4 posts tagged “academe”

Let us start with John Stuart Mill's prayer: "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed nineteenth-century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuarrt MIll: http://olldownload.libertyfund.org/Texts/MillJS0172/Works/Vol10/PDFs/Mill_1277.pdf. "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength..."

In economics, John Stuart Mill's prayer have been answered. We neoliberal types are, I think, a bare plurality, but the Chicago School is powerful, articulate, brilliant, and energetic. On our left thing are less healthy, but improving: the left has escaped its destructive embrace of Marxism. And there are signs of a fundamental rethinking of economics in embryo as the borderland between economics, sociology, and psychology becomes more active.

Outside economics, however, things are much less healthy. John Stuart Mill's prayer has not been answered. Witness Mark Bauerline in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which leads me to beg: Can we please ask the Chronicle of Higher Education to print the works of a smarter class of conservatives? Calls for a diversified intellectual portfolio fall flat when the conservative assets on offer are intellectual shell corporatilns. The benefits of a Millian clash of views to stimulate and deepen our thoughts are nonexistent when one side in the battle of wits is unarmed.

I mean, what can one make of Mark Bauerlein's charge that liberals--like The Baffler's Thomas Frank--are biased against Friedrich Hayek because they talk about what Hayek actually said in his 1956 preface to The Road to Serfdom?

The Chronicle: 12/15/2006: How Academe Shortchanges Conservative Thinking: Public intellectuals are less parochial, and even some of those on the left do acknowledge Hayek's eminence -- but too often with just a dismissive tack.... Thomas Frank, the editor of The Baffler, briefly summarizes Hayek's legacy with a run of high-handed jibes. He mentions Hayek's seminal The Road to Serfdom, but only to disparage it for equating "British-style socialism with the Nazi obscenity."...

But, Mark, Thomas Frank is right. I am a Hayek fan, or at least somebody who thinks it is important to wrestle with Hayek at least once once a month. Nevertheless, here is Hayek, in the 1956 preface to The Road to Serfdom:

Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that "the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people." This is necessarily a slow affair... attitude[s] toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of... political institutions under which it lives.... [T]he change undergone... not merely under its Labour government but in the course of the much longer period during which it has been enjoying the blessings of a paternalistic welfare state, can hardly be mistaken.... Certainly [Weimar Germany's] Social Democrats... never approached as closely to totalitarian planning as the British Labour government has done.... The most serious development is the growth of a measure of arbitrary administrative coercion and the progressive destruction of the cherished foundation of British liberty, the Rule of Law... [E]conomic planning under the Labour government [has] carried it to a point which makes it doubtful whether it can be said that the Rule of Law still prevails in Britain...

In other circumstances, I might cavil at Thomas Frank--I would say that Hayek draws a line connecting Britain's Labour Party and Germany's Nazi Party, but that he does not quite equate them: In Hayek's view, the Labour Party has not established Nazi-like serfdom, but only placed Britain on the road to Nazi-like serfdom. However, not hear: the Road to Serfdom that the Labour Party placed Britain on leads, in Hayek's estimation, to serfdom and nowhere else. And I cannot read Bauerlein's complaint as anything other than saying that it is rude and biased for Thomas Frank to, you know, talk about things Hayek actually believed and cite things Hayek actually wrote.

Bauerline is similarly irate at Michael Berube for "bias." What is the bias? It is pointing out that George Will, Michelle Malkin, and David Horowitz self-identify as conservatives. An unbiased writer, Bauerline claims, would pretend that Will, Malkin, and Horowitz do not exist at all. To note their existence is "stigmatizing" and unfair to conservatives:

In What's Liberal... ?, conservatism suffers similarly from stigmatizing references. [Michael] Bérubé focuses on the anti-academic conservatives and fills his descriptions with diagnostic asides. Gay-rights debates "transform otherwise reasonable cultural conservatives into fumbling, conspiracy-mongering fanatics." The columnist George Will is "furious," and the columnist Michelle Malkin writes "shameful" books pressing "'interpretations' that no sane person countenances," while Horowitz exaggerates "hysterically." Such psychic wants explain why, according to Bérubé, "we just don't trust cultural conservatives' track record over the long term, to be honest. We think they're the heirs of the people who spent decades dehumanizing African-Americans and immigrants, arguing chapter and verse that the Bible endorses slavery and the subjection of women"...

Note the lineage: Not a line of reasoning, but a swell of mad wrath. Not Burke, Alexis de Tocqueville, T.S. Eliot, and Leo Strauss, but slaveholders, nativists, and sexists. Nothing from Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, E.D. Hirsch Jr., Harvey C. Mansfield, and the late Philip Rieff, to cite more-recent writers who may be termed "educational conservatives." The scholarly conservative case against higher education is overlooked, while Bérubé devotes too many words to the claims of discrimination by a conservative student on television's Hannity & Colmes, to a worry by a state legislator about "leftist totalitarianism," and so on...

I truly don't get Bauerlein here. First, by what warrant does Bauerline call Alexis de Tocqueville a "conservative"? Why not call John Maynard Keynes, Max Weber, and Oliver Cromwell "conservatives" as well? Burke, too, has conservative moods but is only a conservative thinker in a modern American sense if you take a chainsaw and reduce him to selected passages from Reflections on the Revolution in France. In Reflections Burke does make the argument that we should respect the traditions and institutions we have inherited because they incorporate the Wisdom of the Ancestors, but he only makes that argument because he thinks that in this case the Ancestors--not his personal ancestors, note--were wise. The argument that it was one of the traditions and institutions of Englishmen that they would conquer, torture, and rob wogs cut no ice with Edmund Burke when he was trying to prosecute Warren Hastings. The argument that it was one of the traditions and institutions of England that power flowed to Westminster cut no ice with Burke when he was arguing for conciliation with and a devolution of power to the American colonists. To Burke, conservative arguments based on respect for the Wisdom of the Ancestors are to be deployed in support of traditions, institutions, and practices that he approves of--they are not trumps. Burke is no more a conservative than Adam Smith is a Thatcherite. And anyone who classifies Burke as a conservative has not read much beyond scattered selections from Reflections on the Revolution in France.

Second, does Bauerline really think that Berube's take on Leo "The Text Means What I Say It Means" Strauss or Harvey C. Mansfield--a man who regards the admission of Blacks to Harvard as the cause of the baneful curse of grade inflation--would be significantly different than his take on Will, Malkin, Horowitz? I agree that we should get Michael to write on Mansfield as soon as possible. But I guarantee you that it won't lead to a more favorable view of modern American conservatism.

And I truly don't get what Bauerlein means when he says "the scholarly conservative case against higher education is overlooked." Does he mean that Michael Berube overlooks the scholarly conservative case against higher education? If so, then why not say so: what is Bauerlein's purpose in removing the active subject from his sentence by placing it in the passive voice? And what is "the scholarly conservative case against higher education" anyway? Is it that people shouldn't learn about science because it will undermine their trust in throne and altar? Is it that only a small, narrow elite should go to college because the masses will get bad ideas if they read Voltaire? Bauerline never says.

Lord, enlighten thou our enemies. Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers: we are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom; their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength...

It is somewhat odd. You would think that I would be an aggressive cheerleader for Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity. After all, if you proposed to take six ladder-faculty slots from Berkeley's Ethnic Studies Department and move two of them to Economics, two of them to Sociology, and two of them to the business school to hire people to really study the workings of the labor market, the intergenerational transmission of inequality, and compensation patterns within organizations--I would say that that would be a wonderful idea, and that it would make Berkeley a better university and the world a better world.

If you were to ask me who did more for the American minorites who are underrepresented at elite universities, and gave me a choice between (a) all the diversity deans in America and their staffs or (b) the neoliberals on the Clinton economic policy team who pushed through the 1993 expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit that boosts the collective incomes of poor Americans by what is now some $30 billion a year, I would have no hesitation in coming down on the side of Bill Clinton and his team--including, in a minor spear-carrying role, me--who changed in our own minor way not social consciousness but social being back in 1993.

I ought to be part of this book's core constituency.

But, instead, The Trouble with Diversity raises my hackles.

Let's dip into it. I flip it open, and land on page 85:

p. 85 ff: But the greatest value of diversity is not primarily in the contribution it makes to students' self-esteem. Its real value, as the widespread acceptance of affirmative action shows, is in the contribution it makes to the collective fantasy that institutions like Harvard and UIC are... meritocracies. For if the students at Harvard are appropriately diverse, we know that no student is being kept from Harvard because of his or her race or culture.... How, then, do some students end up at Harvard and some at UIC? Since the differences between them that produce this divergence are not (indeed cannot be) cultural (remember, cultures are equal), they are attributed instead to the merit of the individual....

This helps explain the popularity on campus... of affirmative action: it is a powerful tool for legitimizing their sense of their individual merit.... Affirmative action guarantees that... the white students on campus can understand themselves to be there on merit because they didn't get there at the expense of any black people. The problem with affirmative action is..,,, that it produces the illusion that we actually have a meritocracy.... [I]magine what that Harvard classroom would look like if we... [made] the [parental] income distribution at Harvard... look like the income distribution of the United States, over half the [current students]... would be gone.... Its no wonder that rich white kids and their parents aren't complaining about diversity. Race-based affirmative action... is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn't help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich....

Hence the irrelevance of Harvard's 2004 announcement that it wouldn't ask parents who earn less than [$60,000] a year to [contribute anything to tuition].... While this is no doubt great news to those financially pressed students who have gone to top high schools, taken college-prep courses, and scored well on their SATs, it is bound to seem a little beside the point to the great majority of the poor, since what's keeping them out of elite universities is not their inability to pay the bill but their inability to qualify for admission in the first place....

[...]

We like diversity and we like programs such as affirmative action because they tell us that racism is the problem... that solving it requires us just to give up our prejudices. (Solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more; it might require us to give up our money.)...

[...]

So on the one hand, we get affirmative action in universities, which solves a problem that no longer exists. It's their lack of family wealth, not the color of their skin, that disproportionately keeps blacks out of elite colleges.... The injury done to the poor... has taken place long before anybody gets to Harvard. But this doesn't mean that these solutions to fake problems serve no purpose. The purpose they serve is to disguise the real problem. We need, as I've already suggested, to believe that poor people aren't kept out of our elite universities in order to also believe that the economic advantages conferred by going to them are earned and so are justified. If going to Harvard is more a reflection of your family's wealth than it is of your merit... then, of course, the legitimating effect disappears. So the real point... the function of the (very few) poor people at Harvard is to reassure the (very many) rich people at Harvard that you can't just buy your way into Harvard...

I find that I cannot help but be annoyed by this.

I am annoyed by the shoddy sloppy neo-functionalist false-consciousness sociology. Perverse functionalist consequences that are asserted without supporting evidence are the "real" "purpose" of affirmative action programs. That's simply wrong in fact, and illegitimate in argument. It's taking 1970s-style cultural Marxism and eliminating the rational kernel while retaining only the mystical shell. Get rid of affirmative action in America tomorrow, and I guarantee that there will not be a great movement to tackle and repair the educational and other inequities and barriers that are driven by our Second Gilded Age distribution of income and wealth.

The primary purpose of affirmative action at elite universities is to partially--partially--counteract the steep differences in wealth distributions across races and ethnicities that our ancestors passed down to us, and give us as a society a chance to make full use of the talents and capabilities of the most fortunate and lucky slice of the rising generation of African-Americans, Hispanics, et cetera--not just of whites and Asians. The primary purpose is not to make the current cohort of students sleep more soundly.

The argument that Michaels is making is, I think, a version of what Albert Hirschman calls "the argument of the perverse effect" in his little book on The Rhetoric of Reaction: the claim that one's intellectual adversaries, are not just directing their efforts at low-value targets, but are doing positive harm. I see this argument every year when I teach Malthus. In Malthus's formulation, the argument is:

You Enlightenment liberals think your attacks on Throne and Altar are liberating humanity from the chains of superstition and ignorance. Fools! Break those chains and you will find humanity enslaved to its sexual appetites, population will rise until checked by famine and epidemic, and life will become even nastier, more brutish, and shorter than before.

Michaels's argument seems to me to have the same structure:

You twenty-first century diversity liberals think that you are reducing inequality. Fools! The more you reduce race, ethnic, and cultural inequality the more you legitimate and reduce pressure on the big enchilada, economic inequality.

I do think there is a difference between Malthus and Michaels. Malthus makes arguments and presents evidence. To counter Malthus's arguments--and I think that for the post-1500 period they can be countered--you have to engage him on the substance. Michaels, by contrast, makes assertions--where is the evidence? How can you respond? By saying, "Your father was a hamster and your mother smells of elderberries. Now go away, before I taunt you again"?

And Harvard's "irrelevant" policy of not asking for money for parents making under $60,000 a year? I think that there are 1,000 families today for whom that policy is not "irrelevant." It's $2 million a year.

A week or two ago, in preparation for the virtual drinking party at the Valve next week, I was thinking about this paragraph from Walter Benn Michaels's The Trouble with Diversity:

American Prospect Online - The Trouble With Diversity: So with respect to race, the idea is not just that racism is a bad thing (which of course it is) but that race itself is a good thing. And what makes it a good thing is that it's not class. We love race -- we love identity -- because we don't love class. We love thinking that the differences that divide us are not the differences between those of us who have money and those who don't but are instead the differences between those of us who are black and those who are white or Asian or Latino or whatever. A world where some of us don't have enough money is a world where the differences between us present a problem: the need to get rid of inequality or to justify it. A world where some of us are black and some of us are white -- or bi-racial or Native American or transgendered -- is a world where the differences between us present a solution: appreciating our diversity. So we like to talk about the differences we can appreciate, and we don't like to talk about the ones we can't...

At that moment the Daily Bulletin from the sixteen-year-old's high school hit my inbox. It said, in part:

RAMADAN & YOM KIPPUR: Leadership is very interested in helping the students celebrate and/or observe the religious holidays of Yom Kippur and Ramadan. If you observe either of these and are interested, please stop by B-1 sometime and let Mr. Petrocco know. The hope is to set up some displays in the library. Be aware in the future the Leadership Class will be displaying other religious holiday materials as the holidays occur...

Now normally--in my usual mind--I am an enthusiastic supporter of what I take to be Walter Benn Michaels's central point: that we have collectively gotten ourselves off balance because we are responding to the fact that celebrating diversity is easy and doing something about upward mobility and the intergenerational reproduction of economic and social inequality is hard.

When I am in my usual mind I grumble that the $400,000 a year that we at Berkeley are about to start spending on an Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity would be better spent hiring ten full-time outreach coordinators and on-campus tutors to make the idea of equality of opportunity less of a joke, and to make the population that does attend Berkeley a little bit more like the population that could benefit from attending Berkeley--if only things had broken right for them before they reached college age.

But I must be outside my usual mind. Because my reaction right now is that we love identity not just because we don't like to think about economic and social class, but because loving identity is a genuinely good thing in a diverse world, especially for America and Americans if we are to become who we are.

Some of us are rich and some of us are poor. Some of us send our children to high schools where they will take two years of calculus. Some of us send our children to high schools where they will still be shaky on their multiplication tables when they leave. Some of us send our children to high schools where they teach five sections of AP European History to tenth graders. Some of us send our children to high schools where they don't. And as a card-carrying child of Adam Smith and company, I think that is the most important polarizing dimension in America today.

But it is also true that some of us are black and some of us are white; some of us are Muslim and some of us are Mormon; some of us have grandparents who speak Spanish and some of us have grandparents who speak Cantonese. These dimensions of difference are important also, perhaps especially so because we as a nation are pretty good at dealing with them.