Sliding down the banisters of the ivory tower.
…and to tide you over until Iqra’i gets a collective handle on schoolwork, social lives, senior essays, jobs, and the increasing amounts of blood in our caffeine system, HuffPo has just posted speeches from September’s YPU debate.
Sadly, no one asked for mine. On the other hand, I have a blog, too, and what could be more democratic than blogging about a debate where I gave a speech about how blogging isn’t democratic?
“La Contre-Révolution ne sera pas une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la Révolution.” — Maistre.
From the end of my “political autobiography” (for class):
More than anything else, I am concerned with how we think about things, and what that means to us in terms of living both virtuous and fulfilling lives. I’ve long since stopped caring about labels: call me a conservative, a libertarian, a reactionary — just don’t call me late for the counterrevolution.
Now to finish write the other two papers due tomorrow. (Note to my mother: just kidding!)
Rule: I take criticism poorly. I find it irritating. But I don’t find it disturbing.
Exception: The commenter who responded to my YDN column about the lack of explanation surrounding increased campus police presence by asking, “What are you trying to hide?”
Oh, right, I forgot. Only the most shamefully degenerate college student would ever engage in illegal activity. Like underage drinking. Or file-sharing. Or jaywalking.
Of course, that’s not only a straw man but an inaccurate one. The real assumption is that it’s foolish to think that the police would ever care about the illegal things students do, because their sole purpose is to protect us from the bad guys. Sure, this comes from a place of blind faith in the institution — “Of course the University has nothing but our best interests at heart!” — but also from entitlement: “We pay their salaries with our tuition, they have no choice but to be on our side!”
There’s also the fact that the closer you get to having decision-making power yourself, the sillier it seems to scrutinize the intentions of power (Obama on FISA, anyone?). But as dangerous as it is to rationalize that “When I’m in charge it will all be okay,” it’s more troubling to assume that there’s some sort of mutual understanding between “decision-making people,” that they have the same interests at heart — and, furthermore, that those interests are necessarily in the best interests of society. That it goes without saying that the police are here to protect students from the strangers roaming their courtyards, and to imply otherwise is not just ridiculous but rude. What are they supposed to be around to protect, anyway? The law?
I was going to blog about yesterday’s YPU debate with John Mearsheimer, but Philip Weiss has done it for me. He gives a great impression of the debate (and the peculiarity of the Union as an institution), and he gets us right.
Before it got going Will Wilson and his friend Nicola Karras of the Party of the Right came over to introduce themselves. Wilson is burly and looks like a wildhaired Irish orator. He wore a 1776 tie and had read my work in the American Conservative. Nicola was smaller, quieter, hair pulled back. Will was to be one of the speakers. I thought, Maybe she is Will’s acolyte.
Don’t give him any ideas…
As for me, I have a few posts kicking around in my head: last night’s debate, Social Security, the drinking age. Any preferences on order, O Two Regular Readers?
EDIT: Oh, or DRM. I’m mad about DRM.
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.
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?”
The newest members of the fold — and really, boys, you don’t write, you don’t call, I have to hear about it from David Porter? — seem to skirting the edge of the reactionary temptation:
If only to preserve consistency with our often ancient ideas, the latest fashion in such circles hasn’t changed in years — among the gentlemen, bowties and tweed jackets are encouraged. Ask us about rap music, a new television show, or weblogs, and you might well be told that we’ve never heard of such newfangled oddities. Fail to hold a door open for a lady? Fear our wrath.
To quote a New Haven local who once had the good fortune to be confronted with a conservative gentleman clad in a three piece suit, a bowtie, and a gold-chained pocket watch complete with pipe, “are you serious?!”
Yes. Yes we are.
There are two ways to wear a bow-tie or a tweed jacket: as if it is the most natural thing in the world, or as a deliberate and self-conscious bit of drag. The problem is that there are very few people today for whom bow-ties and tweed jackets do come naturally. For everyone else, it’s drag — it has to be drag — and drag isn’t serious.
For the bow-tie to come naturally, you must be blissfully ignorant of the present — and that sort of ignorance is impossible. You can, and in fact the Cavers do, rail against the Enlightenment. You can’t claim to have missed it. No matter how distasteful we may find modernity, no matter how much we might like to do so, we cannot go back.
To their credit, they seem to have realized some of this:
But these niceties we hold dear, while gloriously chivalric and ultimately harmless, are nevertheless dishonest. As conservatives, we recognize the limits that our times and our location place on us. We can no more avoid the awful din of popular culture than could a knight of old avoid chivalry. But our white lies serve a lofty purpose in reminding us of the ideals we seek to uphold and helping us to keep something sacred in times that demand the breakdown of all barriers. Thus the conservative can take neither his quaint mannerisms nor the environment in which he finds himself lightly.
But a bow-tie is not a bulwark against modernity. As an unspoken claim that you, at least, have avoided the dissolution of a traditional order, it is prima facie untrue. As an intentional riff on a vanished tradition, it necessarily recognizes its own absurdity. The old sources of meaning have disappeared, and when we choose to ape their forms we recognize that what they offer us is glittering illusion.
We use them not to hold something that might otherwise slip from our grasp — it has already gone — but to recreate them, imbuing them with new meaning. They are, in themselves, harmless, but when we grow solemn about them we forget that we are merely playing. It is exactly our “quaint mannerisms” that we should take lightly. Chesterton, the prophet of God’s mirth, tells us as much: “It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity.”
Will pointed me towards this ridiculous article in the Washington Post. It starts out well: mocking Maha is always appropriate.
She’s the pouty protagonist in the melodrama that runs throughout “Al-Kitaab,” the standard beginning text in Arabic classes at Harvard and other American universities.
We are taught to speak our first Arabic sentences by expressing Maha’s incurable angst. We learn in Chapter 1 that Maha is desperately lonely. In later chapters, we are told that she hates New York, has no boyfriend and resents her mother.
I tried to find a clip from the Al-Kitaab DVDs, but for some unknown reason no one thought they were interesting enough to put on YouTube. Instead, I present you with a claymation re-enactment of her cousin Khalid’s greatest hits.
Pollak concludes that “[l]earning Arabic should not include lessons in political propaganda.” (Propaganda, apparently, being teenage ennui and sad Palestinians.) All I can say is that if Pollak thinks this is propaganda, he’s clearly never encountered Thrasymachus.
Published in 1965 for boys at English public schools, Thrasymachus combines the best of Greek grammar with the remnants of British imperialism. The story itself deals with a painfully stupid child who descends to the underworld, where he encounters — and offends — various heroes of Greek myth. (The episode where he hits on Briseis in front of Achilles is particularly choice.)
It’s in the prose composition exercises that the ideology really comes out. (Prose comp, for those fortunate enough to escape its horrors, involves translating English passages into Latin or Greek. Theoretically this is to practice tenses and particles, but really it is a particularly fiendish bit of torture invented by Classics teachers who think there should be more pain, and that irregular verbs are insufficient for that purpose.)
The prose composition passage for Chapter 29, for instance, reads:
“If I give you this sword, my son, will you promise to fight bravely when you become a man?” “Yes, father. If the enemy attack the city, I shall never betray you but I will fight until they are all driven out.” “If our king leads us against the enemy’s city, you must follow him and never run away.” “But, father, mother has told me never to leave home. If I leave her, she will grieve.” “If she said that, she was foolish. You must always obey the king if ever he orders you to fight for your native land.”
It strikes me that if you get to college, decide to study Arabic, and don’t already know mainstream Arab opinion on Israel, or who Nasser was, your textbook is as good a place as any to learn it. Al-Kitaab has plenty of problems pedagogically, but by presenting famous Arabs from Nasser to Ibn Batutta, it never claims to be making an ideological statement.
Pollak’s objection isn’t really that the book is political — he wants it to be political, in the direction of his own beliefs. He’s welcome to write his own book. If it has better DVDs, I’ll buy it.
Parenthetically, I present my favorite prose comp passage:
In a certain house, which has only one bath, live two young men, Xanthias and Orestes by name. Xanthias likes the bath, but Orestes is already washing in it. Xanthias says savagely to Orestes, “Get out of that bath, young man.” Orestes, however, who is an insolent fellow and does not like Xanthias, does nothing but wash himself. Xanthias therefore seizes an axe with which he cuts off Orestes’ head. Thus Orestes dies and Xanthias washes himself in the bath. Phew! What young men!
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