Even as someone who thinks "don't go to grad school"* is solid advice for almost everyone, Ron Rosenbaum provided the dumbest possible reason for thinking so. His advice duly mocked here.


*i.e. "don't go to grad school if you want an academic job," since there's no guarantee of that, and probably less of a guarantee than being underpaid for many years is worth. All students' milage may vary, and I certainly wouldn't have listened to someone who told me that (or, more honestly, have understood exactly what it meant, 21 year olds not being notoriously good long-term planners, and therefore not having a good grasp of what they'll want at 28). On the whole, though, and especially for students who could probably hack it but could do so with something else, there's still not enough 'don't go to grad school' around.

So, the Erik Loomis thing. On the one hand, I'm with Ken at Popehat: the speech of Professor Loomis' that has gotten him in trouble is uncivil, borderline offensive, and designed, I think, to promote exactly the sort of misreadings that his critics have engaged in (the "I'm not touching you"-type of rhetorical push whose only purpose can be to infuriate; calls to "start a dialogue" about a topic which has an extensive dialogue already, where "let's talk" means "I will not accept a result until I win" are a problem; this is an attempt to torch dialogue entirely). The public heat he's gotten is fair and deserved, or would be, if the people giving it were arguing in good faith (some are not).

On the other hand, the University of Rhode Island overstepped its bounds. His public-non-job-related comments are not a matter pertaining to his conduct as a professor. Even (especially) if they were, that's what a university and academic freedom are for: the ability to espouse all kinds of views. Public universities especially should not be in the business of policing (much less condemning!) the speech of their own communities. The URI president's unwillingness to engage in even the most basic of defenses of one of the university's employees ("we disagree vigorously with the positions of Professor Loomis, but we respect the right of people in the community to disagree on the range of issues, and protect their right to do so as a crucial part of academic inquiry") is unacceptable.

Norm's story here is, I think, a modest argument in favor of the fourth year of college instruction and/or the presence of some required distribution of courses prior to the requirement to choose a major: both provide more time to 'try on' different options with lower stakes. I am certain I will have more definite opinions on this once I have taught in the Core here at Chicago for longer. (I do, however, think the average undergraduate curriculum could probably use more, not less, classroom time to major in a subject, especially where the general education requirements are lower. Philosophy at Michigan had a very structured curriculum for majors and possibly even a higher overall hour-requirement, and was accordingly more systematic and useful than even political science. For me, its use was convincing me that I didn't want to be a philosopher, but that's still a use.)

An excellent point with wider application:

Basically, and I’m venting here, I feel like we’re at this weird point in music where we all worship and adore these musicians of old (The Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Bowie, James Brown, Stax, Motown) while forgetting that these people were trying to write hits. They were trying to write songs that would move people, trying to craft popular songs while still sneaking in artistry and bits and pieces of themselves.

Nor were they the only ones: all the obscure people were trying to write hits, too. The MC5, Iggy, Lou Reed (see Loaded if you doubt it), Gram Parsons, the New York Dolls, even the self-consciously artistically motivated ones like Patti Smith, who did not hesitate to accept "Because the Night" from Bruce Springsteen, and for whom the royalty checks from that song made possible the quiet 15-year period of her life with her (late and lamented) husband, all did so as well. So also novelists and filmmakers: no one wants to be poor. T.S. Eliot didn't work at a bank because he didn't want to make a living as a poet, but because he couldn't for a large portion of his productive life.

Oddly, it occurs to me, the only people who may understand this correctly are academics: I want to research and teach the things of interest to me pretty much exclusively for the rest of my life. But to do this, I need a job, which will provide the money and the platform to do what I want. Therefore I must compromise and work with an institution, and become successful there, in order to have the freedom and ability to do the things I want; the courses I teach have to be a mix of what must be taught and what I would like to teach, etc.

While it's true that there are significant differences in resources available at public v. private schools, I am not entirely certain this trickles down to individual student-level experience in the manner suggested at the link. Take, for a non-random example, my own experience in political science at the University of Michigan: Introduction to American Politics had 500 people, and was taught by a GSI in section with, as best I recall, 25 or so people. Introduction to Political Theory had 400, and a similar discussion-section arrangement. Most of my upper-level classes were around 40 students--40 meant no discussion sections, just the professor.

In spite of this, I had exactly as much attention from the professors in these classes as I wanted--which in a few instances was significant contact over multiple years. In fact, I probably had comparable interactions to those students who went to private schools (at least those who never wrote a thesis). The reason is that the culture of a public school is radically different than that of a private school: students at public schools tend to think of class as a place you go to absorb knowledge and then leave, and the bigger the class, the greater the expectation of no interaction. This meant that, even in those 40-person classes with high student interest, I was competing with--at most--ten other people for the professor's time, and usually fewer than that; at least in my experience, that's equivalent to the more time-intensive approach of private schools.

The lack of resources still matters: it makes a difference in the ability to attract and retain top faculty, and it makes a difference in how the average student is served (I was not the average student), who is unlikely to take advantage of opportunities even if they have some desire to do so because the culture of the school disinclines them to do so--and if this is true at Michigan, which is certainly academically-oriented, I can only imagine it to be more true at other public schools with fewer resources.

The gang at Crooked Timber occasionally let their polemical impulses get the better of them. The parody letter from the board of voters at Virginia is not one of those: it's basically perfect.

As an alumnus of the University of Michigan, I approve of the University of Virginia's decision to remove itself from "best public university in America" consideration via the most spectacular and dysfunctional means possible. As an academic, I'm disturbed by what it means for the future of higher education, public or private.

Somewhere I have a list of claims a speaker can make that will cause me to instantly suspect the veracity of their argument. Prominent on this list is any thesis that covers over a hundred years: a carefully-written book might be able to connect all the relevant threads: a hour-long talk will not. Similarly, any claim that involves a sufficiently large-scale abstract noun: for example, 'religion.'

Does religion cause violence? Only if you have no idea what qualifies as religion, as apparently many academics who study the question do not. As someone who a. knows a decent amount about the development of theology, Christian and otherwise, in Europe and b. studies the late-medieval and early modern period, when people were constantly fighting about 'religion,' this seems obvious to me. All possible cases are sufficiently complex that I'm not sure I could say what is 'really' driving decision-making: does Ferdinand II, during the Thirty Years War, honestly believe in the correctness of his Jesuit Catholic view and consider converting Protestants and other strands of Catholic to his point of view to be a good thing for their souls? Probably. Is he also a political leader who is attempting to control most of Europe and weaken his adversaries, Protestant or Catholic? Certainly. Which is 'actually' determining his policies? Both, or some combination thereof, which I am not certain one could specify apart from inspection of his soul. So any large-ish claims will be close to unprovable.

I must be wrong about this, because I think it makes a pretty basic mistake about publishing:

How many times have you written something, published it, and then realized in retrospect that what you thought you said was not in fact what came through? (Even if you’ve never done this yourself, you’ve certainly witnessed it in others.) What if you could revise a work after publishing it, and release it again, making clear the relationship between the first version and the new one. What if you could publish iteratively, bit by bit, at each step gathering feedback from your readers and refining the text. Would our writing be better?

Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours. The faster the release cycle, the more opportunities for revision—and, often, the better the product itself.

Perhaps this is just a feature of being further along in one's academic career than I am, but I doubt the process is ever "write something, then publish it." It's "draft something, re-draft it, show it to one audience, revise, show it to another audience, revise, send to friends for their comments, revise to send to a journal, receive comments, revise for the same or another journal, repeat this process several more times, then maybe publish if you're persistent enough." In other words, every text already is iterative; these iterations form the basis of future scholarly work if the end product is significant enough, or the basis for travaux on which we can interpret legal documents. Nor does the fact that a book must be published in a discrete form change this: successful books can have editions in which the content changes (especially true for textbooks, one would think), and if one eventually thinks better of an argument one made, then there's always the option of writing something else to represent one's new view on that work (is this not the essence of Augustine's Retractions, or Auden's explanations for why he altered or omitted poetic work he no longer believed in?).

Crooked Timber on the non-tenure track faculty problem. 100% agree.

Phoebe catches out James Poulos in the act of making dubious claims about the differences between men and women. My own rule of thumb is this: any reference in a conservative-oriented blog post or article (or, heaven forfend, academic publication) to "feminism" or "feminists" that does not contain a specific reference to an actual feminist with whom the argument is supposed to be taking place automatically forfeits the argument. The argument may still fail on its merits even if it passes this test, but you'd be surprised (perhaps not) how many do not make this initial hurdle.

My reason for this rule is not any churlishness about feminism, but the expectation that academics (or aspiring academics) should know better than to think this an acceptable citation practice. One cannot hand-wavingly refer to an entire group of scholarly perspectives--'liberalism,' 'conservatism,' 'communitarianism'--as though it were one indissoluble viewpoint. It would be better, but not by much, to make reference to one specific instance of the viewpoint: claiming Carol Gilligan (apparently referenced obliquely) to speak for all of feminism is like claiming C.B. MacPherson to speak for all Locke scholars, or Alasdair MacIntyre to speak for all communitarians--even if it's close to a representative view it's still not cricket.

Wrong, and not even in an interesting way:

Megan McArdle:

5.  The corollary of #4 is the end of universities as research centers.  As I've noted before, tenured academics has worked a great scam.  They've managed to monetize peoples' affection for regional football teams, and their desire for a work credential, and then somehow diverted that money into paying academics to work on whatever they want, for the rest of their lives, without any oversight by the football fans or the employers.  While I'm sensitive to the complaints of conservative critics, I think that by and large, it's a very good thing.  But it's not a viable business model in cyberspace.

First of all, most athletic departments lose money. And by 'most' I mean 'almost all.' For those that don't make money, they're subsidized by the rest of the university. Those that do almost always keep their funding entirely separate from everything else (successful football teams pay for scholarships and fellowships in non-revenue sports). So almost literally zero dollars go from athletics to academics.

And as if this weren't enough, one would then be forced to wonder how colleges swung their finances prior to having football teams. Or, for that matter, if Harvard/Princeton's football team is so terrible, why are their endowments so large? Perhaps because this is a really terrible argument. Perhaps it's supposed to be cute or amusing, but mostly it makes it sound like McArdle doesn't understand much about university funding.

Good-ish academic job market advice: don't be yourself. To the extent that this means "do not be the version of yourself that manifests all your neuroses," it's not very helpful advice. If life hasn't taught you how to do that yet, the job market's not going to help. To the extent that the advice is "project a confident image," that's helpful except to the extent that getting any interest from anyone is rare these days, which tends to ramp up the pressure to present oneself in the best possible light to the hiring department.

As Mungowitz would say, "write every day." Which, if you're an academic or other aspiring writer, should be enjoyable if not easy.

Reading Pascal Probably Isn't Going to Teach You These Things, Either

Even when it comes to conservative critiques of academia, this is a strange opening paragraph, to say the least:

The egalitarian ideology of our time, writes the philosopher Philippe Beneton, in Equality by Default, cuts the human heart and soul out of the profession of the teacher. “Why give priority to classic literature,” he asks, “when Pascal is no better or no worse than any other author, when his style of writing is just one technique among others?” The teacher becomes a technician—and often a not highly skilled technician at that, as witness our millions of young people who cannot calculate a 15 percent gratuity for a restaurant bill, or who cannot name the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The snark in the title: I'm not sure how well Pascal would do at naming the nation south of the Rio Grande.

The great mission of education as “the formation of taste, of character, of will, of civic spirit” is set aside. “How can a school educate,” he concludes, “when it refuses to distinguish between an educated person and an uneducated person? How can it shape a human being when it no longer knows what a human being is?” (emphasis mine).

I don't think there's any great dispute about whether someone who can't calculate a 15% tip is well-educated (leaving aside the possibility that one might be educated in many other areas but not math; absent-minded professors presumably qualify as educated). The rest of the article seems to rest of the--prettily presented--contention that the Classics are More Valuable than Whatever It Is Kids Spend Their Time On Now (content left unspecified). Per the examples given, one is also not going to learn math or geography from Dante or Plato, and heaven help those who try to learn science from Aristotle.

Esolen focuses his essay on what might be broadly considered humanities education. At the very least the words "science" and "math" never appear. This is the problem: even accepting the contention that the humanities have sunk into a morass of relativistic judgments that fundamentally betray our youth, science and math have not. They are good, old-fashioned subjects where the teacher is presumed (usually correctly) to know more than the students, subjects in which there are tightly-defined correct and incorrect answers, subjects in which failure is possible and success, if it is to be had at all, must be earned through years of patient labor. (I have a friend in engineering who graduates when he gets his machine/experiment to work. Singular: it's just one experiment. He's in year eight at the moment. And if you've ever watched someone pipette or run samples for hours, it becomes obvious how intrinsically more interesting the humanities are.)

Instead of pointing to this as a continually successful model of good education, it comes in for criticism because science doesn't 'get it':

Where is that vision of homogeneity to be found? Wherever, Beneton suggests, we find the reduction of man to his constituent parts, or to his environment, or to whatever else will replace the mystery of the human person with a general and scientistic “law.” We would then be equal—in our unmeaning. The carbon that makes up my flesh, the calcium that makes up my bones, the iron that gives my blood its energy-delivering properties, are no different from those in anyone else’s body. The encounter with a particular being, the irreplaceable person, yields to indifference, as one lump of flesh is much like another. One family, like a molecule in the economic crystal that surrounds it, is no “better” than another such molecule. What has happened is that, instead of the object of knowledge determining the method of study, the method of study has determined and reduced the object of knowledge. “The great works thus lose their status of great works,” says Beneton, and are reduced to cultural artifacts, to be explained by the technician, the neutral archaeologist, and not honored for their beauty or wisdom.

So let's all appreciate the irony of someone beginning an essay complaining about the lack of objective standards to mark knowledge, and to separate the learned from the unlearned, eventually complaining about a surfeit of objective standards to mark knowledge, which somehow manage to reduce the overall body of that knowledge. Whatever learning science and math seem to represent, it doesn't count.

I am both a Great Books person and an avid reader. I don't disagree with the contention that most people would be better rounded as human beings if they read more, and read more of what's good. But this is not the argument for that position.

Day of Judgment update: gave the paper and the talk. The paper went over very well, with a few corrections suggested that are pretty easy fixes. The talk went over decently well, with an (unexpected) suggestion I attempt to publish it in the near term. I might be good at this political theory thing?

Because I am writing and only thinking about writing, two writing-related links:

* Jeffrey Eugenides on writing his new novel, and specifically his decision to put aside most of a book that wasn't working in order to pursue an idea he liked. May we all have that courage and the superabundance of good material.

* On manual notetaking. I know I am old because this remains a vital part of my process: read, think about what I've read to organize it, write down what I have, manually write out a schematic of how the whole thing is supposed to fit together, write down the citations I want for each section. Only then do I turn to my computer to actually write the whole thing up. Though I have tried, I can't really automate the earlier processes on the computer, which is fine by me.

Wholheartedly agree with Tim Burke on both the generational shift in academia, and the implications of blogging on academic output:

Maybe it’s also generational. I take a visceral delight in reading past generations of scholars and writers ripping each other to shreds in print, but I’ve never been much of one for playing dodgeball myself, and I think a lot of academics my age feel the same. They just don’t want to live like that.

Maybe what blogs and other digital publications are starting to do is provide an ongoing record of the real-life gaps between idealized descriptions of the dispassionate production of scholarship and the death-of-a-thousand-cuts pettiness of how it sometimes gets debated, deferred, and discouraged.

Again, for my generation, I think this is part of what I'm now tagging "revenge of the organization kid." The increasing professionalization of all the disciplines means, I think, that people are coming less to view them as the fundamental end-all of their existence. Good work matters, and working hard matters, but other things matter, too. There's a certain extent to which I am acutely aware that the five other political theorists who entered grad school in my cohort at Duke are my competition: we all want jobs, and however much our specific career goals may differ, an interview for one of them is an interview I will probably not get. They're also friends, and people whose work I've followed (and done my best to help) for almost a decade. When it comes down to it, I'd rather that everyone do respectably well than do anything that might directly aid my career path by wounding theirs. It's just a job, after all.

I'd like us to dwell for a moment on this paragraph (and note that I haven't read the book in question and take no position on its proposals, but suggest the language of the review is meaningful in its own right):

But all that said, McCormick’s proposals are as plausible as the genre will allow. Any institutional novelty looks questionable on paper—any clever graduate student can quickly throw out a thousand objections—and this one is no exception. Yet our status quo institutions are hardly perfect either, and in any event McCormick is only starting a conversation and hoping for an experiment. The details can be improved as his proposals swim up the salmon-run of politics. (But if his diagnosis is correct, the proposed remedy will probably be blocked by the elites who create the problem in the first place.)

...and request that we, Nozick-style, focus on the throwaway line, enough of a commonplace, and ask what it's really supposed to mean. "Any clever graduate student can quickly throw out a thousand objections." It's a well-understood idea that grad students are first taught how to read serious academic work by learning how to pull it apart. By one's second year, one quickly learns that a very large percentage of what is out there is of dubious value, if the purpose of scholarship is to increase our overall knowledge of the world. The lesson of the second half of grad school is, ideally, that constructing a positive argument is very hard, the ultimate upshot of which is, so I gathered, that we should be accordingly forgiving of the weaknesses in other academic work, the better of others to forgive us our faults. And, Lord knows, that's what I learned.

While that's tidy from a disciplinary perspective, I do wonder if it's too easy, if our self-interest as academics leads us to accept a weaker (and perhaps wrong) argument because it is more congenial to do so. This is the equivalent, approximately, of finding Descartes' last meditations to be as powerful as the first two: even we theists know better than to think good ol' Deskrats has made his argument. Perhaps the thousand objections just mean it's not a good idea. Perhaps they just mean it's not a practicable idea, and we believe we live in a world where practicability is an important criterion for what makes a successful normative theory. Perhaps the grad students are on to something after all.

I'm on the fence about whether this post by Tim Burke adds anything to the discussion Phoebe and MSI have been having about the merits of grad school, but it's another thing to consider. His other piece on grad school (this one) was influential in my own decision-making process, but this seems to be almost entirely from the professor side of things.

The discussion of interdisciplinarity and the limits of particular approaches reminds me, though, of the sage words of one Mike Munger: the most fertile ground is always near the fences, but that's also where you're most likely to be shot.