Archive for July 3rd, 2008
the end of us
I imagine that most of you, at least those of you who look at the NYT, have already seen this.
Baby boomers, hired in large numbers during a huge expansion in higher education that continued into the ’70s, are being replaced by younger professors who many of the nearly 50 academics interviewed by The New York Times believe are different from their predecessors — less ideologically polarized and more politically moderate.
“There’s definitely something happening,” said Peter W. Wood, executive director of the National Association of Scholars, which was created in 1987 to counter attacks on Western culture and values. “I hear from quite a few faculty members and graduate students from around the country. They are not really interested in fighting the battles that have been fought over the last 20 years.”
Cohen is right, of course, to emphasize the changing nature of the American academic workplace and job market – it’s the first and last answer to the problem of the de-politicization of the faculties. But there is something else going on, I think, something deeply related to the material situation but not entirely continuous with it. It has to do with the failure of the ideological momentum of the left itself, the cul de sac that was mainline theory and the bigger, emptier cul de sac that the humanities found themselves in after they emerged (as they emerge) from it. The previous order was handy with a certain problem set – diversity issues, race and gender issues – but stumbled once it had attained many of its aims in these fields.
At the start of his career, Mr. Olneck traced the links between where someone’s family came from and where they ended up on the economic and social ladder. Although he has done quantitative research, 20 years ago he jettisoned number-centric studies for historical narrative, exploring how schools throughout the 20th century responded to immigrants and diversity. In his work one can detect some of the era’s preoccupations when he argues, for instance, that fights over bilingualism and standard English were about power.
The same goes for his extracurricular activities. In 1989 he worked to kick the R.O.T.C. off campus because of the Defense Department’s ban on homosexuals. (The effort failed.) More recently, his neighborhood was riled by a Walgreens plan to open a drugstore. “All these people who had protested the war and civil rights,” Mr. Olneck said, laughing; Walgreens “didn’t know what hit ’em.”
Lots more to say, but for now: it may be becoming clear, only as we lose it, that a progressively-minded academia, however ineffective it can be in attaining the real-world materializations of its aims and ideals, is worth something rather than nothing. And while the intensification of labor and deskilling that definine the business practices of the institutions that hire us are, yes, the first and last cause of the problem, the fading of the old paradigms, the lack of a viable framework that would enable new work and better communication, isn’t helping matters either.
In other words, what, at this point, would we even imagine a left academia to believe in at this point? What, reasonably, would they invest themselves in? Obamania? The permanostalgia that I increasingly feel characterizes my own political inclinations, and that I would love to transform (or even have transformed) into something a little more practicable?
used to be the f train, now it’s the victoria line
While, overall, the London Underground works a lot better than the NYC subway system (how many times did I wait for 15 minutes for the F at Bergen? Waiting 15 minutes here would lead you to think that something terrible had happened topside) I do definitely miss the MTA design elements. Labelling things with single letters and numbers will always, always beat giving them (often political freighted) names, just as numbering streets will always be more modern and wonderful than all those dead folks clotting up our maps and making everything vastly more difficult to navigate. And placing those letters and numbers in sharply colored circles redoubles the fun…
The picture above is from a very nice post on Christoph Niemann’s NYT blog. Sometimes it seems like the only true barometer of things worth keeping in this world – especially when the aesthetics of everyday life are concerned – are things that are worthy of childhood obsessions.
not for circulation, please
Ah, starting to feel the burn of the inevitable backstroke yet? Faith-based post-welfare and fisa. Even the Rovian swift-boating of McCain’s war record smells so strongly of Clintonianism, of “lessons learned in the last election.”