Sorry to have been away. I am still trying to process the
unexpected results of the election. The fact that one week after the election
there is still a very slender chance of the Democrats holding the House is
astonishing. Considering how well the Democrats did down ballot, I think our
little effort giving money to the DLCC was a good choice.
I am coming to the end of my UNC course, which will very
probably be the last course I ever teach. The UNC philosophy department does
not have the money to hire me in the next academic year and the limitations
placed upon me by the Parkinson’s give me little hope of being able to continue
beyond that time. However, I have offered to give a series of noncredit
lectures next semester on Formal Methods in Political Philosophy and since I am
not asking to be paid, I think it may be possible.
I think I will be here to see the 2024 election but that may
be my last. I was born the year that FDR was inaugurated for the first time and
had almost finished college before I saw a president who was not a Democrat. My
older son, Patrick, was born shortly before Lyndon Johnson announced that he
would not run for reelection and I was up in the middle of the night giving Patrick
a bottle and watching television in the kitchen when I heard the news that
Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated.
I was in the card catalog room of Widener Library looking
for a book when I noticed a little group of people gathered around a radio at
the checkout desk and discovered that Kennedy had been shot in Dallas.
I went to my first political rally in the fall of 1948, a Henry
Wallace rally at Yankee Stadium, and when it rained ended up with my friend
Johnny Brown watching a Rex Barney no-hitter in the Polo Grounds across the
river. (It is said that when Orthodox
Jewish boys start to study Talmud, the teacher puts a drop of honey on the page
and tells the boy to kiss it so that ever after he will associate the sweet
taste of the honey with the study of Talmud.
I think seeing a no-hitter on the evening that I had intended to attend
a political rally had a somewhat similar effect on me.)
Well, it is time to start preparing my lecture on Herbert Marcuse’s
1969 book, An Essay on Liberation.
11 comments:
Prof. Wolff,
President Johnson issued his announcement that he would neither seek, nor would he accept, the Democratic Party’s nomination for President on March 31. 1968. That term, I was taking your course on Kant’s Ethics at Rutgers. I don’t recall for certain the time that the class met, but I think it was from 11:00 A.M. to noon. Which meant that you had to rise early enough to tend to an infant Patrick, and catch the train from Manhattan to New Brunswick, N.J., in order to make it to class on time. You were never late, never appeared tired, and you were always prepared.
P:ost-script:
I assumed that you took the train. Perhaps you drove, but that would have been about a 2 hour drive, assuming you did not speed.
It was long ago but I still think of your Formal Methods in Political Philosophy class I took. Lots of really great analytic insights but your verbal description of how to do certain operations on a matrix (I think there was a good verbal description with hand gestures of inverting a matrix and also discussion of why)was memorable to me.
Prof Wolff,
I recently listened to your four ideological critique lectures on Lee and Wilmsen. A wonderful series. Thank you.
The pedant in me has to point out that you seem to have misspoken. "Mesopotamia" is Greek, not Latin. (I think the usual Latin word for river in Cicero's time was flumen. The Greeks used ποταμός, from which we have "hippopotamus," the river horse.) Also, there would have been roughly 10,000 generations in 200,000 years, not one million generations. ;-)
Somewhere in one of those lectures you mention a study that showed the progression in political ideology among college faculty from the most liberal, in the humanities, to the most conservative, in the physical sciences. I bring that up because I was just reading the Powell memorandum, and noticed that he also referred in part to that phenomenon.
In the infamous memo, Powell cited with alarm a poll of students on twelve college campuses, which reportedly had found that "almost half of the students favored socialization of basic U.S. industries."
He further wrote:
"Although the origins, sources and causes [of the assault on the American free enterprise system] are complex and interrelated ... there is reason to believe that the campus is the single most dynamic source. The social science faculties usually include members who are unsympathetic to the enterprise system. They may range from a Herbert Marcuse, Marxist faculty member at the University of California San Diego, and convinced socialists, to the ambivalent liberal critic who finds more to condemn than to commend. Such faculty members need not be in a majority. They are often personally attractive and magnetic; they are stimulating teachers, and their controversy attracts student following; they are prolific writers and lecturers; they author many of the textbooks, and they exert enormous influence—far out of proportion to their numbers—on their colleagues and in the academic world.
Social science faculties (the political scientist, economist, sociologist and many of the historians) tend to be liberally oriented, even when leftists are not present....
This situation extending back many years and with the imbalance gradually worsening, has had an enormous impact on millions of young American students."
Powell also twice quoted Newsweek columnist Stewart Alsop, who had written, "Yale, like every other major college, is graduating scores of bright young men ... who despise the American political and economic system ... (their) minds seem to be wholly closed. They live, not by rational discussion, but by mindless slogans."
I find that hard to believe.
Among Powell's recommendations were that the corporate business community insist on rewriting of textbooks to ensure a more business-friendly point of view. ("If the authors, publishers and users of textbooks know that they will be subjected—honestly, fairly and thoroughly—to review and critique by eminent scholars who believe in the American system, a return to a more rational balance can be expected.")
He also recommended that "the Chamber should insist upon equal time on the college speaking circuit. The FBI publishes each year a list of speeches made on college campuses by avowed Communists. The number in 1970 exceed 100. There were, of course, many hundreds of appearances by [other] leftists and ultra liberals.... There was no corresponding representation of American business, or indeed by individuals or organizations who appeared in support of the American system of government and business."
Were half of students on representative campuses in 1970 really in favor of socialization of major industries? What happened to those students when they grew up? Did they all go the way of The Big Chill during the '80s?
And were faculty really that far left in those days? Marxian economist Richard Wolff frequently recalls that when he was studying economics at Harvard, Stanford, and Yale in the mid-to-late '60s, none of his economics professors discussed Marxism. He basically had to learn about Marxism on his own.
"Were half of students on representative campuses in 1970 really in favor of socialization of major industries?"
This was a constant right wing gripe. Recall "God and Man at Yale" Buckley's early 1950s book and the campaign against Lorie Tarshis' 1940s economics textbook. The right wing screed "Keynes at Harvard" was a conservative staple. Back in the early 1960s I mentioned in passing to our wingnut insurance agent that I had been accepted to an UC campus and he carried on a bit about the "little red school house."
Sorry that you're not going to be teaching classes in the future, but perhaps you can use the opportunity to tape more lectures for Youtube, for example, a series on Marcuse and maybe a bit more on Marx. Your lectures on Marx concentrate on Capital vol. 1 and many of us would be interested in hearing your take on the early Marx. You've said that you've talked about Plato in your retirement community and so maybe you could share those thoughts with us in Youtube.
For a while I have wanted to ask a similar question (see Eric post) to professor Wolff. I have not ever been in a humanities department, but for many decades "Conservatives" have criticized professors and academia in general as out of touch and being too extreme. Conservative Think tanks have proliferated and their views have been given much attention not by virtue of their rigor but because they are conservative and hence are a necessary balance to the "mainstream liberal ideology". Essentially we have a form of affirmative action for conservative views. In the last two decades or so, we have been seeing more clownish criticisms of universities by "conservative" internet activists. Let's ignore the clowns and the liars and the exaggerators: Is there a trend or central feature in the humanities that should be criticized? I am thinking for example in the focus of the personal, the relativism, and the nihilism present in the much of the modern material produced at the humanities departments.
For anyone who cares, the segment where Prof Wolff discusses the 1960s study examining political leanings of faculty members is at
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvboYpmhgs&t=2537s
Of course, one can think about the worldview of a blacksmith. One could think that he compares the world with an anvil while he perceives himself as a hammer. If we look further back, we see the ancient Greeks constructing the Achetypes of their pantheon on the basis of this obvious psychology.
As always, discourses today inevitably end up in the realm of statistics, and one wonders why vegans eat an average of kilos of meat and anti-alcoholics drink gallons of beer.
I am an engineer by profession, so I would have to be politically very far in the conservative camp. In fact, however, I have voted more or less "left" all my life. I am only conservative if you really take this term literally and think of climate change.
... and Eric, thanks for the link.
Speaking of the Powell Memo and his reference to Marcuse, along with your own lecture,
how did Marcuse pronounce his name? A friend of mine who studied with him at UCSD pronounces it "mar cu sy"
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