Osteoarthritis. I use OA for that all the time.
Regarding the "the kids are alright", I believe he's referencing the documentary movie that came out in 1979.
I don't know why he even knows this much about rock n' roll. I'm sure everything he said about superhero movies and YA fiction applies to popular music as well.
He needs to put down the Buber and take a long walk. Preferably off a short pier. It took a real TERFy turn there at the end too. Fuck them.
And I'm certainly sympathetic to the view that contemporary superhero movies are not cinema though I much prefer Martin Scorsese's more nuanced take on that.
I figured out "OA literature". It stands for "Old Adult Literature." It's a joke. This guy is funny.
Are people pressured to give their pronouns in professional life? I've never been asked. I've barely seen it outside of Twitter.
6: No, but I was asked if I was pregnant or lactating before my first vaccination at THE Woke State University.
The only response to part 5 is to refer to Smith solely as she, zer, it, fae, etc, until ze cracks and admits that she prefers he/him. Fae would pretend otherwise for a while, of course, but eventually scale would get tired of it.
So why do terrible ideas clump together? This guy reminds me of Freddie de Boer, about whom I was totally wrong and whose deterioration has made me totally reevaluate my ability to judge people. Like, de Boer has a few stodgy-snobby ideas that aren't obviously incompatible with leftist ideas and then he shades off into awful beliefs. I am naturally drawn to stodgy-snobby beliefs about culture and yet I hate the rest of the thing; there's no one who believes stodgy-snobby things about culture (with the exception of my dad) who doesn't port along transphobia, really dubious beliefs about religion and the contents of knowledge, etc. Why is this? And gender/transphobia is always the marker.
(Did anyone see that lunatic twitter thread that was going the rounds yesterday which started out as a stodgy complaint about anime translations using contemporary slang and turned into this grotesque transphobic rant? It was awful and shocking in its degree of ick but not totally unexpected.)
~~
Pop culture scholarship is often so interesting in itself and yet I find the subject so dull. Like, I will read any decent essay about superheroes, but please don't make me watch a superhero film, they are so dull and loud and boring.
I feel like pop culture rarely pushes me as a reader/viewer and I have to turn to scholarship to challenge myself. This is fine, I guess, but also weird - like, I can read, eg, Virginia Woolf or Rose Macauley and also be challenged by the act of reading, whereas an awful lot of science fiction and fantasy doesn't seem to do much for me as a reader. I don't feel like I'm an especially better or more informed reader after reading The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet the way I did after reading Mrs. Dalloway. This is fine on an individual level because TLWTASAP isn't some kind of failed attempt to be Virginia Woolf, but it does make me feel like a readerly diet of mostly accomplished, contemporary SF isn't doing me any favors.
Also I assume one can have an I-thou relationship to a superhero film, study it with the intent of moral self development, etc, right? If we're not saying that things are intrinsically interesting, then why not just study the MCU? Many people seem to find it fascinating.
Among the many reasons I despise the habit of "stating one's pronouns", and resent being pressured to do so in professional settings, is that my preferred pronouns are not generally included in the list of options. I am not being facetious when I say this.
One of the reasons this is so comically facetious is that if zir's gripe was actually omission of preferred pronouns from the list, then zir's complaint would be, "Why is it always a drop-down list instead of an open comment box?!? You're wrecking my ability to be included!"
"WHY CAN'T THEY INCLUDE THE `other: ____ ' OPTION FOR THE LOVE OF GOD?!"
I can watch about one comic book movie a year. They are too shouty.
We can watch four episodes of WandaVision before the kids all have a heart attack from the suspense. But it seemed promising. At least we got to the basic big reveal, so I'm not that curious to watch the rest.
The more I think about this, the more I think that in a way the essay is correct - the university as a place where you study difficult, specialized and non-popular stuff seems to be collapsing, and this is bad. If it were merely additive, sure, there's no reason not to write about the gothic as it appears in web series, or whatever. If anything, that helps people who are primarily interested in pop culture to understand pop culture better and is therefore good. But what seems to be happening is winnowing out of small language programs, etc.
It feels like snobby-stodgy people don't really want to read work by writers of color (engage with music by musicians of color, etc). When I think about formally challenging recent work that I've encountered, most of the stuff without terrible politics is by writers of color. (Or even, let's say, work with period-standard levels of terrible politics - like, Virginia Woolf had some repulsive views, but she was pretty typical for her time, not a Unity Mitford or something.)
I can barely sit through the extended fight scenes they have now.
10: He addresses this --
Admittedly, in principle such a dyad could be achieved with Marvel comics as much as with Nahuatl inscriptions. But in reality the institutional and cultural context in which pop-culture-focused pseudo-humanities are studied ensures that the student usually remains at the level of I-I identity, which is not a relation at all but pure narcissism, or at best attains a sort of I-Us community, where he or she can bask in the like-mindedness of other comics fans: in other words, academic studies as an institutional buttress for what youth subcultures have always been perfectly able to achieve in a much more anarchic way. (Thank God there was no option for goth studies when I began college in 1990 -- in any case I was already an expert.) Humanistic inquiry is not fandom; it is a basic category mistake to suppose that it is. Conversely, the indulgence of a young person's prior identification as a fan can seldom result in humanistic inquiry, even if the object of her or his fandom is not in principle excluded from the list of humanistic inquiry's possible objects.
I would no more read that essay than I would watch all the X-men movies in a row. But I'm willing to discuss them.
It must be that the only reason no one wants to take classes with this guy is because they love Batman too much.
Why shouldn't pop culture, youth cultures, subcultures be legitimate objects of humanistic inquiry? You can have a bunch of that and still have the classics and much else beside.
17: But that's so totally specious as not to count: "People who study the things I approve of are doing so for pure reasons, people who study things I think are stupid and bad are always-already corrupted". I mean, no serious person believes that there is no narcissism in the study of Important Subjects. If someone for some reason believes this, I can introduce them to some people.
I saw a somewhat less grumpy version of this same idea in an essay on 3Quarksdaily a few months ago. I'll try to find the link.
It was making essentially the point that Frowner makes in 15.1. University is one of the few times when people will have support in engaging with difficult/unfamiliar material. It doesn't have to be Western classics, it could be major works from India, China, wherever, but they should be alien enough to what students are used to that it stretches their reading practices to engage with it (and in that sense writings from ancient Rome are going to be as alien as writings from Tang Dynasty China).
For students to spend their university years in what are basically less fun versions of the same fan communities they already participate in is a wasted opportunity.
Youth culture is mostly YouTube videos of smug young men playing Minecraft.
I couldn't make it very far into this essay because I don't take Adderall, but what I did manage to read seemed like performative contradictions in a big, um, stack. Also, the guy's obscure preferred pronouns are "one/one's," correct?
If he gets a tapeworm, he can use they/ them without worrying about the grammar.
In the circles I run in, pronoun disclosure is pretty common at the start of a meeting, but no one ever, ever, provides a "list of options". He even says it: the protocol is stating your pronouns, as in you have the opportunity to provide them.
And when internet forms are sufficiently woke as to ask for pronouns, that usually goes along with knowing to include an "Other" text box.
Eh, not that great on a second read. I liked the thought that clickbait and capitalist cultural production were a single perspective that applied to all of superhero media, academic cultural analysis, and middlebrow TV. Not enough to outweigh the weaknesses.
9.1 is funny, a great response. I pretty much cosign 9.2, and I like comic books-- not enough to read a ton of them, but above zero.
The middlebrow TV swipe especially struck me-- Netflix boasted that House of Cards' production choices were data-driven. In retrospect, middlebrow seems like about the right description. Not to detract from the effectiveness-- it worked on me, I liked the first few seasons.
14. Here's the last page of the comic that introduced Vision in 1968. The preceding story ends with our hero android killing the robot who created him, whose silver head (still alive, but needs the side antennas intact to stay that way) winds up outside his underground lab in I guess the Bronx. I loved this kind of stuff as a kid.
https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/lxt4mo/the_last_page_of_avengers_57/
Do I have to read this thing or can I keep watching quality TV?
22: But surely that depends on the program. I wouldn't expect someone doing some kind of cultural studies degree to do nothing but sit around and watch Batman uncritically - I'm not au courant but I'd expect that they'd be reading all kinds of aesthetic theory, probably stuff about masculinity and the body, some queer theory about movies and the coding of sexuality, probably some stuff on the gothic. I'd ultimately expect them to encounter the Brontes, Wollstonecraft, Rhys and so on through the gothic and probably picaresque hero narratives starting in medieval Europe. Frankfurt School, theories of fascism and the body, etc.
It's just that all that stuff would be situated so differently than it would be if you encountered it as a standard history of the English novel or whatever. You'd have the same problem either way - given that humans are limited and four years is a short time, there's a limit to how well-situated your reading can be. If you start from a pop standpoint, you're probably not doing the really deep reads to understand high culture intertextual stuff, but if you start from a snob standpoint, you aren't going to do as well with the actual "how these books were read by real people who were also reading pop novels" angle.
28: No TV until your homework is done.
28: Neither! You should immediately begin devoting all your life to the study of an ancient epic poem.
Counterpoint: poetry gets old really fast.
33: Countercounter point: The older the better.
Why shouldn't pop culture, youth cultures, subcultures be legitimate objects of humanistic inquiry?
I'd draw a distinction between studying something vs teaching it at the undergraduate level. I'm fine with scholarly analysis of current popular culture: maybe the world doesn't desperately more journal articles on King Lear. Teaching is different. Students don't need a support structure to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the same way they need one to read Faust (and I say this as a big BVS fan, except for the last season that was kind of lame).
But surely that depends on the program. I wouldn't expect someone doing some kind of cultural studies degree to do nothing but sit around and watch Batman uncritically - I'm not au courant but I'd expect that they'd be reading all kinds of aesthetic theory, probably stuff about masculinity and the body, some queer theory about movies and the coding of sexuality, probably some stuff on the gothic.
I know this isn't what you meant, but this seems to skate pretty close to "Who needs literature when we have Theory?", which is an attitude that I'm very suspicious of.
Well, the author has a blog that seems focused for the moment on learning a Siberian language and early modern philosophy in global context, so I'll totally just read that instead. IME, no one who's any good at all is at their best ranting about the humanities. Every time I have tried it, I end up feeling like I ate a whole bag of potato chips. (I'm not exaggerating! The subject makes me queasy, not figuratively.)
Whatever institution it is that employs this loser should fire him thou and hire Frowner instead.
32 But only if you're not a fan of the poem.
But surely that depends on the program
Absolutely and I would much rather have students watching say, Ozu, or Sembène than watching Batman.
And I agree with the gist of 22.2 and AL's 35.1
35 Isn't BVS considered an ancient text by today's youth? How old were today's incoming freshpeople when the last episode aired?
I haven't yet read the article but this is my area - aesthetics, often drawing on pop culture. Surprisingly, it hasn't yet lead to sitting around talking about how much we like Batman or whatever. I use it either because the work is good despite not being what snobs consider Art*, as a pedagogical tool to reach students who worry that if they can't talk about Art they shouldn't speak, or because honestly it's a lot of fun and life is too short to write boring philosophy. It hasn't displaced reading classics, although being a philosopher we tend to read them to explain why they're wrong.
I can't speak for everyone but it would be really weird for me to design a university class in aesthetics that didn't include the Baumgarten/Hume/Kant run alongside newer work on street art and Black Panther or whatever.
*I hate definitions of art questions with a passion.
How come Batman and Robin had very clear nipples in suits but Batgirl did not?
At least we all agree that the kids today suck, right?
Does AWB lurk anymore? Would love to see her take, or otherwise, context on submerged academic politics.
42: I just had someone turn in an essay that they wrote speech-to-text while driving. So yes, they suck. But not because of what I put on my syllabus.
I watched Newt write an essay on his phone while we were on line to vote last fall, so yes, the children are terrible.
44: The kids today suck, but not in a way we can understand.
Learning to read hard things is a skill. Learning how to think deeply about things is a skill. It seems okay to acquire these independently, and sometimes to think deeply about things which are not also hard to read.
Has anyone mentioned Adorno and jazz yet?
OK, skimming the article. Thoughts: a) I-Thou: cringe. I mean, glad he liked his class with Wollheim on Freud, but the humanities have to be important even for those not wanting to bastardize Buber for the sake of a point. b) Absolutely right that the university has to be not just a big fan-fiction club, and it should be a place where people can read/experience hard things with formal assistance (there's a big social justice point here), but I don't see a whole hell of a lot of evidence that it is becoming one. One or two classes, or, gasp, one or two texts within a class isn't meaning no one teaches or studies Shakespeare and they cut Homer decades ago. c) The right has been shrieking about the death of classics for years while either failing to notice that their universities offer such classes (e.g., Douthat) or aggressively cutting languages/classics/philosophy because they're not data science. It's not like if we declared a moratorium on talking about Buffy we'd get tenure lines back. It's not as though schools that teach poetry have nothing to fear. d) I don't know how the hell pronouns fits into this, and I suspect author just doesn't like his 30-something colleagues.
It's not like if we declared a moratorium on talking about Buffy we'd get tenure lines back.
But has it been tried?
FWIW: have I acquired the skill of reading hard things? Not necessarily.
Habermas is horrible to read. The nutrition label on the back of bread is better.
On the other hand, someone should figure out whatever the curriculum was when/where Rick Santorum was "educated" and replace the lot of it.
I'm sure it's not the fault of the hard working faculty that no one explained where the word 'nittany' came from and why it's still in use.
Ironically, the Algonquian word for "covers up child molestation to win games" is pronounced "Pat-er-no."
46- on line vs in line is a New York regional thing. I used to say I was waiting on line (pre-smartphones) and people would ask if I had a computer with me.
I thought 42 was some breastfeeding joke in response to 41.
Strong agree with 15.1. I think it's helpful to separate college classes and majors into "rigorous" vs. "bullshit." Rigorous essentially means it involves a serious amount of reading, writing, foreign language, math, or labs, while bullshit is everything else (say watching a video and giving one-sentence answers). All the growth right now in the university is in bullshit majors. And for some bizarre reasons parents and HR departments strongly prefer bullshit majors. I think this is weird. After all people still think a Harvard degree is valuable and Harvard doesn't allow bullshit majors. At some point employers are going to figure out that you get better people by hiring people who have done something rigorous in their life. What's the point in hiring only college graduates if they're all just taking high school classes in college? The whole thing is bizarre. I don't understand what employers think the point of college is.
"HR departments strongly prefer bullshit majors"
In a specific type of business, like MCU set designer? Otherwise I can't think of an example where that would be true.
College is two things: a credential factory to certify that a kid can follow instructions and an education. You can do either, often at the same school, sometimes in the same classroom.
I mean, I only had to read The Brothers Karamazov because I took honors classes.
60 The other thing is networking.
What employer wants a rigorous misanthrope? They want people who will fit in with the culture, including recognizing their place in it, and make them money while executing instructions. I'm not saying there isn't a place for rigor in the real world. It's just that, like calculus, a whole lot of human endeavor just doesn't require it.
But the people who study Batman should be required to take a class on Don Quixote as well.
For all its faults, the Marvel Universe way more accessible to undergrads than, say, Homer. I mean, its good for them to deal with Homer as well, but if the goal is to work on exercising their critical thinking and writing skills, its going to be easier to make progress using a canon they actually understand.
And I wonder if that isn't a good heuristic: if you're using calculus in your work, even a little, than rigor is important.
I think we can all agree that we were better off when this sort of axe-grindy rant took the form of, you know, Norman Mailer threatening to fist-fight people in the lettercol of NYRB and Pauline Kael making up a bunch of lies about Citizen Kane's budget to prove that Welles was a clout thief.
I agree, the Simpsons has been on for like 30+ years, kids today are much more likely to connect with Marvel movies.
Brad Pitt's Achilles has aged pretty well, imo. An asshole's asshole, embodying the concept of immortality through spectacle.
Trump doesn't wish he was Hitler, he wishes he was Achilles.
Now I'm going to ban myself for a few hours.
58: Those majors aren't like "Marvel Studies" and "underwater pronoun weaving", though, they're fitness studies and homeland security/law-enforcement
I think my cousin's kid graduated with a degree in P.E.
59.1 I think (though I'm not sure) that it's not that HR depts prefer bullshit majors, but rather that they're full of people who don't know anything about the jobs that they're hiring for and so they write ads where if it's like a caterer they ask for "a college degree in food management", and said degrees are inevitably bullshit degrees.
64: The point is that it's not just about math. Like your job requires a lot of reading and writing, so you should want to hire people who majored in the humanities or social sciences and so have learned how to do a lot of reading a writing.
68: Exactly. Humanities degrees are rigorous and shrinking. The growing degrees that are bullshit aren't any type of arts or sciences.
One of our big problems right now is that students really really don't want to take a foreign language because that's too hard for them, and so they won't major in the college of arts and sciences. We keep coming up with plans to attract majors that are like "let's a have a Spanish and Business major" because it'll have great employment placement, and students won't do it because language classes are hard because they require actually learning something and not just bullshitting.
Spanish is easy. The other languages are hard.
And I wonder if that isn't a good heuristic: if you're using calculus in your work, even a little, than rigor is important.
I think I'm a counterexample.
Brad Pitt's Achilles has aged pretty well
I enjoyed Troy and am kind of impressed that it got made at all. It was a pretty gutsy move in 2003 to propose a cast-of-thousands, swords-and-sandals "epic" of the kind that had last been popular in the early 60s.
Re: bullshit majors, I always recommend Paying for the Party when this subject comes up, so I guess I'll mention it again.
(Although the ways in which I'm sloppy are not mathematical.)
A well-balanced adult has forgotten both calculus and Dostoevsky.
74.last: Indeed I should read that, it's about my university!
A well-balanced member of your favorite out-group to insult drools out of both sides of their mouth.
Also, I'm in more or less constant (but minor) pain from my Achilles tendon. It responds to NSAIDs, but I can't take those because of stomach issues.
My dad takes a knife to the back of all his shoes and hacks off the 1-2" that comes anywhere close to his Achilles tendon, and it seems to help. You could try that.
I think trying to protect it has given me OA in my hip.
Don't wear your shoes when cutting them though or you may nick yourself in a vulnerable place.
The article in the OP is complaining about a lot of things, but the main one or the common thread seems to be the watering down of the studies of the humanities. This is a real problem, and a fairly serious one by the standards of problematic social trends. The article in the OP acknowledges market forces but still seems to be blaming this overall on geek culture, or the left, or modern youth or something like that. That's not just not right, it's so crazy that I'd wonder about intentional trolling or just expect it at the Mad Hatter's tea party. (Is an allusion to Alice in Wonderland highbrow enough?) Does that sound right to anyone else?
83: I was held by the ears when dipped in invincibility potion.
Full immersion is the way to go.
58: The point is to get the ordinary people into bullshit majors that justify why Harvard grads who were encouraged to study rigorous things make more money. Oh, you couldn't study economics/philosophy/history/French because your university cut it? Too bad, should have had wealthy parents.
Moby, I'm the wrong kind of doctor, but look up eccentric calf raises and see if that helps.
84: It seems necessary to sort out the difference between the proliferation of bullshit majors vs the watering down of traditional majors. One of my majors was was English, and back in the late 80s/early 90s it was pretty traditional. Mama Day by Gloria Naylor was probably the most un-canonical thing I read.
There's also the matter of change vs watering down. Expanding the canon with more work in English from India and the Caribbean is different from reorienting the major to focus on the hermeneutics of the Star Wars expanded universe.
Moby, I'm the wrong kind of doctor, but look up eccentric calf raises and see if that helps.
Cala is not a veterinarian?
You're thinking of that salty Australian sandwich spread.
I feel like the "no homo" direction of Troy is only going to age worse though, no?
87: French
Anecdata: My kid's at a good US university, loves languages, and is not minoring in romance languages because very few of the other students majoring in the subject can actually speak French, are not interested in doing any work, and the curriculum is geared towards them. In his biased (but maybe accurate, who knows) view, these are legacy students/ SAT coach + private school admissions. He claims that the expensive classes there are making his French worse, he's keeping up with a pay-to-converse app that lets him shoot the breeze with Francophone African professionals for like $3/hour. Chatting with someone white in France is apparently a lot more money.
So I guess that's one tally for not all of the kids being all right. At at least his school, there's definitely a place in the humanities for kids who don't want to work and whose parents want to pay tuition. I have no idea how the professors could respond.
IDK if we have any classicists left here but ISTR they say the original language doesn't support a homo reading at all. (I mean, unless you just want a more equitable distribution of Pitt. Which, fine.)
Thanks for 36, lk. I was wondering what the author's other writing was like, but chose faster and lazier over any background reading. The history of philosophy excerpt is indeed much better than the sloppy essay.
We are starting to look at colleges for the oldest. He's fluent in Spanish (and English to preempt a Moby joke) and is learning Arabic, and is into cybersecurity. That seems like a productive combination for future career options but maybe is fighting the last war, literally. He's also an Italian citizen so can go live and work anywhere in the EU including attending universities that might be of interest.
English is the one that is hard to learn.
There's a surplus of fascinating, interesting people. There's also a surplus of mediocre people with more than their share of resources. There's also a surplus of mediocre people with less than their share of resources. Some of each of this group attends college. Have I left anyone out?
98.last: You forgot the people who just suck.
This reads to me like warmed-over Allan Bloom.
This whole essay is hilarious to me, if for no other reason than that the class in which I discuss Buber's I-Thou distinction is my science fiction course.
One should endeavor to focus on one's strengths.
My suspicion is that amidst all the bullshit and laziness and sloppy thinking, The Kids Today are no worse educated overall than prior generations, and probably better. It doesn't take all that many good classes/teachers in amidst the mediocrity to plant a seed. Yes, a frightening portion of the population is pig-ignorant and unable to think its way out of a paper bag, but 'twas ever thus, and I think the movement is probably in the right direction.
Kids today are undoubtedly better behaved than prior generations with the lack of lead in their diets. They're probably better educated too, we just can't agree on what that means.
I am unwilling to read the essay based on the ignorant dismissiveness of the comment about YA literature. Clearly s/he hasn't in any way engaged with the scholarship of the field on this, and I doubt very much they've read more than a couple of books either.
Also, I liked Buber a lot when I studied him 20+ years ago and I refuse to read this doofus because I don't want to start disliking him.
OT: Charley, Montana is getting another Congressional seat!
We used to eat lead paint chips and then watch reruns of The BradyBunch. How hard could it be to beat us?
I tried to watch WandaVision, but couldn't. Taking a nap instead.
88
84: It seems necessary to sort out the difference between the proliferation of bullshit majors vs the watering down of traditional majors. One of my majors was was English, and back in the late 80s/early 90s it was pretty traditional. Mama Day by Gloria Naylor was probably the most un-canonical thing I read.
How about the watering down of the non-traditional majors? I gather that some film studies courses, like Scott Eric Kaufman's, were fairly rigorous. Or broadening the major in more senses than just multiculturalism? I had a 200- or 300-level Science Fiction class for my English major. The curriculum included Frankenstein, probably something by HG Wells, Ralph 124C 41+ (by Hugo Gernsback, the guy the Hugos are named after; I assure you, academic interest is the only reason anyone would read it) and the Star Trek episode "Darmok". The first two, I think people would relatively easily agree that they could be in some kind of canon. If nothing else, they're old enough and still being talked about. The last two haven't had the chance to stand the test of time yet, but "Darmok" might.
And again, this kind of stuff (to lump together classes teaching Star Trek and an assignment to produce a one-sentence response to a video, as per 58) isn't happening because professors are too woke, because liberal activists bully college administrators too much, or because the MCU movies are dumber than the blockbuster movies of 50 years ago. It's happening because people are treating college like it's essential for everyone but it's getting funded worse and worse, so there's more of a "butts in seats" mentality.
I mean, isn't it? I'm not in academia, I can't be sure. I'm just saying, I agree with the article in the OP about a problem, but seem to disagree about the cause of it.
Professor Smith is a bad writer in a fascinating way: he doesn't have that fatuous conservative-journalist tone, it's not standard Bad Humanities Writing, it's not only blogger-unused-to-editors excess. I've tried cursorily three times now to read the OP link, and I can't get through it. I tried the earlier jeremiad and had the same reaction. It's radically, monologically dull; and when I said it was a stack of performative contradictions, the main one is that he's talking on and on about I-Thou and relationality and attentively considering all parties to the interaction, all within a specific genre of web-essay/cultural commentary whose addressee is undefined, unleavened in this case by anecdote or evidence beyond one M.A. student writing one thesis on Ghost in the Shell. I conclude that he's been reading Leibniz from within Descartes' stove.
However, please sign me up for this, along with a few other people here:
Nor am I being facetious when I say that it may be time to start thinking about alternative institution-building. If universities don't want to teach and to preserve real humanities, then those of us who do may have to go and do so elsewhere under a different arrangement, one that permits us to pay attention to the things we study in the way that they merit.
Yes, FFS, do it fucking yesterday. It has been impossible for the university system to support the existing supply of talented, dedicated scholars for decades. OF COURSE we need alternative institutions to support humanities research. OF COURSE WE DO.
106 last I saw that! It's so exciting because it's likely that my half will be blue.
110:
My main concern is with not wasting the (probably only) opportunity to stretch yourself in terms of what kinds of art you can appreciate. So I wouldn't make the big distinction between canonical vs not canonical (although I'm probably more bullish on the idea of a canon than some), but between "likely to seek out and read/watch on your own" vs not. So a course on science fiction: good. A course on science fiction that is 99% popular works that someone interested in SF would likely have read anyway: not good.
Yeah, trying new things has been a non-starter for decades with me.
"All the kids they hold a grudge
You fail them and they won't forget it
All your cred won't save you from the kids
They saw what you did
You're all wrong and all the kids are right"
- Local H, singing about this essay in 1998
Anyone feel like an earworm? This one fits because everyone should read a book about whales.
i just strategized with my kid about his courses for ucb in the fall and honestly i have no idea what the dude in the op essay is going on about. the kid is pursuing french, celtic studies and linguistics and there is nothing in any of those departments even vaguely resembling whatever is getting up his nose.
there is a fr cinema course, he's taking this semester's version of it and a lot of the movies have been accessed via the online archive of the pcf, let's just say that the syllabus hasn't been exactly brimming over with superhero flicks. it's true he's avoiding anymore cinema courses bc they are open to film majors who can turn in their written work in english (fr minors and majors write in french), but all the discussion is in fr and he says its painful with the film majors who got over their skis and struggle with the discussion in fr.
the one course (offered in english) that maybe resembles his nightmare looks at franco-american and am in france literature with a "focus on the politics of representation":
https://classes.berkeley.edu/content/2021-fall-french-142ac-001-lec-001
but the reading list doesn't exactly skip the canon, launching with the jesuit relations, chateabriand & de tocqueville. there's a flaherty flick and josephine baker - not exactly comic book movies (altho baker surely had superhuman powers my god if anyone did). yes, it ends up with fisher, child and pollan, but i suspect the point of the preceding reading, thought, discussion is to equip the students to be more skeptical-aware readers of fisher, child and pollan & all the other versions of fr-ness peddled here & there.
I can't actually identify myself because I kinda in a weird way am traceable to this guy, but I think this is a way better version (not that that's hard to do, the linked thing is ridiculous, Buber wtf are you saying) of a vaguely conservative (small c) "what's the matter with the humanities right now" piece. It has the virtue of being sociologically plausible and actually informative about students -- a lot of the current problem is that students and faculty and administrators have actually been quite smart about how to square a circle that's hard to square, which is that colleges are torn right now between being hyper-competitive and relentlessly focused on narrowly winning out meritocratic achievement in a way that would have been unrecognizable even 20-30 years ago, and with a countervailing ethos of supposed "inclusion" -- squaring that circle is tough, but it's been done, and the way it's been done has kinda been making everyone insane. I'm not saying I endorse every word of the below but if you're gonna read one thing of the sort read this one.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/merit-blake-smith
Should add that among the virtues of the linked piece is that it makes clear that it's clear that it's focused on only the tiny substratum of expressly elite colleges -- most pieces of this sort are vague attacks on the English faculty at Yale or their colleagues at Amherst or whatever but don't even mention that whatever one is going on about with these issues has zero to do with 95% of US college students or their majors.
Should add that among the virtues of the linked piece is that it makes clear that it's clear that it's focused on only the tiny substratum of expressly elite colleges -- most pieces of this sort are vague attacks on the English faculty at Yale or their colleagues at Amherst or whatever but don't even mention that whatever one is going on about with these issues has zero to do with 95% of US college students or their majors.
Should add that among the virtues of the linked piece is that it makes clear that it's clear that it's focused on only the tiny substratum of expressly elite colleges -- most pieces of this sort are vague attacks on the English faculty at Yale or their colleagues at Amherst or whatever but don't even mention that whatever one is going on about with these issues has zero to do with 95% of US college students or their majors.
Should add that among the virtues of the linked piece is that it makes clear that it's clear that it's focused on only the tiny substratum of expressly elite colleges -- most pieces of this sort are vague attacks on the English faculty at Yale or their colleagues at Amherst or whatever but don't even mention that whatever one is going on about with these issues has zero to do with 95% of US college students or their majors.
My daughter convinced me to watch Attack on Titan with her (she'd seen it already). 3 and a 1/2 of 4 seasons have aired. It took me a while to get into it, but the first half of season 4 is fucking great. Then she told me that she looked at the manga ending, and it's terrible. I broke down and looked, and it is in fact terrible. It also doesn't make any sense thematically from what I've seen. Should I disown her for this?
What I'm saying is that if there was an entire college class devoted to explaining Attack on Titan, I would take it.
127: How gruesome is it? I saw the trailer for the live action movie nearly puked.
The one with Harry Hamlin wasn't bad.
127: It is super-gruesome, but I find it bearable in animated form. (Live action I would die.) You regularly see people bitten in half, blood spattering everywhere.
125: That's something that has always annoyed me about this type of stuff.
I loved Attack on Titan though I've only see the first two seasons.
122: On reading that essay, I feel really lucky to be from a weird lower middle class family. I mean, I'm also lucky to be old so I went to college in the nineties when things weren't so terrible, but to be always desperately looking for the next career move and the "best" law firm and requiring interviews for clubs and so on sounds incredibly horrible, just an awful way to live, so boring, like you're substituting a check-list for an interior life. And by the time you've spent thirty years pretending to believe in nauseating concepts like "excellence" you might as well actually believe in them.
Man, that's a depressing essay given that it's about rich people who will mostly be shielded from, eg, climate change and so on.
I think it works the other way. You get a bunch of money and then think of why you deserved it.
I feel very weird about that sort of thing, because my kids are sort of just past that high school period where I would have had a lot of influence over grooming them in that way, and we're upper middle class with the sort of resources that would have made it practical. And I didn't, partially out of a belief that it's bullshit and partially because it's lots of work and I'm very lazy, but on the other hand it probably means that neither of them is as likely to be a Supreme Court justice as they would have been if I had Tiger Mothered their resumes more. So I flip back and forth about feeling self-righteous and feeling guilty about having been neglectful.
The kids seem fine.
In my experience, the Supreme Court types actually are self-motivated and don't have helicopter parents. Maybe it's different for people playing on easy mode (ie conservatives), but at some level of competition the people faking it with resume-padding can't hack it anymore.
I could ask my brother about the one, but I'm not going to.
It does not really matter that in the end Freud didn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about.
That's this essay in a nutshell. There are things you are supposed to study and treat respectfully because you are supposed to study them and treat them respectfully, not because they somehow shed light on the world.
If we're choosing between the non-scientific contemplation of snails and the examination of the motifs of comic books, I'll take comic books every time.
Anyway, my particular kid is very much too nervous about how he will earn a living.
132: I think my daughter likes the role reversal, where she knows what's going to happen and I don't. Usually I recommend things to her that I've already seen, so I'm always the one with superior knowledge. When we got to the big plot twist in the middle of season 2, she paused the video just to cackle at how confused I looked.
The show gets steadily better through the episodes that have been made. It kicks into a higher gear towards the end of season 3.
Counterpoint: snails are interesting.
The piece in 121 is interesting. Personally I'm naturally more interested at what's happening at the state flagship level than the U Chicago level, I don't think the schools at that level are having quite the same "college of arts and sciences are dying in favor of professional schools" issue. My favorite paragraph from the article, which I think has a ton of truth from it and echoes a lot of RWM's frustrations when she was an academic advisor, is:
When I ask students to explain how they choose their desired career paths and majors, however, they often answer that these were chosen for them, by their parents, or don't seem to have been chosen at all, but simply bubbled up into their consciousness from their social milieu. Throughout their childhoods, they complain, they were overscheduled, given almost no free time in which they might develop interests and commitments independent of their parents' ambitions for them or the notions of adult "success" that were dominant in their family, school, and neighborhood.
I really do think this is one way in which the elite kids aren't alright.
It's funny. When our high school sports team plays any wealthy high school from Austin, they get utterly crushed beyond recognition. I don't have kids in high school, but the perception is "well, those kids had private lessons to supplement their select travel team that they joined at age 8, so now they're super good" and that narrative sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
My joke is that every high school competition is a creative way to measure who has the most money. I ran a Calculus bowl for about a decade, and it certainly deteriorated into a very complicated way to measure which schools were richest. The individual students from the rich schools? Indisputably very good at calculus! But inevitably from those schools.
Isn't it wonderful that we have hundreds of ways to measure which high schools are wealthiest, and to celebrate the students there?
they were overscheduled, given almost no free time in which they might develop interests and commitments independent of their parents' ambitions for them or the notions of adult "success" that were dominant in their family, school, and neighborhood.
This is the Roc, extending deep into the middle classes. Meanwhile,
The highest unemployment rate was among people with university degrees at 5.37 percent, followed by high-school graduates at 3.37 percent, while people with graduate degrees were unchanged at 2.84 percent, the agency said. People with an education level of junior-high school or lower had the lowest unemployment rate of 2.53 percent, followed by those with a junior college education at 2.57 percent, it said.
i was/am very definitely 135.1 except that i flat out told my kid repeatedly i wouldn't participate in or encourage any careerism or resume building, there were high schools i was very clear i did not want him to go to (lowell, lick wilmerding & the like) and while i wouldn't blanket refuse to support him going to an ivy, u of chi or similar he'd have to make a very strong, specific case for it. which he did for applying to cambridge re: linguistics (two best schools for what he wanted to study are berkeley & cambridge) and then he got into berkeley and he was clear cambridge came a distant second. retroactively thank dog bc of the pandemic, as well as all the other reasons.
there's one guy in my kid's activist circles who's always been on the make. he was tolerated and managed by his peers when he was younger and has gotten better over the years because he figured out he had little credibility with those peers, but definitely enthusiastic sucking up works with adults.
i'm just enjoying watching my kid work tremendously hard on things he is passionate about and as a glorious byproduct leaving a public trail of "radical" positions that will probably limit him to a purely local-regional public career bc is there a greater hell for an otherwise comfortable person than a life of high profile public service in this country?
An obvious example in math of this kind of activity-creep, is that I got into top-5 graduate schools in math despite not having done an REU. That's nearly unheard of nowadays, and you probably see as many people doing 2 REUs as 1. But only 20 years ago it was still pretty normal to not have done an REU (though probably more of my classmates had done one than didn't).
I did an REU, and it was wildly unlike the experience today. I had no summer plans, and my professor announced to the class that they still hadn't gotten any applications for this paid summer thing, so I put in an application. This was at U Michigan. I was the only undergrad, and there was a grad student, and the professor.
I showed up once a week and presented what I'd done. I don't think the grad student did anything besides be friendly, and at one point show me how to get started with LaTeX.
It was horribly isolating. I was under the impression that I should be doing this 8 hours a day, on my own, like a regular job, since I was getting paid. Of course I didn't. I put in a reasonable effort but felt like an abject failure.
I cranked out more and more complex examples and didn't really understand what I might be generalizing or how this might turn into any results. There wasn't much guidance.
Now REUs appear to be well-run intensive summer camps, where you go to a different instiution and have a small group with camraderie. They seem really fun.
This would have been the summer of 1998.
Yeah, I thought that it would last forever.
146: "is there a greater hell for an otherwise comfortable person than a life of high profile public service in this country?"
Someone I knew glancingly back when I could plausibly be thought of as a young potential transatlantic up-and-comer is going to be the first woman to serve as Secretary of the Army. So, no, this is not universally true. At least when we don't have a raging sociopath as president.
It would be fun to write have someone else write a PhD on all the nostalgic takes on one specific time. So, how was 1969 revered 5 years later, 10 years later, 15 years later, etc? In which ways in Bryan Adams saying a lot more about 1985 than about 1969?
I bet this already exists.
The thing in economics in the US is now pre-docs, where people do a (usually paid) internship as a research assistant. Since they're for people just out of undergraduate programs, it's pretty much grunt work whose only function is networking. It makes the path to getting an academic job even longer.
I suspect academic math is the least bad with these kinds of things, relative to other fields. In math, if you're an actual genius you can get lucky and solve an important open problem. Other fields, "genius" is considerably less objective, and the top schools are considerably freer to set the agenda for everyone else. In almost every other field, a story like Yitang Zhang is literally impossible.
I think that's why everything around elite academia is so crazy now. There are far more people capable of elite-level accomplishments than spots in most fields, but it's important for everyone's self-esteem that we pretend that it's a meritocracy.
My go to example of that is the movie Miracle which says a lot more about 2004 than about 1980.
I think Animal Farm is a metaphor.
154.1: I'm pretty sure that the Summer of 69 is not about 1969 at all. The title is a reference to a well-known sex position.
154 I remember hearing once that Adams had originally written the song about some year in the mid 70s -- maybe 77 -- but some suits at the record company made him change it. All that wikipedia has to say on the subject is that it's about sex, not the year 1969.
He's a year younger than me, and while I have specific recollections on 1969, there wasn't any sex involved, or like anything else in that song. (I was 10 that summer, Adams was 9.)
The foursome where two people only enjoy themselves if they are into feet licking.
158 But the suits thought it was. And people buying the record in 1985. So, heebie can still get that second doctorate.
I am disturbed beyond words that that Tablet essay is making me feel like the 90s at the U of C were some lost golden age. We're doomed.
Humanities types are loath to admit that they are also governed to a large extent by the foundational premise of science: "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Shakespeare is so great that -- as regards insight, humor and plotting -- his work is often right up there with a good TV drama -- or a sitcom.
153 - our local state senator has been relentlessly targeted by vicious coordiated online attacks by qwhatever, antisemitic & homophobic types, including by them making it clear they know where his elderly mother lives. sounds pretty miserable to me!
Right, who was it that figured out dril was just posting Shakespeare memes phrased in more modern language?
My dad was, in the innocent pre-internet way, harassed by militia types. It didn't really impact him much that I could tell. They guy who called the radio station to point out that his yard sucked was worse because it did and I was to fix it.
He's a year younger than me, and while I have specific recollections on 1969, there wasn't any sex involved, or like anything else in that song. (I was 10 that summer, Adams was 9.
And every life became / A brilliant breaking of the bank, / A quite unlosable game.
Sex was invented in 1963, but didn't spread to Canada until 1969.
REU
"Reasonable Effort but ... an abject failUre"
re: 159
I (literally) bumped into him (Bryan Adams) once, as I was coming up the stairs of the Atlantic in London and he was coming down. He looked much more like Michael Stipe (eye shadow, glitter, etc) than like the salt of the earth guitar slinger image from his big hits.
I feel like this is a bad time to talk about kids being overscheduled. n=1, but for like the first 6 months of the pandemic I was thrilled to have any way to keep the kid busy other than TV, because of course everything had been cancelled. Now most things have come back in some form but it all takes more time and work. (School is fully online. Swim class here in DC is cancelled, but we found a place in the suburbs that's teaching, so it takes longer to get there. And so on. Even playdates for a long time had to be more carefully scheduled, although that's starting to loosen up now.) 2 activities these days feel like 4 or 5 in the before time. Ask about overscheduled kids when we get to the new normal, whenever that is.
121 is interesting to me because it seems so different from how I remember the U of C. I guess the school has moved up in the rankings enough in the intervening years that its attraction to people wanting a rigorous education but not all the striving after consulting and finance has waned.
This is only loosely related to the thread or the articles, but the biggest difference I see with the "elite" students I teach, compared to when I was a student, is how much they expect to be given to them: they want copies of lecture notes, and detailed solutions to every homework set, and study guides or practice tests before every real test, and sources of extra study problems or places to read when they're unhappy with the textbook, and a detailed list of exactly what might or might not be on the exam, and on and on. A lot of my undergrad classes, there was no assigned book and you never got told the correct answers on the homework beyond whatever the teaching assistant felt like writing as they graded it, and there was no particular advice on what to study for tests. But my students complain a lot when I don't give them all sorts of extra things I never got as a student. And it used to be only the undergrads, but now I'm getting it from grad students as well.
re: 143
It's funny. When our high school sports team plays any wealthy high school from Austin, they get utterly crushed beyond recognition. I don't have kids in high school, but the perception is "well, those kids had private lessons to supplement their select travel team that they joined at age 8, so now they're super good" and that narrative sounds perfectly reasonable to me.
There's a big path dependency thing happening, too, I think. But yeah, I think a lot of that narrative has some truth to it. I have a Friday night drinking group with 5 of the other Dads from xelA's class. He's 8, and the other boys are all the same age. Four of those boys play for kids soccer teams, and three of them are both completely obsessed with playing, and good at it. The local kids team they pay for has good coaching for kids, so they are already pretty good, and their team standardly annihilates other teams.The team has only been in existence about 2 years, and I think they went over a year before they lost their first game.
Now, they are all trying out for the youth academies of professional football teams (Premier League or Championship teams).* Add another few years of coaching, and the gulf between them and their peers is going to be vast.
Their parents are invested enough to take them to a match once a week (which is local, within about a 5-10 mile radius), and to training once a week. But we aren't talking about some kind of massive hot-housing.
* two of them had a trial game for the youth setup of a big team last week, and one of the boys scored 9 goals.
I think we can all agree that graduate students are a problem.
My kid's at a good US university, loves languages, and is not minoring in romance languages because very few of the other students majoring in the subject can actually speak French, are not interested in doing any work, and the curriculum is geared towards them. In his biased (but maybe accurate, who knows) view, these are legacy students/ SAT coach + private school admissions.
not that different in the UK..."legacy" not a thing, but there's a back-door way into some of the French elite institutions through this one, and gaah...
174: this is eventually going to revolutionize football's sociology. remember when Graeme Le Saux used to get stick for reading the Guardian?
172: As long as U of C maintains its reputation as The Place Fun Goes To Die it will be carrying on the tradition that really matters.
154.1: I'm pretty sure that the Summer of 69 is not about 1969 at all. The title is a reference to a well-known sex position.
Me and some guys from school
Had a band and we tried real hard
Didn't quit until we got married
Shoulda known we'd never get far.
I really misunderstood those lyrics.
106. And it looks like we're getting it from NY.
Gerrymander well, New Yorkers, so you lose a red seat.
I think Minnesota has ours -- if we had ninety more people we'd have kept our seat and they'd have lost one. And it's Cuomo's fault -- he completely failed to do anything about census outreach.
Is this much less change than in past years?
182: Yes
1970: 11
1980: 17
1990: 19
2000: 12
2010: 12
This year, 7. Not as bad as the Democrats feared.
Also gets a brief mention in the guest post I just sent you.
I think the biggest change is the lower population growth, but you did your part.
2020 EVs under new counts: Rs gain 3 and Ds lose 3.
I went to a high school reunion for the girls school I went to grade 5-8. I had already learned that they are all supposed to have an internship work experience before graduating. I also learned that they wanted to push STEM in a way that they had not in the 50's, so motivated students could do in-depth work. The school is near Harvard Medical School and a bunch of famous hospitals. President of Dana Farber is an alum. I saw some of their biology posters in the hallway. These were what I thought of as advance undergraduate work, maybe even grad school or science-heavy medical school poster presentations. I mean, I've certainly seen MDs put out presentations that were less sophisticated. It was exciting that they got to delve in to something but it was depressing that it felt as though the only path to success in science was to know that you wanted to be a biologist when you were 14 and to get the right internship in high school. I always thought there was too much baby grad student stuff in college, and now it's even earlier.
It was better when you could just look at snails on your own until you got to college.
It was better when you could just look at snails on your own until you got to college.
Newts. Also, one need not stop even then.
our local state senator has been relentlessly targeted by vicious coordiated online attacks by qwhatever, antisemitic & homophobic types, including by them making it clear they know where his elderly mother lives. sounds pretty miserable to me!
It's no picnic on the other side either.
181 -- They just beat you out on who had to give us one. They kept all theirs.
190: She's actually super nice in person. Just totally bonkers ideologically.
185 Yeah sorry about that, I don't think we'll be able to help you there.
172: I think in general universities are getting uniformized, whereas now that there's more and more competition and people are applying to more and more schools and administrators hate anything unusual, instead you end up with every university becoming exactly the same as every other one except for ranking and location. This is true in banal ways like the calendars all becoming the same (e.g. Harvard no longer has finals after break) and everyone using the common app, but also in terms of schools trying really hard to remove any kind of personality (which I mostly see in my social circles around MIT shutting down dorms).
Interestingly U Chicago does still have their weird essay questions. I'm kind of surprised that they haven't gotten rid of that yet.
If it wasn't for imagination, a man would be as happy with the University of Illinois at Chicago as with the University of Chicago.
Do you mean shutting MIT frats? They've been trying to push people into dorms.
Shutting down Senior House is the big one: https://www.wired.com/story/a-weird-mit-dorm-dies-and-a-crisis-blooms-at-colleges/
My friends are all worried that their dorm is the next one in MIT's targets because they had the second-lowest graduation rate (with Senior House lowest). If you're a welcoming place for weirdos then you'll have a lower graduation rate, and the administration will eliminate you in an attempt to increase graduation rates.
If Chicago State University was good enough for Styx, it should be good enough for the children of elites.
Oh, ok- yeah they demolished Bexley and never liked EC. Is Random still around? I remember they renovated it and removed a lot of the weird layout that led to odd socia groups. Even when I lived a floor below a notorious drinking group that part of their culture was pretty much just a historical note.
Random's still around, that's the one all my friends are alums of. There's definitely a sense though that it's not long for this world and that the administration hates them.
194: I was totally saved by having exams after Christmas. I got to enjoy a thanksgiving instead of working on papers, and I got a bit of rest over Christmas. By the time, exams came around, the days were starting to get lighter, and I felt less depressed.
The reduction in slack is really society-wide. Try reading some biographies on wikipaedia sometime of americans from 100 years ago. Born in eastern europe, immigrate at age 3 to live with cousin, worked in landlord's tailor's back-office for 10 years, moved to new hampshire to try goat farming, went bankrupt, read law in and practiced for 10 years, hobby of inventing agricultural machinery turned into business, moved to Houston to sell machinery, appointed ambassador to guiana because was drinking buddies with state dept undersecretary, joined clergy of new religious sect, died of the clap at age 48.
Penicillin came along ruined everything.
so, we were to have the last county Democratic e-board meeting tonight before the election of new officers in two weeks. Since I'm not running, it's the end of my six years -- the vice chair is also stepping down after six. Two of the 12 members of the board are running for re-election, everyone else will be new. And younger!
We need 7 for a quorum, and only six signed on. So we gabbed a bit, but couldn't vote on the one thing we had planned to vote on -- approving last month's minutes. Said our farewells, and just as I was logging off, the wife called me to come eat dinner. Then, suddenly there were two police officers at my door. Armed, but not guns drawn. I step out to talk to them. Did you have a meeting at 6, asks the officer. What? Did you have a zoom meeting at six? We got a call that there was a zoom meeting at six, and someone asked for but didn't get the zoom link. It was a public meeting, and it's a crime to exclude the public from a public meeting.
Why me? The county chair lives 3 doors down, but she's out of state visiting grandchildren. When they went to her house, no one was home, so they came to mine. She also didn't respond to the email asking for the zoom link, if she even saw it. The vice chair noticed and ran the meeting. But they didn't go to his house, they went to mine, because this wasn't just some random disgruntled public nutball, but an insider who lives to disrupt the Dem party. And intended this as a parting shot at the chair, and if not her, then me.
I explained that we didn't have a quorum, so there wasn't a meeting. He said 'you should figure out a way to tell that to the public. I said not me, this was my last board meeting and my term ends in 2 weeks. I'll pass this along. I also explained that the guy who called them also had the numbers of ten people who have the zoom link, and could have gotten it from any of them. The officer was unconcerned. I also said that I don't agree that this is technically a public meeting under the statutes, and explained that the crank who'd surely called them had sued us over that, had his case dismissed on other grounds, which was on appeal. Hey, we got a call that there was a crime, and it's my job to investigate.
The wife was very wound up by this whole thing. The police is coming to the home of a minor party official to ask about the meeting. Is this Russia?
The asshole has signed up to run for every seat on the eboard, other than those that only women can be elected to. He can't win anything, because everyone is totally fed up with him. Although if people don't want the police showing up at their houses at dinner time, maybe they won't run for the eboard, and maybe he can win something.
I think Walt in 155 hits the heart of the problem. It is related to my AIHMHB theory of the economic benefits of heresy and, to me, explains the most disagreeable and persecutory aspects of "woke" and of academic fashion. The resource being competed for is status rather than anything more immediately useful, but the competition is just as fierce and the penalties for failure seem to get worse and worse.
The wife was very wound up by this whole thing.
I'm pretty wound up about it too! Is there any colorable argument that this was, legally speaking, a public meeting? And is there any other occasion where an actual violation of public meetings law leads to a visit from police?
Certainly not a police response in real time that ever happens around here.
208, 209 -- It is amazing that they gave the guy the time of day.
I've always considered it a genuine legal issue, and a competent lawyer could possibly make it stick. Central committee members are elected on the same ballot as any other elected officials (well, it's the primary, not the general) so there's an element of public funding. And central committees have a couple of statutory functions, mostly providing short lists of names for the filling of vacancies. The public meetings laws are supposed to be read liberally. On the other hand, are we really constitutionally required to invite Republican operatives to participate in our discussions about which legislative candidates to give money to? Do we have to listen to their opinions, in a formal public meeting way, on platform issues? I think that's making us more of a public body than we really are. And I'm not sure whether, even if the central committee is some kind of public body, meetings of the officers (who are not elected on a public ballot) are public meetings within the statutes.
The guy raising this stuff isn't actually concerned about access. It's just a means to an end. Unfortunately, in terms of getting clarity on the law, he's kind of a shit lawyer: the order dismissing his lawsuit would cause any other lawyer I know to slink away, but no, maybe the judge is just in on the great conspiracy. And the other complicating factor is that the state party is providing us legal representation, and their lawyer happens to be one of the foremost advocates of a broad reading of the open government constitutional provisions and statutes. So we're not as actively trying to win on the merits as I might have wanted to do. And the shit lawyer has given us easy technicalities to win on.
Here it's common enough that a small town council gets themselves in trouble for violating the open meeting law, but I've never heard of it for a political party.
Also never heard of the cops showing up over it.
208, 209 -- It is amazing that they gave the guy the time of day.
Yeah. The idea that somebody's being a crank about public meetings isn't surprising. Having the cops show up at your door at dinnertime is!
204: Holy shit! What the utter fuck.
I'm guessing the cops wouldn't show up for a similar complaint against a Republican group.
211 is how it works here, too. Strict open meetings act for actual public meetings.
When I first heard the actual song "The Kids Are Alright" after hearing the phrase for about 10 years it was an emotional experience, because it's such an interesting song, especially for 1966 on their first album, and has nothing to do with politics, generational or otherwise. "The kids" means his friends. The song is really about his ambivalence with his girlfriend, thinking maybe she'd be better off without him, or he'd be better off without her. Then saying "the kids are alright" is how he reassures himself that she'll be ok either way, because the other guys she knows are alright.
Right?
Also this article is a true oddity. This guy Justin E.H. Smith is like the conservative Nathan J. Robinson. A wonderful writer who seems to make total sense and can write long pieces at will, then as you get into the 2,000th word of the article he shoots himself in the foot by the combination of utter pomposity and talking about things without researching them.
215 The officer told me he'd never heard of us. But seemed to be active in his union, and he immediately got the whole eboard quorum thing. During the meeting, I'd texted an absent member that we were one short of a quorum, but she was busy. If she'd called in, we'd have had to deal with the county attorney's office, who would be wondering why anyone was wasting their time on this shit. (The County Attorney is an elected Dem official. Our asshole does criminal defense, so they know him well.)
I am going to take 217.3 as proof that I win by not reading it.
172: I think in general universities are getting uniformized, whereas now that there's more and more competition and people are applying to more and more schools and administrators hate anything unusual, instead you end up with every university becoming exactly the same as every other one except for ranking and location. This is true in banal ways like the calendars all becoming the same (e.g. Harvard no longer has finals after break) and everyone using the common app, but also in terms of schools trying really hard to remove any kind of personality (which I mostly see in my social circles around MIT shutting down dorms).
I think this has peaked already. I noticed when I was applying 20 years ago that it was hard to make any sort of decision because they all claim to be exactly the same (except engineering schools). Now some of them are deleting entire fields of study because they have to stay in business when Republicans are deleting their budgets. Which is sad for the future of research and academic employment, but from the point of view of someone who wants to learn seems like it's going back to a normal situation. Instead of, this college started out as a seminary for Lutheran priests, now it's the 144th best version of Harvard. This college started out as a night school for businessmen in the western suburbs of Boston, now it's the 219th best version of Harvard. This college started out as a bunch of nuns teaching women how to be teachers, now it's the 160th best version of Harvard. This college started out as an agricultural extension, now it's the 100th best version of the University of Michigan.
Having been exposed to middle to upper middle class white people with high school children, it seems to me that people are making an awful lot over very small differences when deciding on a school. Or they're just following the money and not going into that.
Can you counter and hit the guy for harassment/wasting police time?
I sometimes think about how crazy it is that we basically locked into a number of universities a century ago (maybe more?) and locked into an extremely small number of elite universities (wishy-washy how you cut it, but say ~10) around that same time.
It looks like there's currently ~65K undergrads at Ivy league schools. and 16.6 million undergrad students in the US. It looks like total undergrad enrollment in 1950 was 2.3 million.
I guess the rise of community colleges accounts for a lot of this, and swelling enrollment, but it also wouldn't be crazy to add more land-grant public institutions on a regular basis. (I know these occasionally get added, and 2 year colleges get converted to 4 year colleges. Still!)
Anyway, say 1% of high school graduates are truly spectacular. There's so many more of them now than in 1950! Even laying aside all the breathless obnoxiousness of socially striving parental hyper-scheduling and resume-building of the U of Chicago kids.
222 He's an attention-seeking tar baby. He'd like nothing better than a good persecution narrative.
I'll be out of office in 2 weeks. Believe me, I am so completely done with this guy.
I also don't think the county attorney is going to want to mess with that.
The head of the state party is breathing fire this morning, though, so we'll see what comes of that.
223: Not only are the same colleges considered elite for the past fifty years, most of them have refused to increase undergraduate enrollment since around 1970, when there were expansions connected to going coed. I looked at the numbers when a friend of my daughter was applying, comparing my high school graduation year to the present. In 1980 there were about 3 million US high school graduates, 2020 there were 3.7 million. The top Ivy League colleges all have almost exactly the same number of undergrads now that they had 40 years ago when I was applying. But now 10-15% of the slots go to foreign high school graduates, less than 1% in my day. So we have 23% more US high school graduates competing for 10% fewer spots.
This is not even considering how these colleges have become better known and more popular, especially outside of the Northeast, and how the internet has increased the information available to smart kids everywhere, so a higher percentage of high school students are dreaming of an Ivy League education than back in my day. No way would I have been admitted now.
I'd be rejected doubly hard, now! (From Brown.)
At a conference two years back, I learned that Cal State Fresno could only admit half the number of qualified applicants. I have to think that anyone who applies to Cal State Fresno is local, which means that the Central Valley could have (at least) twice as many local college graduates if they could put in another four year college. Lack of capacity is just a stupid, stupid barrier to that kind of life improvement.
In 1980 there were about 3 million US high school graduates, 2020 there were 3.7 million.
This is less growth than I would have expected. [Googling...] In 2002, there were 4.025 million babies in the US, and in 1962, there were 4.167 million babies. For this to hold, there would have had to be some sort of mid-century burst of babies. Some sort of Baby Bang, idk.
I didn't realize that the birth rate never bounced back after the great recession.
The hidden downside of explicitly favoring old people by government policy.
Instead of having a baby, young adults should consider having a retiree.
You're not even the one who has to birth it.
231: Maybe the retiree will turn out to be Brad Pitt!
FWIW, the small handful of current or recent UChicago students I know are neat kids (privileged and all that, but neat kids). My son did say that incoming classes were getting less weird over the time he was there, but still could always find someone to geek out with about pretty much anything.
It's true that "Self, Culture & Society" was kind of the "vanilla" option among Social Sciences core sequences when I was there, so perhaps the Tablet writer is getting a very slightly skewed sample from the kids who pick that one. No one here has to post their SAT scores, but I'm curious if any of the rest of you Chicago people have thoughts or memories about the Core. I did a language-focused Hum sequence and a history of science Civ sequence-- both very good and somewhat eccentric-- as well as "Classics of Social and Political Thought," which has been endlessly valuable to my bullshitting capabilities. Like, 10,000x increase in bullshitting power. (Friends who took Self, Culture & Society, OTOH, tended to get sucked into anthropology, whereas I landed solidly in the misanthropological world of the humanities.)
Instead of babies, Americans should have immigrants.
What percentage of the commentariat at this blog graduated with a degree from UChicago (with bonus points for a post-graduate degree, of course ... )? I can't help but suspect it is well above the national average; but also, perhaps, above the average for the kind of social media site where people tend to have graduated from schools like UChicago ...
I can think of seven off the top of my head, most either absent or infrequent commenters now. There are probably more. Given that I don't think U of C grads like either themselves or their fellow alums, it is surprising to see so many in one place.
I don't think I really knew it existed when I was looking at college.
I actually posted 236, huh. This is the strongest evidence yet that my soul has died.
Nobody can prove that without access to the server log.
I was unimpressed by the Core -- I went vanilla all the way: Self, Culture and Society and Human Being and Citizen. But thirty years back, my specific criticisms are vague.
Was I one of the seven U if C grads you were thinking of, or an extra?
"The Core" would be a good name for a cult.
Or like an enemy horde in a first-person shooter.
244: yes!
245: ...of Straussians.
I am currently luxuriating in my indifference to watching live as the president of the United States delivers what appears to be an important address.
Let me be the first to suggest "Levi, Strauss & Company."
Apparsntly the mayor has heard about events described above and is going to take it up with the chief of police.
This wasn't my ifea and I'm conflicted about the privilege involved. Maybe, though, officers won't be so quick to tje scene of bullshit 'crimes' and maybe that'll help someone down the line.
Apparsntly the mayor has heard about events described above and is going to take it up with the chief of police.
This wasn't my ifea and I'm conflicted about the privilege involved. Maybe, though, officers won't be so quick to tje scene of bullshit 'crimes' and maybe that'll help someone down the line.
I feel like getting cops in trouble for things like this is exactly what privilege is _for_. I wouldn't feel too conflicted.
I'm using mine to save up for an electric car.
236: I took Self Torture Culture and, AIHMHB (probably at great length, in years past) got very grumpy about the "we must read Freud and discuss his ideas without referring to any actual knowledge of human psychology from the last century" approach. The one critical comment I remember the instructor making was that Freud didn't properly appreciate the clitoris. I don't remember the name of the Hum sequence I took, it was only two quarters, and I did a one-quarter music class that I think counted as the third Hum requirement? Anyway, in Hum we read A Clockwork Orange and Giambattista Vico and A Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country. Whatever that one was. I guess there was a common thread, but I've lost it. I generally felt like Hum and Soc allowed both the teaching staff (who were mostly just grad students, or maybe some kind of adjuncts, I think? although I didn't realize it at the time) and (especially) the students to bloviate too much about things they didn't understand. I took Western Civ with Ka/ty Wein/traub and thought it was better, although the grading was kind of hilariously lax.
I really shouldn't comment from my phone.
The one critical comment I remember the instructor making was that Freud didn't properly appreciate the clitoris.
To be fair, he didn't have one.
My strongest memory of UofC was their application fee in 1992 was a *lot* higher than NU's so I didn't apply.
Do people here still pseudonymize their universities with baby animal names?
essear, I think that was the Hum sequence I took, although for unclear reasons we read City of Glass and not A Clockwork Orange (which I had already read, come to think of it). We also read Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By and I hated it so much! I think most of the class hated it. I enjoyed Vico, however, and the Journey into Mohawk and Oneida Country has, as you may know, a graphic adaptation by the guy who did Elke's beloved Olympians series.
I took a very reading-heavy politics and literature class. We read Darkness at Noon, The Brothers Kar...., Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the three plays about the guy who slept with his mother, and Henry the one with the monologue about "fuck the French".
I AM OBLIGED TO CONFESS THAT I SHOULD SOONER LIVE IN A SOCIETY GOVERNED BY THE FIRST TWO THOUSAND NAMES IN THE CHICAGO TELEPHONE DIRECTORY THAN IN A SOCIETY GOVERNED BY THE TWO THOUSAND FACULTY MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. NOT, HEAVEN KNOWS, BECAUSE I HOLD LIGHTLY THE BRAINPOWER OR KNOWLEDGE OR GENEROSITY OR EVEN THE AFFABILITY OF THE CHICAGO FACULTY; BUT BECAUSE I GREATLY FEAR INTELLECTUAL ARROGANCE, AND THAT IS A DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTIC OF THE UNIVERSITY WHICH REFUSES TO ACCEPT ANY COMMON PREMISE.
No; it is not possible you should love the enemy of France, Kate: but, in loving me, you should love the friend of France; for I love France so well that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine: and, Kate, when France is mine and I am yours, then yours is France and you are mine.
Speaking of wanting to fuck the French
239: Applied, was accepted, chose to go somewhere even more eccentric. Had I gone to U of C, I would have been a year ahead of John Scalzi.
This wasn't my ifea
The meatballs sucked.
If you want to shout "fire" in a crowded theater without getting into trouble, why not just light the theater on fire first? That way, you show respect to the Constitution.
Anyway, I happily voted for Biden, but I want to keep my hobbies.
||
I took my lizard to the vet- her eyes seemed swollen and she's been sluggish.
The vet explained that her bones have wasted, nothing to be done. UV bulbs apparently lose effectiveness pretty quickly, and healthy lizards need lots of UV. I inherited her maybe 9 years ago from a neighbor's daughter who had rescued her from a neglectful situation, broken tail, so she definitely had a good run.
She liked piano music, and warmth, sitting on my arm or outside on the veranda table on hot days. Having any sense of attachment is ridiculous, thinly veiled self-pity. But knowing that she relied on me, an incomprehensible warm giant, for food, understood that my coming into the room meant something, leaves me kind of upset .
I imagined her anthropomorphically, puzzled at events that affected her that she couldn't affect. Her attentive gaze left me wondering about theological impulses of human ancestors-- sure hope the storms come again this year. All of that is projection, misdirected pathos that doesn't help, an error to imagine such feelings, or myself as a focus, a pathetic (in the sense of imputed pathos) power fantasy.
The other source of unease is knowledge that my habitat is also quite limited, my body will also fail and it's later than I think, that I can't really do much to change the bulb. Also an idiotic impulse, I have work I should do for my office, discontent as I may be with my management, and more to do for my family as well. Fatalism is a terrible outlook. Maybe writing it out will be helpful, hope it's not too much of a downer.
|>
A downer, but beautiful. "Incomprehensible warm giant" would be an outstanding epitaph.
I am so sorry, lw. That was moving and sad.
I am so sorry, lw. That was moving and sad.
I'm so sorry, lw. But thank you. You captured well a lot of thoughts that have gnawed at me off and on, during quiet lonely moments in the pandemic, since my own sad vet visit.
Thanks guys. Mostly I think that sharing sadness is better reserved for real problems, but I posted this here anyway.
Sympathies on your animal, dalriata. I'd be less conflicted being sad about a mammal, part of what has me suspicious of my own reacting is that this was a lizard.
My condolences. As long as it is a vertebrate, you can connect with them.
To most pets, we're mostly immortals.
Sorry for your loss.
Very sorry lw, that was very moving.