea Party confers all other varieties of conservative ideology, however objectively objectionable, with an unearned halo of reasonableness.
that, or the phenomena called trolling one's own blog.
I was going to make a snotty comment about Great Books programs and Saul Bellow, but Bellow apparently later said that he had read and enjoyed Thomas Mofolo's Chaka (which was not written in Zulu, but whatever, I'll count it as legitimately admitting that the statement* was wrong).
* Which Bellow claimed was a misquotation.
Bellow said the weight of culture was too heavy at Hutchen's UofC, and escaped to Northwestern as an undergrad.
Matthew Arnold was very critical of primogeniture, in Culture and Anarchy and elsewhere.
Snarkout, is it you whom I remember referring once to Dorothy Day's The Long Loneliness?
193 - I think you are half-rememebering; I've talked about Dorothy Day in the past, but I don't think I've read The Long Loneliness. (I've read The Eleventh Virgin and some of her journalism.)
There's a right-wing lesbian Marine Southern comic author who has called for the reintroduction of primogeniture and duelling. Ha-ha-serious. Can't remember her name.
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Tweety, were you the one who mentioned Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and what a bunch of sleazebags the New Hollywood crew turned out to be? 'Cause I just started reading it and Jesus Christ, what a bunch of sleazebags they turned out to be.
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196: sounds like me. Not at all in a lovable rogue way, either. Dennis Hopper: scary, violent, probably mentally ill person!
197: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking of, having just read about Hopper having broken his wife's nose. Also: Peter Fonda trying to stick his foot up Jacqueline Bissett's skirt.
That's basically what Fonda did in Thomas and the Magic Railroad, except it was his head up his ass.
The syllabus tracks my kid's school pretty closely but without the weird US-ian baggage. Kid's school has other weird baggage. Also, his Latin teacher is a tall, willowy and impossibly chic woman with a family background at least partially from SE Asia, defying all stereotypical images of Latin teachers.
I don't know why I'm still upset with him for that. It's not as if the movie would have been good if he gave a better performance. Baldwin also sucked in it, but at least he was clearly trying.
As several have previously said: "St. Johns for elementary school kids but with weird-ass ideological baggage."
Annapolis is lovely little city. Ridgeview is in Ft. Collins? Not as nice as the Chesapeake Bay, but then I'm biased.
I guess I don't really get the "bear's garden" vs "adder's den" metaphor but I guess bears are cooler and more direct than adders.
I recall reading once that natural historians used to call the place where a pack of wolves divides a kill a "wolves' kitchen," an expression that seems to have fallen into desuetude.
"wolves' kitchen" is where you make a "dogs' breakfast"
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I know this is the worst sort of humblebragging, really I do and I already stopped myself from posting this, at two different times today, but I.F. and I really are struggling with which puppy she should adopt which job/life to take, and we really really really need to decide like yesterday.
Any reassurances that Vienna, in spite of its meagre sunshine, is an awesome city and I'll totally be able to find a job there? (Or alternately that it's terrible, and she should definitely pick DC or GA instead?)
Gah I'm history's greatest monster. Sorry.
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The Vienna in Virginia is close enough to DC that it's really not a separate choice from DC.
207: yes, but the Vienna of sausages is quite different to a Frankfurt.
Job-wise Vienna is basically DC; I'd say it's probably less fun/more suburban and expensive to live in than Silver Spring, but YMMV and the presence of the Orange Line is probably a big plus. (I've never lived in NoVa, just worked out there.)
I'm going to need the shoulder blade of an ox, a heated iron, and a copy of the work visa rules for Austria.
Snarkie just loves to work out, wherever.
I think he means the Vienna where Hitler lived.
That is, where Hitler lived before 1946.
As I've said before, I would only want to live in Vienna during the Cold War. Otherwise it's just tourists, and Nazis, and Nazi tourists.
Pick wherever her tenure odds are the highest. The UMD department I'm familiar with keeps about 1/3 of its assistant profs, which is unusually low for my field. Once tenured, she can look to move somewhere you like better, or look before the tenure decision to move to a tenured position elsewhere.
Practically speaking, do you actually need a job? Her income might be enough for you to be a housespouse. I know very few profs who have spouses with time-intensive careers. It's pretty handy to have someone with schedule flexibility for stuff like errands (or kids, if that's your plan).
I know very few profs who have spouses with time-intensive careers.
* sob *
* pokes at JavaScript console *
215.1: Tenure practices vary wildly within Europe, and I don't know much about Austria, so: is it even relevant there? A lot of places in Europe just have permanent jobs, with no notion of "tenure".
I know very few profs who have spouses with time-intensive careers.
Interesting---I thought there were quite a few two-academic couples nowadays. And academia has plenty of schedule flexibility---work any 80 hours you want!
I know very few profs who have spouses with time-intensive careers.
I wonder if this is a field-specific thing, because nearly every prof I know has a spouse who's either a prof or some other time-intensive thing.
I wonder when I last posted a comment that wasn't pwned. It's certainly been a good while.
My asst prof salary is certainly not enough to support our household in the manner to which we have become accustomed. Professional school salaries are different, of course. In my limited circles, work-from-home programmer seems like a very popular faculty spouse career these days.
Tenure practices vary wildly within Europe, and I don't know much about Austria, so: is it even relevant there?
It would be relevant. I've got this weird rash and man oh man does it itch. One time I ate a whole bag of marshmallows. I'm likely to spend a little extra on dairy products.
Right. If you want cheese instead of "cheese food".
223: Then 215.1 seems like an important consideration, not that I took that sort of advice. Though IME tenure rates at UMD are very high, so it's probably department-dependent.
I have no useful insights on these places as places-to-live.
Flip a three-sided coin.
Incidentally, did M/I/T/H come up at all when you visited UMD? That seems like a place for a humanities-oriented person also into tech. But maybe they aren't looking for programmers.
What is it with Austria and starting new research universities? I only know of two and they are both there.
If I google "New Austrian research university", google returns a bunch of hits about Australia.
Since nobody else is saying anything, I'm going to assume we solved trapnel's problem and I didn't notice. Good night all.
Sorta. I'm feeling pretty good about Vienna right now. Maybe it's just the hot chocolate I made.
Vienna is not in the land of chocolate, but it's close.
I recently rode in a friend's RS7.
Nice. Not long ago we had a guy carjack a Lexus ISF. I got pics out to everyone in patrol and such with the message "when he runs get the chase on on the regional channel quick because our Impalas are not going to be able to catch that". Sure enough he fled from us twice in two days and left us in the dust. He got narc'd out though and we were waiting for him when he went to ditch the car in a supermarket parking lot.
Any chance a FPP could delete 223? I realized it's pretty identifying. I guess this is why everyone talked about stupid guinea pigs and wolf cubs and whatever.
What would your work permit situation be? Also, how do you feel about living in a foreign country long term? It can be alienating for some people, others do just fine. What are her living location preferences? Do you prefer mountains or beaches? How fast do you think you can get to full functional fluency in Deutsch, with full comprehension of dialect? In my case I'd probably choose Vienna for family proximity and mountain reasons, but other than that I'd probably choose DC, though it would be very close. GA would be a distant third.
If it's any comfort, I have no idea what the hell 223 means.
Also depends on whether you believe in ghosts.
239 Spend a minute with google and you will. If he doesn't want it to be identifiable it should be removed, though stuff he has said about the other two locations make them pretty easily identifiable as well.
GA would be a distant third.
Eh, maybe? At least for me, there would be the factor of "DC, all of the shitty climate at 3x the cost of living."
241, Googling what? "marshmallow" "rash" "vienna"?
I think we'd get married, which would give me full residence and work rights as family of an EU national. I believe I'd be able to enjoy living abroad; I was mostly unhappy in Heidelberg, but I was also mostly unhappy in NYC, and for that matter mostly unhappy for the first 2 years I was here in SF. The move would be January, so we'd both have some time to relearn German, and hopefully the Dual Career Advice office would be able to help me find something. I might also be able to continue as a contractor with my current company, though I haven't discussed it with them.
Some sort of giant creature is apparently eating the moon.
Yeah, your rights as a spouse of other-country EU national are often better than as spouse of local-country citizen.
Some sort of giant creature is apparently eating the moon.
FOR A TIME, I CONSIDERED SPARING YOUR WRETCHED LITTLE MOON. BUT NOW YOU SHALL WITNESS ITS DISMEMBERMENT.
Regarding Vienna, Trapnel, contact me off-blog.
I should say that I left the comment re:academic spouses thinking of my particular area. I'm in a field where profs run groups of maybe 8-15 grad students and postdocs (up to huge groups of 50) who do experiments all day (not usually all night, mercifully). New profs have to equip labs and train incoming students for the first couple years, which can't be done away from the lab. Outside my general areas, I have no idea what kinds of careers spouses have. Most of my classmates working as profs who are married have spouses with either no job or low-hours jobs, so I don't think it's changed a lot from thirty years ago. I can think of four or five dual-professor couples in my subfield (many more lecturer-professor or staff scientist-professor). Yes, that is a very low number. I just thought I'd throw out the suggestion, since it might simplify things if not working (or at least not needing to find a job before or immediately after moving) is a realistic option. (And because I'm a feminist.)
225.1: Yes, I'm sure rates vary widely across departments (and are hard to find as an outsider). A coworker's husband was an assistant prof there, and he was told that number in his third year. It was really surprising, since it's not all that highly ranked in his field. He took another position elsewhere offered with tenure before his clock ran out. I just figured that it's a worthwhile consideration. It's a bit different not being granted tenure at Puppy U. From what I can tell, most folks get multiple offers at other top 10 schools, sometimes accepted before the formal decision (it's a running joke to some that a few recent Nobel recipients were denied tenure at Puppy U equivalents). If one of the schools is Puppy U, then it's not a stupid choice at all. If you don't get tenure at Guinea Pig U, then it's West Betta State as far as I can tell.
I would recommend, incidentally, that if you recognize that you're not going to get tenure at Big Yak University, and you're vying for a job at Western Salamander University, you should probably not say that your reason for applying is "oh, I'd never get tenure at Big Yak [implying that the Salamanders will be jest so wowed at your fancy book-larnin' that they won't notice that you can't teach.]"
In my field here at Puppy U all of the spouses/partners I know of have reasonably high-powered jobs, either in academia or in business at a fairly high level. I guess on the one hand labs are smaller and on the other hand the cost of living is insane? Also, I dunno, it's a power couple-y part of the world; there are lots of opportunities for two people to be pretty high achieving in different realms.
Any reassurances that Vienna, in spite of its meagre sunshine, is an awesome city and I'll totally be able to find a job there?
I've only visited, but from friends who've lived there: kinda stodgy, but pretty livable. Though small and old and fusty, it's still a major European city, so you've got public transportation and tasty dairy products and good theater. Plus, Austrian food is delicious and their hilarious accent will make you feel superior about your German, even if your German isn't that good.
It was a long long time ago, but my very brief European trailing spouse experiment founded on their nearly obsessive credentialism, far worse than in the US. Among other bases for failure. Of which there were many.
I'm sure things are better now -- they can hardly be worse -- and you've got better skills than I ever did.
Also, I dunno, it's a power couple-y part of the world; there are lots of opportunities for two people to be pretty high achieving in different realms.
Right, if both of the spouses in a relationship have to have high-powered jobs, they usually have to live in an area like where you live. If only one has to have a high-powered job, they can live in, like, the other 95% of the country.
Regarding Vienna, Trapnel, contact me off-blog. IT MEANS NOTHING TO MEEEEEEEEEEE.
Too bad it's the fin de the wrong siecle to be Vienna-bound. I bet it was awesome a century or so ago.
I suspect WWI might have made Vienna a little less awesome than it might otherwise have been.
Okay, it's settled. Trapnel and IF should move to Vienna 106 years ago and plan for her to get a new job before her tenure review.
I liked Vienna a lot (in its "I seem stodgy but am secretly slightly bonkers" sort of way) when I was there for a couple weeks. It seems like might start to feel really small sooner rather than later, though.
re: 259
Vienna was quite a long way from either front, though.
Vienna is probably way more awesome in the realities where the empire didn't fracture, but that's such a far out counterfactual that I can't imagine what that world would be like.
True. Towards 1918 it was pretty devoid of awesome, though, due to lack of food etc.
Don't die of 'flu, IF and Trapnel!!!
I hear there's good money for Americans in the black market penicillin trade. Stay out of the sewers.
We have a severe faculty partner employment problem at Wolf Cub U. It's so rural that anyone whose job might be in a city has to commute an hour to get to work. (An hour commute is no big whoop if you're on a train, but driving every day, often in obscenely horrible weather... shudder.) Several profs have moved to the city just to keep their marriages together. Considering that profs at WCU are expected to work totally obscene hours on-campus, it's a nightmare.
OTOH, if you move here as a single person, you might as well start thinking of sex as a dream you once had that has no place in reality. People drink a lot.
The best planners among our faculty marry people who have extremely modest ambitions and can work in support on campus. One faculty spouse I know of, who used to be the kind of person whose job was the saving-lives kind with lots of international travel and yelling, is now assisting students with summer employment. It's like watching a grizzly bear at a tea party.
Go to Vienna, do whatever Trotsky did, avoid Mexico.
266. Also, if Trapnel gets stung by an insect and develops an abcess, he should go to a hospital and not make IF treat him to save money.
I will say that the one of the best "credentials" I ever had was "staff spouse*" at The Butler Did It ... Really University. $10 one-time fee, library, gym etc. privileges--and we lived within walking/biking distance which was quite rare for that be-autoed metropolis.
*Spouse was not faculty, however.
270: Last spring I transcribed Webern's letter to Schoenberg detailing his last visit to Berg in the hospital. Wrenching!
Congratulations to IF and Trapnel!
I think we'd get married . . .
Congratulations for multiple reasons, in fact.
272 -- Tampa Bay Dominican Institute of Reflexology University?
OTOH, if you move here as a single person, you might as well start thinking of sex as a dream you once had that has no place in reality.
Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.
272: no, it must be a reference... Mousetrap University? Christie University? Marple College, Oxford?
I hear there's good money for Americans in the black market penicillin trade. Stay out of the sewers.
On the Weird Synchronicity front, that's the third "Third Man" reference I've encountered this morning.
Regarding Vienna: be careful. The Russians look about ready to roll over the Ukraine. The Western border is a mere 350 miles away.
278: It's a reference to the fate of its founder and namesake.
Ah yes I should have definitely known that one. Embarrassing for a bunch if reasons.
279.2. I doubt if the Russians will invade Slovakia, which is in the EU and, I think, NATO. And they can't get to Austria without doing so.
Because I am overly fond of oblique references and their potential to lead to wacky misunderstandings.
But it's better than trying to parse the motherfucking animal names.
The page on the site about the butler and his chloroforming says that he planned the crime in partnership with an "unscrupulous" lawyer; you don't say!
My kid (not through me) is one of the most direct descendants of good ole murdered WMR, though there are a bunch of folks in equal standing in that regard.
267: I'm pretty sure we are not at the same school, but I have a pair of friends who meet that exact description. Except that she's about to quite to be a stay at home mom for a while, since setting up summer internships involves lots of travel to bigger cities that sucks to do when you have a 9 month-old.
x-trapnel, staying with your current employer might work out well if you can swing it. My husband did this when we moved from the bay area to a rural town, and then a rust-belt city, for my academic job. The upside is that while he is underpaid by Silicon Valley standards, he makes way above market rate for our current location. And has no commute.
"All sobersided but secretly quite weird" suits Vienna down to the ground. It's no mystery how the unconscious mind was discovered there. It's also a bit like drinking good non-alcoholic beer; "this tastes OK but there's something missing I can't put my finger on, but I reckon it's usually between 3 and 5% by volume". Just in this case it's "about 15% of the population".
Also, it would be much cooler if Berlin wasn't as cool as it has been for most of my life - a lot of interesting people there start doing something interesting, run smack into a wall of sacher torte, and piss off to Berlin or London where nobody minds their green hair/choice of partner/computer diary/whatever.
It seems like might start to feel really small sooner rather than later, though
I don't quite get this. Vienna has 1.75m people--that's a lot! Is it that the metro area is smaller than, e.g., DC's?
Oh, I was there only 2 weeks, so I know nothing. Probably more or less exactly like DC, I imagine.
I was also only in Vienna for two weeks, many years ago, but it seemed like an incredibly pleasant place to live, especially if you're on a marriage+kids track and have enough in pay or benefits to live there comfortably.
It's also a bit like drinking good non-alcoholic beer; "this tastes OK but there's something missing I can't put my finger on, but I reckon it's usually between 3 and 5% by volume"
3-5? I wish you could find beer in that range over here; the average these days seems to be around 7.
Vienna is one of the places I feel most at home in the world but I can't guarantee that the charm is obvious to everyone I spent three months there as a student, learning German and just hanging out. The weight of history has rather diminished since then but it still seems to me to have the balance just right between faded glory and stuff actually, you know, working. In Knife Crime Island we can still do faded imperial glory, but nothing bloody works. Also, the rich people in Austria are rather discreet.
The office is drinking champagne to celebrate winning a prize so I can't apparently type full stops.