In the fallout of Lauren Green's awful interview with (or should I say at?) Reza Aslan (which I've written about here), we've seen a couple people come forward to make the argument that in the interview Aslan misrepresents his credentials as a scholar of the history of religion. At First Things, Emeritus Professor of Political Science Matthew Franck makes the claim, as does an indignant Joe Carter at Patheos.
I'm weighing in here because the claim that Aslan misrepresents his scholarly credentials in the context of the Fox News interview is so silly that it could only be made by someone looking to score cheap and meaningless 'gotcha' points amid a politically charged controversy. And before I go any further, let's note that Aslan is invoking his scholarly credentials to satisfy the question of why he would be *interested* in writing about the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
The arguments of Franck and Carter would appear to center on:
A) That Alsan has a BA in religion from Santa Clara University (for which he wrote a senior thesis on the gospel of Mark), a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard, a MFA in Fiction from Iowa, and a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Santa Barbara (for which he wrote a dissertation on 20th century Islamic social movements). In other words, that Aslan doesn't have a Ph.D. in history.
B) That he's a professor of Creative Writing at UC Riverside (not a professor of religion or history)
Let me explain why these arguments are absurd.
Carter's article is a good place to start, where he poses two rhetorical questions so laughable that they could pass for academic parody: "Why would Aslan claim he has a Ph.D. in history when his degree is in sociology? Does he not understand the difference between the two degrees?"
Well, Carter evidently doesn't understand either the differences nor the similarities between these degrees. The field of sociology, for example, is rather starkly divided between quantitative sociologists who do more 'social science' research akin to the work that dominates political science and economics departments, and cultural sociologists whose work often ranges into historical research. Aslan's Ph.D. in sociology fits rather clearly into the latter, preparing him well to do historical research on religions. Only someone entirely unfamiliar with academic credentialing and doctoral training in these disciplines would ask the questions that Carter does. Either that, or only someone looking to score cheap political points would willfully ignore the wide practice of cross- and interdisciplinary research training and methods in doctoral work and beyond, particularly in social science and humanities fields that often need to gather evidence from across disciplinary boundaries to make convincing arguments.
Carter goes on to complain that "most academic historians as well as academic sociologists would take offense at the idea that a sociology of religions degree and a history degree are interchangeable." "Interchangeable" is itself a misrepresentation of the situation, but I'm curious about which academics Carter spoke with before making this claim. Because I can't imagine any but the most petty and territorial would argue that someone whose research field is so clearly 'religion' and who has a Ph.D. in either the cultural history of religion (from a sociology department) or the cultural history of religion (from a history department) has no business writing about the cultural history of religion.
We should keep in mind here what Carter and Franck seem to want to neglect: what we call departments and degrees is more a matter of heuristics than 'essential' qualities of academic training and methodology. For example, some universities put the history department under 'social sciences' with sociology, political science, economics, and maybe anthropology. Others put history under humanities, with English, philosophy, French, and maybe anthropology. The types of training people get in doctoral programs in each department vary more according to the character and research interests and composition of the departments themselves, rather than the general name of the school or department. To assess credentials as shallowly as by whether a degree says 'history' or 'sociology' on it is childlike in its simplicity and naivetee about how academic training works. What is fair grounds for questioning Aslan is whether he has a record of peer-reviewed scholarship in these fields. But keep in mind that Aslan is portraying himself as expert enough to take a scholarly interest in Jesus, not as someone with a stellar research record on Jesus. For every *trained scholar* who becomes an expert--including scholars who switch gears at some point in their career and study something they're not yet especially known for--there must be a first few publications. Fox host Green grilled Aslan on his justification simply to be interested in writing about Jesus, and Aslan responded that as a scholar of the history of religions, this is in his wheelhouse. It is.
I suspect Franck, an Emeritus Professor of Political Science who apparently thinks that, despite his own title as 'political scientist,' he can weigh in on matters of the history of religion while calling Aslan out for having a sociology degree, really ought to know better. But if we look at Franck's writing background, we see that he's a conservative pundit who is very willing to play dumb about academic credentialing to try to score cheap political points on Aslan. What's especially infuriating about these 'get off my [academic] yard' arguments is they portray academics as snide and territorial. We often are, sure; but it's just not that uncommon for people to do work on and across the borders of their traditional scholarly disciplines. Ph.D. training is narrow, but it's not so narrow that there's no overlap between fields.
That Aslan is a professor in creative writing, by the way, is as much a matter of funding streams than anything else. Again, where these critics fixate on titles, they're the ones being misleading. Aslan clearly teaches a number of courses in religious studies in addition to creative writing. This is the reality of modern academia: people are called on to teach what they *are qualified* to teach (and sometimes, frankly, even more), because universities don't want to spend money on *both* a creative writing professor and a religious history professor when they can have two for one. In a twist of dark humor, it's typically conservatives of the kind making the attacks on Aslan who want to defund higher education and slash faculty hiring budgets, resulting in people teaching outside of their 'title' fields. But again, there's nothing wrong with Aslan, who holds a MFA from the top MFA program in the country, teaching writing, while also teaching religion as a holder of a Ph.D. that, while granted by a sociology department by name, is so obviously a religious studies Ph.D. (given the dissertation). It wouldn't surprise me if Aslan had an historian and/or a religion department representative in addition to a sociologist on his dissertation committee. He may even have had dual advisors in history and sociology, religion and sociology, etc., something that's quite common. And as for the claim that because Aslan's main title is professor of creative writing, he doesn't teach religion 'for a living,' this, too is majorly flawed. It may very well be that Aslan was hired specifically because he could do both, but paid via the tenure stream available in the creative writing department. Again, this is common.
At this point I could assemble a list of academics who have made colossal contributions to fields in which they don't *specifically* have a Ph.D. by the name on the parchment...eh, why the hell not:
Maybe you've heard of:
Jurgen Habermas (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in sociology and history of sociology)
Jacques Derrida (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)
Karl Popper (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in philosophy of science)
Ludwig Wittgenstein (degree in engineering before making his key contributions to philosophy pre-Ph.D.)
Bertrand Russell (degree in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)
Alain Badiou (degrees in mathematics, pioneer in philosophy)
Daniel Kahneman (Ph.D. in psychology, pioneer in economics)
Judith Butler (Ph.D. in philosophy, pioneer in literature)
Martha Nussbaum (Ph.D. in philosophy, professor of law, literature, and philosophy)
I could go on for quite some time, and these only come to mind for me because most relate to my own field/s of study. Apart from these big-name examples, however, the average college student can take 10 minutes to look up the credentials of his or her professors, and will find that many of them are doing cross-disciplinary work, with philosophers and mathematicians trading places in math and science and philosophy of science courses, economists, MBAs, accountants, and psychologists trading places in psychology departments, econ departments, and business schools, literary scholars, historians, and cultural sociologists and anthropologists citing one another in their respective fields, and computer scientists, statisticians, and engineers all working together and across disciplines where relevant.
Alsan is well within his credentialed territory, and anyone who says otherwise should be suspected of either political motives or an unforgivable ignorance about the basics of academic training.
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
Monday, July 29, 2013
Bigots, Muslims, and Scholars: Which Do Conservatives Trust?
If you haven't yet seen it, check out this clip of a Fox News host interviewing history of religion and Biblical studies scholar Reza Aslan, in which the host keeps insisting that the fact of Aslan's Muslim background is more relevant to the argument of his book on Jesus of Nazareth than his scholarship and his credentials. My explanation here doesn't do justice to the magnitude of Fox host Lauren Green's dogged stupidity.
You don't need me to list any further examples of conservative bigotry against Muslims; but what I will comment on here is how this much-discussed clip fits into another history of conservative bigotry, this against scholars.
On one front of the conservative opposition to knowledge and knowledge seekers, any scientist whose findings run contrary to conservative and especially religious conservative dogma gets smeared. Climate science, for example, has and has had its share of serious skeptics. UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller has been a serious climate science skeptic for a long time now, so much so that he put together a group specifically tasked to study all the climate science data they could get their hands on from a metacritical perspective. In other words, Muller, a capable and well funded professional scientist, set up a research group to investigate that which he was skeptical of, and has since found that we do have cause to believe that humans contribute significantly to climate change. The biggest private financial contributor to Muller's research group was the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (i.e. of infamously conservative Koch Brothers machine).
Still, conservatives continue to allege personal bias, payoffs, corruption, and conspiracy anytime a professional scientist like Muller--even one funded by their own people--produce findings that conservatives don't like.
We see the same tactics with regard to evolutionary biologists and 'creationism.' This is a story that, again, you don't need me to rehash to understand what's going on.
The gift and the curse for scientists wading into issues like human evolution, the history of the universe, climate change, and genetic studies that suggest being gay isn't a 'choice,' is that these topics generate enough interest not just from conservatives but from the average person to garner lots of attention and, by virtue of that, lots of angry, ignorant opposition from armchair pundits.
On the other hand, humanities and social science research tends to be ignored by conservatives until it touches a 'culture wars' nerve, like findings about the viability of single or gay parents, for example. Much humanities and social science research likely would really send conservatives into apoplexy; but then again, the gift and the curse of humanities and some social science scholars is that very few bother to read the scholarship, are widely and wildly ignorant of it, and so hardly have exposure to enough publicity to launch any specific complaints about it.
Where such scholarship more prominently comes under attack is with regard to teaching, as when the David Horowitzes and Republican Governors of the world lament courses on the history of sexuality, or gender studies, or Asian American literature, because they'd rather pretend that these things aren't a significant part of the American experience, and because they think that when a course topic sounds kinda liberal, it means the professor is necessarily engaging in liberal 'indoctrination.' This kind of alleged indoctrination that study after study can never seem to locate is also, I should add, somehow different from teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
The conservative attack on Reza Aslan is an interesting moment because here we're not talking about the vaunted findings of science, nor the indoctrination of students by evil mastermind liberal professors, but a piece of humanities scholarship.
And what fascinates and infuriates me most about this conservative response to Aslan's scholarship is that it takes the the approach to the non-falsifiable that would earn humanities undergrads a failing grade.
Because so many of my students are miseducated in their high school literature and history classes, I make clear on day one of every semester that the stuff we're doing in class isn't just some watered down version of science where you claim knowledge that you can't prove. Rather, to take Aslan's book as an example, there are aspects of the life of a guy who lived thousands of years ago that we simply can't know with certainty today. The scholarship marshals as much evidence as it can to make an argument. The result of this scenario is that there is scholarly disagreement even among historicaly plausible arguments.
To put it another way, what I must convey to my students is: just because there is disagreement over plausible but unfalsifiable arguments in humanities scholarship doesn't mean that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all in which any idiot's opinion holds equal weight with a rigorously researched, informed argument supported with ample evidence.
This is the difference between the bullshit paper you're taught to write in high school where you 'argue' that the green tree 'represents individuality in the protagonist's quest for success,' and the evidence-based argument akin to the kinds that Aslan's book makes about Jesus of Nazareth.
As you can see in the Fox News clip, the conservative technique is not merely the bigoted, ad hominem argument that the media has given so much attention to (Aslan is a Muslim, therefore his scholarship on Christianity is bunk), but something else too. The Fox News anchor keeps invoking the fact that 'other scholars' disagree with Aslan's position in order to try to bolster her claim that Aslan's perspective on Jesus isn't duly scholarly, but instead comes from someone with a 'Muslim agenda.' The anchor uses the same elementary fallacy of mistaking the unfalsifiability of humanities scholarship for the idea that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all. She fails to understand that legitimate, informed, evidence-based arguments about an historical figure from a time long in the past absolutely can plausibly disagree without discrediting the rigor of either argument. She fails to understand, in other words, that for historians it's not as easy as looking at the results of a controlled experiment and finding 'yes' or 'no.'
In this way Aslan is doubly marginalized by conservatives as both a Muslim and a scholar. This is a serious problem of modern conservatism--the way bigotry and anti-intellectualism would seem to bolster one another in a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
You don't need me to list any further examples of conservative bigotry against Muslims; but what I will comment on here is how this much-discussed clip fits into another history of conservative bigotry, this against scholars.
On one front of the conservative opposition to knowledge and knowledge seekers, any scientist whose findings run contrary to conservative and especially religious conservative dogma gets smeared. Climate science, for example, has and has had its share of serious skeptics. UC Berkeley physicist Richard Muller has been a serious climate science skeptic for a long time now, so much so that he put together a group specifically tasked to study all the climate science data they could get their hands on from a metacritical perspective. In other words, Muller, a capable and well funded professional scientist, set up a research group to investigate that which he was skeptical of, and has since found that we do have cause to believe that humans contribute significantly to climate change. The biggest private financial contributor to Muller's research group was the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation (i.e. of infamously conservative Koch Brothers machine).
Still, conservatives continue to allege personal bias, payoffs, corruption, and conspiracy anytime a professional scientist like Muller--even one funded by their own people--produce findings that conservatives don't like.
We see the same tactics with regard to evolutionary biologists and 'creationism.' This is a story that, again, you don't need me to rehash to understand what's going on.
The gift and the curse for scientists wading into issues like human evolution, the history of the universe, climate change, and genetic studies that suggest being gay isn't a 'choice,' is that these topics generate enough interest not just from conservatives but from the average person to garner lots of attention and, by virtue of that, lots of angry, ignorant opposition from armchair pundits.
On the other hand, humanities and social science research tends to be ignored by conservatives until it touches a 'culture wars' nerve, like findings about the viability of single or gay parents, for example. Much humanities and social science research likely would really send conservatives into apoplexy; but then again, the gift and the curse of humanities and some social science scholars is that very few bother to read the scholarship, are widely and wildly ignorant of it, and so hardly have exposure to enough publicity to launch any specific complaints about it.
Where such scholarship more prominently comes under attack is with regard to teaching, as when the David Horowitzes and Republican Governors of the world lament courses on the history of sexuality, or gender studies, or Asian American literature, because they'd rather pretend that these things aren't a significant part of the American experience, and because they think that when a course topic sounds kinda liberal, it means the professor is necessarily engaging in liberal 'indoctrination.' This kind of alleged indoctrination that study after study can never seem to locate is also, I should add, somehow different from teaching school children that humans and dinosaurs coexisted.
The conservative attack on Reza Aslan is an interesting moment because here we're not talking about the vaunted findings of science, nor the indoctrination of students by evil mastermind liberal professors, but a piece of humanities scholarship.
And what fascinates and infuriates me most about this conservative response to Aslan's scholarship is that it takes the the approach to the non-falsifiable that would earn humanities undergrads a failing grade.
Because so many of my students are miseducated in their high school literature and history classes, I make clear on day one of every semester that the stuff we're doing in class isn't just some watered down version of science where you claim knowledge that you can't prove. Rather, to take Aslan's book as an example, there are aspects of the life of a guy who lived thousands of years ago that we simply can't know with certainty today. The scholarship marshals as much evidence as it can to make an argument. The result of this scenario is that there is scholarly disagreement even among historicaly plausible arguments.
To put it another way, what I must convey to my students is: just because there is disagreement over plausible but unfalsifiable arguments in humanities scholarship doesn't mean that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all in which any idiot's opinion holds equal weight with a rigorously researched, informed argument supported with ample evidence.
This is the difference between the bullshit paper you're taught to write in high school where you 'argue' that the green tree 'represents individuality in the protagonist's quest for success,' and the evidence-based argument akin to the kinds that Aslan's book makes about Jesus of Nazareth.
As you can see in the Fox News clip, the conservative technique is not merely the bigoted, ad hominem argument that the media has given so much attention to (Aslan is a Muslim, therefore his scholarship on Christianity is bunk), but something else too. The Fox News anchor keeps invoking the fact that 'other scholars' disagree with Aslan's position in order to try to bolster her claim that Aslan's perspective on Jesus isn't duly scholarly, but instead comes from someone with a 'Muslim agenda.' The anchor uses the same elementary fallacy of mistaking the unfalsifiability of humanities scholarship for the idea that humanities scholarship is a free-for-all. She fails to understand that legitimate, informed, evidence-based arguments about an historical figure from a time long in the past absolutely can plausibly disagree without discrediting the rigor of either argument. She fails to understand, in other words, that for historians it's not as easy as looking at the results of a controlled experiment and finding 'yes' or 'no.'
In this way Aslan is doubly marginalized by conservatives as both a Muslim and a scholar. This is a serious problem of modern conservatism--the way bigotry and anti-intellectualism would seem to bolster one another in a self-perpetuating cycle of ignorance.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Abortion is Not a Single Issue
Predictably, recent 'debates' over abortion have been taken over by technocratic arguments about 'fetal pain.' I think this is one of the dumbest possible ways of discussing abortion (I think I have a pretty decent memory, but as it turns out I have no recollection of my experience in the womb). Here I'll offer a much simpler and yet more thorough way of looking at it.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily against BANNING abortion after 20 weeks. I know this will outrage many of my friends on the left; but fear not. As it turns out, I have a few conditions to attach to this view.
Let's start with basic anatomy. Every time a woman and a man have vaginal intercourse, there's a chance of pregnancy. Nevertheless, we know that certain things, like contraception and a basic knowledge of the anatomy and mechanics of intercourse, can reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy to nearly zero.
Here's another fact, this of basic medical technology: if you're not sure if you're pregnant, it's pretty easy for a doctor to resolve that uncertainty for you. A basic check-up with an obstetrician can also tell you if there appear to be an complications of your pregnancy that you need to know about for your own health and safety. Some of you might say sure, but you can get an over-the-counter pregnancy test for that. Yes, if you're insured and wealthy enough to bear the consequences of a false negative, you can; but if not, is the possibility of a child developing in your womb something that you're happy to leave to an over-the-counter test? In most cases, actually, yes, at least as a first step before seeing a doctor; but I'm not the one who portrays abortion as a matter of the life and death of a baby.
Based on these facts, we know three more important things: 1)people who don't understand accurately the basic anatomy of sexual intercourse and human reproduction are at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 2) people who do not use contraception, either because they fall under category 1 above, or because they don't have affordable access to contraception, are also at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 3) women who suspect something is wrong or different with their bodies and think they might be pregnant are at higher risk of only realizing that they're pregnant after 20 weeks if they also fall under category 1 above (ignorant about their basic anatomy) and/or if they don't have affordable access to basic medical care.
This is all just a laborious way of saying that more people will be seeking abortions, and more of those people seeking later-term abortions, when we live in a situation in which not everyone has 1) basic sex education rooted in modern scientific understanding, 2) access to contraception, and 3) access to basic medical care.
In other words, if we provided a guarantee of healthcare for all, free access to contraception for all, and thorough and standardized basic sex education for all, we would be justified in making it illegal to have an abortion after, say, 20 weeks. We could then say that in almost all cases (save, perhaps, rape, mental illness, or endangerment of the life of the mother), a person seeking an abortion after 20 weeks has had plenty of prior opportunities to make a decision on her pregnancy.
This is not our world, however. The next question, then, is: why is this not our world?
The answer is that the same people who want to restrict abortion rights and access are the people also restricting universal and sound sex education, universal access to contraception, and universal access to basic medical care.
I hate to break it to you guys (yeah, it's mostly guys), but there's no way out of this for you. You Republicans who are opposed to abortion rights and access but also opposed to all of that health stuff I've listed above have fundamentally to admit that you are at least one of the following:
1) Logically inept
2) A hypocrite
3) Delusional
4) In favor of tons of women having tons of abortions
5) In favor of society's poorest and most uneducated having lots of unwanted children
6) Of the opinion that having sex is a privilege only to be reserved for the rich and educated
Honestly. If you are a 'pro-life' Republican and you do not readily identify with at least one of the items above, you have some serious explaining to do. Because you're effectively saying that, though you'd prefer to make abortions, especially late-term abortions, a thing of the past, you're also willing to support every single policy we have that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt contributes directly to more people having more abortions. And if, as you prefer, these people weren't allowed to have abortions, then of course they'd be having unwanted children that they can't afford, more children born out of wedlock, and more children and families born into a state of dependence on government support, also things you're not in favor of.
And here, with me, you will not be able to wriggle out of this with some kind of appeal to 'personal responsibility.' Should I hold you personally responsible for information that you don't even know where to get, let alone know enough to know you need to get it? Should I hold you personally responsible for accessing something that isn't available to you? Should I hold you personally responsible for not acquiring the preventative care that I'm simultaneously denying you? Should we hold infant children personally responsible for their parents bearing them into poverty? Come up with any analogy you want, and you'll find that, lo' and behold, people don't think they should be held responsible for that which they are systematically barred from taking responsibility.
Since you can't deny that your policies lead to more abortions, and you can't deny that they also actively bar so many particularly poor women and couples from understanding precisely how to take responsibility for their sexual choices (do you really think the urban poor LIKE having kids they can't afford while they're trying to finish high school?), the only path left for you to go is this:
You just don't think poor people should be allowed to have sex. Or, to put it less polemically, you think that sex is an option that a society should only tolerate among people who have the means to bear the risk. Again, if you were in favor of educating everyone such that they could properly understand the implications of that statement, you might then be able to claim some tenable moral position. But you're not in favor of that, are you?
It's long past time for 'pro-life' Republicans to look themselves in the mirror and admit to themselves what they're actually for.
I'll preface this by saying that I'm not necessarily against BANNING abortion after 20 weeks. I know this will outrage many of my friends on the left; but fear not. As it turns out, I have a few conditions to attach to this view.
Let's start with basic anatomy. Every time a woman and a man have vaginal intercourse, there's a chance of pregnancy. Nevertheless, we know that certain things, like contraception and a basic knowledge of the anatomy and mechanics of intercourse, can reduce the risk of unwanted pregnancy to nearly zero.
Here's another fact, this of basic medical technology: if you're not sure if you're pregnant, it's pretty easy for a doctor to resolve that uncertainty for you. A basic check-up with an obstetrician can also tell you if there appear to be an complications of your pregnancy that you need to know about for your own health and safety. Some of you might say sure, but you can get an over-the-counter pregnancy test for that. Yes, if you're insured and wealthy enough to bear the consequences of a false negative, you can; but if not, is the possibility of a child developing in your womb something that you're happy to leave to an over-the-counter test? In most cases, actually, yes, at least as a first step before seeing a doctor; but I'm not the one who portrays abortion as a matter of the life and death of a baby.
Based on these facts, we know three more important things: 1)people who don't understand accurately the basic anatomy of sexual intercourse and human reproduction are at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 2) people who do not use contraception, either because they fall under category 1 above, or because they don't have affordable access to contraception, are also at higher risk for unwanted pregnancy; 3) women who suspect something is wrong or different with their bodies and think they might be pregnant are at higher risk of only realizing that they're pregnant after 20 weeks if they also fall under category 1 above (ignorant about their basic anatomy) and/or if they don't have affordable access to basic medical care.
This is all just a laborious way of saying that more people will be seeking abortions, and more of those people seeking later-term abortions, when we live in a situation in which not everyone has 1) basic sex education rooted in modern scientific understanding, 2) access to contraception, and 3) access to basic medical care.
In other words, if we provided a guarantee of healthcare for all, free access to contraception for all, and thorough and standardized basic sex education for all, we would be justified in making it illegal to have an abortion after, say, 20 weeks. We could then say that in almost all cases (save, perhaps, rape, mental illness, or endangerment of the life of the mother), a person seeking an abortion after 20 weeks has had plenty of prior opportunities to make a decision on her pregnancy.
This is not our world, however. The next question, then, is: why is this not our world?
The answer is that the same people who want to restrict abortion rights and access are the people also restricting universal and sound sex education, universal access to contraception, and universal access to basic medical care.
I hate to break it to you guys (yeah, it's mostly guys), but there's no way out of this for you. You Republicans who are opposed to abortion rights and access but also opposed to all of that health stuff I've listed above have fundamentally to admit that you are at least one of the following:
1) Logically inept
2) A hypocrite
3) Delusional
4) In favor of tons of women having tons of abortions
5) In favor of society's poorest and most uneducated having lots of unwanted children
6) Of the opinion that having sex is a privilege only to be reserved for the rich and educated
Honestly. If you are a 'pro-life' Republican and you do not readily identify with at least one of the items above, you have some serious explaining to do. Because you're effectively saying that, though you'd prefer to make abortions, especially late-term abortions, a thing of the past, you're also willing to support every single policy we have that we know beyond a shadow of a doubt contributes directly to more people having more abortions. And if, as you prefer, these people weren't allowed to have abortions, then of course they'd be having unwanted children that they can't afford, more children born out of wedlock, and more children and families born into a state of dependence on government support, also things you're not in favor of.
And here, with me, you will not be able to wriggle out of this with some kind of appeal to 'personal responsibility.' Should I hold you personally responsible for information that you don't even know where to get, let alone know enough to know you need to get it? Should I hold you personally responsible for accessing something that isn't available to you? Should I hold you personally responsible for not acquiring the preventative care that I'm simultaneously denying you? Should we hold infant children personally responsible for their parents bearing them into poverty? Come up with any analogy you want, and you'll find that, lo' and behold, people don't think they should be held responsible for that which they are systematically barred from taking responsibility.
Since you can't deny that your policies lead to more abortions, and you can't deny that they also actively bar so many particularly poor women and couples from understanding precisely how to take responsibility for their sexual choices (do you really think the urban poor LIKE having kids they can't afford while they're trying to finish high school?), the only path left for you to go is this:
You just don't think poor people should be allowed to have sex. Or, to put it less polemically, you think that sex is an option that a society should only tolerate among people who have the means to bear the risk. Again, if you were in favor of educating everyone such that they could properly understand the implications of that statement, you might then be able to claim some tenable moral position. But you're not in favor of that, are you?
It's long past time for 'pro-life' Republicans to look themselves in the mirror and admit to themselves what they're actually for.
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Can there be Good Corporations?
People who consider 'growing' a large corporation to be the pinnacle of life achievement will talk about the corporation as the centerpiece of not only American life, but of modern civilization. For most of us the corporation is just a semi-neutral fact of life. And for others just uttering the word 'corporation' calls up nostalgia for hippie protesters trying to 'stick it to the man.'
By the logic of political tennis, it's become a stock liberal thing to be unthinkingly anti-corporate and a stock conservative thing to be pro-corporate even when corporations violate key tenets of conservatism (like open market competition). I'm not very interested in this article in red-meat interest stories about corporations behaving badly (like the BP oil spill) or corporations defying expectations and doing something good for the world (corporate charities). I'm interested in a more fundamental question about the corporation: can it ever be a good thing?
I realize that technically a corporation can be two guys running a business out of their garage, but this obviously isn't what I'm talking about here. Since the amorphously defined 'small business' is a cheerleading occasion in our political discourse, let's not play word games here: you don't get to laud the 'small business,' then come back to me and say 'yeah, but don't hate on corporations; a corporation can be two guys operating out of a garage.' When I say 'corporation' here I mean a large-scale business association. I'm not using 'corporation' as a legal term, though I'm aware that it is one.
The questions, then, are whether large-scale business operations can be a good thing, and at what point is large too large. The second I'm not prepared to answer here. The first I have preliminary thoughts about.
In some ways the large corporation is a paradox. It's a business under one name (even, absurdly, when it becomes a conglomeration of large corporations doing things independently); but it's also a disconnected group of individuals over whom no one can possibly maintain realistic levels of accountability. Corporate CEOs command increasingly enormous salaries based on the premise that they're responsible for tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees. But a child could point out that it's just not possible for a single human being to actually take on that quantity of responsibility with any realistic expectation of oversight, accountability, or relevance in the lives of the vast majority of employees. And I get it; the point of the CEO and upper-level executives is to think about the 'big picture'; but really, what else could they think about? And what do they know about what the 'big picture' means when, like a giant mosaic, it's employed as millions of little-picture operations in the daily business of the corporation?
So the first thing about corporations that's arguably very bad is that the magnitude of responsibility that those at the top of corporations take on is, paradoxically, the very reason that these people have absolutely no realistic sense of responsibility whatsoever. It's easy to see this paradox in action. Just read the words of upper-level executives when some lower-level employee or far-flung appendage of the giant corporate association does something stupid that makes news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running for president and disavowing responsibility for the high-leverage destruction his firm was specializing in? Of course he disavowed responsibility. As an executive (chairman of the board, I think) he's part of a elite group of people who take it as a given that they should get paid hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year to do absolutely nothing. When he disavowed responsibility, he admitted then and there, unwittingly perhaps, that the job he was getting a six-figure salary to do was a sham, that he wasn't actually doing the job, that only an idiot or a madman would have the audacity to expect someone in his 'job' to do anything for their compensation, and that of course he had nothing to do with the mistakes his firm made, because he was only...CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD. What kind of corporate executive actually TAKES REAL RESPONSIBILITY for what happens at the lower levels?
Yes, I'm sure you can point to all kinds of examples of CEOs being fired for what shareholders deem underperformance or enough of a scandal to harm the corporate image. This happens with university presidents, too. This scenario of accountability typically goes like this: "Bad, bad CEO! Take this $22.5 million severance, plus this $8.5 million in stock options, and this house in Malibu, and DON'T EVER COME BACK until next month when we meet in this lavish boardroom with the Chairman of the Board of Other Corp., which, we understand, is now you."
Ah yes, accountability in action.
The second inherent problem with corporations is that, like their CEOs and upper-level executives, they, too, defy their very justification for being. A corporation's reason for existing on such a large and in some cases monopolistic or oligopolistic scale is that the free market is a meritocracy. By the fallacy of petitio, a corporation argues for its existence no matter what the costs because its existence itself is evidence that it has outdone the competition.
The problem with this is that within themselves, corporations are fundamentally anti-meritocratic. The student in my class who writes the best essay gets an A; and when I catch a student in my class plagiarizing, they fail the assignment. That's meritocracy. The corporation, by contrast, is built on plagiarism. Lower-level people do work and receive money for it. Their work is taken by the next rung up the ladder and claimed for the merit of that group. The mid-levels' work is taken to the top and claimed for the merit of the executives. You could call it a pyramid scheme, but it's really more properly a sanctioned form of plagiarism. When I worked for a corporation, my work was presented to clients by someone else every week. In fact, much of my daily work as a consulting firm analyst involved teaching the results, methods, and context of the work I did to the upper-level executives of my firm so that they could present it to upper-level clients.
We can look at this in other ways besides what I call sanctioned plagiarism. You could say my work is part of a labor collective, that I don't own my work, but it goes toward the good of the collective (corporation). In this way, as an employee, I can't have the expectation of ownership of my work products; it's 'proprietary,' as we say in the biz. In this sense, then, you could say a corporation is fundamentally communistic. Not even socialistic, but communistic. The resources, including labor resources, are owned by the collective, and the bureaucratic head of this collective decides who does what with these resources,who gets credit for what, and what privileges each member of the collective accrues, independent of who does the work. Sure, even within a communist collective merit plays a limited role; but this is no meritocracy.
The second point, then, is that corporations claim a moral right of existence by the principles of meritocracy, but operationally corporations are anti-meritocratic.
I think that these problems are primarily problems of scale, and that the large-scale corporation, then, is inherently problematic because it necessarily outgrows its own principles and justifications, with often terrible results for employees, the economy, and virtually anyone but the Inner Circle.
Take, for example, the two (or let's say 22) guys (or employees) running a business out of their garage (or small warehouse). First, the person or persons in charge can feasibly be accountable to the actions of their employees. Second, this smaller scale creates the potential for employees to work with closer proximity to the end product and the profits that ensue (whereas the person in China making your iPhone has no reason but fear to do anything less than their best). Third, a smaller and more flexible employee base makes it easier for those at the top to properly evaluate and compensate those working below them, which gives meritocracy a fighting change in such a system, because such a system can be flatter in organizational structure (and remember, the people in China making your iPhone aren't really rewarded for doing better; only punished for doing worse). Finally, a smaller scale business has less need for the sanctioned plagiarism that is par for the course in corporate culture, I think largely because a very large scale necessitates hypercompartmentalization of labor and the imposition of structure for structure's sake.
Many of these thoughts are speculative, I acknowledge; and there are other insidious aspects of corporate culture that have to do with things other than scale. But the very fact of the large-scale corporation strikes me as inherently bad for the reasons above. Certainly I've waded into a much larger series of issues regarding corporate governance, and not simply the fact of the large-scale corporation itself; but it's also worth considering whether any massive association of human beings will choose to organize itself any other way, or without falling victim to the flaws I point out above.
A final question: if we wouldn't be cool with a communistic dictatorship running a country, a city, or even a township, because of the whole 'if men were angels' thing, why are we so OK with such a system running a massive corporation that employs as many people as reside in some cities and townships, and controls enough aspects of the lives of these people (what they do with most of their waking hours, health insurance, drug testing, internet footprint, maternity leave, etc. etc. etc.) that employing is akin to governance?
By the logic of political tennis, it's become a stock liberal thing to be unthinkingly anti-corporate and a stock conservative thing to be pro-corporate even when corporations violate key tenets of conservatism (like open market competition). I'm not very interested in this article in red-meat interest stories about corporations behaving badly (like the BP oil spill) or corporations defying expectations and doing something good for the world (corporate charities). I'm interested in a more fundamental question about the corporation: can it ever be a good thing?
I realize that technically a corporation can be two guys running a business out of their garage, but this obviously isn't what I'm talking about here. Since the amorphously defined 'small business' is a cheerleading occasion in our political discourse, let's not play word games here: you don't get to laud the 'small business,' then come back to me and say 'yeah, but don't hate on corporations; a corporation can be two guys operating out of a garage.' When I say 'corporation' here I mean a large-scale business association. I'm not using 'corporation' as a legal term, though I'm aware that it is one.
The questions, then, are whether large-scale business operations can be a good thing, and at what point is large too large. The second I'm not prepared to answer here. The first I have preliminary thoughts about.
In some ways the large corporation is a paradox. It's a business under one name (even, absurdly, when it becomes a conglomeration of large corporations doing things independently); but it's also a disconnected group of individuals over whom no one can possibly maintain realistic levels of accountability. Corporate CEOs command increasingly enormous salaries based on the premise that they're responsible for tens if not hundreds of thousands of employees. But a child could point out that it's just not possible for a single human being to actually take on that quantity of responsibility with any realistic expectation of oversight, accountability, or relevance in the lives of the vast majority of employees. And I get it; the point of the CEO and upper-level executives is to think about the 'big picture'; but really, what else could they think about? And what do they know about what the 'big picture' means when, like a giant mosaic, it's employed as millions of little-picture operations in the daily business of the corporation?
So the first thing about corporations that's arguably very bad is that the magnitude of responsibility that those at the top of corporations take on is, paradoxically, the very reason that these people have absolutely no realistic sense of responsibility whatsoever. It's easy to see this paradox in action. Just read the words of upper-level executives when some lower-level employee or far-flung appendage of the giant corporate association does something stupid that makes news. Remember when Mitt Romney was running for president and disavowing responsibility for the high-leverage destruction his firm was specializing in? Of course he disavowed responsibility. As an executive (chairman of the board, I think) he's part of a elite group of people who take it as a given that they should get paid hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year to do absolutely nothing. When he disavowed responsibility, he admitted then and there, unwittingly perhaps, that the job he was getting a six-figure salary to do was a sham, that he wasn't actually doing the job, that only an idiot or a madman would have the audacity to expect someone in his 'job' to do anything for their compensation, and that of course he had nothing to do with the mistakes his firm made, because he was only...CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD. What kind of corporate executive actually TAKES REAL RESPONSIBILITY for what happens at the lower levels?
Yes, I'm sure you can point to all kinds of examples of CEOs being fired for what shareholders deem underperformance or enough of a scandal to harm the corporate image. This happens with university presidents, too. This scenario of accountability typically goes like this: "Bad, bad CEO! Take this $22.5 million severance, plus this $8.5 million in stock options, and this house in Malibu, and DON'T EVER COME BACK until next month when we meet in this lavish boardroom with the Chairman of the Board of Other Corp., which, we understand, is now you."
Ah yes, accountability in action.
The second inherent problem with corporations is that, like their CEOs and upper-level executives, they, too, defy their very justification for being. A corporation's reason for existing on such a large and in some cases monopolistic or oligopolistic scale is that the free market is a meritocracy. By the fallacy of petitio, a corporation argues for its existence no matter what the costs because its existence itself is evidence that it has outdone the competition.
The problem with this is that within themselves, corporations are fundamentally anti-meritocratic. The student in my class who writes the best essay gets an A; and when I catch a student in my class plagiarizing, they fail the assignment. That's meritocracy. The corporation, by contrast, is built on plagiarism. Lower-level people do work and receive money for it. Their work is taken by the next rung up the ladder and claimed for the merit of that group. The mid-levels' work is taken to the top and claimed for the merit of the executives. You could call it a pyramid scheme, but it's really more properly a sanctioned form of plagiarism. When I worked for a corporation, my work was presented to clients by someone else every week. In fact, much of my daily work as a consulting firm analyst involved teaching the results, methods, and context of the work I did to the upper-level executives of my firm so that they could present it to upper-level clients.
We can look at this in other ways besides what I call sanctioned plagiarism. You could say my work is part of a labor collective, that I don't own my work, but it goes toward the good of the collective (corporation). In this way, as an employee, I can't have the expectation of ownership of my work products; it's 'proprietary,' as we say in the biz. In this sense, then, you could say a corporation is fundamentally communistic. Not even socialistic, but communistic. The resources, including labor resources, are owned by the collective, and the bureaucratic head of this collective decides who does what with these resources,who gets credit for what, and what privileges each member of the collective accrues, independent of who does the work. Sure, even within a communist collective merit plays a limited role; but this is no meritocracy.
The second point, then, is that corporations claim a moral right of existence by the principles of meritocracy, but operationally corporations are anti-meritocratic.
I think that these problems are primarily problems of scale, and that the large-scale corporation, then, is inherently problematic because it necessarily outgrows its own principles and justifications, with often terrible results for employees, the economy, and virtually anyone but the Inner Circle.
Take, for example, the two (or let's say 22) guys (or employees) running a business out of their garage (or small warehouse). First, the person or persons in charge can feasibly be accountable to the actions of their employees. Second, this smaller scale creates the potential for employees to work with closer proximity to the end product and the profits that ensue (whereas the person in China making your iPhone has no reason but fear to do anything less than their best). Third, a smaller and more flexible employee base makes it easier for those at the top to properly evaluate and compensate those working below them, which gives meritocracy a fighting change in such a system, because such a system can be flatter in organizational structure (and remember, the people in China making your iPhone aren't really rewarded for doing better; only punished for doing worse). Finally, a smaller scale business has less need for the sanctioned plagiarism that is par for the course in corporate culture, I think largely because a very large scale necessitates hypercompartmentalization of labor and the imposition of structure for structure's sake.
Many of these thoughts are speculative, I acknowledge; and there are other insidious aspects of corporate culture that have to do with things other than scale. But the very fact of the large-scale corporation strikes me as inherently bad for the reasons above. Certainly I've waded into a much larger series of issues regarding corporate governance, and not simply the fact of the large-scale corporation itself; but it's also worth considering whether any massive association of human beings will choose to organize itself any other way, or without falling victim to the flaws I point out above.
A final question: if we wouldn't be cool with a communistic dictatorship running a country, a city, or even a township, because of the whole 'if men were angels' thing, why are we so OK with such a system running a massive corporation that employs as many people as reside in some cities and townships, and controls enough aspects of the lives of these people (what they do with most of their waking hours, health insurance, drug testing, internet footprint, maternity leave, etc. etc. etc.) that employing is akin to governance?
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
The Elephant in the Massive Open Online Classroom
Let me begin by stating that online education has a place and a set of roles to play in higher education. I don't think many would say otherwise; but if they did, I'd be inclined to disagree with them. I'm not absolutely opposed to the technologies online education avails itself of; in fact, I use some of them in teaching my own courses.
Nevertheless, every time something to do with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) comes up, the media jump on it and proclaim it the most earth-shatteringly revolutionary 'disruptive' mind-blowingly novel and innovative innovation since the invention of Jesus Christ. A MOOC can never just be what those of us who actually work in higher education usually talk about it as: an experiment, a data-collection method, a thing foisted upon us by the university administration, or a useful component of a course that also involves a taught, face-to-face component. Never. A MOOC must be the news equivalent of an extinction level event. This silly article at Slate is titled 'The MOOC that Roared," and implies that, somehow unlike every other MOOC news that roars until it's hoarse and we're all smothered in hot air, this one that costs money is going to be a cheaper equivalent to the highly-rated but much more expensive classroom-based master's in computer science at Georgia Tech. This is almost comical in light of the fact that the last such 'this one actually counts toward a degree' experiment, San Jose State's partnership with Udacity, has resulted in epic failure.
Despite all this blustering about 'disruption' and 'revolution,' the MOOC and its ilk are not pedagogically revolutionary or 'game-changing' in any way. They don't change anything about the fundamentals of how people teach or learn, apart from providing limitations to these, as we saw in the SJSU case. We tend to talk about MOOCs as things that add possibilities for what teachers can accomplish; but in fact the MOOC adds nothing that a 200-person lecture hall and a platoon of TAs haven't been accomplishing for decades. The MOOC only scales this up from the hundreds to the thousands, which again offers nothing new in the way of pedagogy; only scope. For those inclined to think that such magnification of scope is itself a revolutionary and democratizing thing, let me remind you of the massive elephant in the room.
To make this elephant appear more real to you, let's give him a name. His name is Prestige. Prestige the Elephant.
As I've been arguing for a long time, the fact that US higher education, even at some of the most technical and vocational 4-year institutions, is based on a liberal arts educational model, what matters to employers is not what you majored in, but where you majored in it. Apart from those hiring for a minority of very technical or specialized jobs whose markets would be detrimentally flooded if everyone listened to the grandstanding politicians and suddenly majored in [speech-language pathology or biomedical engineering], it's not about the major.
Despite the corny articles that come up every month in business trade newsletters and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about '10 Majors That Aren't Worth the Tuition,' filled with cartoonish assessments of job prospects for typical scapegoat majors like 'theater arts' ('so you wanna be a thesbian? Good luck performing street tricks for quarters!') or 'religious studies' ('There are only 3 jobs in the world at Religious Studies Museums, where you could hunch over your old dusty Bibles and do whatever little thing a 'religious studies' major does!), employers don't look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person MAJORED IN BUSINESS! HIRED!' They look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person GRADUATED FROM HARVARD! They have a chance.'
The reason for this is that quality of education--not just general topic of education--matters to US employers. What matters even more, however, is prestige. Prestige the Elephant, remember? If you're misguided enough to go to college simply because you think college owes you a job, and you want a leg up in the job market upon graduation, my advice is: go to the best college you can and major in whatever the hell you want.
The prestige factor flies directly in the face of arguments that MOOCs will revolutionize higher education. The point of getting a degree from Harvard isn't necessarily that Harvard provides a better education than Brown, UVA, or Vassar. You go to Harvard because of the absurd number of people who apply to Harvard each year, only 6% are told by Harvard they're ALLOWED to go to Harvard. Getting into Harvard, then, is a signal to employers that you've made it past a significant competitive hurdle; that you're validated as elite, even if you never actually end up graduating.
When Harvard offers free MOOCs that anyone can take just by signing up, and that don't lead to a Harvard degree, it's a nice public service, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything about higher education. Just watch what happens when universities like San Jose State and Georgia Tech start charging for online degrees. First, the degrees will be worth nothing if anyone can enroll. Second, those paying for the degrees will begin to wonder whether they're getting as good an education as those paying more for face-to-face instruction (and we'll be able to measure this to some extent; the early results don't look good for MOOCs). Third, employers will begin to wonder the same thing.
Thus, though MOOCs don't exactly revolutionize teaching and learning, they do have the potential to revolutionize one thing in particular: labor costs. MOOCs offer the illusion of quality for the reality of cheap. While brick-and-mortar college tuition is way too high right now, a product of corporate people running universities into the ground and building stadiums and gyms instead of academic reputations, there's a reason why higher education costs must necessarily be above free. The reason is you have to pay experts and provide expert-ready facilities for students to learn with. These are the fundamentals of higher education, which the existence of MOOCs will not alter. You will never get the same experience answering a multiple-choice chemistry quiz online that you do being guided through an experiment in a state-of-the-art chemistry lab by a PhD student working under a PhD-trained professional chemist. It really is that simple.
But what you will get for cheap through a MOOC is a cut-rate education. And if you are the person receiving this cut-rate education (which doubles as a market experiment for for-profit companies like Udacity), chances are you're not a well-positioned student like the kind who goes to Harvard or Swarthmore, but a first-generation college student, likely working-class, likely speaking English as a second language. In other words, the MOOC enterprise experiments on our most vulnerable and underprepared students, creating an even more pronounced multi-tier system of privilege in US higher education.
At the same time, the MOOC will undermine faculty pay and resources, and, if implemented full-scale the way many of its proponents envision, will turn the university experience into a consumer experience akin to shopping at Walmart. There's a reason that plastic toy costs less than $2: it was made by someone in rural China for a fraction of a penny. It may be good enough for your 4 year old, but is it a good enough model to base higher education on? The MOOC offers a similar mechanism. It employs a combination of technology and part-time, non-professinal, unskilled technical labor to replace the quality of classroom instruction under a trained and credentialed professional.
As a consequence, one thing academia an the technology sector have in common is that both are increasingly run not by trained experts, but by business types and MBA-holders. This is why the tech sector and stories about it are now flush with absurd, blindly optimistic jargon like 'disruption' and 'innovation' and 'synergy.' This is the kind of shit only corporate culture can come up with. For some these may appear big and exciting words, but in reality they're just the language of inflation and destruction.
Nevertheless, every time something to do with Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) comes up, the media jump on it and proclaim it the most earth-shatteringly revolutionary 'disruptive' mind-blowingly novel and innovative innovation since the invention of Jesus Christ. A MOOC can never just be what those of us who actually work in higher education usually talk about it as: an experiment, a data-collection method, a thing foisted upon us by the university administration, or a useful component of a course that also involves a taught, face-to-face component. Never. A MOOC must be the news equivalent of an extinction level event. This silly article at Slate is titled 'The MOOC that Roared," and implies that, somehow unlike every other MOOC news that roars until it's hoarse and we're all smothered in hot air, this one that costs money is going to be a cheaper equivalent to the highly-rated but much more expensive classroom-based master's in computer science at Georgia Tech. This is almost comical in light of the fact that the last such 'this one actually counts toward a degree' experiment, San Jose State's partnership with Udacity, has resulted in epic failure.
Despite all this blustering about 'disruption' and 'revolution,' the MOOC and its ilk are not pedagogically revolutionary or 'game-changing' in any way. They don't change anything about the fundamentals of how people teach or learn, apart from providing limitations to these, as we saw in the SJSU case. We tend to talk about MOOCs as things that add possibilities for what teachers can accomplish; but in fact the MOOC adds nothing that a 200-person lecture hall and a platoon of TAs haven't been accomplishing for decades. The MOOC only scales this up from the hundreds to the thousands, which again offers nothing new in the way of pedagogy; only scope. For those inclined to think that such magnification of scope is itself a revolutionary and democratizing thing, let me remind you of the massive elephant in the room.
To make this elephant appear more real to you, let's give him a name. His name is Prestige. Prestige the Elephant.
As I've been arguing for a long time, the fact that US higher education, even at some of the most technical and vocational 4-year institutions, is based on a liberal arts educational model, what matters to employers is not what you majored in, but where you majored in it. Apart from those hiring for a minority of very technical or specialized jobs whose markets would be detrimentally flooded if everyone listened to the grandstanding politicians and suddenly majored in [speech-language pathology or biomedical engineering], it's not about the major.
Despite the corny articles that come up every month in business trade newsletters and USA Today and the Wall Street Journal about '10 Majors That Aren't Worth the Tuition,' filled with cartoonish assessments of job prospects for typical scapegoat majors like 'theater arts' ('so you wanna be a thesbian? Good luck performing street tricks for quarters!') or 'religious studies' ('There are only 3 jobs in the world at Religious Studies Museums, where you could hunch over your old dusty Bibles and do whatever little thing a 'religious studies' major does!), employers don't look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person MAJORED IN BUSINESS! HIRED!' They look at resumes and exclaim 'wow, this person GRADUATED FROM HARVARD! They have a chance.'
The reason for this is that quality of education--not just general topic of education--matters to US employers. What matters even more, however, is prestige. Prestige the Elephant, remember? If you're misguided enough to go to college simply because you think college owes you a job, and you want a leg up in the job market upon graduation, my advice is: go to the best college you can and major in whatever the hell you want.
The prestige factor flies directly in the face of arguments that MOOCs will revolutionize higher education. The point of getting a degree from Harvard isn't necessarily that Harvard provides a better education than Brown, UVA, or Vassar. You go to Harvard because of the absurd number of people who apply to Harvard each year, only 6% are told by Harvard they're ALLOWED to go to Harvard. Getting into Harvard, then, is a signal to employers that you've made it past a significant competitive hurdle; that you're validated as elite, even if you never actually end up graduating.
When Harvard offers free MOOCs that anyone can take just by signing up, and that don't lead to a Harvard degree, it's a nice public service, but it doesn't fundamentally change anything about higher education. Just watch what happens when universities like San Jose State and Georgia Tech start charging for online degrees. First, the degrees will be worth nothing if anyone can enroll. Second, those paying for the degrees will begin to wonder whether they're getting as good an education as those paying more for face-to-face instruction (and we'll be able to measure this to some extent; the early results don't look good for MOOCs). Third, employers will begin to wonder the same thing.
Thus, though MOOCs don't exactly revolutionize teaching and learning, they do have the potential to revolutionize one thing in particular: labor costs. MOOCs offer the illusion of quality for the reality of cheap. While brick-and-mortar college tuition is way too high right now, a product of corporate people running universities into the ground and building stadiums and gyms instead of academic reputations, there's a reason why higher education costs must necessarily be above free. The reason is you have to pay experts and provide expert-ready facilities for students to learn with. These are the fundamentals of higher education, which the existence of MOOCs will not alter. You will never get the same experience answering a multiple-choice chemistry quiz online that you do being guided through an experiment in a state-of-the-art chemistry lab by a PhD student working under a PhD-trained professional chemist. It really is that simple.
But what you will get for cheap through a MOOC is a cut-rate education. And if you are the person receiving this cut-rate education (which doubles as a market experiment for for-profit companies like Udacity), chances are you're not a well-positioned student like the kind who goes to Harvard or Swarthmore, but a first-generation college student, likely working-class, likely speaking English as a second language. In other words, the MOOC enterprise experiments on our most vulnerable and underprepared students, creating an even more pronounced multi-tier system of privilege in US higher education.
At the same time, the MOOC will undermine faculty pay and resources, and, if implemented full-scale the way many of its proponents envision, will turn the university experience into a consumer experience akin to shopping at Walmart. There's a reason that plastic toy costs less than $2: it was made by someone in rural China for a fraction of a penny. It may be good enough for your 4 year old, but is it a good enough model to base higher education on? The MOOC offers a similar mechanism. It employs a combination of technology and part-time, non-professinal, unskilled technical labor to replace the quality of classroom instruction under a trained and credentialed professional.
As a consequence, one thing academia an the technology sector have in common is that both are increasingly run not by trained experts, but by business types and MBA-holders. This is why the tech sector and stories about it are now flush with absurd, blindly optimistic jargon like 'disruption' and 'innovation' and 'synergy.' This is the kind of shit only corporate culture can come up with. For some these may appear big and exciting words, but in reality they're just the language of inflation and destruction.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Unmuddling Race in the Trayvon Case
I know you've read plenty of opinions on the Trayvon Martin tragedy, but I'm offering this today because there's so much confusion and sloppy thinking out there about the role of race in the shooting and in Zimmerman's trial. I'm attempting to clear some of this up here.
We have a lot of people on the left claiming this is all about race, and a lot of people on the right claiming this has nothing to do with race at all. Both positions are typical, and both positions are stupid.
First, though the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is perhaps unsatisfying, it's a technically correct verdict. According to the law and the process, Zimmerman was rightly found not guilty. Where there's room to criticize this outcome, it's with the laws and the process themselves: perhaps we shouldn't have such broad legal interpretations of 'self-defense.' And even though Stand Your Ground wasn't invoked explicitly in this case, you better believe it was a card waiting to be played, a card that influenced the outcome of the trial and certainly both the prosecution and defense strategies. In fact, the defense's choice to waive the Stand Your Ground hearing at the beginning and fold those issues into the broader self-defense trial was itself a play on Stand Your Ground: it allowed the defense to keep Zimmerman off the stand.
We can criticize jury selection, police action at the scene, and other factors that allowed for Zimmerman, a cop, to get a very fair trial, a degree of fairness that, as Alex Pareene rightly points out, is not necessarily available to everyone in our society. This is the point at which the race question begins to come up; but it's important to understand that we don't even need to get to the race question, nor do we need to criticize the verdict itself, in order to question the law. The law allows room for Zimmerman's defense to argue that deadly force was justified because Trayvon's 'deadly weapon' was the concrete sidewalk. This effectively means that any time you get into a fistfight in Florida and someone goes down, so long as someone has a gun, they're legally justified in using it to shoot someone dead. To win a fistfight. In my view that's entirely moronic, and a society that wants to resolve fistfights with gun death is the epitome of insane. So for those who are claiming this is 'all about race,' it's not ALL about race. It's largely about the law. We could have a field day on the law alone before mentioning race.
Of course race and the law aren't extricable. Which is to say this can't ever be ALL about one or the other. It must necessarily be about both. In other, less publicized cases, race and the law are always at play together; we just choose not to notice. Either that, or it's just harder to tell that race is operating in white-on-white or black-on-black murder, albeit in different ways.
Next, for those who claim that this is NOT about race AT ALL, I'll explain why you, too, are wrong.
Race is a social construct (this phrase is repeated all the time, but most have no idea what that means). What this means is that race doesn't inherently describe who someone is, with depth or logic or accuracy; instead it's a category that we make up based on very rough and not particularly logical nor consistent impressions about how people look. Race is not the same as ethnicity, for example. This is why the term 'African-American' is used to describe black people, even if they don't come from Africa. This is why a 'white' person may be of Italian, Polish, Irish, or even Hispanic ethnicity.
There's been a lot of confusion about whether Zimmerman is 'white' or 'Hispanic.' He's both. White is a racial category and Hispanic is an ethnic category. This is why someone descended from Cuba via Africa from back in the 18th century when African slaves were transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar cane and tobacco fields would typically identify today on the US Census as Black Hispanic (black and Hispanic at the same time). This is why someone whose ethnic heritage is more closely tied with indigenous Latin America via Spanish imperialism would typically identify as White Hispanic (white and Hispanic at the same time). And of course someone who hails directly from Spain would typically identify as 'white,' like other Caucasian Europeans. Zimmerman is white Hispanic. We can dispute these categories or the very assignation of racial categories; but within the racial framework we have--mind you, a framework that is based on social construction--there's nothing wrong with labeling Zimmerman a white guy.
Of course, some will argue that it's reductive to call Zimmerman a white guy. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that he's Hispanic? I tend to agree; but then again, how often do we demand that a white Irish guy gets called 'white Irish,' a white Italian guy 'white Italian'? Why don't we demand that all 'whites' be identified with an ethnicity in addition to a racial category, like 'white European,' 'white Hispanic,' 'white Anglo-Saxon,' 'white Celtic,' etc.? Because each of these categories is every bit as white as Zimmerman; and Zimmerman is every bit as white as each of these categories.
I've argued for a long time now that the category of 'whiteness' is extremely problematic precisely because it gets imbued with a specifically gentrified white Anglo-Saxon culture to which the vast majority of white people don't belong or identify (including Zimmerman). To put it more simply, people like Mitt Romney are 'white,' while people like Marshal Mathers are 'acting black.' But why should people like Mitt Romney dominate the representation of whiteness? Why can't Eminem represent whiteness too? It's not that all us white people got together and voted on it. It's because whiteness, like blackness, is culturally loaded beyond its (weak) racially descriptive function. This loaded notion of whiteness is precisely why when we accurately call Zimmerman, an Hispanic guy, 'white,' people get confused and can't seem to accept it. Because 'white' and 'Hispanic' are culturally loaded, too; and the identity stereotypes they carry are often incompatible. For many on the left the idea of calling an Hispanic man 'white' comes too dangerously close to eliding the historically protected status of Hispanics as a minority in the US.
The wrench we throw into this, then, is this idea of historically protected status. Racial and ethnic identities aside, there are some components of identity in the US for which, because of historical (which is NOT to say not ongoing) discrimination, we have certain legal and cultural protections for protected groups. Consider, for example, that a white Jew could identify as both white and Jewish (a term with ethnic as well as religious connotations), and be protected as a consequence of historical anti-Semitism. As a white guy Zimmerman isn't protected as such; as an Hispanic he is. By calling Zimmerman white, we don't forfeit whatever protections are due him because he is also Hispanic. But too many people can't seem to see past this fact, and want to put him into one box or the other. In a way, I admit, this is not fair to whiteness, nor to Hispanics. When we persecute Hispanics as 'illegals,' stop and search them (like Zimmerman did Trayvon) without reasonable suspicion, and perpetuate any number of other harmful stereotypes, we prove that 'Hispanic' is and should remain a protected status. But this doesn't mean some whites--like, say, white Hispanics--aren't discriminated against.
To put it simply, we don't have to purge an individual of all his or her whiteness in order to admit that they can be discriminated against. To think this way is to be discriminatory against whiteness, placing it squarely in the evil category, the category of irredeemable status.
What matters much more than Zimmerman's race, however, is Trayvon's. Remember, Trayvon is the innocent dead kid. The innocent dead black kid. If it were Zimmerman in Trayvon's position, we might talk a bit further about whether Zimmerman's Hispanic ethnicity had anything to do with what happened to him. But since Zimmerman got the fairest of fair trials and the best legal defense to be expected--far better than virtually 99% of the rest of the US population--we don't need to question whether race played a role on his end. The real racial issue in this case is about a young black man dressed a certain way being unquestionably profiled as 'suspicious' despite doing nothing wrong. This profiling unquestionably led directly to his tragic death. This is principally where race is very relevant. Not because of the racial dynamic between the shooter and the shot--black cops shoot and beat innocent black kids too--but because of the racial import of Zimmerman's 'suspicion.' How many white kids in hoodies get stopped by police and shot for walking around at night? And just imagine how quickly white people would 'play the race card' and beat the 'reverse-racism' drum were a white kid to get gunned down by a black or brown cop with a demonstrated history of profiling whites?
And when the black community was understandably outraged at what happened, race perceptions again meant that the media had to warn us that we had to fear for 'riots' and disorderly and violent behavior. Like Trayvon, blacks who are justifiably angry about what happened are presumed guilty until proven innocent. So to say race isn't a part of this picture is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
We have a lot of people on the left claiming this is all about race, and a lot of people on the right claiming this has nothing to do with race at all. Both positions are typical, and both positions are stupid.
First, though the verdict in the Zimmerman trial is perhaps unsatisfying, it's a technically correct verdict. According to the law and the process, Zimmerman was rightly found not guilty. Where there's room to criticize this outcome, it's with the laws and the process themselves: perhaps we shouldn't have such broad legal interpretations of 'self-defense.' And even though Stand Your Ground wasn't invoked explicitly in this case, you better believe it was a card waiting to be played, a card that influenced the outcome of the trial and certainly both the prosecution and defense strategies. In fact, the defense's choice to waive the Stand Your Ground hearing at the beginning and fold those issues into the broader self-defense trial was itself a play on Stand Your Ground: it allowed the defense to keep Zimmerman off the stand.
We can criticize jury selection, police action at the scene, and other factors that allowed for Zimmerman, a cop, to get a very fair trial, a degree of fairness that, as Alex Pareene rightly points out, is not necessarily available to everyone in our society. This is the point at which the race question begins to come up; but it's important to understand that we don't even need to get to the race question, nor do we need to criticize the verdict itself, in order to question the law. The law allows room for Zimmerman's defense to argue that deadly force was justified because Trayvon's 'deadly weapon' was the concrete sidewalk. This effectively means that any time you get into a fistfight in Florida and someone goes down, so long as someone has a gun, they're legally justified in using it to shoot someone dead. To win a fistfight. In my view that's entirely moronic, and a society that wants to resolve fistfights with gun death is the epitome of insane. So for those who are claiming this is 'all about race,' it's not ALL about race. It's largely about the law. We could have a field day on the law alone before mentioning race.
Of course race and the law aren't extricable. Which is to say this can't ever be ALL about one or the other. It must necessarily be about both. In other, less publicized cases, race and the law are always at play together; we just choose not to notice. Either that, or it's just harder to tell that race is operating in white-on-white or black-on-black murder, albeit in different ways.
Next, for those who claim that this is NOT about race AT ALL, I'll explain why you, too, are wrong.
Race is a social construct (this phrase is repeated all the time, but most have no idea what that means). What this means is that race doesn't inherently describe who someone is, with depth or logic or accuracy; instead it's a category that we make up based on very rough and not particularly logical nor consistent impressions about how people look. Race is not the same as ethnicity, for example. This is why the term 'African-American' is used to describe black people, even if they don't come from Africa. This is why a 'white' person may be of Italian, Polish, Irish, or even Hispanic ethnicity.
There's been a lot of confusion about whether Zimmerman is 'white' or 'Hispanic.' He's both. White is a racial category and Hispanic is an ethnic category. This is why someone descended from Cuba via Africa from back in the 18th century when African slaves were transported to the Caribbean to work the sugar cane and tobacco fields would typically identify today on the US Census as Black Hispanic (black and Hispanic at the same time). This is why someone whose ethnic heritage is more closely tied with indigenous Latin America via Spanish imperialism would typically identify as White Hispanic (white and Hispanic at the same time). And of course someone who hails directly from Spain would typically identify as 'white,' like other Caucasian Europeans. Zimmerman is white Hispanic. We can dispute these categories or the very assignation of racial categories; but within the racial framework we have--mind you, a framework that is based on social construction--there's nothing wrong with labeling Zimmerman a white guy.
Of course, some will argue that it's reductive to call Zimmerman a white guy. Shouldn't we also acknowledge that he's Hispanic? I tend to agree; but then again, how often do we demand that a white Irish guy gets called 'white Irish,' a white Italian guy 'white Italian'? Why don't we demand that all 'whites' be identified with an ethnicity in addition to a racial category, like 'white European,' 'white Hispanic,' 'white Anglo-Saxon,' 'white Celtic,' etc.? Because each of these categories is every bit as white as Zimmerman; and Zimmerman is every bit as white as each of these categories.
I've argued for a long time now that the category of 'whiteness' is extremely problematic precisely because it gets imbued with a specifically gentrified white Anglo-Saxon culture to which the vast majority of white people don't belong or identify (including Zimmerman). To put it more simply, people like Mitt Romney are 'white,' while people like Marshal Mathers are 'acting black.' But why should people like Mitt Romney dominate the representation of whiteness? Why can't Eminem represent whiteness too? It's not that all us white people got together and voted on it. It's because whiteness, like blackness, is culturally loaded beyond its (weak) racially descriptive function. This loaded notion of whiteness is precisely why when we accurately call Zimmerman, an Hispanic guy, 'white,' people get confused and can't seem to accept it. Because 'white' and 'Hispanic' are culturally loaded, too; and the identity stereotypes they carry are often incompatible. For many on the left the idea of calling an Hispanic man 'white' comes too dangerously close to eliding the historically protected status of Hispanics as a minority in the US.
The wrench we throw into this, then, is this idea of historically protected status. Racial and ethnic identities aside, there are some components of identity in the US for which, because of historical (which is NOT to say not ongoing) discrimination, we have certain legal and cultural protections for protected groups. Consider, for example, that a white Jew could identify as both white and Jewish (a term with ethnic as well as religious connotations), and be protected as a consequence of historical anti-Semitism. As a white guy Zimmerman isn't protected as such; as an Hispanic he is. By calling Zimmerman white, we don't forfeit whatever protections are due him because he is also Hispanic. But too many people can't seem to see past this fact, and want to put him into one box or the other. In a way, I admit, this is not fair to whiteness, nor to Hispanics. When we persecute Hispanics as 'illegals,' stop and search them (like Zimmerman did Trayvon) without reasonable suspicion, and perpetuate any number of other harmful stereotypes, we prove that 'Hispanic' is and should remain a protected status. But this doesn't mean some whites--like, say, white Hispanics--aren't discriminated against.
To put it simply, we don't have to purge an individual of all his or her whiteness in order to admit that they can be discriminated against. To think this way is to be discriminatory against whiteness, placing it squarely in the evil category, the category of irredeemable status.
What matters much more than Zimmerman's race, however, is Trayvon's. Remember, Trayvon is the innocent dead kid. The innocent dead black kid. If it were Zimmerman in Trayvon's position, we might talk a bit further about whether Zimmerman's Hispanic ethnicity had anything to do with what happened to him. But since Zimmerman got the fairest of fair trials and the best legal defense to be expected--far better than virtually 99% of the rest of the US population--we don't need to question whether race played a role on his end. The real racial issue in this case is about a young black man dressed a certain way being unquestionably profiled as 'suspicious' despite doing nothing wrong. This profiling unquestionably led directly to his tragic death. This is principally where race is very relevant. Not because of the racial dynamic between the shooter and the shot--black cops shoot and beat innocent black kids too--but because of the racial import of Zimmerman's 'suspicion.' How many white kids in hoodies get stopped by police and shot for walking around at night? And just imagine how quickly white people would 'play the race card' and beat the 'reverse-racism' drum were a white kid to get gunned down by a black or brown cop with a demonstrated history of profiling whites?
And when the black community was understandably outraged at what happened, race perceptions again meant that the media had to warn us that we had to fear for 'riots' and disorderly and violent behavior. Like Trayvon, blacks who are justifiably angry about what happened are presumed guilty until proven innocent. So to say race isn't a part of this picture is naive at best, willfully ignorant at worst.
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