A University Education is Liberal Indoctrination: Bullshit

In addition to believing that aspiring to a higher education is snobbish, Rick Santorum also believes that colleges and universities are places of liberal (left-wing) indoctrination, where people are re-made in the political image of President Obama.

Sociologist Neil Gross, among others, has done a fine job of challenging the validity of the claim that higher education indoctrinates students to become more liberal and less religious; but for those who will dismiss Gross' work as just another instance of the bias of a liberal college professor, let's examine the logic and assumptions underlying the claim that college is indoctrination.

It would be hard to disagree with the fact that, over the course of a lifetime, or even over the course of a childhood, there are many things that can influence someone's political affiliation, religious beliefs, notions of how to live a just and fulfilling life, and general worldview. The views and regulations of parents can of course shape the views of their children; the books children read or have read to them, the television shows they watch, the people (including the children of other parents) they speak with, the teachers they have, the priests or religious officials they see, and even the cashier at the corner store where a child stops every day after school for chocolate milk or a candy bar, all represent varying degrees of opportunity for influence over the way a developing person thinks about the world.

When someone like Rick Santorum singles out the experience of attending a university specifically as a form of (liberal) 'indoctrination,' he's not simply talking neutrally about the influence of one formative institution (which happens to be liberal) in the life of a young person versus that of another. By using the word 'indoctrination,' not merely influence or teaching, but influencing or teaching something uncritically and with negative effects, Rick Santorum and his compatriots are making a claim that the influence of a college experience is qualitatively different from and more insidious than other influences in the life of a young person. Further, by characterizing this influence as negative and insidious, he's making a claim that the way you learn things in college is worse than the way you learn things through other institutions and from other people in your life. To put it another way, what and how you learn from your parents is innocuous learning, but what and how you learn from your college or university is 'indoctrination.'

Let's consider this further. What exactly is the substantive difference in value between what and how one learns from one's parents and what and how one learns at one's college? Certainly parents can 'indoctrinate' their children every bit as much as universities can, and probably more. After all, even if we concede what has already been disproven by Gross et al.--that the political affiliation of college professors, who are mostly left-of-center, has the effect of making students more liberal during the college learning process--there remains the question of whether indoctrination in college is necessarily worse than indoctrination by the people who preside over one's childhood by accident of birth, the parents. Putting aside that college explicitly functions to expose young adults to a range of ideas and subject matter, many of which are competing even if the professors teaching them are less politically diverse, the possibility remains that just as liberal college professors could theoretically indoctrinate students, so too could students' parents indoctrinate their children, raising them in one household political environment, bringing them up in one religious tradition, feeding them one type of diet, etc. We often make the assumption that 'indoctrination' is something that happens from the outside, once someone has already acquired a worldview and has been compelled to change it; but it's quite possible that the purest form of indoctrination is that which occurs in youth, before one has any opportunity to independently seek out and comprehend new ideas not as a child, but as a developing adult.

Underlying Santorum's comments, then, is the assumption that a child's mind is rightfully the property of his or her parents, and that the ideologies in which parents raise their children are inherently more valid than others, in and of the fact that they belong to the parents. This is a belief that, even with the acknowledgement of the obvious fact that parents cannot be the only shapers of their childrens' worldviews even in early childhood, parents nevertheless ought to have the right to be the primary shapers and controllers of the way their children see the world. What follows is that anything else that violates or contradicts the set of ideologies under which a parent raises his or her child is 'indoctrination.' When Santorum laments the university as a place of liberal indoctrination, what he's really saying is that a university education and experience threatens the ideological monopoly that parents whose values align with his own have, think they have, or wish they had, over their children. But what would Santorum, or anyone else who accuses the university of liberal indoctrination, say to the following line of questioning: so what? Why is the 'indoctrination' of parents and other pre-university institutions more valuable and more desirable than what students learn and experience in college? How is the college experience more limiting and less ideologically diverse? Why should a child be made in the ideological likeness of his or her parents, and at what age is a child permitted to have thoughts and ideas that deviate from the parental or childhood-innocence-age ideology without such a deviation being characterized as 'indoctrination'?

Lost in all of this, of course, is the child (or the young adult) as a thinking agent, a concept that the likes of Santorum must not believe in. For to argue that colleges are places of liberal indoctrination is also to argue that people who have reached young adulthood at the ages of 17-19 years, and who have been educated enough by that point to qualify for admission at an institution of higher education, are nevertheless incapable of thinking for themselves. 'Indoctrination,' if it works the way Santorum and others suggest it does, means that young adults who have been raised in a given family tradition for the better part of two decades, young adults whose parents and pre-college social institutions have had a 17-19 year head start on universities in shaping the values and worldviews of their children, are nevertheless overpowered, their entire set of values and life experiences overturned, by the university experience. That being the (supposed) case, we must then ask two very obvious and very important questions: first, how strong were the parental values and ideas, really, if they were so easily broken down by liberal college professors?; second, how feeble are the minds and resolve of our young people, and how feeble is our belief in them and their integrity, if they can be so easily 'indoctrinated' over four years of undergraduate education?

Following from these two questions, logically, is a third: could it be that the ideas themselves that young, thinking adults are exposed to in higher education are as great a factor (if not a greater factor) as the so-called 'indoctrination' program in whatever change of heart a student might have over the course of a higher education? Is it not, for example, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, but the 'liberal ideology' of a professor of American history, that has the greatest potential to change the hearts and minds of students?

Those who argue that a college education is an exercise in liberal indoctrination do so perhaps without full knowledge of the disturbing assumptions that underlie their accusations: one, the assumption that the mind of a young adult, likely away from home and independent for the first time, developing and learning to deal with new ideas and new experiences, should rightfully continue to be the property of the institutions that raised him; two, that ultimately college-aged people are not thinking agents, lacking the ability to account for their two decades on Earth and think independently enough to avoid 'indoctrination,' and unprepared to deal with the realities of ideological difference and contestation. My final question for the likes of Santorum, then, is: when? At what age, exactly, are young people capable of engaging independently in critical debate with other thinking agents, however liberal, without such engagement being considered 'indoctrination'? I suspect that, following the logic of Santorum and others who believe that college is liberal indoctrination, the answer is never. Because the charge of college as liberal indoctrination comes down to one thing and one thing only: there are a lot of people at universities--students, faculty, staff--who disagree with the ideas of Rick Santorum. And for an ideologue like Santorum, everyone who disagrees with him is suffering from 'indoctrination' of one sort or another.

On the Republican Strategy of Treating Women Like Children: A Theory

First, let's consider what the Republican strategy of 'treating women like children' means in practice.

In large states including Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama, legislation has been introduced that would require some variation of this scenario: when a woman shows up at an abortion clinic having made the choice to schedule an abortion procedure, a procedure that is fully legal in the United States of America, her doctors will be required by law to perform on her a medically unnecessary ultrasound, either over the belly or, because it provides a clearer image of the fetus, by means of a probe inserted into the woman's vagina. The idea is that a woman in the process of exercising her legal right to obtain an abortion in these states, at least to the extent that she's opted to schedule the procedure (whether she goes through with it is a different matter) would be legally coerced into viewing an ultrasound image of the fetus in the womb (the Pennsylvania legislation specifically says that the ultrasound monitor is to be turned by the doctor toward the patient). Crucially, as I mentioned, this procedure is medically unnecessary, meaning that doctors would be forced by the hand of the government to perform a procedure of varying degrees of invasiveness against both their own will and better judgment as licensed physicians and the will of their patient. After this unnecessary and invasive procedure is carried out against the will of the doctor and of the patient, the woman would then be forced to wait 24 hours before she is allowed to have the abortion procedure.

Unlike the politicians touting these kinds of laws, let's just be clear about what's going on here. There being no medical reason for these ultrasounds, and hence no incentive aimed at safeguarding the health of the patient, the objective of these types of laws is to appeal to the emotions of women in the vulnerable position of making the undesirable choice to have an abortion. Proponents of such laws often say that the intent is to provide women with 'all the information' they would require to 'make the best decision'; yet these laws do not require the handing out of pamphlets or even a lecture from the informed physician about the nature and risks of the procedure, both physical and psychological (patients are given this information before an abortion anyway, with or without new legislation). Instead these laws specifically call for a scenario in which the patient is made to confront a visual image of what's going on inside of her womb. The logic behind this attempt to emotionally blackmail women who are already in many cases in a vulnerable emotional state before having a difficult, invasive, and often traumatic medical procedure is that after seeing a picture of what looks like a proto-human, the patient will question the long series of decisions she already made to land her at the abortion clinic, and reverse them all in a final moment of emotional uncertainty.

Let's also be clear about what these types of laws say about proponents' attitudes toward women.

As I said, in the United States, abortion is legal, with some restrictions. If you believe abortion is murder, whether as a private citizen or an elected legislator, you have every right to petition the government to make abortion illegal, to draft legislation that would make abortion illegal, and to state your case before the court of law that abortion should not be legal. But today, right now, abortion is legal. This means that even if you believe that a woman who chooses to have an abortion is a bad, fragile, or emotionally inept person, anymore than you believe that a man purchasing a bottle of vodka at the liquor store is that sort of person, the onus is on you to come up with a damn good reason for why your opinion that what these people are doing is wrong should interfere with the rights of these people to do that which is perfectly legal.

You will notice, however, that when a man who looks less than presentable drives up to a liquor store, walks in with valid identification and no ostensible signs of impairment (other than, perhaps, a ragged beard, a facial scar, some 'unprofessional' attire), no citizens' movement, not even Mothers Against Drunk Driving, is petitioning the government to force the sales clerk to show this man a video montage of drunk driving accidents, or a collection of old photos of him passed out shirtless on his ex-wife's kitchenette table, before permitting this man to purchase a bottle of vodka (after a mandatory 2-hour waiting period, during which he is to reflect on the potential gravity of his decision). After all, alcoholism and drunk driving are not things to be taken lightly; and how can we know that this bottle of vodka won't be THE bottle of vodka that leads this poor man to take to the roads after a bender and kill someone, or to strike his insubordinate daughter, or lay that final, catastrophic joker upon the house of cards that was his failing marriage)?

(Alabama ranks 6th in the nation for worst states for drunken driving; Virginia 28th; Pennsylvania 30th, if you're curious. For most abortions, Pennsylvania is 21st; Virginia 18th; Alabama not in the top 25).

But when it comes to women and abortion, proponents of this flavor of anti-abortion law make clear that they simply don't trust or respect women as decision makers on matters concerning their own reproductive systems. There is, without question, a misogynistic component to the types of legislation we're seeing in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Alabama. Because rather than attacking directly the issue of abortion itself, proponents of these laws attack women. More specifically, these laws say that women who choose to schedule an abortion procedure are not capable of deciding for themselves, without state intervention, whether they can pursue the wholly legal option of having an abortion. Again, to be clear, these laws explicitly say, just as their supporters frequently argue, that what's at issue here isn't the right of the woman to have an abortion: after the medically unnecessary and invasive ultrasound, and the 24-hour waiting period, she may 'choose freely' to have an abortion. The aspect of the abortion-scheduling that these laws take issue with is precisely the woman's independent decision-making, not the right to have an abortion.. The creators and supporters of these laws, who are probably against the legal right to have abortions, nevertheless avoid tackling the actual issue at hand, choosing instead a cowardly and misogynistic form of opposition that strikes at the heart not of a woman's right to choose, but of her capability of choice.

In the case of every other kind of behavior within the sphere of legal action, we, especially the conservatives and Republicans among us, assume that adult humans are capable of making rational choices for ourselves, without the intervention of government to steer us one way or another. Further, conservatives and Republicans believe fundamentally that not only do we not need the government to assist us as individuals in making rational decisions, but that we're actually better off when we make our own decisions without government intervention; that if the government intervenes to make decisions for us, our outcomes will be less favorable, and our society will deteriorate. Today, we can plausibly add a caveat to this sacred, fundamental belief: women, on the other hand, are not always capable of making rational decisions without the assistance of the government.

This is what I mean when I refer to as infantilizing this Republican strategy of drafting and promoting a series of legislative initiatives that places exceptional government requirements on women, who, we must assume, choose rationally and legally to schedule abortion procedures, and who make such choices under the sacred protection of freedom of conscience and in their capacity as free and and law-abiding American citizens, dignified by such freedom and such protections. This is what I mean when I say that this is a strategy that treats women like children, making women a special case for extra governance while seething against 'Obamacare' as that which would 'put the government between doctor and patient' (curiously enough), against 'invasive' and 'demeaning' security patdowns at airports, and other such violations of the liberty of individuals.

Why, you ask, would a major party in an election year coalesce around such policies, and others that strengthen the rights of the employer against those of the individual in providing contraception as part of health insurance? Don't they understand that women, today, also have the right to vote?

I have a grand and speculative theory about this generally anti-woman strategy. In the past I have written about what I see as the crux of American political disagreement and partisanship, the pluralists versus the singularists. In brief, I align much of contemporary conservatism with a singularist politics, which I think is more illustrative of this politics than the label 'conservative.' A singularist believes in a narrow set of characteristics of Americans and America, which I described this way:

America's success stems from America as a Christian nation with a free-market economy, a particular set of family values, a way of educating in the great Western European tradition, and particular versions of individualism and self-determinism that sanctify the pursuit of wealth for its own sake.

A pluralist, on the other hand, takes a fundamentally rights-based approach to Americanness and American identity, believing that the primary strength of the country is its great historical diversity and plurality, its privileging of the right to dissent, its welcoming of difference, creativity, etc. A singularist is less likely to call 'un-American' that which s/he disagrees with, or that which deviates from the mythical, Puritan narrative of the Shining City upon a Hill.

As I see it, contemporary conservatism is increasingly dominated by singularism. You see it trivially when the likes of Sarah Palin ridicule coastal city life, and hold as the 'real America' the 'American heartland' of the rural midwest, along with a set of values abstractly identified as 'heartland values.' More recently, in his presidential campaign, Rick Santorum has sought to portray as 'snobs' those who believe in the virtues of widespread higher education, suggesting that while a group of elitist professors in the image of President Obama indoctrinate innocent, unthinking students, the 'real' America is busy doing 'real' things in the 'real' world. For these singularists, there is no room in the American tent for people who simply enjoy the hustle and bustle of city life, or believe that education is among the highest virtues to aspire to. Nevermind what it would mean to be a conservative college professor from Boston or Chicago (no shortage of those advising Republicans on economic policy), or a New York financier backing the GOP. The singularists are so politically committed to defining what's acceptably 'American' and what's intolerably 'un-' or 'anti-American' that they're willing to give up, essentially, on America itself as a wider project.

In this vein, you will have noticed the prominence of 'states' rights' rhetoric among contemporary conservatives, particularly among national-level politicians attempting to speak about the types of invasive anti-abortion laws being proposed in Alabama, Pennsylvania, and Virgina. Mitt Romney, for example, doesn't seem to believe that the Federal government ought to have an opinion on such laws that are, after all, legitimately proposed and moving through the democratic process at the state level (he's not entirely wrong about this, at least as Federal legislation currently stands); but he's happy to comment on the Federal 'Blunt' amendment to a transportation bill, an obviously transportation-related amendment that would allow employers to decided based on their conscience, religious or otherwise, what things it will or will not cover for employee health insurance.

What's going on here, I think, is that Republicans understand that at the national level--meaning with regard to the US population in the aggregate--the country is not as singularist as its party positions are. The US population in the aggregate probably does not want to scale back on contraception, or to force women to have medically unnecessary vaginal probes should they chose to schedule an abortion. The US population in the aggregate likely does not think that consumers need fewer protections, rather than more, or that it's snobbish to aspire for one's children to go to college, or that the poor should pay a higher percentage of taxes, or that gay people should have fewer rights under law than straight people, or that a gay war veteran should be booed rather than thanked. I think Republicans smartly recognize that these singularist positions are losing positions, increasingly so, at the national level. On the other hand, Republicans also recognize that there are regions and clusters throughout the US for which these singularist positions are very appealing. While I don't think that Republicans are giving up on the national stage, I do think they're strategically re-focusing on state-level politics, bolstered with intensifying 'states' rights' rhetoric at the national level, as a means of advancing singularist positions at the local level. By overtly ostracizing women who'd like to think that they can make important decisions about their own reproductive systems competently for themselves, without government intervention supposedly 'on their behalf,' Republicans can better identify smaller regions throughout the country that will go in for such policies, approaches, and beliefs, taking advantage of the intricacies of the American democratic-republican political system, and building strength and support from the ground-up, so to speak.

This raises many questions.

Why USA Soccer (and Pittsburgh Soccer) Suck

After a grueling running career that was infinitely more successful than my trials with other sports, the inconvenient truth remains as clear as ever: soccer was my first love. Despite the fact that soccer also accounts for most of the worst sporting experiences of my life, I can't say I've ever toed a starting line on race day or dug into the batter's box with the same joy, enthusiasm, and anticipation with which I took the soccer field. Even today, in the odd 5-a-side pickup game, I still get that feeling that I used to get about 25 minutes into every game I played (until senior year of high school, at least): I wish this half would never end. For all of these reasons, each time I watch the steaming pile of mediocrity that is US soccer bump and grind its way through lesser opponents before getting tooled around by the class of the world, I see a good deal of my own experience as a soccer player in Pittsburgh.

With maybe the exception of Texas, Western Pennsylvania is football's most important region, the cradle of football civilization (note for international readers: when I refer to 'football' in this post I mean American football). This is the home of Joe Montana, Dan Marino, Jim Kelly, and too many more Hall of Fame football players to list. Not surprisingly, then, if you grow up in Pittsburgh and choose soccer over its entrenched Autumnal counterpart (or if your genetics effectively make this choice for you), you're automatically second place, second-rate, second-fiddle...you get the idea. Even today's economically reinvigorated Pittsburgh region maintains the sort of hard-nosed, working-class ethos of its steely past, an ethos that places high value on traditional modes of masculinity and the sporting cultures that go with them. Children are of course imbued with these values, a by-product of which is epithets like 'pussies' and 'soccer fags,' aimed commonly enough at non-football fall athletes.

If you flip through mainstream media coverage of US soccer for the past two or three decades, a period during which the US seems to have taken soccer fairly seriously, at least when it comes to international competitions, you're bound to find the national-scale, journalistic equivalent of 'soccer fags': sports writers have traditionally treated soccer like an entry-level children's game that boys who aspire to be men grow out of by puberty and 'only girls' stick with (you have to realize that here 'only girls' is sex-neutral: a young male soccer player is a 'girl,' too). Though soccer has certainly suffered its mini-epidemics of Swan-Lake syndrome, you'd think from reading US sports journalism that a soccer game is fundamentally nothing more than a bunch of poncy little elves flopping effetely to the ground without being touched while European aristocrats of questionable socio-sexual integrity applaud timorously in their glass boxes. A few meters below them the soused hooligan groundlings pour lager over each other's heads and neck tattoos. In the warped view of USonian sports journalists and their readers, in other words, soccer is neither manly nor 'American' nor class-blind enough to be taken seriously.

Most sports journalists will tell you that the main reason the US hasn't fielded an elite international soccer team, concomitant with the resources at our disposal and the exceedingly high social value we as a nation place on sports, is that these cultural factors that make the game less appealing to the 'average American'—the factors that make soccer incapable of competing with football on American soil—have the effect of reducing the prospective talent pool, then the resources and attention we expend on soccer. The best USonian athletes, they say, go into other sports (football, baseball, basketball) that offer them both more cash and more cachet. But this argument misses the point. The real problem is not that our soccer athletes are not good enough athletes, or that they don't have the resources they need to be among the world's best; it's not that Tom Brady and Hakeem Nicks decided on professional football careers instead of soccer careers (I can't see either being a very effective soccer player). The problem is that the general USonian sporting mentality, and its attendant coaching strategies, takes soccer players with potential and turns them into middling, unconfident, uncreative players who get more respect for bouncing around the field like pinballs, running into stuff, than for playing with creativity and tactical sophistication.

This is where my old shipwreck of a soccer career comes in. Permit me, first, some gross self-indulgence:

I got into sports later than most of my peers, largely because (thankfully) I wasn't pressured by asshole parents of the sort that were common in my community. There were lots of dads who coached soccer and little league baseball because they genuinely enjoyed it, enjoyed participating in the community, enjoyed bonding with their children and supporting other children in learning some of the greatest games on Earth. Then there were clichéd asshole dads who coached, pathetically, to feed their own egos. They were usually the ones who forced their obviously uncomfortable and untalented children into every spotlight situation imaginable; the worst kind of nepotism. My dad would have been in the category of the former, though because he didn't coach he was neither, and I'm very grateful for that. He was a good athlete in his youth (it's clear from just watching either of my parents move, throw, or do physical work that I owe my athletic success in large part to the genes I got from them), and surely wanted his first son to be an athlete; but he let me choose sports for myself, when I was ready. Prior to that I spent most of my physical energy chasing bugs and climbing things. I picked soccer first because it was weird and involved a lot of running, then baseball shortly after, though only after developing an obsession with baseball cards, games, and statistics.

On account of my late entry into soccer, there were no expectations. The coaches already had a sense of who the best players were when they put the whole lot of us through a kind of mini-combine, a skills and drills test designed to rank our abilities. The idea behind this was not merely (at least ostensibly) to separate the talented from the rest so they could pick the 'traveling' teams that would compete against other communities, but to divide the entire pool of 10-11-year-old kids fairly into teams for intramural competition. To put it simply (and self-indulgently), I came into the skills and drills test with no reputation, a complete x-factor, and scored the highest in the age group. Accordingly I made the first team in my age-group on my first try, and was for several years thereafter generally regarded as one of the better players.

The first signs of characteristically USonian tactical shallowness in the soccer department came early, still when I was about 11-12 years old. When we played against teams with one particularly outstanding player who could change games singlehandedly, my coaches assigned me to that player. I wasn't merely positioned on the field opposite that player; I was explicitly tasked to shadow that player everywhere he went on the field, to mark him out of the game. As a child this was a great honor and made me feel special. In retrospect it was only the beginning of a long trend of shortsighted, ultra-conservative coaching tactics that crushed whatever of my career I didn't screw up personally, and continue to crush US hopes at fielding a globally elite national team. I was being told quite literally to react to the play of my strongest opponents, rather than to force them to react to me.

In Western Pennsylvania soccer, size matters. When you watch team USA play against smaller and less-physical rivals like Mexico, you'll always hear commentators talk circularly about how the USonian side uses its size, speed, and power to outpace, outjump, and overpower their opponents whenever possible. Being broad and tall is almost a non-negotiable attribute for big-time college soccer recruiters; and big-time college soccer is still a significant feeder system for the US national team. In the Pittsburgh soccer scene, coaches are especially compelled to compare the athletic prowess of their players (measured in height, weight, and body appearance) to the formidable football and basketball bodies they see all around them. This is a microcosm of the national-level argument that US soccer could be more globally competitive if only the 'better athletes' chose soccer; and in this case 'better athletes' means bigger, stronger athletes with athletic-looking bodies—people you could see playing basketball or football. Think Ronaldo (either one, really), not Messi (merely the best player in the world).

By the time I got to junior high school (7th -8th grade) I was already being screened out for size. Apart from being a year younger than the average student in my grade, I was skinny and barely average height. Despite that coaches in the high-school system had already seen me hold my own against bigger players (this was the case almost by definition, since I was still regarded as one of the best players in my age group, and was nonetheless one of the smallest on the field every time), they wouldn't consider me for the freshman team until I was actually a freshman, hoping I would have my growth spurt then. On the other hand, they bumped some of the bigger but less skilled eighth-graders up that year (ironically, it wasn't long after that that I grew taller and faster than those guys; and by college my strength and speed were regularly enough to outsprint sprinters who made even the biggest soccer players look frail by comparison). By high school, even when I consciously played aggressively—even when I played flagrantly and recklessly out of frustration and anger, committing fouls and forcing collisions—I carried a reputation for being 'soft' and weak. My coaches and teammates envisioned me as someone who was too small and not aggressive enough to play effectively. For them, my value as a player was measured by how physical I could prove I could be; how much testosterone I could expend on the field; how hard I could 'get stuck-in.'

It wouldn't be too hyperbolic to say that getting 'stuck-in' was the general aim of Western Pennsylvania soccer, directly correlated with winning games. A player's physicality was valued above his other attributes. Physicality made people on the sidelines cheer as though they were watching football games. It made coaches pump their fists and grit their teeth and beam with pride at the toughness and tenacity of their squad. The cheerleaders even recycled at the soccer games some of the bang-'em-up chants they used for football. To be clear, we're not necessarily talking about dirty play, but simply the idea that physicality, above all else, wins soccer games. On top of the fact that physicality was itself more prized than, for example, poise on the ball, touch, long-range passing, vision, creativity, playmaking ability, tactical discipline, and all the other things that make for the world's best teams and the world's best players, my size, and the coaching staff's obsession with size, meant that by default I always had something to prove in the physicality department. I was actively discouraged from playing to my strengths and benched when I wasn't ostensibly physical enough, and benched again when, predictably, the forced emphasis I placed on being physical minimized my abilities and caused my overall game to suffer. We had one or two guys roughly my size who eventually got more playing time than I did by the end of my career largely because they found a way to be effective in the eyes of our coaches and teammates by flailing around on the field like hell-crazed hummingbirds, getting 'stuck-in' at every opportunity. I was never a delicate flower, but neither was I ever anywhere near as effective a player flailing around and getting 'stuck-in' as I was when I played a skill game, took people on in the corners, and made the dangerous pass. This never meant I didn't chase hard; I never shied away from tackles; I ended up on the ground a lot, and consequently drew a lot of fouls from my opponents (this is a good thing for a reasonable coach). In the myopic views of coaches and teammates, however, my size meant I had to sacrifice my strengths as a player for no other reason than to prove that I could meet some abstract standard of physicality. This only got worse in my senior year, when my coaches found out that the previous spring I had taken up track and field as a hobby and ended up All-State: it was as if this not-so-subtle reminder that I could (always) run suddenly bound me to an even more specialist role, being put in and pulled out and put in and pulled out after being screamed at to chase everything like it was a track meet and get 'stuck-in.' I was substituted (with loose substitution rules) more like an outside linebacker than a midfielder, used ridiculously in spurts.

My experience embodies the failure of US soccer. Even given all the slack in the world (I was given none), left to run free and play however I wanted, I wouldn't have been good enough to go anywhere with soccer. In Pittsburgh, however, I had what it took to be a lot better than I ended up being, and was stifled by what I can only put candidly as bad and at times plainly idiotic coaching and team management, combined with a heavy dose of this tendency to tragically misunderstand soccer as a game of thoroughbreds and blunt instruments rather than a game of creativity and tactical dexterity. How many US soccer players who actually have what it takes to be great (unlike me) get told to spend a whole game following around the other team's best player, or to expend all their energy 'getting stuck-in' to the detriment of the counter-attack? How many players who can wheel and deal are made to pound and grind? How many players of small stature are screened out of the process before they can showcase their talents? And how many coaches will we go through before these players, who are surely out there, are given a chance to emerge? Every elite soccer nation cultivates its talent; in the US we malign ours only to destroy it.

On The Lazy Thinking Of Negative Versus Positive Rights Distinctions (or, How To Argue With A Libertarian From A Libertarian Perspective)

Thomas More's Utopia (simultaneously 'no place' (utopia) and 'good place' (eutopia)) is a satire of the idea of achieving a perfect society through a collectivist system. For this reason the term 'utopian' is most frequently applied to leftist government solutions. There is, of course, a libertarian Utopia as well, as problematic as More's collectivist Utopia. For this we can turn to the writings of John Locke on the State of Nature.

The State of Nature according to Locke is a pre-governmental existence in which all are endowed with personal freedom, endowed by God's law or the Natural Law that governs and produces the State of Nature to pursue property, be free in their persons, speak their minds, and make their own decisions with their own consciences, etc. As one would expect, and as Locke also pointed out, the State of Nature can also be a pretty terrible state in which to live. Ultimate personal freedom in the State of Nature also means that any one person's pursuit of self-interest can infringe upon the self-interest and self-interested pursuits of others. In the State of Nature, you trade for your complete personal freedom the risk that it may be in the self-interest of someone more powerful, more popular, or more capable than you to hurt you, kill you, or enslave you. For this reason, according to Locke, the State of Nature is not such a great thing after all. In fact, the State of Nature is so undesirable a living condition that Locke figured that it would be reasonable for us to consent to give up some of our freedom in order to escape the State of Nature.

Specifically, Lock believed that by forming a government upheld by the consent of the governed and adherent to the will of the majority, we could protect our Natural Rights while guarding against the possibility that the self-interested pursuits of some could deprive others of their Natural Rights. This compromise is evident, for example, in Locke's discussion of taxation:

The supreme power [government] cannot take from any man any part of his property without his own consent...For the preservation of property being the end of government and that for which men enter into society, it necessarily supposes and requires that people should have property...Men therefore in society having property, they have such a right to the goods, which by the law of the community are theirs...(qtd. from Michael Sandel's 'Justice' podcast, Episode 4: 'This Land is My Land,' produced by WGBH Boston and Harvard University).

We can see in Locke's language here two very important ideas: first, that property is a Natural Right, worth so much to us that we consent to give up our ultimate freedom in the State of Nature to “enter into society,” and thus to preserve this Natural Right for all; second, and paradoxically, what endows us with our property once we've abandoned the State of Nature and 'entere[d] into society' is not Natural Law, but, crucially, 'the law of the community.' The important point to recognize here is that while Natural Rights like property arise and are endowed by Natural Law, once we consent to leave the State of Nature they are nonetheless endowed in a society not by God or the Law of Nature, but by the 'law of the community,' the consensual law of government. This engenders the fundamental distinction between Natural Rights and Legal rights.

The genius in Locke's admittedly flawed maneuvering around the paradox of the unsuitability of the State of Nature for our understanding of the rights of wo/man, and thus the paradox of God-given rights that must be given in practice by man-made government, is this: Locke recognized that there must be something more than simple majoritarian rule. He understood that if we couldn't bind everyone who's consented to enter into society to the decisions of the majority, we'd be treating people unequally, the system would collapse, and in effect we'd only have a slight revision of the undesirable State of Nature: majority rule would have no power to prevent rights infringements without the power and legitimacy to enforce its decisions over all who comprise the democratic society. Similarly, if we had no set or agreed-upon baseline, like some notion of Natural or inalienable rights, the rule of the majority could crush the rights of the minority, and, again, we'd be back to just a slightly reconfigured State of Nature in which Natural Rights cannot be equally protected for all. Thus, the genius of Locke here is to show that the will of the majority carries insignificant moral force to guide a society; and that while the will of the majority is important, we must have some other guiding principles, or rights, that a just government must protect. Arising from this important observation, then, is the longstanding debate over which rights, and with what costs, must the government protect.

Here we can consider the frequently made differentiation between what are called 'negative rights' and 'positive rights.' Negative rights are essentially what Locke and others considered Natural Rights or unalienable rights, rights like freedom of speech, habeas corpus, and the pursuit of property (later 'the pursuit of happiness'). For those who distinguish between negative and positive rights, what separates these negative rights is the notion that claiming these rights is an entirely individual gesture; that these rights require no person or no government to force another person to do something—to infringe upon the liberty of another—in order to produce these rights. This is the idea that, in other words, by simply exercising my freedom of speech right now, I'm not forcing anybody to do something to enable my exercising of this right to free speech. By contrast, a positive right would lie outside the scope of what are generally considered the Natural Rights, and would require the forced action of others, or the interference with the liberty of others, in order to exist as a right. A positive right in this sense would be, for example, the right to health care: by guaranteeing people the right to health care, it would be necessary also for me to require doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. to give of their liberty and provide a service. As becomes clear, the differentiation between negative and positive rights is frequently used by libertarians and small-government conservatives to draw a line between services or protections that the government could be expected to provide and the people could expect to receive (negative rights) versus those for which it would be a violation of the individual liberty of others to ask the government to provide (positive rights).

I've given you the context of Locke thinking through the problem of the State of Nature versus the consent to 'enter into society' in order to help illustrate why this distinction between negative and positive rights is specious.

The first phase of the argument against this distinction relates directly to Locke: once we abandon the State of Nature and enter into society, Natural rights or negative rights (associated for our purposes here) might be a guideline for which rights our government should protect; but these rights are no longer endowed by Natural Law or God's Law, but by, in Locke's words, 'the law of the community.' In a society, Natural Rights become legal rights. Accordingly, in a society, it is no longer the 'free labor' of God or the State of Nature that upholds these rights in its own way, but the expensive labor of the government as well as the members of society.

As you recall, the problem with the State of Nature was that Natural Law resembles more closely the Law of the Jungle than the laws of a democracy of the people; in the State of Nature, this lack of protection against the will of one person to impose upon the will of another in such a way as to deprive that person of his or her life or freedom was the very reason to leave the State of Nature and enter into society. The whole point of a society, in other words, is to offer protections that the State of Nature cannot. And the means of achieving this—of endowing rights through the 'law of the community'—is precisely through the necessity that members of the society choose to give of their labor and sacrifice some of their freedom in order to uphold and protect an agreed-upon set of rights. To put it simply, once we leave the State of Nature and enter into society, there is no such thing as a negative right; ALL rights are upheld, enforced, and protected by the 'law of the community,' at the expense of the community. In practice, this means that even rights that you enjoy that seem like negative rights—like free speech—require a vast and expensive social apparatus to guarantee.

Just as Locke and other Natural Rights philosophers argue that taxation (a prime example of giving up some individual freedom in order to enter into society) is a necessary and just government action because a government apparatus (including an army, navy, etc.) provides us with protection from enemy invasion, taxation is necessary to provide us with the structure of society itself, the whole point of which, you recall, is to protect and uphold our rights. Without such protections, society would serve no purpose; and without revenue and consensual commitment from members of society to produce lawyers, judges, police officers, legislators, and a military force, all of which make the societal endowment of rights possible, and protect our rights crucially from both inside (domestic policy) and out (foreign policy), we would have nothing better than a formulation of the State of Nature, from which the very founders of the US Constitution and other key Enlightenment political documents sought prudently and visonarily to escape.

As you can see, then, negative rights, based on Natural Rights, have theoretical value only, because they cannot exist in practice. No government can protect against the otherwise unchecked encroachment of the self-interest of some upon the rights of others without requiring the people who consent to, form, and comprise that government to give up some of their liberty and property (taxation) to uphold and to maximize these rights for all members of the society. You cannot erase the Lockean tradeoff, or the conundrum of sacrificing some of the positive aspects of the State of Nature to eradicate the worst aspects of the State of Nature by entering into society. Even Locke attempted to have it both ways; but as we can see the Natural Rights or negative rights given everyone by God from the starting point in the State of Nature are no more protected by doing nothing in society to uphold them than by doing nothing in the State of Nature. Accordingly, even these so-called 'negative rights' require positive action from others in order to exist in any meaningful sense.

The second phase of the argument against negative rights, then, is the interrogation of the idea that even if negative rights don't formally exist in practice, they are nonetheless the guide for which rights a society and its government should uphold, versus which 'rights' it should not. In other words, that even if it costs money and service (freedom sacrifices) to uphold the right to free speech in any meaningful sense, just as it costs money and service to uphold the right of healthcare, the former should be protected and upheld by government in a society because it's a Natural Right in the State of Nature, whereas the latter should not be protected by government in a society because it never existed as a Natural Right in the State of Nature.

This is a circular argument that holds no water, however. For what, then, are Natural Rights (or negative rights) to begin with, if not rights endowed by God that cost no sacrifice of liberty from others to uphold (as a corollary, what is a Natural Right in the State of Nature if it's not protected as a right? It's like giving someone surrounded by a pack of hungry wolves a porterhouse steak and calling it a 'right.')? Once we remove from our understanding of negative rights the false distinction of 'not requiring any freedom sacrifice from others,' what else is there to separate a so-called negative right from a so-called positive right? If life, liberty, and property cost nothing in the State of Nature both because they were in some sense endowed by God as basic human desires and they were not protected for all (thus requiring no cost of protection), what makes them meaningful or special, other than an unsubstantiated belief in their superiority on an abstract 'rights hierarchy'? Do not humans have other basic desires that can be linked with other important rights, which could also have been just as plausibly endowed, but not protected, in the State of Nature? The right to food? The right to sex? Or would traditionalists file these also under 'property'? This is to suggest that what we call negative rights are not only meaningless as rights unless they're upheld or enforced with the money and labor of others (in which case their very definition as 'negative rights' collapses); they're also no different, qualitatively, from certain so-called 'positive rights' without the circular and illogical definition of 'negative right' attached to them. Is freedom of conscience or freedom of religion, for example, more important for the fundamentally free existence of a human being than the right to basic treatment, through healthcare, of treatable ailments that can otherwise cause a lifetime of pain, suffering, or premature death? Does life precede liberty, or is it the other way around?

The question of healthcare as a right is an example of the kind of pertinent question for which there are legitimate arguments for both sides, the very type of question a society should debate. But by shutting down such an important debate by applying to rights like, for example, basic healthcare, what I have shown to be the arbitrary and illegitimate distinction of 'positive right' (since there is no such thing as a negative right in any meaningful sense), we prevent societies from having such important debates in a serious way, and mislead people with this lazy thinking about 'negative' and 'positive' rights. If, as I have shown, there is no such thing as a negative right in a society, and, without that distinction, no argument and no firm definition yet made in Natural Rights discourse to separate a right like free speech from a right like basic healthcare, then it's time for us to stop hiding behind these weak rhetorical and theoretical distinctions between rights within an abstract rights hierarchy. It's time to start having the difficult political and societal discussions about which rights we think governments should protect, which rights are most important for the free flourishing of us all, or, in other words, where to draw the baseline. We need to face the reality that there is no easy, comfy, 'natural' distinction between which things we can call rights (and task governments to protect and enforce) and which we can't. The negative versus positive rights distinction, heuristic at best, has taken us as far as we can get in this discussion. It's time to do the intellectually and socially responsible thing and let it go in order to move beyond it.

What Do We Want From Literary Studies?

Lots of people (and some bears) spend lots of ink on what literary studies offer. This post is about what we (should) actually want from it.

This is a big question; so I'm going to approach it from a wide angle.

What do we want from the study of anything? At base, knowledge. But knowledge for itself is not always enough for people. What people want is knowledge with which they can do something.

Consider the principal aim of the natural sciences (science from scientia, or 'knowledge'): to acquire knowledge about the natural world. That the study of physics tells us plausibly that there is a force associated with mass called gravity is interesting. Knowing this is valuable. What's more valuable for many, however, is not simply knowing about gravity, but the fact that knowing about gravity enables us to do all sorts of fun and useful things. Like egg drop competitions, at which the author has always excelled.

The distinction here is simple: knowing is one thing; applying knowledge is another.

The relationship between these two--knowledge and its application--is more complicated, however. Because when we set out to apply knowledge of certain kinds of force, rigidity, strength, volatility, etc.--knowledge of the natural properties of things--we usually need to be sure that our knowledge is accurate. Because when it's not, bridges collapse, things explode, and people get hurt. Accordingly, the fields of knowledge that we apply to things like building bridges and generating power are not merely accuracy-driven because their principal aim is to know the natural world; they're also accuracy-driven because of the types of application they have.

To recap: the study of the natural sciences is accuracy-driven; its primary objective is to know accurately the natural world; and this accurate knowledge is widely applied precisely because it is reliably accurate. In a sentence: the quest for accuracy is the driver of the study of the natural world.

For a long time in literary studies, accuracy has also been a primary objective (that is, accuracy of interpretation). The task and value of the literary scholar has been largely to interpret what an author meant in a literary work. What an author meant (authorial intent) would then be taken as the meaning of the work; after all, the work is decidedly the author's. After a while literary scholars began to question the value and plausibility of authorial intent, yet maintained that the principal value of literary scholarship is accuracy of interpretation. Literary scholars began to argue, plausibly, that it is simply impossible for us to get inside the heads of authors, living or dead, in the moments in which they write a literary work. Instead of focusing on trying to prove the impossible--trying to prove intent, not just in general terms, but in terms of the specific meanings of words and phrases--literary scholars would do better to focus on relationships between wider histories and contexts surrounding the literary work, and what the words and phrases in the work mean in light of their historical context, as a means of determining an accuracy of meaning in the work. The result of this movement is twofold: 1) we have what the New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley called the 'intentional fallacy,' the notion that what the author intended to mean is neither available to the scholar (possible to derive), nor particularly relevant to the scholarship (worth investigating in light of the spuriousness of any claims of authorial intent, or especially important for judging the artistic merit of the work as art); 2) we have Roland Barthes' notion of the 'death of the author,' the idea that the author relinquishes control over the text in the process of writing, and, consequently, the text (no longer called a 'work') speaks for itself.

After all of this, however, literary scholarship has remained relatively preoccupied with the idea of accuracy of interpretation. Even if that accuracy has since relied less on notions of authorial intent, and more on wider historical and textual support for arguments about meaning. Astute readers among you will notice that with the interventions of Wimsatt and Beardsley that I've discussed above, a new element surfaces in my discussion, as well as a new evaluative criterion to consider here: the question of literature as art, and its artistic value. I will discuss this in another post in more detail, but here I only want to say, in the service of following this line of discussion of the primary aim of literary scholarship being accuracy of interpretation, that for the longest time in literary studies, and even to a large extent today, to hold up a literary text for interpretation presupposes an answer to the question of its artistic merit: if it's worth interpreting by literary scholars, it must have artistic merit.

To recap: just as the driver of the natural sciences is accurate interpretation of the natural world, the driver of the humanistic sciences (scientia, 'knowledge'), which include literary studies, has long since been and to a great extent continues to be accuracy of interpretation of humanistic objects of study (here literary texts).

Herein lies the central problem, as I see it, with literary scholarship: accuracy.

Just as answering the question of authorial intent is rightly deemed an impossibility (it is what Karl Popper would have called an unfalsifiable question), so too is almost any claim made by a literary scholar about a literary text. There are relevant conditions here:

Firstly, a literary scholar can observe the presence of a word or phrase in a text with as much certainty as a physicist can observe the presence of a subatomic particle through a microscope; the literary scholar cannot, however, prove in any objective sense a universal meaning of that word or phrase. The point here is that, whereas there is the possibility of deriving objectively accurate answers to falsifiable questions, questions like 'what does this phrase mean' are not falsifiable questions, and cannot be answered with any objective accuracy.

Secondly, however, unfalsifiable questions of the sort that literary scholars pose about literary texts can be answered with precision, which is to say that the relevant counterpart to objective accuracy in this case is not 'making shit up.' What I mean here is that literary scholarship can marshal precise attention to textual and historical evidence, reasoned arguments that are logically coherent in the most formal sense, and a depth of subject-specific knowledge in order to say something plausible about a literary text, such that levels of 'repeatability' among scholarly readings are actually quite high, even if there remain fundamental disagreements and contradictions between sound arguments.

Here, then, is the crucial point in all of this: the primary aim of literary scholarship is not to make accurate interpretations of literary texts. In fact, even when authorial intent and accuracy of interpretation were at their strongest as critical objectives, no literary scholar, to my knowledge, ever claimed that his or her reading of Beowulf was an unfalsified, objective truth of the cosmos or the natural world. Nonetheless, when we hold in comparison what C.P. Snow called 'the two cultures,' the proponents of that culture which is primarily concerned with deriving accurate interpretations of the natural world will almost always posit a critique of literary scholarship on the basis that no knowledge it produces (if we can call it knowledge at all) can be tested to the extent that we can say it is objectively and universally true.

What a profoundly silly accusation.

The accusation that literary scholarship cannot prove objectively and universally its conclusions is not so profoundly silly because it's false, but the opposite: it's so profoundly silly because it's so self-evidently true. Is this really what we've been arguing about since the days of Leavis and Snow? Really?

Exasperation aside, the point here is that only a fool would judge the value of literary scholarship by how it measures up to a quality to which it expressly never aspires: to tell a universal, objective truth. When Sir Philip Sidney wrote in his sixteenth-century Apology for Poetry that 'a poet...nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,' he was insightful about one thing in particular: it's not only possible, but noble and worthwhile to pursue forms of knowledge that aren't necessarily concerned with deriving an objective, universal truth about the natural world. In other words, we should ask unfalsifiable questions too, and answer them with rigor (even Popper agreed with this, and posited the idea of 'criticizability' as an overarching notion under which the particular condition of falsifiability is housed).

It has taken this long to arrive at the beginning of the discussion about what we want from literary studies. What we don't want from literary studies, as I have explained, is what literary studies is not (alas!); so let's not critique it for what it is not and what it never aspired to be.

What literary studies can (and does) offer is a form of knowledge which is (unsurprisingly) humanistic, and is more concerned with the relationship of the person to the natural world, rather than the objective facts of the natural world itself. This much is obvious. What we want from literary scholarship, then, is deep and extended knowledge of human interactions with everything. Yes, everything. Because that's what humans do. We interact with everything, then we write about it. I know you're disappointed with this conclusion, which is why this isn't the conclusion.

Back to the initial distinction I made between knowledge for itself and applied knowledge, we can consider a few more things before concluding:

Firstly, literary studies, and the wider humanities, are sciences (scientia, 'knowledge'). They concern certain fields of inquiry and produce knowledge. This is a fact. The reason we should recognize these fields as sciences is not to poach social and governmental cachet from the natural sciences and their widespread and widely recognized applications, but because we need to be reminded that humanistic fields produce knowledge.

Secondly, the knowledge produced by literary studies (here again I narrow the scope back down to my primary subject in this post, backing away from claims about the broader humanities for the time being) is a vast for-itself knowledge. Reading literary texts themselves is certainly an instructive process; nobody would deny that they learn from reading literature, and here I don't even mean sweeping 'life lessons' or moral precepts, but simply minute bits of knowledge (read The Old Man and the Sea and tell me you know nothing about fishing). The literary scholarship itself organizes and ameliorates that knowledge by adding context, providing new readings and interpretations aimed not at being universally accurate but at creating an idea for consideration, an idea that could lead to any number of possibilities, from simply 'oh, that's interesting' to 'oh, maybe aesthetics are a more important aspect of hardware design than I initially thought.' And therein lies the application of knowledge that might be considered of the realm of ideas rather than interpretations: ideas are an essential part of progress in any field, from ethics to public policy to hardware design.

What we want from literary scholarship, then, is ideas. Teachable, intriguing, instructive, informative ideas. Maybe you're still disappointed, because this conclusion is so obvious. It's almost as though, once we've identified the basic facts that literary studies 1) is a field of precision and not accuracy, 2) does not pretend to universally prove its conclusions, and 3) produces a knowledge that is of the realm of ideas, as opposed to the realm of interpretation, we can see literary scholarship for what it is, and not what it isn't. Consequently, we can find what we want from literary studies, rather than wallowing in what we falsely (and inaccurately) presume to be its shortcomings.

Academics and Entrepreneurialism

If you listened to President Obama's recent State of the Union Address, you will have noticed his (expected) emphasis on job-creation through small business and entrepreneurialism. With the US economy struggling to its feet, politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle have been making regular political hay of the macroeconomic benefits of entrepreneurialism. Typically this means touting small businesses and the removal of regulatory 'red tape' without describing in any detail how exactly we can promote and foster entrepreneurialism. For example, our elected officials and policy leaders seem to have plenty of vague ideas about how to provide tax breaks and incentives for the promotion of already-existing small businesses, but don't seem to have any substantive sense of where those small businesses come from in the first place. What educational and professional background (yes, they do at least acknowledge that education gives one a significant advantage in starting a successful business), or what set of skills, leads to successful entrepreneurship? Though our politicians and policy wonks do have stock answers to these questions--it's generally and uncritically accepted that business and technology education is essentially all we need to pay any attention to if we want to train the next generation of job-producers)--we are, as usual, living in a political climate in which it's easier to latch onto a few popularly held assumptions and repeat them for political gain than to think entrepreneurially about entrepreneurialism itself.

One economic sector that is truly a powerhouse of entrepreneurial spirit and practice is academia, though the talking points of politicians, journalists, and the like would have use believe otherwise. Conventional 'wisdom' would have it that entrepreneurialism is anathema to academics. As in J.M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, in which the sensibilities of a curmudgeonly academic writer, Senior C, are contrasted with those of Alan, the young financial pragmatist, the academic man of belles lettres is portrayed as disconnected, unambitious, and sedentary, while the young businessman is always looking for ways to get paid (ethics aside). Such stereotypes even apply to academics who are viewed to be in more 'pragmatic' and widely encouraged fields, like the natural sciences: we don't look to the boffin the the white lab coat to start a company (like, I don't know, Genentech).

The truth, however, is that few professions, if any, are as fundamentally entrepreneurial as academia. Even in the study of subjects like, say, literature, which are less 'applied' in terms of their research output, one's livelihood depends directly and almost exclusively on one's ability to generate new, viable, and reasoned ideas, to articulate these ideas to several levels of audiences, to identify and/or create a market for these ideas, and to capitalize on them (literally, to translate ideas written on paper into real monetary gain). There are no teams, and rarely any collaborations for the majority of research output, which means that you live and die by your ability take an idea from its infancy to its marketability to your payday. If this sounds like a crude way of expressing the academic research process, consider yourself disabused of the dated stereotypes and silly fantasies you've been fed about life in the 'Ivory Tower.' If there's anyone who understands what it means to be an entrepreneur every day and in every step of his or her career, it's an academic; particularly an academic in a field for which there is little governmental or other institutional support and a hypercompetitive marketplace for ideas. No, this experience is not in itself identical to the experience of starting a company and managing a crop of employees from the ground up; but it is an outstanding exercise in realizing ideas from conception to viability to marketability to payoff, an exercise not unlike some of the earliest and most crucial phases of business entrepreneurship (likely for this reason, academics actually tend to be more likely than the average American to start a business of their own).

Beyond these aspects of entrepreneurialism, of course, it remains the case that in 'knowledge economies' academics are also tremendously important as educators. But, when policymakers are looking for new ideas and new sources of economic growth, they would do better to acknowledge the unacknowledged entrepreneurial resource that most of us presume falsely to be useless and idealistic by choice: the academics.

Why RyanAir Sucks

PMB doesn't usually write about explicitly personal experiences, though this case warrants an exception. The personal issue at hand is what many would readily know and expect as typically poor treatment of this RyanAir customer by the Soviet-like machines that RyanAir trains as staff.

The broader issue is the extent to which we as consumers have been conditioned (or conditioned ourselves) to tolerate certain business practices that make absolutely no good sense whatsoever, and ought to be better 'punished' by the consumer market. I've been critical of the boycott as a means of governing, through market imperatives, our moral action in public life; but strictly as a capitalist I think it's necessary for consumers to be as informed and act as rationally as possible in our consumption choices for capitalism to run optimally. Admittedly, in one sense, capitalism is a self-sealing ideology: because it's meant to be maximally efficient in and of itself, any functions or results of capitalism, however unacceptable and truly and absurdly irrational, are deemed optimal, because the machine does not err. On a less utopian note, however, it's clear that many of the bases of capitalism in its original form--foremost the accountability that comes with looking someone in the face who's providing you a service that you genuinely want, and that person and his or her associates bearing some level of shame when they cheat you or screw something up--have been evacuated from the site of most transactions. Either a company conducts business from behind a wall or through subsidiaries, consultants, or hired agents with no actual ties to the company otherwise (and little stake in its success or failure), or it trains its own staff (usually in a call center somewhere) to dehumanize the entire process of exchanging goods and services for money, and to address any needs or problems with a kind of robiticism that makes you think, frankly, yeah, now I see how Soviet communism claimed so many casualties: by using the communist version of the capitalistic trick of training humans as automata. Consider the following commonplace business practices that we put up with, despite their absurdity:

1) Bank fees of the order of charging someone for using a debit card as a debit card, or for failing to use a credit card a minimum amount of times in a given month, etc.

2) Fine print on television advertisements that flashes by in seconds and is so small that it is objectively unreadable in the time it appears...and yet it also fundamentally alters or modifies the message of the advertisement and the terms of the service being offered (false advertising loophole).

3) Tipping (especially in the United States), a system by which a business gets consumers to pay directly not only for the service they purchase (the meal, which, typically, has labor and production costs built into its price) but for the wage of the employee (the waiter): restaurateurs typically pay their waiting and bar staff below minimum wage, but get away with it because the tipping expectation from consumers puts their total earnings above minimum wage and into legal territory. But why should a consumer pay directly the hourly wage of the business staff, especially after already paying for the associated costs of producing a meal built into the price of the meal itself? It's the employer's responsibility to pay its labor costs and set its prices accordingly, not the consumer's responsibility to pay for labor directly out of pocket per transaction.

Bearing all of this in mind, we come now to RyanAir.

By way of disclaimer, I've flown RyanAir many times, and I understand what it is, how it operates, etc. I know they look to charge customers for virtually anything they can find (I could recite to you a litany of such charges, and, for that matter, much of their entire service level agreement text); I know they're a cut-rate airline that pride themselves on getting you somewhere cheaply and on-time and nothing else (not at all an ignoble goal) (in fact, when they land you on time, which should be a given, a chime comes on the loudspeaker in the plane bragging about how they've landed on time and boast the highest on-time flight rate in Europe); I know they have strict policies and the strictness and ruthlessness of the way they carry out such policies is essentially their lifeblood as a business. I should also say that I don't expect even friendly service, not even a smile, no frills and no extras. I don't care about that stuff. I want basic, competent service that matches what was advertised to me and what I paid for it. I don't pay for smiles. I don't walk into a McDonald's expecting four-star restaurant service, and then complain when I don't get it.

But alas, RyanAir has finally failed me on the fundamentals. The troubles begin with the RyanAir website. If you haven't checked out the RyanAir website, it looks like what you'd expect to get if you accidentally clicked on a spam e-mail for male enhancement pills. But no, it's actually a prosperous and widely patronized European airline, operating out of offices in multiple countries, rather than some guy's mom's basement in central New Jersey. As I suggested, though, I'm not particularly moved by web aesthetics in this case; the real problem with the website is that it's clunky and suffers frequent errors that make it impossible at times to obtain certain basic services from the website. If one of those times and one of those certain services happens to be when you're trying to check in for your flight online and when you're trying to print out a boarding pass, the consequences of RyanAir web failure are dire, as I discovered.

After trying to check in and print out a boarding pass on two separate computers and two separate internet connections on two separate days, I was unable to do so. The RyanAir website does, helpfully, inform you when purchasing a ticket that failure to print out your boarding pass and bring it to the airport with you results in a 6 euro re-issuance fee (essentially for them to print your boarding pass at the airport). Knowing this, yet unable to access my boarding pass on their website to print it out before leaving for the airport, I figured I'd let them know that their website wouldn't give me access to my check in and boarding pass, and so I ought not to be charged. In the back of my mind I figured that, were I unsuccessful, I'd fork over the 6 euro.

The first RyanAir representative I spoke with listened to my 'story' for about 30 seconds before telling me, plainly, that I was lying. His exact words were 'You're lying, I'm done with you sir,' before sending me to the ticket counter to pay my fee.

The second RyanAir representative suggested first that there was no IT problem, then backed away and said that if I had an IT problem (ah, what an admission!) I should have contacted the IT department (for one euro per minute on the phone), but now they had to charge me. Curiously, the guy at the counter before me happened to have had the same problem as I did. Nonetheless, the clerk then proceeded to tell me that the surcharge for failing to check in and print out my boarding pass was not 6 euro, but 60 euro. When I asked how this was the case, pointing to the information I had on my ticket receipt, she said 'because it went up.' Thanks.

After arguing further with her and her supervisor up until the point at which I might miss my flight, I forked over the 60 euro, flew back to England, and obtained a form letter from the RyanAir desk in Birmingham for how to make official complaints to the airline (curiously, the staff in Birmingham, like at most airports, but unlike Dublin, a RyanAir headquarters where I started from, do not directly work for RyanAir; they're specially contracted to check people in and print boarding passes, but cannot receive complaints or grievances because they are not with RyanAir; no coincidence, of course).

Upon further investigation of the materials I received from RyanAir, an itinerary they sent me immediately after ticket purchase suggests that the check-in/boarding pass fee at the airport is 40 euro. This puts the information I have at the following: upon purchasing the ticket, the charge was 6 euro; at the airport, the charge (which I actually paid) was 60 euro ('it went up'); on my e-mailed itinerary it's 40 euro. I've since discovered that RyanAir, a while ago, upped this charge from 40 to 60 euro; but then why did my itinerary have the 'old' price? Does RyanAir even know it's own policies?

The point in all of this is that there's a difference between accepting that cut-rate business services like RyanAir aren't exactly luxurious and flexible, and drawing a line at blatantly poor, inconsistent, fraudulent, and predatory business practices. RyanAir does catch people off guard with little inconveniences that could have been avoided by measures within the control of its customers, like, for example, charging massive rates for even the slightest amount of excess baggage weight. A google search produces endless complaints about huge fees for bags that are fractions of a kilo over the weight limit. In these cases I'd say to the customer 'tough shit,' because the baggage policies are pretty explicitly there on the website (so long as the website is actually working).

In my case, however, RyanAir crossed a line. For one, it failed to take responsibility for the fact that its lousy website prevented a knowing customer (actually, in that little time window, at least TWO knowing customers; coincidence?) from executing the instructions it set out. Though the woman at the ticket desk repeatedly informed me that my printed receipt was not a boarding pass, and I repeatedly told her I fully understood that, and brought it to her to prove that I had indeed purchased a ticket in the first place, but couldn't get to my boarding pass because of website problems, there was no actual communication going on about how plausible and regular it is for people to have such problems with high-volume commercial websites, and how absurd it is to penalize someone with proof of purchase 60 euro for the trouble.

Notwithstanding having been called a liar by one of the RyanAir employees, the second way RyanAir crossed the line here was by sending me two different correspondences that indicate radically different fees for the same situation, and then charging me a third different fee, completely unadvertised and unmentioned in my receipts, itineraries, and their website, a fee which happened to be 20 euro more than the second fee they advertised and 54 euro more than the first, the one that appeared while I was making my decision to purchase my ticket. If a business doesn't give the customer the opportunity to factor these types of things into their decision, then they're not practicing fair business. At best they're predatory, at worst fraudulent. Were I aware that it would cost 60 euro to show up with no boarding pass; even that such a possibility existed; I would have made a series of very different decisions. For example, yes, I could have contacted the RyanAir IT department for 1 euro per minute on the phone; but since it was advertised to me that I'd pay 6 euro at the desk for failing to show up with a printed boarding pass, and it's likely that I'd be on the phone with IT for more than 6 minutes, why should I have called IT?

This is, ultimately, why RyanAir sucks: not because the staff are unfriendly and unprofessional; not because of baggage fees or sparse legroom in the cabin; not because they try to sell you everything under the sun that you don't want both while buying a ticket online and during the flight; but because they fail to provide with honesty the fundamental service that they advertise.