Ph.D. Octopus

by David

The University of Cambridge in England is one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious academic institutions. Some of history’s greatest thinkers, including Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Sacha Baron Cohen, are among its alumni. One would think, then, that a university of this import would only offer the most reputable academic awards, grants, and scholarships to assist its students. Not quite.

Take the Elizabeth Kolb Memorial Trust. Sponsored by Fisher House, the University of Cambridge’s Catholic Chaplaincy, the grants of up to 500 pounds, for the purchase of books and other school-related materials, are to be awarded to female Catholic students born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland. But wait, there’s more:

The trust was created in 1958 by the will of Louis Michael Kolb, “in memory of my truly beloved and unforgettable wife Elizabeth”, to give “grants-in-aid to assist worthy girls of the Roman Catholic faith born in the United Kingdom engaged in any particular course of studies and in their living expenses at the Cambridge University, England”. Applicants must be practising Roman Catholics who were born in the United Kingdom or the Republic of Ireland, and must be engaged in any course of studies at the University of Cambridge. Under the terms of the will, preference is to be given to“Roman Catholic girls whose parents or either of them were born in the Jewish faith whether or not such parents shall have remained in the Jewish faith”. (emphasis mine)

So, if you know any British-born practicing Roman Catholic girls whose parents are or were Jews, make sure to get the word out.

by Bronwen

This week I lectured on ‘The First World War and Africa’.  My students seemed to really enjoy the topic, which isn’t surprising; in a course (African History since 1800) where so much is new to first year undergraduates, the First World War is a topic they know quite a lot about and for which they have an extensive frame of reference.  This is because the First World War is constantly talked about here.  Between high school course work on the causes of World War One, and the pervasive cultural memory – enhanced by Downton Abbey and recent BBC miniseries like Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong – students arrive at university with a pretty solid foundation in World War One history.

Obviously, the First World War was pretty devastating to Britain.  Not only did 2.19 per cent of the population die in the war, but over a million and a half servicemen were wounded as well.  Its social and economic impacts in the British and French colonies in Africa were similarly devastating.  Contrast this with America’s 0.13 per cent casualty rate (as a percentage of the population) and its easy to see why this is a topic that has a much greater, more lasting emotional impact here. World War I was the event that catapulted Britain – like it or not – into the modern age. Add to that the historiographical line that has made its way down to the classroom level – the futility and pointlessness of the war – and it becomes clear that all my student essays this term are going to be about the impact of the Great War on Africa.

I think all of this is interesting because, although I feel like I had a really excellent high school history education, and a fantastic undergraduate history education, I arrived in Britain knowing only a few key facts about the First World War: that it had been the first major conflict in which the flame-thrower was used; it gave rise to Egyptian nationalism; and it was a major influence on Hemingway.  My husband was pretty dismayed when I explained that in a lot of American schools, World War I is taught as basically the pre-World War II: the same actors, basically; the same plot-line from an American perspective (we come in late and end the war); and pretty much important (from our perspective) because it lines up the causes of the Second World War.  Obviously this is not the case everywhere in America, and I’m sure that if you chose to focus on this in college, there’s loads of good teaching out there.  But it is possible to come through the American education system without too much emphasis on this conflict.

Despite my explanation, I’m not sure he believed me until we (finally) watched the first season of Boardwalk Empire.  Talking about it afterward, we were commenting that if this had been a story set in Britain at the same time (1920), it would have been all about the war, the changes in society after the war, the crumbling British institutions, etc that are all the fodder for Downton drama [in fact, the first episode of season 2 of Downton drove me nuts a little because they just wouldn't shut up about the war! even though it was supposed to have been going on for a couple of years by that point!].  Instead, the characters who fought in the war are outsiders, are really not supposed to bring it up, and are even shunned a little for having participated (especially for having volunteered).

In fact, the big cultural shared moment that pushed the US into modernity in the way most like World War I for Americans is the Great Depression, an event that really didn’t affect Britain to the same degree.  For both countries, there’s a heyday for the wealthy before an almost hubristic crash, which brings about more equality and more social programs. A recent piece in the FT Magazine by Gillian Tett points out that the reality of economic austerity is much closer for those in Britain than for those in the US precisely because our big cultural shared memory of austerity in America is over a generation ago, while the memory of the pain Britain felt in the 1970s is still relatively fresh.

Perhaps, following on from Gillian Tett, this all helps to explain both countries’ recent behavior, then.  If the First World War is such a dominant theme in British life and education, maybe that explains their unwillingness to get sucked into the entangling alliances of European politics and finance.  And if the Great Depression is a strong cultural memory in America, perhaps the idea of austerity and life before safety nets, and the pre-modernity it implies, makes the total return to Gilded Age politics distasteful enough to prevent too many cuts.  Here’s hoping, at least.

by David

Tony Judt (1948-2010)

While Peter was participating in (and ably chronicling) the Occupy Chicago’s protest of the American Economic Association’s (AEA) annual conference, I stayed behind at the American Historical Association’s (AHA) annual meeting to attend a panel commemorating the late historian Tony Judt.

The similarity and contrast between the two events is revealing. Before succumbing to ALS in 2010, Judt became an intellectual leader to the left, most notably in his moving 2009 NYU address, “What Is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy,” later expanded into a book called Ill Fares the Land. Had he lived, I think Tony Judt would have found a lot to admire in the broader Occupy movement and in this specific protest, for as Peter notes, he was an ardent critic of “economism,” the American cult of efficiency, and he howled against the decline of the welfare state and rising rates of inequality.

On the other hand, a central theme of the Judt retrospective, and of the latter half of Judt’s life, was his militant, strident anti-Marxism. All four panelists, John Dunn (Judt’s professor at King’s College), Marci Shore (eastern European historian at Yale), Peter Gordon (European intellectual historian at Harvard and my undergrad professor), and Timothy Snyder (also an eastern European historian at Yale) made this a major focus on their talks, particularly the last three presenters. Judt would have had no use for the Marxist and anarchist platitudes of the protesters.

Read the rest of this entry »

by Bronwen

On a recent visit to the Houses of Parliament, I was struck by the differences in tone between British and American politicians.  Although there’s still the same rivalry and competition, and certainly in these times of ‘austerity budgets’, a feeling that the stakes are high, there  also seems to be more tempered feeling.  And in a totally admirable way, a sense of a government of novices.  Of course, this is not true, since as we know from Yes, Minister, government is really run by long-serving civil servants here.  But on the political side, the majority of MPs seem to have come to Parliament after another career, Cinncinatus-style, to serve their constituencies. Despite political differences, they can all have a drink together in the members’ bar.  They shout at each other in debates and Prime Minister’s Questions, but at the end of the day, they’re all trying to run a country.  Meanwhile, American politics seems to celebrate the fact that our politicians refuse to even talk civilly to one another.

As my friends here like to point out, the difference is also one of tone: in America, politics and the running of the country is a serious, dramatic business (captured in The West Wing) and in Britain, it’s the butt of jokes (Yes, Minister; The Thick of It).  I feel like this was probably the other way around in the early nineteenth century, maybe particularly under Jackson.  Or maybe that’s just me trying to hold onto an image of a scrappy, underdog America (and an evil British empire?) when in so many ways they have reversed.

But I can’t really do justice to the differences in the system, and how their perceived by both sides, as well as Armando Iannucci can:

by apini

Yesterday’s FT featured a book review by the Conservative operative Danny Kruger.  The book reviewed was The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox, a book that lays out the intellectual framework for ‘Blue Labour’.  Blue Labour is a newish move in the British Labour Party to appeal to middle class and working class voters by shifting to the right (the Tories are blue and Labour is red here) on a number of social issues, particularly immigration, crime, and the welfare state.  It is not unlike the idea of ‘blue dog democrats’ in America in its appeal to somewhat socially conservative, blue collar and middle class voters. I haven’t read the book and this isn’t a counter-review.  Kruger made some interesting statements, though, in defense of the ‘blue’ of Blue Labour.

In terms of the political spectrum as outlined by Kruger, there are both ‘Utopian’ and ‘Nostalgic’ forms of both Labour and Tory ideology.  Blue Labour conforms to the Nostalgic: He reports that Maurice Glasman (one of the leading lights of Blue Labour) ‘wants to rebuild a “Tudor Commonwealth” of freemen, hustings, guilds and guildhalls. The task for Labour, in today’s outsourced and globalised world, is to be “the collective poet” for England, retelling the stories of the nation.’ In contrast, the New Labour of Tony Blair and the Millibands is Whiggish and Utopian.  Kruger points out that the Conservatives have the same two strands of Utopian and Nostalgic ideology.  He rejects the Utopians in both parties and supports the project of Blue Labour for that reason.  He likes that ‘Glasman and Rutherford give hat tips to Burke, Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Conservative elegists who saw the 19th century coming and didn’t like it. Most of all, credit is given to Aristotle – though Moses and Jesus should  also have got a mention too, given that Blue Labour’s worldview is, in large part, Judeo-Christian. Instead of progress, our task is civilisation, the melioration of brokenness.’ Read the rest of this entry »

by apini

I just re-watched Empire Records for the first time since…1998?  It used to be my favorite movie.  It didn’t really hold up as well as I had hoped, but something did stick with me after watching it again.  Remember when we used to pay for stuff in order to stick it to the man?  Like at the end of the movie, where everyone comes along and buys loads of CDs and records and beer in order to keep the store alive in the face of a corporate take-over?

That movie came out in 1995, before anyone really knew what the internet was for and before everything became free.  To my generation, music, movies, news, software all came free from the not-yet-illegal-but-will-be-as-soon-as-the-corporations-figure-it-out services.   For us, getting stuff for free was a right that corporations were trying to deny us.  Couldn’t they see that their models were out of date?  Couldn’t they see that content should be freely available to everyone?  Take that, Corporate America – we’re getting our stuff for free!

It didn’t help that the corporate bad guys were about as square and whiny as David Spade in PCU.  They whined about how being able to get things for free was

cutting into their profits.  As though teenagers care about corporate profitability.  They called what we were doing piracy of all things.  Like piracy’s a bad thing.  And the ‘You wouldn’t steal a car’ ad campaign presumed too much.  They made it so easy to hate them and all the things they stood for, just like Music Town in Empire Records (banning visible tattoos, revealing clothing, loud music, etc).  Newspapers seemed trickier, but Rupert Murdoch was buying them all anyway, right?

So what changed for me?  Why am I sitting here, about to click ‘confirm’ on my New York Times app subscription?  I think it’s for the same reason I just donated to NPR/APM.  And the same reason that I Read the rest of this entry »

by Luce

Just wanted to point out a fantastic, extremely thorough post from Jonathan Jarrett at Cliopatria on details of new governmental higher ed policies and resulting protests in the UK, where the government has decided to cut its subsidy of teaching by 80% overall and 100% in the Humanities:

This will, ineluctably, mean the raising of tuition fees on new students, a massive consequent rise in the cost of higher education and its consequent restriction to those who can pay to a much greater extent than at present….If you believe in meritocracy, equal access, a level playing field and so on, there is no way not to be angry about this. If you believe that higher education contributes something to a person, and that academic research and teaching are worth something, this is an attack on that belief, a belief which is clearly not shared by a powerful part of the current government.

Jarrett documents protests in Cambridge and Oxford which I think he rightly sees as sign that the UK government has radicalized a student body that had been very sleepy before. Sustained occupations and protests went on for a week at Cambridge a month or so ago.

You should also for sure read an essay in the London Review of Books by Stefan Collini on the Lord Browne report, which has been a key instigator in the dramatic shift the UK has taken in its funding scheme for univerisites, but most significantly in its approach to the underlying value of education itself:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). Instead, we should think of it as a lightly regulated market in which consumer demand, in the form of student choice, is sovereign in determining what is offered by service providers (i.e. universities).

While I am all for student voice in university government and teaching, a thing that the UK has done much better than its American counterparts with a tradition of student unions, the idea that higher education should pander to the financially-driven demands of its undergraduate population is  ludicrous. Academic critique and original analysis for one depend on an educational system that protects diversity of argument [manifested within a variety of disciplines and offerings] against a contemporary discourse that can tend toward the totalizing. And secondly, if you shape your curriculum according to the perceived desires of your students you reify them into their current incarnations — you take away the opportunity for them to grow. Without that opportunity I’d likely be sitting on the 20th floor of a corporate law office across from Rockefeller Center right now.

Not to get dramatic (though the situation seems bizarre enough), but I’m going to go ahead and quote some Dialectic of Enlightenment on this one:

Subjectivity has given way to the logic of the allegedly indifferent rules of the game, in order to dictate all the more unrestrainedly. Positivism, which finally did not spare thought itself, the chimera in a cerebral form, has removed the very last insulating instance between individual behavior and the social norm. The technical process into which the subject has objectified itself after being removed from the consciousness, is free of the ambiguity of mythic thought as of all meaning altogether, because reason itself has become the mere instrument of the all-inclusive economic apparatus.

[Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (Verso, 1979 ed.), p. 30; orig published 1944 as Dialektik der Aufklärung]

Update: Thanks to Greg for pointing out Simon Head’s great essay in the New York Review of Books, which [rightly] argues that the “alliance between the public and private sector has become a threat to academic freedom in the UK, and a warning to the American academy about how its own freedoms can be threatened”

Texas A&M University of College Station, Texas, provides an extreme example of a teaching factory in the making. For the academic year 2008–2009 each faculty member at Texas A&M was given a “profit and loss account” by the university administration, where the “loss” of the faculty member’s salary was or was not offset by teaching revenues brought in by the faculty member in the form of “semester credit hours.” Professors were in the red when their salary “loss” exceeded their teaching revenues. A professor’s research and publication record, and the value of research grants he or she might have received, did not figure in the profit and loss calculations. So Professor Chester Dunning, a tenured historian of Russia with a distinguished research and publication record, was nonetheless judged to be a $26,863 “lossmaker” for the university because his total salary plus benefits of $112,138 well exceeded the $85,275 he attracted in semester credit hours.

By Wiz

I’m normally a tolerant person, and generally welcome immigration. It’s what makes America great and all. But recently, some of you may have noticed, there have been groups of foreign radicals, zealots known as exponents of terrorism and violence who have infiltrated our shores, even showing up here in Manhattan, near the sensitive location of Ground Zero.

I’m talking, of course, about the English.

Specifically, the English Defence League, who rallied over the weekend opposed to the construction of an Islamic community center blocks away from Ground Zero. They’re a truly noxious group of people, who intentionally exacerbate conflicts between Islamic citizens and others.

Outside Agitators

A group of them were allowed to come to America to protest. Good for America for letting them in, we shouldn’t be blocking any ideas no matter how hateful. But think for a second if an analagous group of Muslims from some other country wanted to come to protest something in New York City. I’m sure they would have no problems getting past customs.

by Wiz

Because I love a good nasty book review…

I haven’t read Tony Blair’s new book, nor, I admit, am I likely to. And obviously a writer who goes by the tag line “lenin” isn’t exactly a dispassionate one. But I encourage everyone to read this post reviewing Tony Blair’s memoirs, titled, cutely, “Tony Blair Must Die.”
Favorite lines:

Bless the former PM for reminding us why we despise every sordid molecule of him. Few British leaders apart from Margaret Thatcher have been so completely loathed….To his war crimes, he adds crimes against language and taste. It is appropriate, perhaps, that one of the monsters of our age should communicate his de profundis to us in a style befitting the morning television chat show. The matey populism, the chattiness, and the familiar cliche-riddled inarticulacy, is surely the fitting idiom for a thoroughly modern serial killer. But there’s something else – the discursive style suggests that Blair probably made use of a ghost writer who transcribed his waffling while the former premiere gurgled from the shower or expatiated from the back seat of a limo. Blair would deny this, and has complained that Robert Harris was a ‘cheeky fuck’ for suggesting that he was such a lightweight as to require a ghost-writer. A plausible alternative is that he used a team of monkeys with typewriters and some unfortunate editors had to piece together the smarmiest copy.

Almost as enjoyable as Matt Taibbi’s reviews of Thomas Friedman…

by Weiner

So apparently there’s an election in England today. I can’t profess to know a great deal about English politics. As a progressive, I suppose I’d like to see some sort of coalition between Labour and Lib-Dems. But what the hell do I know?

One thing I’ve been hearing a lot about though is the issue of electoral reform, how the Lib Dems will be vying for a shift to a proportional representation system, rather than the “first past the post” system they have know, where the winner in a particular riding (or do they call it district) gets the seat if he or she gets the majority of the votes, and all the votes for other candidates count for nothing.

This is also the current system in Canada for electing Prime Minister. And while the United States can use its fair share of electoral reform, I wonder if people are as in to this in Canada. I mean certainly these people are. I confess I haven’t been keeping up with Canadian coverage of the English elections. Do Canadians care about this issue? I have to say it would be nice if my NDP vote in my riding, a Liberal stronghold, would finally count for something.