Motus Mentis

13 Comments

1. Kevin Kim says

   The blog-post title is some sort of fart reference, isn’t it.

   That was, indeed, a sad article.

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 12:01 am | Permalink
2. Malcolm says

   “Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men?”

   Who, indeed? The question contains its own answer.

   I suppose the question now is: “Who? Whom?”

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 12:10 am | Permalink
3. Dom says

   I don’t want to live on this planet anymore.

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 10:59 am | Permalink
4. the one eyed man says

   Right wing newspaper Investors Business Daily quotes right wing think tank (pardon the oxymoron) “scholar” Heather MacDonald “shocking” her audience by revealing “liberal indoctrination” from “leftist academics” in the UCLA English department. Had Ms. MacDonald possessed the slightest acquaintance with actual scholarship, she might have gone to the UCLA website to see what the requirements to be an English major at UCLA actually are.

   http://www.english.ucla.edu/programs-a-courses/english-major-

   Her assertion that “UCLA junked these individual author requirements (to read Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare) and replaced them with a mandate that all English majors take three courses in the following four areas: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies; Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies; Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory; or Creative Writing” is false. UCLA requires all majors to take at least ten English classes, including one of each of the following:

   English literature before 1500

   English literature 1500-1700

   English literature 1700-1850

   English literature 1850 to the present

   UCLA did “junk individual author requirements” — and replaced them with requirements to study their eras, and not only the individual writers specifically. What didn’t happen is “replacing them with a mandate” to take courses in the areas she abhors. But hey: if you can tell a willing audience that UCLA is forcing undergraduates to give up Blake for Bisexual Studies, they will believe you.

   The UCLA English department is “officially indifferent to whether an English major had ever read a word of Milton, Chaucer, or Shakespeare?” Really? Then why is 30% of the course requirement in their works and others of their eras?

   Now let’s look at these dreaded course requirements:

   In Gender, Race, Ethnicity, Disability, and Sexuality Studies, you could take a course in Chicano Literature. Or you could take one in American Literature 1832-1865, Jane Austen, or American Political Novels.

   In Imperial, Transnational, and Postcolonial Studies, you can take courses in American Literature 1776-1832 or Literary London (Dickens, Fielding, Defoe).

   In Genre Studies, Interdisciplinary Studies, and Critical Theory, you can take courses in the Hebrew Bible, Christian Biblical Texts, King Arthur and the Round Table, and so forth.

   Creative Writing has been a part of English Department curricula since the first guy with tweed and a pipe droned on about it.

   If you want to take courses in Queer Literature – which includes writers like Proust, Emily Dickinson, and D. H. Lawrence – you can do that too.

   Let’s review. Ms. MacDonald shocks her guests by revealing secrets of liberal indoctrination in the schools, such as stiff course requirements to read literature written before 1850. She riles them up with scary sounding course rubrics which, upon examination, aren’t so scary. What exactly is she kvetching about?

   The piece from IBD is a synecdoche for the right wing noise machine as a whole. Random data are cherry picked, taken out of context, and then blown out of all proportion to enflame a gullible and excitable audience, whose limited powers of observation and ratiocination and inability to think critically make them easy consumers of this claptrap. Anything which feeds one’s confirmation bias is accepted as an a priori fact. If we, as a culture, are “dying, dying,” it’s not because English teachers are indoctrinating their students. It is because of the vacuum left by the once-proud conservative movement, which has been replaced by shrill and perpetually aggrieved ideologues whose twaddle is eagerly embraced by their uninformed and uncritical followers.

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 11:36 am | Permalink
5. Dom says

   Reading D.H. Lawrence is one thing. Reading him as an example of queer literature is something else. It represents an attempt by a small minority to insinuate their agenda into larger educational concerns. It is similar to this piece of nonsense: http://www.mcgilldaily.com/2013/11/movember-as-micro-aggression/

   As far as the debasement of American education goes, isn’t that a given? Weren’t you embarrassed by the group of 88 idiots at Duke University?

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 7:26 pm | Permalink
6. the one eyed man says

   There is the naked wrestling scene in Women in Love with Gerald and Rupert which stands out as a prime example of gay themes in literature, despite the fact that D. H. Lawrence (or דוד חיים האלאוי to members of the tribe) was straight. I don’t mean to imply that he was in the same league as Proust, who would leave his Paris mansion to pick up sailors at the docks.

   I don’t follow what happens at Duke, so I can’t comment there.

   As far as elite schools in America go, I don’t see any reason to believe they are debased. I’m on the board of the Northern California Alumni Association for the fancypants school which I attended, and I’m familiar with Stanford and Berkeley. They all provide a tough, demanding, and rigorous education. I’m sure that Yale, MIT, Chicago, and so forth are as good as they always were. I recently read that of the thirty highest-rated schools in the world, about two thirds were in America.

   As for the rest of American higher education: I really have no idea if they are better, worse, or the same as they have always been.

   Posted November 30, 2013 at 9:31 pm | Permalink
7. Malcolm says

   Peter,

   I don’t know why you’d want to begin your little screed with an ad hominem attack on Heather Mac Donald (a graduate of Yale, Cambridge, and Stanford Law who is known for the rigor and careful research that goes into her work). I guess that’s just the way you people roll. But I have little doubt that she had a good close look at UCLA’s amended curriculum.

   We will, of course, ignore all your fizzing and spluttering about the “right-wing noise machine”. We all understand that this is just an involuntary defensive response on your part, as when a hog-nosed snake, confronted by a threat, hisses, spits, and emits an unpleasant odor, or a hagfish fouls the water with noxious slime. I know you can’t help it. It saddens me, though, to think that you are so far gone that an academic’s genuine concern for the survival of a great civilization becomes mere “noise” in your ears. (Is all this heretical “noise” just static to you, and easy enough to ignore for the sake of the Party, or is it something much harder to bear — a horrid buzzing sound, perhaps, like cicadas?) Anyway, we all understand that you’re simply practicing everyday crimestop, and we’ll pay it no mind.

   “Nothing to see here,” you say, as always. Actually, there’s something rather important to see, but if you’re still on the blue pills, you could easily miss it. What the rest of us see at UCLA (and very clearly too) is what we see throughout academia — a steady tectonic motion, gradual and inexorable, in one direction only. What we see also is the steady subduction of high Western culture — the very culture for whose preservation and propagation these great Western universities were erected — as it slides into oblivion beneath an amorphous, atomizing multiculture, a seething, foaming congeries of envy and resentment, a debased and discordant metaculture that is actually no culture at all.

   Do you ever think it strange that all of these great universities move so steadily leftward, with such admirable coordination? And that they do so in almost perfect lockstep with the major newspapers, followed a year or two later by the actions of government? Imagine yourself (if you can overcome the shame of thinking such a thing, even for argument’s sake) being openly opposed to gay marriage as public policy. Yet — and you may just have to take my word for it, depending on your dosage — this was in fact a perfectly respectable, majority point of view just a few years ago. Even Barack Obama himself only came round about eighteen months ago.

   The blogger who calls himself Mencius Moldbug has written about this:

   Except for a few unimportant institutions of non-mainstream religious affiliation, we simply do not see multiple, divergent, competing schools of thought within the American university system. The whole vast archipelago, though evenly speckled with a salting of contrarians, displays no factional structure whatsoever. It seems almost perfectly synchronized.

   There are two explanations for this synchronization. One, Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because they both arrive at the same truth. I am willing to concede this for, say, chemistry. When it comes to, say, African-American studies, I am not quite so sure. Are you? Surely it is arguable that the latter is a legitimate area of inquiry. But surely it is arguable that it is not. So how is it, exactly, that Harvard, Stanford, and everyone else gets the same answer?

   I’m afraid the only logical alternative, however awful and unimaginable, is the conclusion that Harvard and Stanford are synchronized because both are remoras attached, in some unthinkable way, to some great, invisible predator of the deep – perhaps even Cthulhu himself.

   Our commenter Dom got right to the point, with characteristic pith. I’ll make the same point at somewhat greater length:

   Until quite recently, if one were to pursue an English major at a great university, it was from a love of English literature as among the highest expressions of our culture’s depth and greatness, as a means of understanding our civilization’s psyche and history, and as sublime art unto itself. It was understood that the pillars of such an education must be the study of those great writers who were themselves the pillars of English literature.

   The key word in that description is ‘love’. To be an English major was to love English literature — and much more than that, to love the magnificent culture of which it is the beating heart.

   What do we see now? Let’s look at some of the course offerings:

   Why yes, here’s Shakespeare! English 150C:

   This course works as an introduction to Shakespeare race studies by closely examining the relationship between Shakespeare and African and African-American cultures.

   Because, of course, one cannot properly understand Shakespeare except as in relation to ‘African-American’ cultures. (Which would have been much on the Bard’s mind in 1600 or so.)

   Another option is English 153, which focuses on ‘female agency’.

   English 145, which covers medieval times, places its emphasis is on ‘dissent’, and how dissent was ‘framed’.

   English 150B zeroes in on human rights and “Olaudah Equiano’s slave narrative”. It asks: “Was the Enlightenment really so enlightened?”

   English 163C is all about Jane Austen: women’s rights, “female subjectivity”, and feminism, but it still manages to slip in a healthy dose of race grievance, in the form of abolitionism and and “post-colonial” issues. (God help the white male in that class.)

   English 167B, which deals with “American fiction until 1900” is described in only the briefest terms. We do learn, however, that it will give “particular focus” to gender and race. (That’s all you need to know about it, apparently, if you’re trying to decide whether to sign up.)

   As for English literature since 1850, we get:

   English M101B: Pre-Stonewall LGBT/Queer Literature since 1855.

   English 102B: Survey of post-1980 Asian American literature. “Race and geography”, etc.

   English M104B: African-American literature.

   English M105C: Chicana/o Literature since el Movimiento

   This class surveys some of the most popular genres of recent Chicana/o literature: the novel, short story, and poetry. These forms of expression examine the various meanings (social,
   sexual, racial, ethnic, cultural, political, economic) evoked by the terms “Chicano” and “Chicana.” The class will examine literary texts as sites where the process of becoming Chicano/a is configured and critiqued as part of a broader trajectory in which identity gets generated out of a history of (Spanish and U.S.) imperial control. We will isolate and examine various themes and forms associated with Chicano/a cultural production as both postcolonial and transnational phenomena. The emphasis will therefore fall less on a historical survey of Chicana/o literature and more on the thematic and formal concerns the literature manifests regarding such issues as political agency, oppositional consciousness, gender and sexual identification, class concerns, aesthetic production, and racial stratification.

   English M105E: Latino USA: Movement and Movements

   Reading the literary output of twentieth century Latina/os of Caribbean, Central, and South American origin will help us to see how political upheaval and circular migration inform issues of ethnicity, gender, family, race, and class.

   English M107A: Women’s Words: Gender, Ethnicity, and History

   Gender and ethnicity construct women’s lives in the Americas and, we might argue, the choices women face in their lives are often bounded by cultural preconceptions determined by one’s gender, race, and class. But women’s lives are shaped by history too, whether that history traces back to the legacies of slavery, miscegenation, and the civil rights movements, back to the Japanese immigration and World War II internment, back to nineteenth-century immigration, or more deeply into a continental history of European displacement of Indian tribes, Spanish colonization of indigenous Aztec and native populations in the southwest, and the continuing struggle to live in the borderlands between the United States, Mexico, and Latin America. How do women authors writing today create texts that capture this postcolonial and transnational complexity of women’s lives, determined by their gender, ethnicity, and history? How do women negotiate the complexity of identities seemingly fractured, often ruptured irreparably by the triple claims? Where do women find in the reservoirs of ancient lineage, female networks, commitments to children, cultural traditions, spiritual beliefs, the sources of identity and connection that enable survival and creativity? How does history link to land and landscapes, nature and nations? What is my space, my nation, my region? How do women learn to live in “the father’s house” yet to perpetuate and transmit the “mother” tongue, lineage and history?

   English 130: Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures

   This course provides a critical introduction to postcolonial literatures produced after decolonization. We will draw upon postcolonial theory…

   English 132: Women Authors and the Postcolonial Americas

   Our focus will be especially on issues of gender, feminism, racial identity…

   English 171A: Later 19th-Century Poetry

   This class introduces students to developments in British and Irish poetry from 1850 to 1900.

   Moreover, the lectures include discussions of other types of poetry, especially the dramatic monologue, in relation to feminist thought and imperial ideology.

   There’s more, but I think we get the picture. Of course, there are still a few courses that an English major might have taken at the UCLA of old — English 142, Medieval Poets and Their Lesser Works, looks safe enough — but we can see that things are not what they used to be.

   The English departments of our universities, which once dedicated themselves to cultivating the highest appreciation and deepest understanding of all that was good and fine about the English-speaking civilization, are now something very different indeed. This isn’t a curriculum built on the love of our culture, but upon a loathing of it — upon an outsider’s envy and resentment of it, and implacable grievance against it. What is sought here is not the preservation and propagation of the culture that founded UCLA, but its marginalization and destruction; the latter-day academy offers for study not a pantheon of immortals, but a litany of sins, injustices, and oppressions. It’s a ‘Two Minutes’ Hate’ that lasts four years.

   Do you recall from your own studies that the great totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century spawned their own branches of science? The Nazis, for example, had what was called Deutsche Physik — a pure reaction against decadent “Jewish physics”, born of tribal grievance and resentment. The same principle is at work here.

   For some of us, this is worth mentioning.

   Posted December 1, 2013 at 12:19 am | Permalink
8. Horace Jeffery Hodges says

   This is why everyone should read my novella — it makes a case for the study of Western civilization.

   Jeffery Hodges

   * * *

   Posted December 1, 2013 at 1:32 pm | Permalink
9. the one eyed man says

   Whatever Heather Mac Donald’s qualifications may be, they were not on exhibit in her speech. She made stuff up. Her assertions were highly deceptive, and could easily be refuted by anyone with an Internet connection and three minutes to spare.

   * * * *

   There is nothing I said which is ad hominem. When conservatism was epitomized by William F. Buckley, it had a lot of interesting things to say. Now that its exemplars are Bill, Sean, and Rush: not so much. Right wing media thrive on enflaming their audience with a steady stream of narratives with no basis in reality. Facts are distorted and blown out of proportion to tell their audience what they want to hear, whether it is Hillary Clinton’s murder of Vince Foster or Barack Obama’s birth in Nairobi. Ms. MacDonald’s speech was emblematic of this. It feeds a pre-conceived notion (liberal academics are indoctrinating our youth) by distorting facts to make them appear other than what they actually are. Since her audience is predisposed to believe that sinister leftists are poisoning innocent children, her assertions are accepted uncritically.

   This is not to say that conservatism is bereft of thoughtful minds. Josh Barro, Ramesh Ponnuru, Charles Krauthammer, and the Wall Street Journal editors are all worth reading. (I was amused by the WSJ editorial this week lauding Obama’s decision to fly B-52’s near China, as you could tell how much discomfort they felt about praising Obama, yet couldn’t avoid doing so without making their case that assertive action was necessary and proper.) However, these worthy commentators are overwhelmed by a machine which churns out a steady stream of intellectual pablum to keep the masses agitated and angry.

   * * * *

   The remainder of your blustery and ill-focused post betrays a profound misunderstanding of teaching literature and liberal arts education in general.

   The study of English literature is far broader than what you find in the Great Books section of the bookstore.

   There is nothing untoward about teaching Chicano, Asian, or Latin literature under the aegis of an English department. An English student benefits from reading works written in other languages. This used to be called Comp Lit.

   There is nothing untoward about asking whether the Enlightenment was enlightened or whether there were African influences in Shakespeare (whose character Othello was probably African), Perfectly legitimate topics of inquiry.

   There is nothing untoward about teaching African-American literature. I hated reading novels until senior year in high school, when my inspired English teacher, Gary Sykes, assigned Ralph Emerson’s Invisible Man. It was a life-changing experience. I got it. This led in all sorts of directions — Mann, Joyce, Proust, Dostoevsky — that I never would have gone without Sykes’s class. (Coincidentally, my daughter is reading that in her senior English class now.) Why not teach it, along with James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and so forth? Your suggestion is that it is A-OK to teach Dickens, but not these guys?

   There is nothing untoward about teaching courses in how dissent figures into literature. Literature has often been a force for social change, from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Mein Kampf.

   There is nothing untoward about teaching literature through the axes of class, gender, or sexuality. Understanding the social, economic, and political environment a writer knew is helpful in understanding what he wrote. It’s hard to study Thomas Hardy without the context of class struggle. I’ve never read Jane Austen, but I would suspect that gender plays a big role in understanding her oeuvre.

   It is likely that some of the professors teaching these courses are feminists. They may even be — gasp! — radical feminists with short haircuts and Doc Martens (and you know what that means!). There is nothing wrong with having a strong viewpoint. The only thing which is wrong is if only one viewpoint is expressed and contrary views are not allowed. Whether or not there are countervailing viewpoints at UCLA is impossible to know from the curricula. You would have to know the actual people involved and how they teach.

   * * * *

   One of the many flaws in your argument is the assumption that teaching something other than Dickens and Milton, or teaching considerations beyond the words in the books themselves, somehow indicates a “loathing” for Western civilization or its achievements. It doesn’t. I’ve taken a lot of English classes, and my sister is an English professor. People who teach literature usually really like the stuff they are teaching, which is why they studied it in the first place. Placing great works and great authors under a critical lens does not demean them. It clarifies them.

   Teaching authors in addition to Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer – not in lieu of them, as Ms. MacDonald would have you believe – does not mean that Milton, Shakespeare, and Chaucer are to be loathed. It simply means that students who want a broader education than simply the Great Books can have it.

   * * * *

   I had a professor who constantly challenged us: what is the strongest argument against your position? That question epitomizes the essence of critical thinking.

   I had another professor — my advisor, Hadley Arkes — who I learned more from than anyone else. He is a rock-ribbed conservative who would lecture us daily on why abortion should be illegal, why affirmative action is wrong, what the limits should be on political dissent, and so forth. He’s still there. You can read his stuff in NRO, the Wall Street Journal, and First Things. He was honored by PowerLine as their favorite college professor:

   http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/05/the-power-line-100-hadley-arkes.php

   So while the Vietnam war was raging on the other side of the globe, I learned that you can’t construct a durable argument without knowing what the counter-argument would be, and why yours hews closer to the truth.

   My point here is that rather than the homogeneous collection of Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys which Ms. MacDonald would have you believe populate higher education, the reality is very different. I have no idea how much ideological diversity there is at UCLA, but I do know that any conjecture based on the curricula is groundless.

   * * * *

   A liberal arts education is much more than the accumulation of facts. More important is the process by which those facts are studied. Like most schools, UCLA has a core curriculum so that an English major is required to have a broad background in the field (the four temporal requirements). Beyond that, English majors can choose electives based on their interests. The important thing is less the specific books you read — whether T. S. Eliot or Queer Literature — than whether you know how to read a book and intuit what the author is trying to say.

   We had a saying in college: education is what you have left after you forgot everything you learned. Whether you study agronomy in the Jutland, Urdu semiotics, or the Albigensian Crusade, the important thing is not what facts you acquire, but whether you acquire the skills of rigorous and critical thinking. An education which does nothing more than teach a student how to think clearly and how to express himself clearly is a success. As long as you have a core understanding of your discipline, whether you learn that from studying Shakespeare or Lesbian Latvian Literature is almost beside the point. I got more out of Invisible Man than anything I have read since then. If a student learns critical thinking from gender issues involved in Women Authors in Postcolonial America, that’s fine by me.

   * * * *

   It is 70 and sunny here by the Bay, so this will be my last word on the subject. It is time to maintain the most solemn of holiday traditions:

   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSCmZU0eFJg

   Posted December 1, 2013 at 2:07 pm | Permalink
10. the one eyed man says

    Whoops! Ralph Ellison wrote Invisible Man, not Ralph Emerson.

    (Although Ellison’s mother named her son Ralph Waldo for a reason.)

    Posted December 1, 2013 at 2:11 pm | Permalink
11. Malcolm says

    And there you have it, goodthinkful readers.

    Nothing to see here. Our academic institutions represent, as always, the full and glorious Diversity of intellectual opinions, in precisely equal proportion. There is no ideological hegemony, nor prevailing current. All opinions are welcome! (Evidence for this, as if any were needed, is that Peter himself had a conservative professor, in 1974.) Any Gleichschaltung that we may see — of academic curricula in all leading universities, and political expression in leading media organs — is due, as always, merely to convergence upon Truth.

    Nothing has changed. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

    Posted December 1, 2013 at 2:42 pm | Permalink
12. libertybelle says

    Malcolm, I think your excellent 12:19 am comment yesterday should be a blog post and not buried in the comments section. You often write really terrific stuff in your comments section and post links with sparse wordage in your blog posts. My writing problem is I’ve got too many opinions and ramble – need to develop some self-discipline in this format.

    As to the actual topic, Heather McDonald is known for her in-depth investigations, so I would look askance at assertions that she didn’t do her homework. From my casual acquaintance with academia, through four kids and their college experiences, even the hard science departments have more than their fair share of left-leaning political ideologues. Anecdotally, so take it as a random not a comprehensive , my son who has a physics degree commented frequently that the socially accepted political tenor among his peers is left-leaning. He attended several American Physical Society meetings around the country, working as a research assistant for the head of his university’s physics department. He commented that the socializing chit chat is all from the liberal perspective. Reading commentary from the renowned Stephen Hawking, sometimes leaves me wondering if he bases his predictions on humanity’s future more on his political beliefs than scientific study.

    The indomitable JK posted a link, which I’ll hunt for later on that O’Bagy bimbo, who John McCain hired after ISW fired her. The link was to Georgetown and the master’s program thesis in that international relations department – some really unusual topics, at least I found them so.

    Posted December 2, 2013 at 12:00 pm | Permalink
13. Malcolm says

    Thanks, LB. It’s a bad habit of mine – I start out to write a brief response in the comment thread, then end up with something long enough to have been a post of its own. A lot of bloggers will publish any substantial responses as new posts, and link to them from the comment thread; I should get in the habit of doing that.

    I’m sorry also that my final post in this thread was just snark and asperity. I get exasperated sometimes when it becomes clear that discussion is unproductive.

    It really does sadden me that one as astute as Peter simply cannot see the sea change that has happened here — that in the latter-day academy Western culture is studied not as an exemplar of high human achievement, but as a defendant standing in the dock for crimes of oppression. The student is brought to the subject not as a trustee of a sacred cultural heritage, but as a plaintiff.

    Posted December 2, 2013 at 10:36 pm | Permalink