A quiet Sunday, and are you looking for reading? Look no more:
Thorstein Veblen a century ago diagnosed what is ailing the university now—too much presence of businessmen trying to run things. These authors don’t like that. I tend to agree, though I think they maybe don’t realize that a person with a name like “Richard F. Teichgraeber III” is as likely to appear in one of Veblen’s nightmares as to edit his books.
This is devastating to read:
“the Obama White House initially underestimated the scope of Russian mischief. Although it had identified Putin’s complicity quickly, it was slow to connect the dots of Russian intelligence’s multiplatform assault, which ultimately reached about 220 million Americans on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.”
You can bet I’ll get this book.
Fun piece—that I disagree with a fair amount—on David Bentley Hart’s recent writings, including his rejection of the idea of Hell as not properly Christian. Starts off weirdly over-confident, without much interest in what goes on outside the author’s own head; but then again, that may be why this author likes David Bentley Hart. (And I speak as a person who has warm feelings toward DBH as a person.)
This, on US higher education, is sobering:
Taken together, these books paint an altogether gloomy picture of American higher education. Once imagined as an engine of mobility, college now augments inequality. And instead of providing economic security, it provokes anxiety. The woes of the well-to-do receive the most attention in the popular press, which runs frequent features about angst and depression among overscheduled rich high school kids taking six or eight Advanced Placement courses in an attempt to gain a coveted slot in the Fortunate 46. Not content to game the system by hiring SAT tutors and college counselors, a handful of desperate parents recently paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes to fake their children’s athletic prowess and test scores. Of course, these are the people with the least to worry about. Most families don’t have the luxury to fret about going to one of the best colleges; instead, they wonder whether they can pay for college at all. Underwritten mainly by private dollars, college is no longer regarded as a public good: it is a personal investment on the part of individuals and their families, not a collective endeavor that benefits all of us. In a 2018 survey, six of ten Americans agreed that higher education is “headed in the wrong direction.”4 Are we good enough to change direction, and to reinvigorate the idea that college is something we owe to one another and not just to ourselves?
And this:
To absolve themselves of responsibility for students’ academic performance, many professors invoke the oldest schoolhouse myth in the book: I taught it, but they didn’t learn it. In a paper quoted by Kirp, just 20 percent of surveyed two- and four-year college professors cited institutional reasons for student failure; most blamed the students’ lack of skill or effort. That fails to account for success stories like the University of Texas—where targeted efforts under Laude’s direction raised the black graduation rate from 37 to 58 percent—or for dismal situations like the University of Akron, which, in Kirp’s calculus, graduated just 13 percent of its African-American students. In a now-classic 1977 study of professors at the University of Nebraska, 94 percent said they taught better than their colleagues did; in the classroom, as in Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, almost all of us think we’re above average.
Ouch.
A detailed account of Sianne Ngai, whose writings on central aesthetic categories—“cute” and “interesting” among them (think about how often I use the word “interesting”)—have been really illuminating for me. Her new book, on “the gimmick,” sounds fun too—basically using that category as a figure that sounds to me a bit like what Marx was getting at, when he called the commodity form a “cultural hieroglyphic. Someone calls her “an Adorno for our generation,” which seems odd but not entirely wrong. And she studied with Cavell! And Barbara Johnson!! That’s pretty cool.
Small piece on Bayard Rustin, who is worth knowing about, and would have been worth knowing. My friend Sarah Azaransky has written about him (among others) in her book This Worldwide Struggle, and especially how his Quaker faith was a powerful source for his life.
A review of Kristin du Mez’s book on how white evangelicals have embraced a problematic form of masculinity and how this has led them to Trump. I don’t exactly disagree that this is a major factor, but I admit to thinking it needs to be put in rich conversation with whiteness and white supremacy to really get going. Still, sounds interesting.
The history of fascism in America, going back before the coining of the term fascism:
Trump is neither aberrant nor original. Nativist reactionary populism is nothing new in America, it just never made it to the White House before. In the end, it matters very little whether Trump is a fascist in his heart if he’s fascist in his actions. As one of Lewis’s characters notes of the dictator in It Can’t Happen Here: “Buzz isn’t important—it’s the sickness that made us throw him up that we’ve got to attend to.”
(By the way, there’s a great podcast with the author of this piece at the Talking Politics podcast; I highly recommend it.)
Digitizing archives in Ghadames, one of the crossroads of the Sahara:
Along with goods piled high on camel saddles, the caravan trade facilitated the flow of religion and scientific concepts, shaping the culture of the entire region. This flow, as well as the network of people which sustained it over vast distances, depended on a sophisticated system of documentation and accounting in several languages. Ghadames was one of the brightest nodes along this network and became an important repository of manuscripts documenting these relationships which managed to thrive across inhospitable stretches of sand.
Admittedly, part of what attracts me to this piece is the idea of a life lived in the desert ocean of the Sahara. It seems dangerously (and delusional) alluring right now. Akin to the “altogether elsewhere” in Auden’s poem “The Fall of Rome” .
Stay safe. Where we are, it's sunny but a bit blustery; not a hot July day as it would be were we back in Virginia. Hopefully soon.