Advertisement

Advertisement

News, Views and Careers for All of Higher Education


University Diaries




Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 3:48 pm EST

By UD

Charles Murray on Elites  
(8 comments)

As we wait for the next water to break on the Palin story, it’s worth recalling that one of the country’s most high-profile conservative thinkers, Charles Murray, has been promoting a book which argues, among other things, that college should be reserved for America’s intellectually gifted. The cognitive elite, Murray says, is the group most likely to be running government and industry; and, given these crucial responsibilities, it should be as seriously educated as possible:

There is an elite whether we like it or not. And what that elite has in common is that they are not only able, they are also academically talented. They are all in the top ten percent of intellectual ability. And we’ve got to start thinking about the kinds of education those people who have such an enormous influence on the culture and the society — what kind of education they need. Here is where college comes into play in a useful form. College should be the place where they are forced to think deeply, drawing on the best that has been written in the past about questions of virtue and the nature of the good and what is required in order to live a good life.

For everyone else, “the solution is not better degrees, but no degrees,” Murray argues, noting that the vast number of Americans don’t need the higher-level reflection on “questions of virtue and the nature of the good” that the elite needs. Most Americans merely need certification programs in a vocational field, not a four-year BA with its courses in philosophy and so forth. Again, the academic elite needs a serious education in virtue because it’s most likely to be running the country; the vocational non-elite can save everyone a lot of time and money by taking career-oriented training targeted to success on a certification test.

The Palin mess puts the problem with this position in an especially clear light.

A lot of Americans don’t seem to like highly educated people, and they don’t want them running the country. They prefer people with poor academic backgrounds, like John McCain, whose class rank in college was 894 out of 899, and like Sarah Palin, who got a degree in communications at the University of Idaho, a Tier 3 school in the US News and World Report rankings. Mike Huckabee, who had a very parochial college education, did extremely well in the primaries. If John McCain drops Palin from his ticket, he might well pick up Huckabee, who seems to share her genial indifference to large parts of the world outside of the United States.

Many conservative voters, then, disagree with Charles Murray; they expect cognitively middling people with little academic exposure to moral philosophy and international relations to run the country.

Given this preference for intellectually average and below-average folk in positions of power, I think we need — with Country First the watchword — to take a position as far away as possible from Charles Murray’s. We need to encourage everyone to be in college for as many years as they possibly can, in the hope that somewhere along the line they might get some exposure to the world outside their town, and to moral ideas not exclusively derived from their parents’ religion. If they don’t get this in college, they’re not going to get it anywhere else.





Thursday, August 14, 2008 at 9:49 pm EST

By UD

Professor Meets Gun, Part 10: To Arms  
(8 comments)

Where to learn to shoot? Where does a fiftyish female English professor with bad aim and a bad attitude go for some bangbang?

UD contemplated this. She considered an NRA class; she considered the many kind shooting invitations from gunnies that she got via this Inside Higher Ed series. She considered taking things slower, the way professors do, sitting around libraries reading about guns rather than shooting them...

And then it — as it were — hit her. Down the dirt road from her Upstate New York country house lives H., a big tough mountain man and owner of many rifles and shotguns.

H. is about pig roasts and buck hunting with a bow and scaring the geese off a neighbor’s pond by blasting away at the air above them for hours.

When H. bombs up to UD’s house in his all-terrain vehicle, there’s something — despite the sweat and the fatigues — regal in his bearing: He sits straight and high, with many dog attendants, master of the mountains.

H. is all that UD is not: A man, for whom women’s inferiority is an obvious truth, a Red Stater, an enthusiastic outdoorsman (UD loves her little country house and environs, but you won’t catch her tromping the hills all day), a joiner (this weekend, H. goes on a group outing to a loggers’ convention)... No doubt H. regards UD with the same amazement with which she regards him; but since they both have a sense of humor, they enjoy talking together.

And so, just now, UD presented herself at H.’s place and asked him if he’d teach her how to shoot.

“Of course,” said H. “No problem. Listen, I’m taking my wife to Cobleskill at the moment. I’ll come by your place at around four o’clock and take you down to mine and we’ll shoot.”

“Do you have a gun light enough for me?”

“I have just the thing.” He went and got a rifle and showed it to UD. “No kick. Smooth and easy. You’ll see.”

“What will we shoot at?”

“I’ll set up some cans.”

UD walked back up the hill to her house and told Mr. UD, who was on the deck reading The Theory of Communicative Action, about her appointment to shoot cans.

“The question,” he said, after thinking about this for a moment, “is not what you will shoot, but whom.”

“Yes. I certainly hope I don’t shoot H. Or myself.”
——————————————————————————————-
It’s 4:17 and here comes H., powering up our hill on his ATV. Mr. UD’s mowing the grass.

“Where’s your honey?” H. asks Mr. UD, who doesn’t quite understand the question.

“Your honey’s right here!” UD calls from the house.

“My God, they have ears on them, don’t they,” says H.

“You have a woman problem,” UD tells him, and he laughs.

Les UDs walk down to his place while H. mounts his ATV again.

H. is waiting on his back deck — it has a long view of a wildflower field and then forest and then hills — with a 22 caliber rifle. “See how lightweight this is? Now I’m putting the bullets in ... Sure, you can put them in... Just drop them in with the rim in this direction... And I’ve made a target for you.”

On the lawn below us, instead of cans, sits a large upright cardboard box, its back panel removed. A white circle’s been painted on it.

H. shows UD how to rest the gun on her right shoulder and hold it in her left hand. “The sight on this is really no good. You can try seeing through it, but it’ll be hard. Just aim without it and see what happens. Just get off some shots.”

So that’s what UD did. UD fired the gun repeatedly, calmly, easily, focusing as well as she could on the target. After fifteen shots, they went down to see whether she’d hit the box at all.

Mr. UD and H. found quite a number of bullet holes in the target, one of them near the center of the white circle.

—————————————————————————————
“Now I’ll show you a real gun.” H. opens the door to his garage and walks over to a way-serious looking safe. Size of a refrigerator. Fort Knox City. He twirls the gold handle on it and opens it to reveal, leaning together, many guns. “Plus there’s one I keep in my bedroom in case someone comes in.”

“What the difference between a shotgun and a rifle?”

He brings out some shotguns. “They don’t use bullets. They use pellets. You use shotguns for shooting birds.”

He also brings out a couple of specialty items — a Nazi knife, and a tiny pistol with a folding trigger, also of Nazi provenance.

“You told me you were applying for a pistol license. Why not just use this one?”

“This one’s unregistered, and because it’s from Germany, I’d have to send it back there, and go through all kinds of international paperwork. Not worth it... Still, I’d use an unregistered gun like this one if I had it handy and had to defend myself... You know what they say: I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six.”

He hands UD a much heavier rifle than the 22 she just used, with a much spiffier looking sight on it. “I want you to try to shoot this. There will be some kick. Give it a try.”

We’re standing at the entrance to his garage, and one of his dogs scampers about, anticipating an afternoon of hunting. “I don’t want to kill your dog.”

“Aim at the ground.”

Bang. The kick doesn’t bother UD, but the blast does. She understands now why everyone at the NRA range protects their ears. The greater power of this weapon is immediately, viscerally obvious to UD, who, as she thanks H. and prepares to leave, considers the fact that although she wouldn’t even touch a gun at the Virginia gun show she went to a couple of weeks ago, she seems here, in the calm of the countryside on a sunny day, quite willing to let it rip.





Wednesday, July 30, 2008 at 7:47 am EST

By UD

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN, Part 9: Suck My Glock  
(23 comments)

UD got a cab ride to the Chantilly, Virginia gun show last weekend with her taxi driver friend, G. No way was Mr. UD going to drive UD to a gun show.

G., a working class woman in her forties, told UD about her alcoholic husband (he died of cirrhosis a year after she left him) grabbing his rifle one night and blasting her car when she got home late from a friend’s.

The show took place at the Dulles Expo, a large, low-ceilinged, industrial space near the airport. As she got out of the cab, UD was surrounded by men cradling locked rifles.

Lots of people entered the Expo. The show was well-attended.

An NRA booth next to the ticket kiosk offered to pay your admission if you took out a membership.

***************************************************

The vast room was 99% men, most of whom wore wifebeaters with motorcycle or military messages on them, and camouflage shorts. Baseball caps carrying messages about love of country and love of Harley topped many heads, and tattoos of baroque complexity appeared on arms and legs and necks. Facial hair was big, as were beer guts. Deep southern accents prevailed.

This was not UD’s world. She gazed about.

One guy she called Columbine Guy because he was young, skinny, pale, all in black, and carrying a very big gun. His fat nerd sidekick, also in black, had a police stick attached to his belt and fascist symbols on his shirt.

An old man wore his VFW hat plus a t-shirt that said Oliver North: American Hero: Duty, Honor, Country.

A punk couple — her hair deep black, his belt heavily studded — walked arm in arm.

Guys recruiting for the State Guard wore khaki.

Large groups of Asians circulated.

*****************************************************

UD wandered a bit among the long low tables loaded with pistols, rifles, and shotguns. One of the sellers was a sort of cave man, with rough shaggy hair, a beery face, and seen-it-all, pissed off eyes. He scrutinized customers with tired contempt: their ignorant questions, their stupid enthusiasms.

UD sat down at a little cafe in a corner of the massive room. She watched a guy at a table near hers buy a gun from another guy; the seller barely glanced at the identification card the buyer flashed.

Examining his purchase, the buyer said: “Somebody smuggling a ton of cocaine. That’d give me so much satisfaction. To nail him.”

******************************************************

Wandering the tables again, UD noticed that although the guns were out there for you to handle to your heart’s content, she wasn’t touching any of them. Not one. By the time she left the show, she had touched nothing. ("Taboo,” Mr. UD said later. “It’s taboo for you.” “You’re a girl,” said Jonathan, a friend who writes for the blog ChicagoBoyz. “It’s because you’re a girl.")

UD did handle some t-shirts. She bought one that says Suck My Glock.

******************************************************
Back at a cafe table, UD found herself in deep conversation with a recruiter who took a seat near her. He told her about the State Guard. She only knew about the National Guard. Then she asked him to talk to her about guns.

“You have to take responsibility for yourself. No one else is going to save you. I’ve got a lot of guns at home. I keep one locked by my bed, and all I have to do is key in four numbers to get it out and use it.... I live in the countryside, sort of away from other people, because I like to do a lot of target practice and it’s real noisy and people complain. Target practice is relaxing. You concentrate so hard. Everything else disappears.”

He lived in Virginia. “You must be pleased with Jim Webb.”

“No. I’m not pleased with Tim Kaine either. I don’t like politicians. Liars and thieves. The elites follow their own rules. The rules should apply to everybody the same.”

He went on at great length about elites.

“You told me a moment ago,” interrupted UD, “that you make a hundred thousand dollars a year as an electrical engineer. You’re closer to the elites than to any other social group.”

He looked hard at UD — really looked at her, for the first time. “What are you? I mean, what do you do for a living?”

“I’m an English professor.”

“What kind of literature do you teach?”

“English and American, twentieth century.”

“I do a lot of reading. You should recommend some novels to me. Where do you teach?”

“George Washington University.”

“That hospital saved my life. I had this big tumor in my chest.” His hands went out wide, like a fisherman describing his catch. “The little country hospital near my house almost killed me doing a test — put a couple of holes in my heart. I got myself over to GW and they fixed me up.”

“Give me a hospital for urban elites over your local place any day.”
“You said it.”





Sunday, July 13, 2008 at 6:43 pm EST

By UD

PROFESSOR MEETS GUN: Part Eight -- We're All That Way  
(23 comments)

“Guns,” conclude two Yale law professors in a recent Emory Law Journal, “are at the center of an expressive struggle between the adherents of competing visions of the good society — one egalitarian and communal, the other hierarchic and individualistic.”

Yeah, and which is which? “The more hierarchical and individualistic individuals were in their orientations, the more they opposed control; and the more egalitarian and solidaristic they were, the more they supported it.”

I know ... Must people write like this? Individualistic individuals? Is solidaristic a word?

But put that aside. UD’s back from her blogging break — though she’s still on vacation, negotiating Hurricane Bertha-inspired tides at Rehoboth Beach, Delaware — and ready again to shoulder the subject of guns. She’s grateful to one of her Inside Higher Ed readers for linking her to the Emory piece, because it moves her along in her attempt to understand and take up a position somewhere on the control/confiscation continuum...

The piece argues, just as Mark Tushnet does (see this post), that we can waste time fighting about whether lots of legal guns lying about decreases or increases crime (it almost certainly increases suicide), but we’re not really going to be able to answer these questions decisively. It makes more sense to understand the cultural divide underlying the gun conflict in America, and then to attempt to get the warring parties to understand one another and possibly moderate their positions. As Wendy Kaminer writes, “Debates about gun ownership and gun control are driven more by values and ideology than by pragmatism — and hardly at all by the existing empirical research, which is complex and inconclusive.”
**********************************

UD’s problem with the fundamental divide on offer here between hierarchical and individualistic gunnies and egalitarian and solidaristic anti-gunnies is that it doesn’t map all that well onto professors.

Of course, you could argue that the large national conversation about guns the guys writing in the Emory journal want to start doesn’t need my lot to get itself going; but this IHE series is titled professor meets gun, and its focus for better or worse is on one professor typifying one form of antipathy to guns. So let’s proceed.

Let’s begin with this excerpt from a recent essay about being a tenured professor in America today. The anonymous author tries to account for the incessant bickering in his department:

Although I’m not even at the midpoint of my career, I’m already worried about the repetitious nature of my job. Teaching the same classes year in and year out would seem to be a one-way ticket to tedium. On bad days, you feel like the protagonist from the movie Groundhog Day. On good days, you feel motivated to discover new texts, develop new courses, and strike out in new directions.

But innovation requires effort, and opportunities for change are often limited by curricula, concerns about coverage, and other constraints. Perhaps we initiate and perpetuate interdepartmental fights in order to keep boredom at bay. Not that we do that consciously or calculatingly, but at some unrecognized level, aren’t we itching for intensity? Tenured for life, we perhaps need the drama of conflict to inject the thrill of spontaneous emotion and extreme passion into our stable and predictable existences. Conflict might be our unacknowledged antidote for ennui.

This comment goes to the deep, almost problematic, sense of security UD has always known — and, as a tenured professor, will, at least in her public existence, rather likely continue to know. (Recall this post, in which UD describes her life of remarkable security, a security that started at birth.)

Professors are so bored in their stable, predictable lives, so oppressed by ennui, that they provoke conflict in their little group just so that, for a few moments, they can feel intensity, drama, and passion.

Of course, this enviably calm life is supposed to help professors think freely and creatively; one might say that a professor’s passion is supposed to come from her scholarly and pedagogical activity... though mainly from her scholarly activity, since tenure is ultimately about the provision of intellectual freedom... Yet here we’ve got a young professor stressing the depressing non-eventfulness of an academic’s life, the almost maddening nothingness of it. The claim is that there’s an acutely felt tedium to a tenured professor’s days, and it’s so fierce that the professor will pick fights to give herself a sense of being alive.

**************************************

Whatever else you might say about this picture of dead academics stimulating themselves through quarrel, it doesn’t exactly describe the social solidarity the law journal authors evoke. Most professors are pro-gun control, but are they really the egalitarian communal types the article associates with this political position? It’s not very communal to be fighting all the time. And as for egalitarian...

UD can think of few more hierarchical settings than American universities. Professors live in a tightly titled universe (lecturer, assistant, associate, full, named, named in three departments, named in four schools, man of letters, man about town, Man Booker recipient...); they’re constantly comparing their schools to other schools (the US News and World Report rankings are notorious obsessions, and now there’s that other thing, that ranking of public intellectuals.... plus, what, Posner’s book?..), and they keep close watch on everyone’s course load and annual report and article production, with many departments ranking each tenured faculty member each year in terms of productivity and reputation.

This is one of the big reasons why our universities are the envy of the world. They’re full of restless quarrelsome status-obsessives. You want communal egalitarians, go to an Italian university.

****************************************

It’s noon. There’s a fine breeze and a full sun and a beach steps away. UD will conclude this post with the following thought: We’re all that way. We’re all of us — Americans — hierarchic and individualistic. At least we’re much more hierarchic and individualistic than we are communal and egalitarian. People characterize tenured radicals as communal and egalitarian, but they’re really not. They just look that way because they’re bored.