Urban ethics and theory

So, here’s a rough recap of what went on at the Chronicle of Higher Education, in bullet form:

1. The Chronicle published one of their puff pieces on the Young Guns of Black Studies. It’s behind a paywall, but the teaser tells you quite a bit: it’s one of their little anointing articles, but in this case, it’s about a group of young scholars from a new PhD program in Black Studies. I hate these CHE featurettes in general because there’s way too damn much fame-seeking and celeb culture in the academy already, yours truly included, but black scholars should, in general, get as many props as possible just for putting up with the rest of us.

Now, in reality, these dissertations all sound interesting enough, particularly that first one about Chisolm and Jordan. Barbara Jordan was one of my first role models.

2. This was followed up by this swaggering attempt at a takedown by Naomi Schaefer Riley, who, after sniffing that the dissertations were all irrelevant and useless and unworthy of attention, said that these dissertations were proof these programs were, basically, worthless:

The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations. – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Seriously, folks, there are legitimate debates about the problems that plague the black community from high incarceration rates to low graduation rates to high out-of-wedlock birth rates. But it’s clear that they’re not happening in black-studies departments. If these young scholars are the future of the discipline, I think they can just as well leave their calendars at 1963 and let some legitimate scholars find solutions to the problems of blacks in America. Solutions that don’t begin and end with blame the white man.

(Via chronicle.com)

3. And then, when called on her controversial piece, said:

Black Studies, Part 2: A Response to Critics – Brainstorm – The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Finally, since this is a blog about academia and not journalism, I’ll forgive the commenters for not understanding that it is not my job to read entire dissertations before I write a 500-word piece about them. I read some academic publications (as they relate to other research I do), but there are not enough hours in the day or money in the world to get me to read a dissertation on historical black midwifery. In fact, I’d venture to say that fewer than 20 people in the whole world will read it. And the same holds true for the others that are mentioned in the piece.

(Via chronicle.com)

4. This little revelation has caused her to get fired, which has thus made her some kind of darling among some commenters on the academy. I mean, she has freedom of speech, right? This is all just political correctness, right?
Um, no.

First of all, my dissertation had to do with national effing security , people, and I’d bet you $100 that 20 people in the whole world haven’t read my dissertation, either. They read the papers that came out of it. Or at least I desperately hope.

Second of all, the Chronicle is journalism about the academy. And journalists are supposed to to look at evidence. Like reading things, even things you think are boring or beneath you because it has to do with black people.

But more importantly, since when did the argument that your writing is about the academy rather than journalism excuse you from reading the material before you open your big fat gob? Isn’t reading, reflecting, and THEN critiquing kind of what we do? Aren’t there enough sources of uninformed yammer on the internet without scholars adding to it?

Here’s my favorite discussion of this problem, from Timothy Burke, a professor of History at Swarthmore. I quote at length, but his suggestions are so good I can’t stop myself, and I’ll give the excuse that I’m encouraging you to start reading him if you don’t:

Crashing the Pity Party:

If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and work a bit, I think you’ll find that there are important criticisms of Black Studies as field within the field and outside of it, by white authors and black authors alike.

Some suggestions for the person who is genuinely seeking well-considered, ambitious criticisms:

Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity.
Michaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home

Challenging critiques of identity politics and the academic study of identity from a broadly leftward direction–but that should be as interesting and useful a resource for conservatives as anyone else.

Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa
Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism

I would definitely get some flack from colleagues for suggesting the former book, but as long as you understand that Lefkowitz is primarily criticizing a specific branch of thought within Black Studies (Afrocentrism, and specifically forms of Afrocentric scholarship from the 1980s and early 1990s), I think it’s an interesting and important critique. Howe’s critically-focused intellectual history of Afrocentrism will help put the sharp exchanges between Lefkowitz and her critics in a longer and wider perspective.

Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity
Paul Gilroy, Against Race
Hazel Carby, Race Men
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People: A Memoir

I think these authors would not describe these works as rejecting the political project of Black Studies–indeed, they’re all taught and read as part of the canon in the field. But I think it’s possible to read these books as criticizing some prominent aspects of or ideas about identity and blackness, including how the study of those topics has been institutionalized in academic institutions. (Appiah’s dialogue with Amy Gutman in Color Conscious may also be of interest in this vein.)

Stanley Crouch, pretty much all of his non-fiction that isn’t about jazz, but especially The All-American Skin Game
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts
John McWhorter, Losing the Race

Sharp, contrarian critiques of the institutionalization of identity politics, among other things.

Scott Malcolmsen, One Drop of Blood
Leon Wynter, American Skin
Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together
Clarence Walker, Mongrel Nation

All indirectly or directly raising big questions about whether the black or African (or other fixedly racial) subject is the wrong thing to be studying.

More? I can supply it. The point is, you don’t need a shallow, proudly uninformed rejection of Black Studies to participate in a critical evaluation of the field or of scholars within it. 

(Via Easily Distracted)

5. I’m sure Riley will go on to much more lucrative gigs as some money-flush part of the media world picks her up. Read: Palin, Sarah. No need to worry about her.

But sheesh. Why is commenting without reading now seen as a *right* instead the scholarly equivalent of breaking wind in public? Reading and reflecting is central to our g-d jobs, people! If we give up on those tasks, who in the sam hill is going to embody those scholarly tasks in democratic deliberation if not us?

1. Grading
2. The roughly 1,000,000 emails that people feel entitled to send me
3. The fact that I can’t just take time off after graduation because I have some overdue service obligations due to #1
4. Mitt Romney’s statement that he’s rich and he won’t apologize for it. Nobody’s asking you to apologize. They’re debating what’s the fair share of taxes you should pay, which is a perfectly reasonable question for deliberative democrats to ask when facing a deficit, and they are asking about the content of your character and your ability to lead. Try taking both those questions seriously, and it will serve your campaign better than performing for your frat boy buddies who are going to vote for you anyway.
5. Plagiarism
6. The fact I’ve watched all the White Collar available on Netflix
7. Grading
8. Grading
9. The fact I am 1/4 done painting my shutters, so the front of my house looks like crap. People who walk by stop and stare, noting that it looks like crap. I know that, mkay? What, you miss the Pepto Bismol pink shutters and the white primer is such an eyesore you can’t deal? I can’t finish the job yet due to #1 through #100 on my list of things to grade
10. Grading
11. Grading
12. Grading
13. Grading
14. The book I am reading makes no sense and has a sleazy professor character in it. Trust me, if my colleagues and I were *half* as sleazy as the wider public thinks we are, faculty meetings and your classes would be A LOT LESS BORING.
15. Grading
16. Grading
17. Grading
18. Grading
19. Grading
20. The fact I’ve used up my book buying budget for the month and I can’t buy any more books, even as a reward for all this #@!@ing grading
21. Grading
22. Grading
23. Grading
24. Grading
25. Grading
26. Grading
27. Grading
28. Grading
29. I’m going to have to say goodbye to students who have become very very dear to me.

We’re in the midst of finals, and it’s all just ghastly grading, grading grading, which makes your blogger grumpy, grumpy, grumpy.

I’ve been circling around the nonsense blather that is David Levy’s “Do College Teachers Work Hard Enough?” simply because I’m running out of ways to say that people who write these op-eds are generally full of crap. When you do get an op-ed from somebody who has actually done the job, as with Levy, it’s always an administrator who looks down on his faculty. His little missive annoyed me from the title onward. What a loaded question. Have you stopped being a jerk? Logical fallacy 101.

Apparently, though, I get a pass because of where I work:

Such a schedule may be appropriate in research universities where standards for faculty employment are exceptionally high — and are based on the premise that critically important work, along with research-driven teaching, can best be performed outside the classroom. The faculties of research universities are at the center of America’s progress in intellectual, technological and scientific pursuits, and there should be no quarrel with their financial rewards or schedules. In fact, they often work hours well beyond those of average non-academic professionals.

Yessiree. I’m doing important work when I research. The rest of you rabble, however, aren’t working hard enough.

Like I said, I’m running out of rejoinders, and I’m writing this bleary-eyed before my coffee because I spent all day in San Diego teaching high school kids via a college pipeline program (program that takes promising kids from poor neighborhoods), then finally finished today’s teaching prep at 11:30 last night. So yeah: my work day yesterday started with me getting up 5 a.m. and stopping at 11:30; clearly not working hard enough.

All that? That’s all teaching and outreach for the university.

It’s not clear to me whom Levy is even talking about. He’s not talking about people like me because he caveats that he’s not talking about research universities. His experience is at small liberal arts colleges, people who are in the private labor force in many cases. If private universities can not manage their human capital correctly, what exactly is anybody supposed to do about it? Regulate management for private universities? Beyond that, anybody who has taken one class in labor economics would understand that that higher salaries for professors at research universities would have spillovers for salaries elsewhere, including community college teaching.

And finally, can we get real here? The average pay for full professors at community colleges is all of $88K? Oh My God. What are those people doing with all that money? Probably flinging it away on stuff like food and rent and their children’s education. Let’s just put it this way: I wouldn’t want to live in most places in Maryland on $88K a year. Especially when that’s the AVERAGE pay for the *top rank* of my profession; since I’m a woman, my salary is likely to be 70 percent of that, on the lower end of the distribution.

I think it’s interesting how in the WashPo, when it comes to raising income taxes, people making $250K a year “aren’t rich.” But somehow, when somebody makes all of $88K a year, it’s a veritable deluge of money. Grrr.

Ok, I am sure that this can happen. Everything else in the world does.

Because I teach theory, however, I face this particular problem–”you don’t like my politics so I am getting a bad grade”– all the time. I teach both Hayek and Marx (sometimes) during a given year; I say sometimes because I get bored, and there are a lot of urban and planning theorists to learn about Marx or Hayek from. That’s more true with Marx than with Hayek.

So in reality, I don’t care what theorist you draw from to form a position, I just want you to form a reasoned argument. The problem is that today’s civic culture (and not a small amount of journalism) does not differentiate between reasons and opining. A theory professor should.

Most of the time, students skim the books I offer them to work from and then take up an essay filled with vague impressions and uninformed opinions–and then they get a poor score and they blame me and my politics. “These neighborhoods are full of drug addicts. People who think we should support the poor don’t ever consider that most of the people living in poor neighborhoods are drug addicts. Hayek thinks we shouldn’t help drug addicted people. Those people aren’t entitled to help. They need to get jobs and get right with society.”

You score this essay with the D that it deserves, and instead of coming to talk with you about how to do better, the student decides you’re a hairy-legged, close-minded feminist who hates white male Republicans and that’s why he got the grade he got.

A great deal of “These are my beliefs and my beliefs are sacred because they are mine” underscores a lot of today’s politics: think Sarah Palin complaining about how people dared challenge her beliefs during political debate. But having to defend one’s beliefs and preferences are part of engagement; it’s not enough in a pluralistic democracy to run for prom queen based on “These are my beliefs; vote for me because you share those beliefs” because the undecided middle is too numerous and too important. And if being expected to defend your beliefs, rather than just describe them and get a pat on the head, is an insult to you, then pluralistic politics might not be the right career for you. There’s no better way to be disabused of believing the “silent majority” agrees with you than to run for office.

There are ways to make a principled argument about the ravages of drug addiction in particular communities. Like with evidence. Libertarians have discussed drug addiction and the drug trade in depth. One thing one might do is *ask one’s professor for help* if one wanted to learn more about a principle argument from libertarians about the role of addiction versus overpolicing addiction as a source of poverty in communities that have been hit hard by both. One might be directed this piece by Illana Mercer at the Mises Institute to get some ideas for such an essay. (BTW, I think she’s wrong, but it’s a reasoned argument, using evidence and theory, not an unreflexive victim-blaming rant.)

Somehow, Catholic ethicists manage to make principled arguments about the virtues of self-control without calling anybody a “slut.” I wonder how they do that?