Ph.D. Octopus

by David

Yale Quarterback Patrick Witt aka Captain Douche

As a Harvard alum, I suppose I could take some obscene pleasure in the recent revelations about Yale quarterback Patrick Witt. You know, the guy who chose to play in the Harvard-Yale game instead of attend his Rhodes Scholarship interview? Yalies celebrated his upholding team and school loyalty over personal prestige–even as Harvard crushed Yale in The Game, 45-7. Except, according to this New York Times story, Witt rescinded his Rhodes application not because of the scheduling conflict, but because of a sexual assault allegation issued against him by a fellow student.

This was already a bizarre tale. Witt’s coach at Yale, Tom Williams, had lied about having been a Rhodes Scholarship candidate himself to suggest that he was in a prime position to advise his star quarterback. Then we find out that the campus paper, the Yale Daily News, had known about the sexual assault charges and been sitting on the story for months.

The thing is, I don’t take any pleasure in this at all (nor should anyone). Instead, we should lament the perils of athlete worship, which has reared its ugly head recently, most notably in the rioting of Penn State students over the firing of the late and disgraced Joe Paterno, protector of alleged child-rapist Jerry Sandusky.

I don’t know if Witt is guilty of sexual assault. But as the NY Times piece indicates from his prior arrests, he has a clear record of extreme douchebaggery. What we have here is a problem of the over-emphasis of collegiate athletics, and particularly the worship of male college athletes. These are people whose already inflated egos are fed from the moment they arrive on campus. This problem can lead to an equally inflated sense of privilege. Sometimes, this privilege just creates more and bigger douchebags. But other times, it can create atmosphere where real crimes go unnoticed, unreported, or unpunished.

By Peter

Education is increasingly become a central domain over which class conflict is being fought in the 21st century. Will corporate “Education Reform” succeed in privatizing our nation’s high schools, turning them into union-free charter-schools? Will there be any affordable public colleges in ten years? Will the burden of education be borne by society? Or by individuals who must go massively into debt to finance their own education? Is high-quality education a social good that benefits the whole community? Or is it a commodity, a form of individual social capital that each person should finance themselves through debt?

In this light we see the devastating cuts to public higher education:

Total state support for higher education declined 7.6 percent from the 2011 to the 2012 fiscal years, according to an annual report from the Grapevine Project, at Illinois State University, and the State Higher Education Executive Officers. As a whole, state spending on higher educa­tion­—after being supported by the recovery-act money for three budget years—is now nearly 4 percent lower than it was in the 2007 fiscal year. Twenty-nine states appropriated less for colleges this year than they did five years ago.

As public colleges that were formerly free or cheap increasingly rely on donations and tuition to fix their budgets the line between public and private college further erodes. Increasingly the only difference between, say UCLA, the public school, and USC, the private school, is that UCLA gets a nominal portion of their budget from the state. At both schools, of course, students can only even come close to affording tuition through back-door Federal subsidies, via Pell Grants and various student loan deals. The average student starts life burdened with $25,000 in student loan debt (and going up every year). Its very plausible for a student to attend a public university (like say $22,000 a year UConn) and have almost $100,000 of debt when they are 21.

All of which brings out the generational warrior in me. If I hear another old white Fox News watching person talking about how he had no problem making it, back when tuition was negligible and good jobs were aplently, I’m going to fucking lose it.

The roots go much deeper.

By Julian

Last week, Newt Gingrich reinvigorated his presidential campaign with a fiery appeal to conservative victimhood. Questions about his past infidelities, Gingrich explained, reflected the liberal media’s efforts to destroy the conservative movement. “I’m tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” he thundered. Cue the multiple standing ovations from the rapt audience of South Carolina conservatives. Never mind the fact that Gingrich had helped build his career by denouncing Bill Clinton’s commitment to “family values” while he himself engaged in extra-marital affairs. For those in this audience, all that mattered was that they had found a politician willing to voice their grievances against the all-powerful liberal establishment.

The right-wing populism that Gingrich so effectively marshaled at last week’s debate is often contrasted with a more reasonable brand of conservative thinking that supposedly flourished in a past golden age. In this declension narrative, touted by Mark Lilla in his controversial review of Corey Robin’s new book, The Reactionary Mind, a sophisticated conservative intellectual tradition has recently descended into the swamplands of populist demagoguery. As Lilla explains, “Most of the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.”

The problem with this view, as others have pointed out, is that American conservatives have been bashing the “liberal elite” now for going on six decades.  It’s part of their DNA. William Buckley Jr., the most influential intellectual in the postwar conservative movement, might have rejected the conspiracy theorists at the John Birch Society, but he also supported massive resistance to the Civil Rights Movement, wrote a book defending Senator McCarthy, and praised the fascist government in Franco’s Spain. While he could be witty and charming, Buckley was also merciless in attacking a liberal elite that he believed had come to dominate (and enervate) American society since the New Deal.

In fact, Buckley launched his career in 1951 with a book that claims liberals had used “academic freedom” as a tool to monopolize higher education and suppress conservative thought. During a period in which over 100 professors lost their jobs because of the Second Red Scare, Buckley asserts that conservatives were academia’s true victims. In God and Man at Yale he also calls for the elimination of peer review and tenure in favor of a system that would allow those who pay for colleges and universities—typically parents and alumni—to determine their ideological content: “For in the last analysis, academic freedom must mean the freedom of men and women to supervise the educational activities and aims of the schools they oversee and support.” Universities needed to be run by the people who paid for them, not a band of unaccountable academics. It’s hard to imagine a critique more populist in character.

To be fair, right-wing appeals to populism explain why conservative intellectuals helped inspire a mass movement rather than a club for disenchanted, antediluvian curmudgeons. Still it’s worth remembering that intellectuals such as Buckley gained fame and notoriety by providing learned support for causes such as McCarthyism, Massive Resistance, and the firing of liberal faculty at Ivy League Universities. They provide a blueprint for today’s Newt Gingrichs, not an antidote.

by Weiner

When I first read this piece by Misha Glouberman in The Paris Review about being a Montreal Jew at Harvard, I felt an instant rush of familiarity. Was Glouberman not telling my own story about 20 years earlier? I felt as if I could have written the first paragraph:

I grew up in Montreal and went to an upper-middle-class Jewish day school where kids had parents who maybe owned a carpet store or maybe were dentists. And then I went to Harvard for college. And it was pretty weird.

It certainly seemed weird at the time. And sometimes it still does. But upon further reflection, I realize that it wasn’t that weird. Sure, Harvard was and is a unique institution. I suspect going there for college is a very different experience than going to Penn State or UCLA or any university in Canada, England or elsewhere in the world. But it’s probably not all that different from going to another Ivy League school, or Stanford or MIT.

More important, in one crucial way, Harvard is like everywhere else: there are good people and bad people, interesting people and boring people, and yes, even smart people and dumb people. In fact, I’d argue that the Montreal Jewish community is a far weirder environment than Harvard was. I’ll try to explain what I mean by examining Glouberman’s essay in more depth, and sharing some of my Montreal, and especially my Harvard experiences.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

It’s already known that for Janet Malcolm, no profession is sacred, not even her own. Yet while remaining hyper-aware of her role as journalist in her latest book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, she also assumes the mantle and mentality (with intense psychological portraits) of lawyer, judge, and executioner, not to mention father of the dead, daughter of the accused, state-appointed law guardian, and alleged murderess. Some might call it a performative contradiction, but then again she sees all the characters in the trial as performers with deep contradictions. Perhaps she’s merely joining the gang, or perhaps her own performance is intended to highlight the inconsistencies that surround her.

Iphigenia in Forest Hills recounts the murder trial of Mazoltuv Borukhova, a physician and member of the Bukharan Jewish community in Forest Hills in Queens, accused of hiring a hitman to murder her ex-husband after a court ordered their young daughter be transferred into his custody. I recommend it wholeheartedly. About her protagonist, Malcolm writes, “she couldn’t have done it and she must have done it.” This appears on page 32 of 155 pages, and by the end the reader is left with no further conclusion than that. Either we remain satisfied with this impossibility, or we start doubting Janet Malcolm’s authority. But why doubt Malcolm’s authority rather than someone else’s? Take the judge for instance: Robert “Hang ‘em” Hanophy, whom one juror (apparently hand-selected for his gray everydayness) says (on page 96) is “real and down to earth and serious about his job. And funny. He had a good sense of humor.” But nearly 90 pages before, Malcolm has already described Hanophy as “a man of seventy-four with a small head and a large body and the faux-genial manner that American petty tyrants cultivate.”

I keep noting the timeline of the book because it tells us something about what Malcolm’s doing here. Malcolm doesn’t ask the reader to reach his or her own conclusions as testimony is laid out; she doesn’t pander to expectations of objectivity. The jurors and judge are already biased toward actions and behaviors that seem legitimate to their own understandings, and Malcolm isn’t about to let them get the monopoly on prejudice. Yet while Malcolm gives her narrative precedence, the nature of the written form allows her thoughts to become interwoven with those of other characters’; the reader flips back and forth to re-read a  Malcolm characterization of someone an interviewee has presented in a very different light. And so Malcolm’s own narrative can be retroactively challenged. While I was initially convinced by Malcolm’s claim that Borukhova both couldn’t have and had to have killed her ex-husband, at some point I began to doubt that she couldn’t have. Despite this deep paradox, Malcolm is more convinced that she knows Borukhova’s character than I am (though in a recent Paris Review interview, Malcolm admits, “As I went along I felt I undestood her less and less… [Borukhova] becomes who you imagined she is.”) Flawed legal evidence abounded, and Borukhova appeared to be a successful career woman, a devoted mother, and quite possibly an abused wife, but none of this convinced me that she couldn’t have done it.  Perhaps this makes me the radical relativist to the contrarian Malcolm, characterizations that make generational sense given her birth in 1934 and mine in 1983.

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by Nemo

Most observers seem to agree that the CUNY Board of Trustees made a boneheaded move by vetoing an honorary degree that the faculty and administration of John Jay College had planned to award to the playwright Tony Kushner. When you have people like Jeffrey Goldberg and Ed Koch attacking you for going too far with your “pro-Israel” activism, you know you probably went overboard. In fact, the trustees themselves seem to have realized the error in their ways, since they have now decided to overturn their previous decision.

Tony Kushner

Now, there were many reasons to criticize the board’s initial move to deny Kushner the degree. These include its unprecedented heavy-handedness (this was the first time that the board had overruled a motion for an honorary degree), its gross mischaracterization of Kushner’s views on Israel, and the obvious attempt it represented to narrow the range of acceptable debate on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Even some of Kushner’s harshest critics believed that the vote to deny the honorary degree was patently unfair and gave Zionism a bad name. This is to their credit.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Weiner

In one of the better of the 8 billion pieces about reforming American universities, Peter Brooks in the New York Review of Books (hey, that rhymes!) runs down what’s wrong with many of the well-known critiques. We’ve been through some of these arguments before at PhD Octopus, so I won’t rehash them here now. Instead, I’d like to point to one sentence that struck me in Brooks’ piece, when discussing Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’ contribution to the discussion, Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids–And What We Can Do About It. Brooks notes:

They want universities to… abolish varsity athletics (good again, but even William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton and of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who has studied this subject more deeply than anyone I know of, has given up on that reasonable but impossible task).

This passage hit home, especially since I just witnessed, in person, one of the greatest sporting moments I’ve ever experienced: the Harvard Crimson men’s basketball team defeating the evil Princeton Tigers for at least a share of this year’s Ivy League title (see Kyle Casey‘s wicked dunk above).

You see, I’m a big sports fan. I grew up living and dying with the Montreal Expos (mostly dying), fell in love with professional boxing, and have tended to enjoy most sporting events, always rooting for the underdog. At Harvard, I rooted for the Crimson, and also covered sports for The Crimson, our daily paper. I covered a variety of sports, though my main beats were wrestling and women’s hockey. In my sophomore year I travelled to Duluth, Minnesota where the women’s hockey team, staffed with several Canadian and American Olympians, lost in overtime in the National Championship game to the hometown University of Minnesota-Duluth. Despite the devastating loss, it was a great experience.

As time went on, however, I became a bit disillusioned with varsity athletics. I came to disdain the athlete worship I detected on campus, and felt that Harvard and other elite schools were compromising too much of their academic standards in admitting some star recruits. I read William Bowen’s The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, and Bowen’s follow-up, with Sarah Levin, Reclaiming the Game, and I sympathized with their arguments that the intercollegiate athletics rendered university admissions too biased, and had a pernicious effect on college academics and campus life.

And yet, when I stormed the court last night following Harvard’s win, when I congratulated freshman guard and St. Bruno, Quebec native Laurent Rivard in French (Rivard took a key charge in the waning moments of the game),  I felt one of those sports-euphoria moments that made me forget the institutional criticisms of Bowen’s books. College sports, at their best, provide a sense of school spirit and camaraderie that professional sports can rarely match.

I haven’t made up my mind on this issue. It will probably depend on my mood, and on the circumstances. But last night, I was definitely in favour of keeping varsity sports around. And I still am this morning.

by Weiner

My day has been made. As The Crimson reports, Tyra Banks has enrolled in Harvard Business School.

Of course it’s not a regular MBA, but the “Executive Education Owner/President Management Program (OPM),” some three-week stint every three years for people who have already made it rich. But so what? And frankly, what the hell do the business gurus of HBS have to teach Tyra, really? She’s already done better in the business world than any of them ever could. She should be teaching them how to smize and look fierce.

Also, I attended a taping of the Tyra Banks show a couple years ago, and it was awesome.

For those interested in Banks, this New York Times Magazine article is quite informative.

by Weiner

Everybody and their mother has been commenting on Amy Chua and her recent Wall Street Journal article “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.” David Brooks tried his hand at it, but came off sounding silly. Columnists and bloggers have been putting in their two cents. Chua has tried to clarify the point of her article, which is excerpted from her book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.

I just finished the book, and have a few quick thoughts about this:

1) The book is different than the article in the sense that you do see a narrative, and something resembling character development in Chua and especially her younger daughter Lulu. Still, Chua comes off as pretty nutty, but at least moderately self-aware.

2) As Matt Yglesias notes, “many less extreme parents subscribe to some version of this ‘video games bad, classical music good’ view of the world.” Chua takes this to an absurd and possibly cruel extreme, but her basic values are not abnormal among the well educated middle class in the United States.

3) I think that Tenured Radical is right that the real question we should pose here is whether this academically-oriented classical-music emphasizing middle-class parenting is a good thing, or should be applied universally to all children. She laments the fate of “kids who are academically unremarkable but are pushed to excel in conventional ways when they might be happier devoting themselves to sports, art, dance, cooking or hedge fund management.” She goes on to note:

the part that really fascinates me is that Chua’s desire for rote forms of perfection are being derided in a society that is, in fact, devoted to increasingly unimaginative ideas about what counts as intellectual life.  My generation and the several that have followed have mostly gutted anything that counts for progressive education.  As if that was not enough, we have even taken what used to be fairly standard and unremarkable forms of critical pedagogy and gutted those in favor of a national standardized testing agenda.  Languages, classics, art and music have been stripped from secondary curricula.  Students no longer read for fun; they read to satisfy the AP requirement.  We talk, talk, talk about excellence — but we can’t say what it means, beyond winning admission to a “selective” school.  Although Chua isn’t a person I would choose to be my mother (is there a world where you get to choose your mother?) what she describes actually reflects our current winner-take-all philosophy of what education should look like at its best.

Chua has a particularly narrow vision of success, insisting that her daughters can only play the violin or piano, cannot be in the school play, and should not really care about their social life. Obviously, other instruments are worthwhile; so are activities like drama, art, sports, and creative writing. Making friends is valuable too. So is having fun.

4) Insofar as that academically-oriented form of parenting is accepted, there is no question that Asians, broadly speaking, have mastered it. As Chua appropriately admits, there are plenty of Asians and Chinese people who employ “Western” parenting techniques, and plenty of non-Chinese who use the same methods she does (though probably not to that insane extreme), but statistics show that Asian-Americans, especially those of Chinese, Korean, and east Indian origin, do better scholastically. Politically correct people who disagree are living in denial. The secret is not genetic, it’s work ethic. These kids work harder in school. Culture and history matter. When Jewish, Italian, Polish and other immigrants came to the United States 100+ years ago, they left under conditions that had some differences and similarities, but they also came with different cultures, and thus had different academic and economic outcomes in America. The same is true of the post-1960s immigrants from Asia and elsewhere, and of the second and third generations from a variety of lands. Rather than deny this, we should try to explain it.

Of all the commentary on this piece, perhaps the best comes from my the publication I used to write for, The Harvard Crimson. Sophomore Nataliya Nedzhvetskaya argues for a middle road, for “authoritative” rather than “authoritarian” parenting. She notes:

Sorry, Amy Chua, but “Chinese mothers” are not superior. Instead, parents who promote the value of education without sacrificing their children’s autonomy are. It would be ideal to combine the best of both worlds and stress academics while giving them room for growth. It would be best to make them understand that there are more important things in life than impersonating Kim Kardashian, but let them watch enough TV to know who Kim Kardashian is. Not only will they turn out to be smart, competent human beings, but they’ll be independent, socially adept, and self-motivated.

Maybe I’m a sucker for a Kim Kardashian reference, but that balance captures my ideal perfectly. Soon, I’ll have another post about Amy Chua, looking at “The Jewish Angle” (but of course). But since I don’t have an Amy Chua breathing down my neck, it’s not ready yet.

by Weiner

Growing up in Canada, I was never required to read Mark Twain, so I never did (I do remember the Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes where he appears as Samuel Clemens though). With the controversy surrounding the editing of the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I’ve decided to go out and read it. I’ve also realized that as someone who aspires to teach American history, this particular controversy is rather important to me. I know I don’t support the changing of the text, but I do think that teaching the “n-word” is difficult, no matter what the race of the students or teacher. With that, I link to this outstanding essay from Autumn 2005 issue of The American Scholar, “Teaching the N-Word,” by University of Vermont English professor Emily Bernard. Here’s a taste:

Over the next 30 minutes or so, Eric and I talk about “nigger.” He is uncomfortable; every time he says “nigger,” he drops his voice and does not meet my eyes. I know that he does not want to say the word; he is following my lead. He does not want to say it because he is white; he does not want to say it because I am black. I feel my power as his professor, the mentor he has so ardently adopted. I feel the power of Randall Kennedy’s book in my hands, its title crude and unambiguous. Say it, we both instruct this white student. And he does.

Read the whole thing. And also read the post from the US Intellectual History blog by Lauren Kientz Anderson which directed me to Bernard’s article.