Heather Mac Donald on a company filling the knowledge gaps left by modern academia:
The company offers a treasure trove of traditional academic content that undergraduates paying $50,000 a year may find nowhere on their Club Med–like campuses. This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans, Women in American History, 1600–1900, or Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs, but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck. A Great Courses customer, by contrast, can choose from a cornucopia of American history not yet divvied up into the fiefdoms of race, gender, and sexual orientation, with multiple offerings in the American Revolution, the constitutional period, the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, and the intellectual influences on the country’s founding. There are lessons here for the academy, if it will only pay them heed. […]
So totalitarian is the contemporary university that professors have written to Tom Rollins [founder of Great Courses], complaining that his courses are too canonical in content and do not include enough of the requisite “silenced” voices. It is not enough, apparently, that identity politics dominate college humanities departments; they must also rule outside the academy. Of course, outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like Queering the Alamo, say, can’t compete with Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.
At which point, readers may wish to revisit the mighty works of Duke’s Professor Pete Sigal – among them, Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism and Anthropological Knowing and Transsexuality and the Floating Phallus.
Via Jeff and not entirely unrelated, Jack Cashill on the Obamas:
Scarier than Obama’s style, however, is his thinking. A neophyte race-hustler after his three years in Chicago, Obama is keen to browbeat those who would “even insinuate” that affirmative action rewards the undeserving, results in inappropriate job placements, or stigmatises its presumed beneficiaries.
In the case of Michelle Obama, affirmative action did all three. The partners at Sidley Austin learned this the hard way. In 1988, they hired her out of Harvard Law under the impression that the degree meant something. It did not. By 1991, Michelle was working in the public sector as an assistant to the mayor. By 1993, she had given up her law license. Had the partners investigated Michelle’s background, they would have foreseen the disaster to come. Sympathetic biographer Liza Mundy writes, “Michelle frequently deplores the modern reliance on test scores, describing herself as a person who did not test well.” She did not write well, either. Mundy charitably describes her senior thesis at Princeton as “dense and turgid.” The less charitable Christopher Hitchens observes, “To describe [the thesis] as hard to read would be a mistake; the thesis cannot be ‘read’ at all, in the strict sense of the verb. This is because it wasn’t written in any known language.”
Mrs Obama’s exercise in eye-watering narcissism can be puzzled over here.
Also vaguely related: I’ve been listening to Radio 4’s rural soap The Archers, in which teen eco-warrior and grand enunciator Pip has just received her A-level results – “a B and two Cs.” She is therefore, naturally, going to university.
By all means add your own.
I’ve been listening to Radio 4’s rural soap The Archers,
Er, why?
“Er, why?”
Long car journeys. Through the countryside.
Hey, I’m complicated.
Here’s one. Policing the ‘peaceful’ Notting Hill carnival…
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/londoners-discover-that-they-can-have-a-good-time-without-rioting/
“DEDICATION
To Mom, Dad, Craig, and all of my special friends:
Thank-you for loving me and always making me feel good about myself.”
Well, wasn’t that nice of them.
Michelle Obama’s multisyllabic bitchfest – stuck her head up her ar$e and described the view in 50 pages of double-space.
“Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs”
“Queering the Alamo”
“Ethnopornography”
Actually, I think these academicians deserve praise for being honest about themselves: they all sound like they write their courses with one hand down their trousers.
lovegoats,
Well, it takes remarkable unrealism and self-preoccupation to write a degree thesis that’s in effect about yourself and how difficult it is to be a middle-class black woman in one of the most comfortable, privileged and racially coddling environments in human history.
John,
As I said in the post about Pete Sigal, you can’t help thinking his talents would be more suited to churning out genre-bending homoerotic romps filled with bare-chested marines and spear-wielding savages. Which would at least be a more honest living than his current position.
David, I recommend Radio Five. I’ve long since discovered that Jimmy Arnfield beats the hell out of a tired soap which has as much to do with country life as ‘Spooks’ has to do with the realities of counter-intelligence.
sackcloth,
I started listening to The Archers ironically, as it were, but I’ve a horrible feeling I’m now invested in it. I can name most of the characters.
The ‘City Journal’ piece is fantastic, particularly the following:
‘The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’ ” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.”’
David, I teach military and diplomatic history as part of my job, and what strikes me in UK academia is that while both fields are viewed with disdain by many bien-pensant lecturers they remain popular with students. It is quite striking that ‘queer theory’, po-mo and other fads survive in academia despite – not because of – student attitudes.
You might also want to read the following:
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2008/04/03/why-dont-colleges-teach-military-history_print.html
sackcloth,
Thanks, will add it to my list.
I’m pretty sure “Queering the Alamo” is an unlawful act in Texas.
Peeing on it sure as hell is.
Well according to the wisdom of GySgt Hartmann, only steers and queers come from Texas ;o)
A good thing about the “great stagnation” is that some of the worst abuses of post-colonial post-modern post-intellectual ultra-political scholarship may be brought to heal. Students might actually start demanding value for their money.
To be fair, I didn’t find the future FLotUS’s language anywhere near as opaque as the academic charlatans you have quoted here. This is based on skimming half dozen random paragraphs in the first 30-odd pages.
OTOH, I found several obvious writing errors (“predominate” for “predominant”, “questionning”, “reconstruction” – uncapitalized – for the post-Civil War, period, “desparation”).
I don’t fault her for coining neologisms to refer to people with particular attitude clusters – it saved a lot of typing.
I do wonder what there was in this thesis to make the University of Chicago give her a $100,000/year job as “Director of Diversity Outreach” (and a subsequent raise to $300,000/year). Her performance in the job must have been mindblowing. When she departed in 2009, the U of C didn’t even try to find a replacement.
Rich: that her thesis is not as opaque as the writings of, say, Jacques Lacan or Luce Iragary or Gilles Deleuze is not to confer any merit on her work. That her writing is more comprehensible does not mask the fact that it reads like it was written by a simpleton. If it were written at the late high-school stage its vapid pretentiousness and ungrammatical meandering might possibly be excused as the greenness of an as-yet incompletely formed mind and the necessary pomposity of youth. But it’s not. This is the major contribution to the academic output of a student in her final year of study at one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It’s so sub-par as to be insulting – and not just to us, but to Michelle Obama herself.
Rich,
“I do wonder what there was in this thesis to make the University of Chicago give her a $100,000/year job as ‘Director of Diversity Outreach’…”
It’s hard to see much merit in Mrs Obama’s thesis, unless narcissism and unrealism are now considered credentials. But the “diversity” industry does employ quite a few racists. To say nothing of obnoxious and cartoonish idiots and opportunist parasites. And these shortcomings are not coincidental, they’re a function of the job.
Which may answer your question in a roundabout way.
“I ought to have looked up the Manhattan Institute [City Journal’s publisher] before I replied to your first e-mail,” he wrote. “I cannot in good conscience contribute in any way to any project associated with an institution which rejects everything I believe. It says something about the undeclared civil war in U.S. life that I have to say that to you.”
I wonder what exactly he thinks it says about the “undeclared civil war in U.S. life…”
The City Journal is, of course, a favorite amongst of the world’s super-villains and people with secret underground lairs.
‘I ought to have looked up the Manhattan Institute [City Journal’s publisher] before I replied to your first e-mail,” he wrote. “I cannot in good conscience contribute in any way to any project associated with an institution which rejects everything I believe. It says something about the undeclared civil war in U.S. life that I have to say that to you’.
A couple of years back I got an invitation from Press TV (the English language service of the Iranian state broadcasting agency) asking me to attend a study debate on Iraq. I told them to poke it, because I didn’t want to be associated with (1) the mouthpiece of a regime which murdered its critics and (2) any institution (such as Press) which supported Holocaust denial.
I wonder if the academic in question would have said ‘yes’ if he’d received the same invite?
“The City Journal is, of course, a favourite amongst the world’s super-villains and people with secret underground lairs.”
Heh. And actual, classical liberalism is indigestible to so many of academia’s so-called “liberals.”
Re. Michelle O’s writing. Her hubby is also hardly Shakespeare. Try the…er…only example of his unaided penmanship yet discovered: http://www.hlrecord.org/2.4475/record-retrospective-obama-on-affirmative-action-1.577511?pagereq=1
And people wonder why his university transcript and thesis are firmly under wraps…
Michelle’s thesis should have been entitled: “Is it cos I is Black?”
And these shortcomings are not coincidental, they’re a function of the job.
Which may answer your question in a roundabout way.
The question was a rhetorical one.
Mrs. Obama was hired by U of C when Mr. Obama became a state senator. Her salary was trebled when Mr. Obama became a U.S. Senator.
And since she departed to take up the duties of First Lady, the position has been vacant.
I rather doubt that anyone even looked at her thesis.
It might be interesting to look at the correspondence and other work product of her office during her employment at U. of C.
If any.
Why not link to some of Cashill’s other work, such as his theory that Obama is the illegitimate son of Jimi Hendrix?
At this point linking to Goldstein is little better than toying with the mentally ill.
I should have commented on this remark as well:
‘In its emphasis on teaching, the company differs radically from the academic world, where “teaching is routinely stigmatized as a lower-order pursuit, and the ‘real’ academic work is research,” notes Allen Guelzo, an American history professor at Gettysburg College’.
This is a curse. Good research feeds good teaching, and vice versa. A tutor who can inject his or her own work into a lecture or seminar can show students that they’re not just regurgitating texts, and that they have had a proactive role in expanding (even to a miniscule degree) the bounds of their discipline. In turn, interaction with students – in the form of Q&A, classroom debate, criticisms and insights – should actually spur research and inspire academics to be more critical and rigorous in their own studies …
… at least, that’s what’s supposed to be happening.