TWO THINGS, GRRR!!

It is a beautiful end of June evening here in North Carolina and I have been in a foul mood all day long. There are couple of things I want to get off my chest and I think my blog is the perfect place to do it.

First of all: I am appalled by the childish behavior of so many of my fellow Americans who, in the presence of an existential medical threat, simply cannot keep themselves from going to bars and beauty salons and beaches and restaurants. These are not people who desperately need to get back to work in order to feed themselves and their families. These are just people who are bored and selfish and thoughtless and thoroughly self-indulgent. If they were only endangering their own lives, I would be inclined to say “go ahead and die.” But they are endangering me and my wife and my sons and daughter-in-law and grandchildren and my sister and my friends. A country populated by such people is not a place that I can admire or to which I owe allegiance.

That was the first thing I wanted to get off my chest.

Second: I am outraged that the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of the United States, informed that someone is putting a bounty on the heads of the soldiers he commands, does not think it worth doing something about. Perhaps I care so much about this because 60 years ago I did a little not at all heroic service in the Army National Guard. But the thought that a commander would be told that someone had put a bounty on the heads of his soldiers and then did nothing about it is to me inexcusable and unforgivable. Oh, I am well aware that the Taliban who are being paid by the Russians are the modern day version of the force that the United States brought into existence for the purpose of fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. This is hardly a secret. All one need do is watch the Rambo movies – the third one, I think. I am not interested in who is right and who is wrong in a part of the world that I have never visited and know relatively little about. But it makes me furious that a commander would not think it worth his while to protect the lives of his own soldiers.

On the other hand, dinner was pleasant this evening and the desert was good.

DOWN MEMORY LANE

I suppose Shakespeare, from time to time, fussed and fretted over his quills, trying to get them sharpened in just the right way so that he could write his immortal sonnets. And no doubt Plato, from time to time, encountered a resistant tablet. Well, I spent this morning on a lengthy phone call with a Dragon tech expert trying to get my voice recognition program to work. He was very patient with me and talked me through an endless series of revisions until finally he managed to make it work. So here I am now, once again dictating rather than doing my traditional hunt and peck.

It is difficult to know which medical, economic, or political horror to comment on – there are so many. I do genuinely believe that Trump is going down the tubes and is likely going to take the Republican Senate majority with him. Like everyone else, I am terrified each time I say that, knowing what happened in 2016. But this really does feel different. Now if we can just persuade Joe Biden to stay in his basement until November 3 we may be all right.

Earlier today, I received an email message from a professor in Texas who assigns my essay, “Beyond Tolerance,” in a course he teaches. He wondered whether perhaps I would be willing to write something in the form of an update for his students next fall. Since I published the essay 55 years ago and probably have not read it in 50 years, I thought I should take a look at it before I had a go.  Several things struck me immediately. First, there is no evidence in the essay that women are part of the human race. That was rather embarrassing. Second, there is almost no evidence that race played an important role in American politics. That too was rather embarrassing. Perhaps the best thing I could do is write an essay attacking my essay.

Stay tuned.

RESPONSES TO TWO COMMENTS

Opaque asks, “What is the most influential force contributing to the dominance of STEM funding? Is it a historically enacted policy? Is it just the most marketable aspect of any university in today's higher education industry? Who does it appeal to and where do the expected returns come from? Immigrant and middle class families with bourgeoise values hoping their kids will make more money than they did? Or is it an international force of "new money" coming from students overseas hoping to get an American education? Why STEM in particular?”

An interesting series of questions. I am not sure I can answer all of them, but I can offer the following remarks based on my observations over the past 60 years or so. So far as I can see, there are three reasons why the STEM fields command the attention of university administrations. First, the STEM fields bring in outside grant money which, especially when it comes from the federal government, brings with it very large sums of overhead money which then go into the general university coffers. This is, by and large, soft money, which is to say money that can be used in a variety of different ways. The second reason is that there is a constant demand in the corporate world for graduates of the STEM fields. The third reason is that more and more, professors in the STEM fields have monetized their laboratory discoveries by forming companies to profit from them, and universities have been quite successful in compelling the professors to share their profits with their home institutions.

Let me tell you one lovely story about how things work in the other direction on occasion. For a long time, MIT turned out engineers who went on to get good jobs in corporate America. But about 50 years ago, the MIT administration realized it had a problem. Their graduates would do quite well in their new jobs, rising through the ranks, until about 10 years in they ran into a stone wall because when they became eligible to ascend from the engineering specialties to management, their lack of polish acquired in the humanities and social sciences made them less attractive candidates than their counterparts from schools like Harvard or Princeton or Yale. So MIT decided that it would buy itself some humanists and social scientists and require engineering students to spend little time getting culture. Being MIT, when it went looking for an economist it chose Paul Samuelson, and when it went looking for a linguist, it chose Noam Chomsky. I know about this because my first wife, a literary scholar, got a job teaching at MIT. I guess it worked, because to this day, MIT requires its undergraduates to spend little time a outside the laboratory.

Jerry Fresia remarks:  “Republicans have to be thinking...if Trump dropped out and we Repubs nominated a halfway sane "moderate"....Sleepy (I prefer "Creepy") Joe would suddenly be in trouble, given his baggage and his charisma-challenged campaign ability.”

That occurred to me also, but then I reflected, if Trump drops out it will be extremely important to him that whomever the Republicans choose to replace him should fail because if that replacement were to win the election, it would brand Trump as the loser. I will make a little bet: if Trump drops out, claiming that the election is rigged or whatever, he will do whatever he can to take his followers with him, telling them not to vote in a rigged election. If he were to do that, even Joe Biden, with all his faults, would win.

DARK THOUGHTS ON A SUNNY DAY

I sit here, safe and isolated, brooding about the world, about the devastation that the virus is causing, about police murder of black men and women, about the millions of Americans being driven even further into poverty, and since I spent my entire life in the Academy, my thoughts turn to the future of higher education. I am terribly fearful that this virus will accelerate trends that have been long evident and extremely distressing.

The discussions about the prospects for higher education, of which there have been many, tend to focus almost entirely on a handful of elite institutions with large endowments. But the most damaging effects of the virus will be felt in the hundreds, or even thousands, of institutions lower down in the pecking order, private colleges that depend almost entirely upon tuition and state university campuses that, although ostensibly publicly supported, in fact get most of their funds from other sources.

What do I foresee? A large number of small private colleges will simply go under, unable to survive even a semester or two without the tuition flows on which they depend. State university campuses, pressed for funds, will start firing tenured faculty in the humanities and perhaps also in those branches of the social sciences that are unable to raise significant grant funds. The long-standing rush to replace full-time faculty with adjuncts will accelerate and senior professors will either be forced out of their jobs or required to take early retirement. Independent humanities departments will be amalgamated into a single humanities division providing introductory survey courses and little else. Graduate programs will be closed, journals will fold, and the glory days – those four decades or so after World War II – will only be a memory, rather like the days of silent films in Hollywood.

Even the elite universities with a billion-dollar endowments will face problems. Columbia has recently embarked on a multibillion-dollar expansion campaign to build a new campus devoted to the hard sciences. The humanities and social sciences, the fond memories of which prompt alumni to make large donations, depend very heavily on the fully 30% of their student body who come from overseas. In the last 50 years or so, these elite schools have raised their tuition five or 10 times as rapidly as the rate of inflation, relying on the willingness of parents to go deeply into debt in order to shoehorn their young sons and daughters into the stratosphere of the gilded jobs in the American corporate world.

The problems facing the United States are now so great that the future of higher education must rank low on the order of our priorities, but as someone who has spent 70 years as a student and professor in higher education, these prospects saddened me.

On the other hand, there are glimmers of good news. Several extremely left-wing candidates won Democratic primaries in which they defeated establishment members of the House of Representatives. And this morning, on Morning Joe, the thought was first bruited about that perhaps Trump, confronting sinking poll numbers, would choose not to run again. I am, I realize, clutching at straws, but that is the way with drowning men.

SCARY BIT OF SCIENCE

If you are a college or university professor, you might want to look at this.   It really raises doubts about whether an on-campus fall semester can happen.

IF YOU HAVE NOTHING BETTER TO DO

I have now finished reading my 1989 Amherst talk onto my computer, courtesy of Dragon.  It runs to 8000 words, a trifle much for a blog post, so I shall post it on box.net and give you a taste of it here,  These are the opening two pages:

Ideology and Oppression at Amherst College

By

Robert Paul Wolff

To be delivered at

Amherst College

April 13, 1989

Yesterday evening, Mitch Snyder offered you a religious message of individual redemption and exemplary action, a counsel of withdrawal from the secular world and salvation through faith and works. He spoke in the long Judeo – Christian tradition of prophetic jeremiads and ascetic condemnation of the things of the flesh. You may not have noticed that this was his message, because it was couched in the language of social protest, but a little reflection will show you, I think, that is what it was.

This evening I will offer you a different message – a secular message of social analysis and collective action. You must decide which of these messages, if either, will find a welcome in your hearts and minds.

Those of you who gathered here last night, and have come back tonight, are – if I may just once use a religious rather than a secular metaphor - most likely the saving remnant of the Amherst College community. As is so often the fate of those of us who proclaim a doctrine of social change, I am, I fear, preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, I offer these remarks to you in the hope that they will enlighten you, embolden you, perhaps reassure you in the moral and social conviction that have brought you to this event.

The topic of this five – year series of fora, sponsored by The Student Trustee Advisory Committee On Student Life At Amherst College, is oppression. The specific focus of the second forum in the series is ideological oppression, under the title: Intolerance: The Steamrolling Of Individual Expression.

First things first. There is no oppression at Amherst College. Closemindedness, no doubt. Bigotry, without any question. A studied unwillingness to listen to political, moral, or religious opinions with which one disagrees, most certainly. Why should Amherst College be strikingly different from the rest of the United States, or from the rest of the Pioneer Valley for that matter? But oppression? I think the college security office would not be amused if I were to ask how many students had been tortured or murdered in recent months for their political opinions, how many will be detained without charge in local prisons as a result of their commitment to the elementary forms of democracy.

No doubt, students at Amherst College who hold unpopular opinions risk – unpopularity. Since one’s political and moral beliefs are, in some sense, one’s inner self, one’s truest essence, it is only fitting that young men and women who embrace unpopular positions should be unpopular. There is nothing morally or politically admirable about a Willie Lomanesque desire to be well-liked. Those who have been raised in a world which grades its kindergarten boys and girls on working and playing well with others may perhaps be made nervous by the prospect of being rejected by their playmates – or classmates – merely for the deviance of their politics, despite their nice manners and an endless willingness to be accommodating. Nevertheless, as I shall suggest presently, an easy, comfortable, tolerant aura of good feeling is almost certainly the social manifestation of ideological distortion and concealment. Beware the siren lure of popularity!

It is I suppose conceivable that students at Amherst College have received lower grades for taking the position in an examination or term essay different from that held by the professor. I tend to doubt that such violations of elementary academic freedom happen often. In my experience, professors are so delighted to come across a student who has strong, individually arrived at opinions, however unpopular – indeed however absurd – that they tend to grade higher than the objective merit of the student's work warrants out of sheer gratitude.

Nevertheless, something must be afoot. The student committee organizing this affair says, in its letter of invitation to me:

“We believe that the ideological conformity we want to uncover is fundamental to systems of oppression. Conversely, it’s unmasking is crucial to the understanding and hence the breakdown of oppression. Ideological conformity represses individualism and stymies self – examination. It breeds complacency and self – deception. If we are to work towards eliminating oppression we must understand its many guises and tools when we lock ourselves into one system of ideas. When one pervasive ideology takes hold of us – a lot of us – we surrender individuality, the questioning that is crucial to maintaining freedom and fairness.”

They go on:

“Amherst College is dominated by a mainstream that sees itself as liberal. However, this belief has become an oppressive attitude. Somehow, the naming has become the end. So – called liberalism does not function past its name, as evidenced by the mainstream’s denial of the legitimacy of alternative systems of belief. This is largely manifested in student social life, but we believe that, to some extent, it has its roots in the classroom.”

These words are assuredly well meant – the product of an earnest and wholly admirable desire to think more independently. What is more, I detect in them, or at least hope that I detect, a desire to move to the left, a desire that is always and everywhere to be encouraged whenever it manifests itself. But these words, and the mindset they exemplify, require some criticism and examination, before we can actually begin the process they call for. In fact, they express a view of the relationship between thought and reality which is, in my judgment, almost the exact opposite of the truth. So, if you will bear with me, I shall attempt a few moments of textual criticism, as a preface to the body of my remarks.

INTERIM REPORT

I am hard at work reading into my computer a lengthy speech I gave at Amherst College thirty-one years ago, using my new voice recognition program.  At one point, I quote an early passage from Marx.  Dragon is doing an heroic job.  It got Lake Woebegone right, but it crashed and burned on "Hegelians," rendering it as "hack aliens."

On the other hand, maybe the Dragon program was written by a closet Marxist.