professor label

NYT: "Professor is a label that leans to the left."

A pair of sociologists think they may have an answer: typecasting. Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up.

Gets to Bourdeiu classifications thing, also the efforts to construct political identities over generations. Good assignment for CP.

a nation of intellectuals - gasp!

Thomas Sowell in a National Review TV thing, when asked if the US is becoming a nation of intellectuals: "It's a chilling thought."

Possible use in habitus week - the conservatives' problem with higher education is that it places people in an open-minded, tolerant, questioning environment that can re-shape people's political outlooks through their everyday living context. They become intellectuals, and then intellectuals don't vote for reactionary, reality-ignoring policies.

Professionalism and PhDs

Ugh. Great article though. Louis Menand in Harvard Magazine: "The PhD Problem. On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy's self-renewal."

The history department does not ask the mayor or the alumni or the physics department who is qualified to be a history professor. The academic credential is non-transferable (as every Ph.D. looking for work outside the academy quickly learns). And disciplines encourage—in fact, they more or less require—a high degree of specialization. The return to the disciplines for this method of organizing themselves is social authority: the product is guaranteed by the expertise the system is designed to create. Incompetent practitioners are not admitted to practice, and incompetent scholarship is not disseminated.

Since it is the system that ratifies the product—ipso facto, no one outside the community of experts is qualified to rate the value of the work produced within it—the most important function of the system is not the production of knowledge. It is the reproduction of the system. To put it another way, the most important function of the system, both for purposes of its continued survival and for purposes of controlling the market for its products, is the production of the producers. The academic disciplines effectively monopolize (or attempt to monopolize) the production of knowledge in their fields, and they monopolize the production of knowledge producers as well.

Very interesting observation that CP kids would really like this - systems of knowledge, power-knowledge, its production, and the like.

academic sins

From the Times Higher Education: Seven Deadly Sins of the Academy

Two points of interest:

1. possible use with a unit on habitus

2. one item on the list, lust, becomes a great controversy when the writer claims "The fault lies with the females." UH OH.... the folks at Crooked Timber respond here and here. Apparently the author is "a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books". Great.

The Future of Reading

"The Right to Read," by Richard Stallman.

He had to help her—but if he lent her his computer, she might read his books. Aside from the fact that you could go to prison for many years for letting someone else read your books, the very idea shocked him at first. Like everyone, he had been taught since elementary school that sharing books was nasty and wrong—something that only pirates would do. And there wasn't much chance that the SPA—the Software Protection Authority—would fail to catch him.

Found this in a complaint about the Kindle and fears of Big Brother taking over our information. As if that could happen! What? It could? Never mind.

Friday Feith

Seeya, Eichmann!!

The Hoya: Feith Contract Not Renewed

Douglas Feith (LAW ’78) may not have devised an exit strategy for the U.S. occupation of Iraq, but according to the former Bush administration official, a group of Georgetown professors apparently had no trouble coming up with an exit strategy for him.

The distinguished practitioner in national security policy in the School of Foreign Service will not be returning to teach at Georgetown next semester after the university chose not to renew his two-year contract.

“Technically I was appointed for two years and there was no extension of the appointment,” Feith said in an interview. “My understanding is that there were some members of the faculty that didn’t want me on the faculty.”

Cry cry cry. More from TPM:

Dana Milbank offers us a good take down on Douglas Feith, one of the two or three principal architects of the Iraq war.

Feith, typical of the ideologues and seekers after profit, feels no guilt whatsoever about the role he played manipulating intelligence to help lie us into the war.

So sad. Will Berkeley follow suit and fire Yoo?

tenure history

CT provides some handy links.

dealing with ideology in the classroom

Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber muses on Michael Berube's latest book on the Horowitz problem. Includes a discussion of three kinds of conservatives that come up in the classroom (briefly: obstinate ones who seek not to be confronted, dishonest partisan manipulators, and intellectually honest thinkers).

Also includes thoughts on Weber's Politics as a Vocation, and some thoughts on the differences between a professor and a politician. Put simply:

The duty of the professor to the student is not to impart the professor’s values to the student, but rather to help the student to understand his or her own values more clearly.

vs the politician:

The duty of the politician, in contrast, is precisely to use argument to express one’s own beliefs and, where possible, to sway others towards them so that one’s political goals can be achieved.

There is a difference between the way these two worlds look at debate. Here Henry puts some good words to a problem I've experienced firsthand when debating friends with political jobs. It is not just about expressing yourself, but in exploring which aspects of your views are flawed. Not in trying to cover them up or distract from their flaws, but to expose their flaws to your own analysis. Politics avoids that altogether, understandably so.

The scholarly realm (within the social sciences) is one of debate where one starts from the premises that no point of view is foundationally right. Thus, the teacher imparts two important kinds of moral lesson to her student – lessons that allow the student to clearly articulate his own views to himself, and lessons that allow the student to recognize in principle that no point of view provides an account of the world that is complete and foundationally grounded.

Very interesting!

And to make a point directly to Horowitz and those of his ilk:

His main line of attack is that of the standard political hack, concocting a farrago of innuendoes, half-truths and out-and-out lies in order to beat down those whom he sees as his political opponents. However, when he’s attacked in the same terms as those he himself engages in, he’s perfectly happy to appeal to academic norms of reasoned debate in order to accuse his accusers of themselves being politicized.

This is something that's annoyed me about the current incarnation of conservatism -- they don't believe in politeness, diversity, respect for others.... except that they've learned to use these as cudgels against people who do believe in them!

Bonus: a commentator links Marcuse's Repressive Tolerance from 1965.