This is a particularly ridiculous newsflash from Number 10 Downing Street, that I just had to share:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7520401.stm
I just got back from (finally) seeing Wall-E. So much ink, virtual and otherwise, has been spilt over the film that I’m not sure I have anything fascinating or original to share. My favorite moment of the film — besides the ought-to-be immortal phrase “I don’t want to survive, I want to live” — was very simple.
Wall-E bumps into the floating chair of one of the Axiom’s inhabitants, turning off the ever-present screen that keeps her virtually connected to all her friends. (Irony levels rising…) Suddenly, she sees the starfield beyond the ship’s windows, the panoply of multimedia advertisements, the wonder both of nature and of what man has wrought. She looks down: “Hey, I didn’t know we had a pool!”
That feeling it just familiar enough to make me wistful. Every so often, I pause and look around. Suddenly, instead of seeing “just” a tree, I remember the complicated dance of photosynthesis and respiration, the compact mystery of the atoms, the sheer alien wonder of a thing that turns sunlight into leafy shade. And then I blink, and check my email.
The joy of Wall-E isn’t in the story or the animation, but in the discovery. Like the best science fiction, the robots and spaceships are only there to make us remember the wonder of home.
So I’m a bit late to join the “women in academia or the YPU” party (some of us have real summer jobs, you know) but as a wannabe academic-cum-YPU hack I just couldn’t restrain myself. Dara’s right to argue that we should look at “success as the field defines it”, which is why I’m surprised that no one of my fellow “Union-theory” obsessives has mentioned the political elephant on the room : that according to the obscure nature of Yale Political Union, “Union” posts are actually fairly low-status, as opposed to “Party” office. With the strength of the Parties comes an assumption that “real leadership”, charismatic and intellectual, comes through Party Chairmanship - this is seen as glamorous leadership compared to the administrative responsibilities of the elected Executive Board. So on positions occupied, the YPU no longer seems such a women-friendly place after all, when you notice that for the forthcoming semester, only 1 out of 7 Party Chairmen will be a woman (Jane Hu, of the Progs, the smallest party).
Within the YPU, the charismatic leadership to which the many aspiring politicos are taught to aspire is explicitly described as masculine. I’ve never forgotten the very semester I arrived, hearing a dear and intelligent friend state that “leadership has two main areas - administrative management, and inspiration of other people to follow a vision. Obviously, a woman can do the first, but not the second.” This past semester, the very same friend told me “when given the option, a Fall Chairman should always be a man, because he has to inspire new recruits to join his party, and obviously a man in charge will always be more inspirational than a woman”. (N.B. It’s not who you think it is, and I’m not going to tell you).
Of course, if you’re still reading this you’re enough of YPUer to know that the cult of Chairmanship is more powerful in the POR than in any other party. But I’ve heard similar sentiment in other parties (the IP, Tories and POL) - and from members of AdComm explaining that the masculine / feminine dichotomy is necessary to the very fabric of the YPU.
The argument goes like this: the YPU is defined by conflict between Parties - at its best, this is competition for intellectual supremacy which makes us all fiercer thinkers. The members of EBoard have to co-ordinate these components and weave together the different parts to make a harmony. Men are naturally more aggressive and confrontational, women more harmonious…Male Party Chairman, Female EBoard = great. Whether or not we actually buy into gendered conventions of “warrior” or “peacemaker”, as long as others around us in the YPU do, they will be part of the parlance that defines our YPU careers - even if there’s still a status inequality given that leading one’s close comrades is widely considered more significant than leading the Union.
So where does this relate to larger claims about affirmative action and academia? Well, certainly the analogy of warrior and peacemaker holds true for academia. A Yalie who graduated a few years ago and is now a PhD student in philosophy told me recently that “Academia at the highest levels is a blood sport, it really is. It’s all about whose argument you savaged last and whether anyone else has been able to tear a strip off your latest publication. When I meet academics socially, who don’t know my work, and tell them that I want to go into the field, they tell me ‘but you seem like a sweet girl, you’re probably too nice for this’.” In the other side of the field, a Yale academic who served her time on ExComm told me “they’re always trying to get women onto the pastoral and disciplinary committees, because we’re apparently more student friendly”. Anecdotal evidence, but in both cases stemming from years of experience at the hard end.
So for both our microcosm of the YPU and the only larger world that really matters, academia, affirmative action doesn’t stand a chance of succeeding unless it adapts to the subtle discourses that define and redefine success. And as both fields success is chiefly measured by the approbation of the community as a whole, the discourse has to change before anything approaching collective action, conscious or subconscious, can help anyone. Let’s face it, if communities frequently went in for affirmative action in combating their own stereotypes, affirmative action of the tangible kind we usually refer to would never have been proposed in the first place.
And because this is a late night (British time) rant to friends, rather than a structured blog post for public consumption, on that inelegant note I’m going to bed.
5 reasons you should watch Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:
- It’s a musical about superheroes.
- It was made for free, during the writers’ strike, to prove that there was another way.
- It goes down tomorrow.
- It’s written by Joss Whedon, and thus is hilarious.
- It includes fantastic lines like this:
Billy: I want to be an achiever…like Bad Horse.
Penny: The Thoroughbred of Sin?
Billy: I meant Gandhi.
Get thee hence.
Impressively, in the last few days I’ve been chided both for failing to recognize the divine jazz-like looseness of blogging and for failing to recognize the requisite statistical rigor of blogging. The former accusation is harmless enough; the latter is the same argument used since time immemorial to wave aside cultural criticism on the whole — indeed, any knowledge that isn’t quantitatively generated — and that’s a problem.
It’s impossible to gather enough data to meet statistical standards while understanding the context that generated each point in that data. That’s the purpose of statistics in social science: to create discrete phenomena out of messy reality in an attempt to generalize where generalization is helpful. But generalization will never get you more than a few good options for what circumstances generated that data, a few strong correlations (which, the statisticians so ceaselessly remind us, is not causation). If you want to talk about not just the what but the why, you need to venture into conjecture anyway.
And conjecture based on those same generalizations doesn’t draw from nearly as deep a knowledge base as knowledge based on more comprehensive understanding of particular situations. Maybe those situations are anomalous — though in this case, the fact that I was using personal experience to illuminate a broader statistical study whose results lined up with that experience indicates that “fluke” is putting it strongly — and they’re certainly statistically insignificant. But until we can invent statistics to explain connections we don’t yet know exist, we’ll never be able to use them to explain social forces and cultural trends, only to record them after the fact like starlight on an Earth-bound telescope. Cultural criticism is by its nature tentative and speculative and flexible, but to say you can only explain a phenomenon after you’ve zoomed out too far to really examine it is missing the point entirely.
David Broockman thinks Kay Steiger’s post on women in academia could be turned into an argument against affirmative action. Maybe that’s true, but only because I think she infers too much too readily. Here’s the gist:
Once women earn tenure and arrive at the institution they immediately begin getting pulled into various “service” commitments. This includes heading committees, become program coordinators, or take other leadership roles. While this is good for women that long to go into administration at a university, it often pulls female professors away from research…I think the urge is to make sure women are represented in leadership roles but when this pulls time away from their principal mission of research, it becomes a bad thing.
On the face of it, I can see why it’s easy to read this as a simple affirmative-action narrative. But I’m surprised that Broockman didn’t pick up on the fact that the affirmative-action motive is inferred, and start thinking if there might be something else going on. Especially because he’s in the Yale Political Union, where a similar phenomenon takes place, and there is very definitely something else going on.
You see, the YPU on the whole doesn’t have anything close to gender parity, at least among active members. And at any given debate, women are much less likely to speak than men are. But the Union’s executive board has represented something pretty close to a 50/50 split during the three years I’ve been around, and the top three positions have been held by more women than men during that time.
But here’s the result, as in Steiger’s example: while women end up running the show — managing, that is — men are able to devote themselves to success in the field as the field itself defines it (for Steiger, research; for the YPU, debating prowess), and therefore continue to be labeled “leaders”. This is only progressive in the same way that, say, thanking a housewife for the hard work she does is progressive: it’s nice to have the recognition, but it’d be nicer to acknowledge that maybe she’d rather be doing something other than housework.
But even to get the acknowledgment, women have to get noticed and taken seriously, which is tricky in an environment where they’re underrepresented. And often, the way to get noticed and groomed for leadership is to get things done, and get them done well. It’s hard to mount an impressive track record in intellectualism as a freshman, because intellectualism doesn’t lend itself to track records; it’s much easier to hang posters and organize events and do other things that mark one for “management.” Like female academics, they get siphoned out early and therefore miss the chance to get everything they can out of the environment they’re in.
So I really can’t see this as a reason to oppose affirmative action, but rather to ensure that the pools from which candidates are selected are of equal size, so that women don’t feel the need to “prove themselves” in male-dominated settings. Much more importantly, though, we need to recognize that in plenty of fields (academia, sure, but what about advertising? Programming?) many of the roles that get marked as “service”, “management” or “administration” aren’t positions of authority in the least; rather, the managers are those who keep things running so that other people can do what they came to the field to do in the first place, and get all the glory in the long haul.
I’m all for specialization, but let’s be honest about it. Appointing a junior academic to the position of program coordinator, regardless of gender, isn’t a promotion but a qualitative job shift. I think many of the problems that affirmative action hasn’t fixed or has exacerbated might be addressed if we stopped thinking purely in terms of organizational flowcharts but also in terms of social capital or personal fulfillment. And I certainly think that the trends Steiger notices might begin to reverse if tenure committees et al. had it brought to their attention that their actions were the ivory-tower equivalent of telling their daughters: “Oh, no, little girls can’t be doctors. Why don’t you pretend to be the Head Nurse instead?”
I am (slowly) catching up on my missed reading. There has, in my absence, been a lot of silliness.
The Absurd — Bill Kristol, in eulogizing Tony Snow, writes:
For quite a while now, optimism has had a bad reputation in intellectual circles. The fashionable books of my youth — and they are good books — were darkly foreboding ones… We who read Albert Camus — and if you had any pretensions to being a non-Marxist intellectual, you read Camus — loved the melancholy close of his essay “The Myth of Sisyphus”: “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Melancholy? Has the man read “The Myth of Sisyphus“? (I suppose it’s his father who was the Marxist intellectual.) That’s the least melancholy passage of the entire book — the statement that there is meaning and heroism in struggle even in a struggle you know you’ll lose makes it a powerfully optimistic close. Call this the Applebee’s salad bar of literary criticism.
Justice is Sweet – Obama seems to get the hint:
I said I wouldn’t give because of the FISA vote, and the caller instantly launched into some talking points about how the law expired in August, which is why Obama voted for it even though it wasn’t a perfect bill.
Luckily, if we want to know more we can just ask AT&T for a transcript of the call!
My Cold, Dead Hands — Details of proposed DC gun legislation:
Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.
“Just hang on a sec, Mr. Burglar — I have to unlock, reassemble, and load my gun.” Yeah. Really effective.
The Doctor May Dance — But he doesn’t smoke. I will, however, make an exception on the basis that the Tennant eyebrow-raise looks good on Julian.
Puppy Love — I am heartened to hear that the Obamas are getting a dog, but this phrasing makes me suspect either insufficient copy-editing or a wicked sense of humor:
While we don’t disagree that it’s important to choose a dog that matches well with the family, mixed breeds should certainly be considered along with pure breeds.
I Don’t Care If You Burn — San Francisco legislators propose to prohibit tobacco sales in pharmacies and limit outdoor smoking:
“Tobacco remains the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S. - period,” [Mitch Katz, director of the Department of Public Health] said. “It’s government’s responsibility to protect people from obvious risks.”
Then just outlaw the damn thing! Enough of this namby-pamby combination of death-in-a-box rhetoric and irritating-but-ineffective legislation.
Try to do better next time, world.
I spent most of the last week sick in bed, which means that in addition to accumulating empty packs of cigarettes (Will) and water glasses (mostly me) on the porch, we have been surviving on takeout and ramen.
The first order of business, once Cipro returned me to some semblance of normalcy, was real food. (Well, maybe second, after catching up with work.) Luckily, there has been substantial discussion on this topic, and well-fueled with theory we traveled Whole Foods-ward.[1]
Tonight, we made — by which I mean I made and was observed while making — John’s fantastic Pasta with Corn, Pancetta, Butter, and Sage. Due to a shocking lack of pancetta, it was actually with bacon, and I only used half the butter called for,[2] but it was delicious. I might reduce the amount of butter even more and leave out the pasta altogether (the corn and bacon all hid at the bottom of the pot) to have it as a side dish.
Oh, and also, if anything important has happened in the world in the last few days and you didn’t e-mail me about it, I probably don’t know it happened. Hillary — still in the race, right?
[1] Advantages to Whole Foods being the only supermarket within walking distance: quality of produce and meat, selection of delicious gourmet food. Disadvantages to same: temptation to blow entire grocery budget on cheese.
[2] This is still an entire stick of butter, which I think is quite sufficient. On the other hand, the reason my Thea Helen’s baklava is so much better than mine is that she uses twice as much butter. The parallel is left as an exercise for the reader.
Helen asks:
We can debate the behavior of the clerk in question, but the fundamental question is: Should a fifteen-year-old’s experience of buying a pregnancy test be unpleasant for her?
I disagree. I think the question is: Why should it be permissible to invent a law that doesn’t exist for the purpose of shaming an individual whose behavior you feel to be immoral? It’s pretty clear to me that that’s what the clerk was doing — at very least, she was under a misapprehension and didn’t reconsider it in the face of contrary evidence — and in fairness, Helen hasn’t tried to argue otherwise. However, she seems to treat it as of a piece with anything else the clerk could have done: lecturing the girls, handing them a Bible, telling them her register was closed, etc.
I think it is probably true that the transgressing legal norms carries much more shame than transgressing social ones in contemporary America, so it’s likely that nothing the clerk could have done would have been as likely to be effective as what she did. But it seems to me that the right answer in the long term isn’t to appropriate the force of the law — especially when it doesn’t actually exist for this purpose — but rather to reinforce social norms so that they have comparable force.
This is especially true in this situation, when the would-be customer had an advocate with her who actually knew the rule, and therefore “defeated” the clerk by proving her wrong. Had the clerk kept her reaction within the realm of the social, the defender would have looked much more silly and petulant in writing her post — “How dare they judge us at all?” — and Helen’s response would be entirely justified. As it was, the post reads as much of triumph as of righteous anger: “They tried to lie to my friend; luckily, I was with her, and I knew the facts!” It’s extremely difficult to shame someone once she feels you’ve conceded the moral high ground to her.
Helen continues her advance on the heights of literary society by getting paid to blog ’bout ha’ obsessions. Shame culture, as ever, is on the agenda, as today Ms Rittelmeyer applauds the cashier who told a teenager trying to buy a pregnancy test that “you shouldn’t be having sex in the first place”. Helen has long championed “shame culture” over “guilt culture”, a distinction known to popular parlance ever since ER Dodds identified Homeric society as a “shame society” (even if JT Hooker’s analysis of Iliad threatened to prove him wrong). According to Helen, in a moral society, there should be no “freedom from shame”. The problem is that the example she has picked to illustrate it, on further examination, actually illustrates shame failing to police the teenage sexual activity that Helen so deplores.
According to Helen’s argument, teenagers should cease a behavioural practice simply because other people will express disapproval (which is why Benedict, in her groundbreaking study of shame culture in Japan, defined it as fundamentally collectivist social trait). Letting aside the obvious protests about the tyranny of the majority, this doesn’t involve the girl in question making a change to her own moral philosophy, just going to enough lengths not to get caught. What the individual does in private doesn’t matter, unless the consequences of that action ever become public and identifiable. This is fine if you think the problem can be solved by the teenager using enough contraception to ensure she never has to face another check out clerk. That’s not what the clerk herself had in mind, however, given that she was keen to dictate her customer that “you shouldn’t be having sex at all”.
The social behaviour actually enforced by the clerk was: Buying pregnancy tests is shameful. Therefore, don’t buy pregnancy tests at all.
This, of course, is no help to anyone. Whatever your views on abortion, it’s clear that the earlier a pregnancy is discovered, the better.
We now live in a society where sex has been largely divorced from its visible consequences. So to use shame culture to stop someone having extramarital sex, you have to ensure that shame is inherent in the very moment of the sexual act. You can’t rely on pregnancy itself being shameful. Sexual acts only take place in the presence of people who approve of them. So the only way in which a disapproving spectator can be philosophically introduced is through belief in God. It is possible to teach people to feel shame in the sight of God.
And isn’t that what we Christian cultures just call guilt?
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