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Andrew Delbanco’s insightful new book on the history and future of the American college exposes an institution that has no idea what it should be.
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Delbanco’s survey of the tradition of college education and its basis in Puritan faith, both its provision of a universal liberal education and its focus on building character, is a salutary reminder when today’s colleges and universities brand themselves ‘Comprehensive Knowledge Enterprises’, distance-learning hubs or engines of social mobility. Teaching at Columbia – one of the few colleges still to make two years of the liberal arts compulsory – Delbanco is in a good position to diagnose the slow death of the college model even where it should be healthiest: in the well-endowed and elite institutions of American higher education.
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Yet it was just this democratic approach to tradition that was to be thrown out along with the bathwater of religious faith. Not in the 1960s, but nearly a hundred years before, when the college began to be seen as hopelessly backward, full of dull clergymen boring America’s youth with ancient history, ill-suited to the pressing demands of the modern world and the new industrial nation. The issue came to a head with a famous debate, recounted by Delbanco, between James McCosh, president of Princeton, and Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard, who met, like boxers, on neutral ground in New York in 1885 to decide what a college curriculum should be.
Criticism of The Republican Brain by Chris Mooney
"The Global Civil Society Knowledgebase is an online database of the LSE Global Civil Society Programme's policy-oriented research expertise. It includes the content of nearly a decade of Global Civil Society Yearbooks, allowing academics, civil society practitioners, policymakers and journalists across the globe to quickly access a wealth of information on global civil society as an increasingly influential source of power and political influence in today's interconnected world."
"But this does not mean that it is wrong to push the question even further, asking how we can be encouraged to care more about the well-being and suffering of those who happened not to be born within the same borders as us. Haidt thinks liberals ignore concepts like authority and the sacred. But really, liberalism’s power consists in challenging the moral relevance of such concepts. Since liberals dispute that authority really is of fundamental moral importance, it is circular reasoning to argue that this is a form of “moral blindness.”"
"So, is the future post-liberal? The WEIRD liberalism of the baby boomer generation was perhaps condemned to a dogmatic universalism as a result of emerging in the shadow of two world wars, the Holocaust and the anti-colonial and civil rights struggles. There was a lot to react against and it is perhaps understandable that in eagerly embracing the moral equality of all humans, some boomers slipped into a carelessness towards national borders and identities and a rigidity towards many forms of equality. The next generation of politics need not make the same mistake."
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The Righteous Mind
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by Jonathan Haidt (Allen Lane, £20)Together
by Richard Sennett (Allen Lane, £25)
"The new Baffler has a more difficult task. At a time when the Left is energized, or at least paying attention, and when everyone has a blog to stand on and shout from, it’s not clear what street corner The Baffler is laying claim to. It’s worth pointing out, for instance, the disappointment behind both Silicon Valley’s successes and the glamour of the creative class, and The Baffler does this as well as anyone. But fables of techno-utopia are not nearly as hegemonic as were the fantasies of post-industrial society in the 1990s. For every celebration of the latest dot-com there is another weary sigh that the internet, in the end, is just a massive waste of time. "
"Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 is an important book that will have large influence. It is unfortunately not a good book—but its lack of merit in no way detracts from its importance. If anything, the book's flaws add to its power, by enhancing the book's appeal to the audience for whom it is intended. Coming Apart is an important book less because of what it says than because of what it omits; less for the information it contains than for the uses to which that information will be put."
Review of The Great Divergence by Timothy Noah; Coming Apart by Charles Murray; Power, Inc by David Rothkopf; Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt; Greedy Bastards by Dylan Ratigan; Tea Party Patriots by Meckler and Martin; Spoiled Rotten by Jay Cost.
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Liberals would do well to read Cost’s book, for reasons other than what he intended: it demonstrates how powerful the impulse is to see what you’re for as unself-interested and what the other guy is for as interest-group greed. A full sense of what conservatives object to in the Obama program can be hard to extract from daily conservative discourse. Cost provides this. You can put on his glasses and see that “Obamacare” looks like a set of deals with privileged health-care companies that got a seat at the bargaining table, that the stimulus and the financial rescue were ways of helping banks and unions that contributed to the 2008 campaign, that cap-and-trade environmental legislation was a way of rewarding big environmental groups and corporations.
"Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system, but that's just a smoke screen. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core of your belief system is no different from choosing any other guiding ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome.
This is a depressingly reductive view of the human experience. Men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held by philosophers and theologians. They have made our lives freer and more efficient. And we are the poorer for it."
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After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:
Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.
Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.
The question we most need addressed is not what epistemic modals mean, but what to do with other people's.
Review and commentary on R.A. Lafferty
"In their 2009 book “Class War? What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality,” Benjamin Page and Lawrence Jacobs put together survey data and make a convincing case that this cynical story is not a fair summary of public opinion in the United States. Actually, most Americans—Democrats and Republicans alike—support government intervention in health care, education, and jobs, and are willing to pay more in taxes for these benefits."
"David Harvey’s new book, Rebel Cities, is the latest entry in his life-long interest in uncovering the intersection between capitalism and urbanization. It’s a collection of previously published, but updated and revised, essays and articles. They are all particularly important to our understanding of both the long fall out of 2008’s economic crash and the rise of urban revolts in Egypt, Greece, New York and elsewhere. "
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Who creates what Harvey calls the “collective symbolic capital” that turned Williamsburg into a real estate bonanza? Well a lot of it comes from the collective labor of the thousands of artists, intellectuals, street musicians, freelancers, community-garden tenders, and everyone else who makes the area desirable. The real estate developers, then, act as a parasitic force on our common-labor, growing rich building the condos that will destroy the communities that are the product of our labor and life-activity. It strikes me that universities act in similar, though less self-destructive, ways. It is all of our labor and intellectual production that gives NYU its reputation, which it then trades on to consume ever more of Greenwich Village, raise money, and develop in the future.
"If you want to seriously level-up your thinking about how the world works, you might want to try reading 3 very ambitious books together: Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order, Pankaj Ghemawat’s World 3.0 and David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5000 years."
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I am deeply tempted to read the three as a sort of Brahma-Vishnu-Shiva trinity. Fukuyama’s project is ultimately a creationist account of the world in a sort of “more perfect union” sense. Ghemawat’s is a preservationist account, deeply absorbed in the actual complexity and constraints of the world as it exists, and the problem of defending against threats and preventing things from unraveling. Graeber’s is destructive-nihilist, focused on fundamental inequities, social justice and a revolutionary agenda. You get the sense that he wouldn’t be too upset if everything unraveled.
"Valorizing machine-generated imagery is like valorizing the unconscious mind. Like Surrealist imagery, it is cool, weird, provocative, suggestive, otherworldly, but it is also impoverished.
That’s the big problem, as I see it: the New Aesthetic is trying to hack a modern aesthetic, instead of thinking hard enough and working hard enough to build one. That’s the case so far, anyhow. No reason that the New Aesthetic has to stop where it stands at this moment, after such a promising start. I rather imagine it’s bound to do otherwise. Somebody somewhere will, anyhow."
"David closes by returning to his original question: why were old knowledge systems so fragile? These systems assumed knowledge was bounded, settled, orderly and proceeded step by step. But that’s not what knowledge feels like in the age of the internet. It feels unbounded, overwhelming, unsettled, messy, linked and governed by our interests. And those properties are the properties of what it means to be human in the world.
“Networked knowledge may or may not be truer about the world, but is is truer about knowing… This crazy approach to knowledge feels familiar to us, because it’s how we tend to know.” He closes with an observation that’s both hopeful and unsettling: “What we have in common is a shared world about which we disagree, not a common knowledge we share and can collectively come to.”"
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