My personal belief is that the 1619 Project is pretty questionable history, but now that it's caught up in the culture war it's impossible to view objectively. Beyond that, the idea that you would give someone with no academic experience tenure pretty surprising, though maybe it's normal in journalism. On the other hand, college boards shouldn't interfere in hiring decisions.
So, I don't know.
I have absolutely no trust for Republicans appointed by North Carolina governments.
1: I think it's common in journalism and common for previous holders of that position.
I'm surprised to hear you say that, Walt. Is there something specific about the 1619 Project that you think is wrong? It's been pretty exhaustively reviewed and defended. Aside from one eye-caching phrase that NYT did correct, I haven't seen any critiques that appeared to be accurate or even in good faith, though admittedly I haven't read them all.
I have zero background in academia but my thirdhand understanding is that for journalism school professors in particular there isn't the same expectation that people have academic experience.
I believe she had unanimous support from the faculty committee. This is pure political meddling.
The big question here is whether this is NC-specific insanity, or whether this kind of BoT intervention is what's going to happen at state schools over the next decade or two.
The big thing here is that this just isn't something the BoT should be involved in at all. That is, whether teaching experience is required for the position, whether the candidate merits hiring, etc. are decisions made by the faculty and the provost not by the Board of Trustees. The best quote I saw about this was in an opinion article the Chronicle by critics of the 1619 project which said "Boards retain the power to approve of faculty-hiring decisions in the same way that the queen of England retains the power to approve legislation passed by Parliament - as a ceremonial formality only."
6: It's going to be everywhere. Most famously, a certain university made me agree to not boycott Israel in order to be paid. (And did not tell me this until after I'd done the work.)
So now I'm continually boycotting Israel until somebody pays me not to. This involves switching brands of hummus.
How would they know if you were boycotting Israel? What if you just don't like oranges and don't want a sodastream.
7 - It's norms vs. letter of the law, right? Republicans have decided to focus on the "boards retain the power to" and ignore the history that says it's a "ceremonial formality only." I would make an analogy with how Republicans in other elected and appointed offices act, but then I would be banned.
4: Wasn't it the core claim to the 1619 Project's account of the American Revolution?
My impression is that historians are not particularly enthused about it, but they don't want to get caught up in the culture war. The part I know the most about is not by her, so maybe it's not relevant, but the one about how slave-owners invented accounting is pretty egregious. (It also inflates the importance of the US to the development of things that were invented elsewhere, which is a pet peeve of mine.)
Zeynep tufecki, herself a UNC academic, wrote on Twitter that someone named Sciarrino was appointed to a Knight chair at the same school in digital marketing in 2012 had a masters degree only and was an advertising executive, also completely outside academia.
10: Look in my refrigerator and see if the hummus is Sabra.
There's also a norm behind the norm, which is that I don't think BoT appointees used to be as purely political as they are now.
I suppose in a better social welfare state it might be possible to separate questions of academic freedom and economic security, but as a non-academic I get the impression from time to time that tenure controversies reach mainstream attention because journalists, who lack job security of any sort, get possessed by angry envy.
It reminds me a bit of the phrase "set for life," which appears time and again in descriptions of celebrities, even small-scale ones (e.g., popular writers), as mitigating pretty much anything that occurs to such people.
Honestly, seeking financial security by working at a university is really fucking stupid.
17: Have you ever tried working as a journalist?
In college. I got $10 a story plus all the notebooks I could steal.
That was back when a good computer cost $2,000.
17: It's for people that aren't smart enough to invest in Dogecoin.
||
The end begins.
https://www.lawfareblog.com/ransomware-problem-bitcoin-problem
https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3134473/china-escalates-crackdown-bitcoin-mining-trading
(I see the side-eye, and blame peep.)
|>
12: Looked it up and read most of it. I don't want to go off on a rant but despite their good intentions, that piece is just awful. There is a core that's interesting and enlightening there--maybe entirely within the book he references, Caitlin Rosenthal's Accounting For Slavery--but from that he overstates his case to apparently tarnish the entire concepts of accounting, finance, and arguably measurement. Maybe this is acceptable in polemic, but each paragraph has leaps of logic that leave me more befuddled than anything.
7: "Boards retain the power to approve of faculty-hiring decisions in the same way that the queen of England retains the power to approve legislation passed by Parliament - as a ceremonial formality only."
Then the faculty and rest of the university need to make sure that this power gets used the same way it might be used by the Queen: once.
23: I read somewhere the intro of the "Accounting for Slavery" book states explicitly that it's not claiming that they invented accounting, just that they kept careful books. Even that's a bit odd subject for a book, just because it's well-known, at least among economic historians. It's the reason that economics of slavery was one of the first economic history topics to be studied using statistical techniques back in the 60s.
Well, this was journalism, not purporting to be innovative historical research. Even if it was known in the field, it's worthwhile if it was new to the NYT readership.
I've been wanting a Soda Stream for years but haven't bought one because Israel. If I got a job at Moby's place of work it sounds like I would be forced to buy one.
That was just some consulting I did on the side.
26: I meant the book, which is historical research.
The article mischaracterizes the book, using to make a more dramatic claim that we owe accounting to slave-owners. Which gets to one of my pet peeves -- accounting was a European invention (and predated the existence of the US). The Medicis didn't need John C. Calhoun to tell them how to keep their books.
The Medicis didn't need John C. Calhoun to tell them how to keep their books.
But it they had -- just think how many more Michelangelo statues there would be!
29: Exactly. Double-entry bookkeeping is no younger than the Italian Renaissance--Wikipedia mentions that similar systems were invented in various places (Roman Italy, early medieval Jewish Cairo, ancient India, medieval Korea) independently, but it isn't clear to me that any of those were ancestors of the modern Western system. From the author of the article:
When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps.
Two-dimensional arrays of essentially financial data go back to, I dunno, Akkad or Sumer? Tons have been found in places like Ugarit that didn't survive the bronze age collapse. (It's possible that he might have more of a point about depreciation, but I'm skeptical, and his argument isn't convincing.)
In my consulting work, I am leery of pissing of China. If the CCP ever wanted to get me fired they could make it happen.
Combining the threads, you can imagine China deciding to threatening to stop their students from going to certain schools combining with the new involvement of BoT in hiring to make it so that not only does Fox News have veto power over tenure, so does the CCP.
Though I guess in principle they could do the same thing with the Provost as the pressure point.
What's likely to happen is a steady erosion of the academic standing of flagship public universities in red states. This will mostly harm smarter but poorer kids in those states. Which is probably as much the intention as hurting the liberal professors.
The "America had its revolution to protect slavery" thing in the 1619 project was legitimately false and bad, and also a pretty central political claim for the project.
The accounting stuff is crazy wrong.
With that said I think that most historians basically accurately think that it is really important to ground almost all of American history to the connection to slavery, the 1619 project is by like light years the best and most effective popularization of that project, so it nets out to a good thing even if some of the actual history is weak. Plus no one wants to look like a Trumper by pushing back too hard against it. That's probably all right and for the good.
Some respected recent history by real historians in this area is crazy bad though too. Mostly on economic history (which is central to the project). Ed Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told is so bad on these issues that it walks the line between incompetence and actual academic fraud -- he double or triple counted inputs to make up numbers about slavery's importance to GDP, ignored or misrepresented tons of evidence to make up a story about slavery and cotton productivity, etc. He's probably the worst but there are some other examples. So there was a whole mood of real historians doing bad history about slavery with good political and a good overall message about the importance of slavery for the 1619 project to draw from.
"bad [knowledge-gathering field], good politics" is a really uncomfortable place to be in.
35 is the reason why I care so much about the answer to 6. I'm in a state that's much redder than NC or Wisconsin, but which also has a Republican party that takes a less explicitly hostile approach to higher ed as such.
Is there something specific about the 1619 Project that you think is wrong? It's been pretty exhaustively reviewed and defended. Aside from one eye-caching phrase that NYT did correct, I haven't seen any critiques that appeared to be accurate or even in good faith
I thought this one seemed fair, she was one of the historians consulted by the project.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248
33: The impression I see among the China watchers is that the Chinese students are never coming back. Post-covid, post-hate crimes, post-HK, they won't want to go and the CCP won't want to let them, except for advanced students in some fields where there is still knowledge to be transferred, and security/xenophobia will be closing doors in exactly those fields. Other avenues of influence, Confucius Institutes, think tank funding, PRC satellite campuses, are getting lit up and shut down.
I guess that will drop rents in my neighborhood. The dumplings should be O.K. because the owners rotate cooks in from your island.
And when the war comes the killer robot factories around CMU will make Pittsburgh rich again.
I know a Chinese guy who lives in the UK who said that Brexit worked out well for him because it made housing prices drop.
With double entry bookkeeping, every economic negative is somebody else's gain.
40: Some Pittsburgh twitterati recently had FOMO that a Mossheimat group had developed an autonomous flooded mine exploration robot. Obviously CMU should've been all over that, given Pittsburgh's mining history.
41: Back when I would talk with a local businessman in that community, he described some practices (not his) to extract money from overseas students that seemed almost certainly illegal, e.g. completely under-the-table transactions, massive subdivisions of apartments into N individual rooms, etc. So there might be some more slack there before it has a huge effect on rents. (I got the impression he completely despised the students but was happy to take their money; they were pampered and spoiled but they paid out and weren't usually trouble.)
43: Whatever effect that had has totally been wiped out by the COVID increase also seen in the US, plus a temporary stamp duty holiday. If he got in before that, good for him.
(On that note, if anyone in the London Unfoggetariat, or UK more generally, has any thoughts about the local real estate market, would love to hear. It's intimidating.)
46: He did. He was in the middle of looking when the referendum happened, and immediately saved a bunch of money.
1619 had some stronger and weaker pieces to be sure, like anything that makes it into the popular press. But it would be great if critics would engage with the claims and rhetoric actually in the pieces, not the exaggerated or misrepresentative summaries they either read about secondhand or themselves want to argue against.
If 49 is directed at me, I read the actual thing I'm talking about.
There has been a lot of criticism of it that sounded to me like treating differences of perspective or emphasis as factual errors. There was an incident we talked about before where someone was going after N H-J on Twitter for saying that 1619 was the real founding of America when any fool knows it was 1776. And that's just silly -- obviously no one's confused about when the war started that led to the initiation of the continuous governmental entity that's still in operation. She's making a claim about the founding of American society as it recognizably exists today. That claim might be well or badly founded, but it's not a simple statement of fact you can refute by pointing at the date on the Declaration of Independence.
Even the accounting piece, that clearly has problems -- saying that when you use spreadsheets or depreciation, you're using practices whose "roots twist back to" slave labor camps isn't a straightforward claim that those practices were new in slave labor camps. You can read it as saying something more like they were popularized or brought into conventional, common usage in the US through their use in slave labor -- that professionalized, systematic accounting was pervasive in the slave labor economy early, and spread through the rest of the economy from there.
That's a claim that could still be true or false, but it's not easily refuted by pointing out earlier examples of double-entry bookkeeping.
But it is wildly implausible as a claim. Accounting was invented in Europe, and used widely by Europeans. Pretty much the history of European accounting is the history of whatever the most complex business ventures of the time were -- Italian trading companies, then the Dutch, then the British. The people who copied British railroads, and British finance to pay for the railroads, and in fact raised money in Britain to pay for those railroads, somehow turned to the American South to learn how to do the accounting for the railroads, rather than the British?
Seriously, what you're sounds right to me offhand. But it seems like the sort of thing there might be a valid argument about -- were there quirks of slave-related accounting that were real innovations, that show up elsewhere later? Were there favored accounting texts that became popular among slave owners and then became standard texts economy-wide? There's detailed inquiry you could do (that may have been done already but doesn't show up on the surface of a summary, journalistic essay) that could support those kinds of claims. "But the Medeci" doesn't get you to establishing the essay is worthless.
If you want to make an argument like that, you don't make for the first time as a piece of journalism in the New York Times. Especially if you are a sociologist, relying on a book that doesn't really make the claim that you are making. (It makes the smaller claim that slave owners kept careful records of people as property, because they were amoral psychopaths.) Instead, it relies on innuendo that there's something wrong with the standard account in the exact way that liberals would suspect.
The main claim to novelty seems to be depreciation. I was curious about this when I first read it, and I found an accounting history paper that traces it back to 1399, and an Italian trading company.
54: I particularly called out ancient use of two dimensional record keeping because that is a precise antecedent to managing rows and columns in Excel; if he was talking about a different innovative quirk, he should have said it. (Now, he does try to claim depreciation is an invention of the slaving south, but doesn't linger on it, and it doesn't seem to align with what I can find elsewhere.)
So, using your more generous reading reading of "roots twist back to," there certainly could be a valid argument, but even then I don't think the writing makes it. If we wanted to show that a particular innovation of plantations is the progenitor of a modern practice, not only do you have to show that it either started or acquired a relevant form during slave times, you have to tell a story of how it got from plantations to today. Is the Taylorism that many modern practices actually are descended from an outgrowth of plantation management systems, or just something that'd naturally happen when capitalists try to suck all they can out of labor? I have no clue, it doesn't actually connect the dots, but the author wants you to think there's an intellectual lineage. (If it seems weird that I'm talking about management practices and not accounting practices, he leaps back and forth between them.)
It genuinely is true that capitalism is tied up into slavery. It's barbaric and something like the 1619 Project is a great place to inform people of that in detail. He just did a bad job of it. It would have been stronger if it had been more honest. I think one of the main problems is that it's not merely an American story, and trying to tie everything back to Southern plantations at a certain time period weakens the argument.
56 before seeing 55. To be fair, this paragraph, with my earlier quote, is the entirety of what he says about depreciation:
Like today's titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck's "Plantation Record and Account Book," which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck's book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book "was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period," [author of Accounting For Slavery] Rosenthal told me. "I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck's book for free labor." Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck's recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points.
That sentence raises more questions than answers. Mostly I'd just like to read an interview with Rosenthal. Her research sounds fascinating and I don't think this is giving us a good glimpse into it.
..and here's a thread by her. (There's also an interview video on the 1619 Project website, but I don't have the energy for that right now.) She's supportive of the project while having quibbles. She ends with "1619 is about how our history looked to enslaved people and their descendants. (It isn't about whether slavery caused capitalism!)" Which is true and important. (Sorry for getting us more sidetracked on one particularly weak article.) But I'm still feeling how I did back in 37.
I feel like this is holding 1619 to a different standard than other journalism. All journalism is sloppy and full of errors and oversells it's thesis. That's just what journalism is. She isn't getting hired to a history department, she's getting hired to a journalism school and she has a fucking Pulitzer. What more do you want in a J-school hire? A genius grant? Well she's got that too.
59: NHJ not getting tenure was a travesty and doesn't reflect on the quality of the 1619 Project. If it isn't clear I'm not stating any issues with the project as a whole, I'm stating my issues with a single particularly bad essay in it that wasn't even written by her.
That being said, you're right, it probably is holding it to a different standard than normal journalism. It isn't even written like normal journalism, it isn't current affairs, it's a self-consciously grander project, a sweeping description of the real history of America and its racism. Why should it be held to the same standard?
Quite aside from any specific strengths or weaknesses of NHJ's work, the General Assembly purged anybody with remotely Democratic leanings from the Board several years ago. Every single sitting member sees their primary role as wiping out liberal influence in the university system. That is specifically what they were appointed to do.
As I understand it, she's not being asked to leave or declared ineligible for tenure; she's just not getting tenure upon being hired. It's still ridiculous, but it's a different kind of ridiculous. How many Pulitzers does a black woman need to earn tenure these days?
"The 1619 Project" has become this weird buzzword like "critical race theory" that's completely detached from reality. The legislature decided to issue a resolution against critical race theory, so we're not allowed to teach that one race is superior to another (!) and it would not surprise me to see a resolution that we must not teach that America was founded in 1619.
I think the anti-CRT laws are going to rely on an ambiguity. Of course already anti-racist classes aren't teaching one race is superior to another, or whatever else they list, so the laws outlaw something that doesn't exist. But administrators are going to take it as a signal to ban the types of courses that right-wing nutjobs don't like.
We should try to find someone who still teaches that slavery was justified because God set white people over others and find out.
63: oh, of course. It's just the clearest case of idiots legislating from soundbites since the....so many choices, actually.
63, 64 Our attorney general has issued an opinion on what is banned: https://media.dojmt.gov/wp-content/uploads/AGO-V58-O1-5.27.21-FINAL.pdf (Just skip to page 18, if you click through). Classes and trainings that suggest to students that they are racist, or need to rehabilitate themselves, or force self-criticism sessions, and the like. It's probably not happening all that much, but it's probably happening some, at some places on the margin.
Hey, I see that Texas is having an 1836 Project. Apparently, some Texans not not sufficiently appreciating the significance of the Alamo! The important thing, though, is to ban any suggestion that Mexico's abolition of slavery was any kind of factor in the Texian independence movement.
I've been recently discovering, among my DNA matches, people who are great great grandchildren of someone who is identifiably part of the Missouri French population. How much of the movement from Indiana and Illinois to Missouri had to do with keeping slaves? I'll bet it was non-trivial.
From 67.1:
Individuals may not be forced participate in "privilege walks" that treat students differently based on race.I'm curious. These walks sound like the approach of the Apartheid Museum, which I've heard universally praised (including by white racists) as a great teaching approach. Also footnote:
69 For example, the New York Times' 1619 Project has been debunked by historians across the spec-trum. See Letter to the Editor: We Respond to the Historians Who Critiqued The 1619 Project, N.Y. TIMES (Dec. 29, 2019) ("[W]e are dismayed at some of the factual errors in the project and the closed process behind it. These errors, which concern major events, cannot be described as interpretation or 'framing.' They are matters of verifiable fact, which are the foundation of both honest scholarship and honest journalism. They suggest a displacement of historical understanding by ideology."). This cur-riculum is nonetheless protected by the First Amendment and it is reserved for policymakers to decide if it belongs in classrooms.And:
Thus, when evaluating whether antidiscrim-ination protections threaten to chill the teaching of curricula that may offer great value to students, First Amendment caselaw takes into account a school's legitimate pedagogical interest in explaining and effectively and lawfully addressing racism. See Arce v. Douglas, 793 F.3d 968, 985 (9th Cir. 2015). Hostile environment caselaw, similarly, takes the totality of the circumstances into account, including the age of the student. See 59 Fed. Reg. at 11449, 11452; Harris, 510 U.S. at 23. CRT and antiracist ideas may be bandied about like any others. Let the marketplace of ideas be the judge. I predict it will not be kind. This opinion concerns race-based treat-ment, classifications, and compulsions that arise from CRT and antiracism theory.[...]
The First Amendment prevents the government from restricting protected speech, but it also prevents compelled speech. W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 637 (1943). "[F]reedom of speech 'includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.'"Almost as if the jurists have ridden this rodeo before.
Looks like the tenure fuckery was instigated by the Journalism School's biggest donor: https://www.theassemblync.com/long-form/nikole-hannah-jones-a-mega-donor-and-the-future-of-journalism/
Aside from the obvious problems of donor influence over the academy, I have to wonder how exactly you amass or even maintain an 8-digit fortune working in newspapers over the last 30+ years.
I guess my quest to be the compromise candidate for prime minister of Israel has failed.
65: There has got to be someone somewhere in an economics department at an American university teaching just that.
The guy in 69.1 seems so annoying. It's like he's a parody of the only white men can be objective concept.
69: The idea that the donor in question did that out of a dedicated principle of literally supporting bothsides journalism rather than out of pure pwn-the-libs fuckery is somehow even more depressing.
I feel like this is holding 1619 to a different standard than other journalism.
I feel like this is holding history to a different standard than history is normally held to. I am in favor of raising standards in both professions, but you inevitably run into a problem because if you are an American in either profession, you are engaged in a dialogue with racists.
You see this with the discussion of the origin of the pandemic. A bunch of racists came out and said it was a plot by China to kill Americans. In that environment, it's very difficult to have a sensible conversation about the different possibilities for the origin of the virus.
This thread offers an insider perspective and an answer to my finance question: https://twitter.com/douglasblackmon/status/1399144117704273923?s=21
I'm working on a project with a colleague. He used to drive me nuts, but when we started on this project a few years ago, I observed that he seemed to be toning it down for me, and he no longer drove me nuts.
I haven't seen him this past year, and now we're zooming to resume this project. He's visiting family.
Colleague: My uncle is driving my wife crazy. He's that liberal type of annoying.
Me: What does "liberal type of annoying" mean?
Colleage: You know, he thinks he's super worldly and cultured and always thinks he has the best taste in everything."
Me: That sounds like pretentious to me.
Colleague: yes, very pretentious.
Me: how is that liberal?
Colleague: Well, it's the conservative idea of why liberals are annoying.
Me: yes, but plenty of liberal people aren't like that. It doesn't have anything to do with liberal policies or ideas.
[Note: his wife is actually very liberal, more than my colleague, who prides himself on being a dumb centrist.]
Colleague: Sure. It cuts both ways. It's like how liberals think that conservatives are uneducated and vote against their best interests.
Me: [deep breath and steely gaze and just sitting there for a few beats while I decide if I want to unpack that.] Well, let's look at our project.
I'm remembering all my misgivings about working with him, and I'm totally annoyed that he's forgotten how to get along with me.
Maybe you just need to say something nice about his Ed Hardy shirt?
"I see what you mean. Three is exactly the right number of wolves to picture howling at the moon."
"Good point. So, who do you think won the presidential election?"
who prides himself on being a dumb centrist.
"I'm a dumb centrist," he said proudly.
"I'm a proud centrist," he said dumbly.
"I'm proudly dumb," he said centrally.
There's a certain sort of wishful thinking involved in centrism. "I'm in the middle so I'll have the deciding vote."
If you are in the middle, they probably really will shoot you last.
Surely they would shoot you in the middle. Or even first, depending on the exact procedures and configurations.
Might want to brush up on your modular arithmetic in case they're fans of Josephus.
Every time I'm reminded of it, I'm still surprised that I'm older than the Heimlich maneuver.
About the local housing market -- I don't know anything about London. But it makes no sense out here in the provinces, where it is being driven upwards, I think, by the great exodus of families where the adults have acquired a taste for working from home during the pandemic. I don't see that bubble subsiding for a while.