Harry

I received the email about Sandy on early on Saturday morning in the middle of a five hour visit to the Emergency Room, at a point at which it was not clear everything was going to be ok (don’t worry, it was). Still, and although his friends have all been preparing themselves for this, it was devastating. I didn’t think I’d talk about it here. But, although The NYT obit is very straightforward and accurate, it misses something that everyone who knew him will wish it had mentioned.

Sandy was already an intellectual hero of mine when I met him at a Spencer Foundation Board retreat in 2007. It’s not just that he wrote the best philosophy paper about equality in education, which as a sociologist he had no right to do, but because I had started reading his work when I committed myself to doing empirically informed political philosophy, and realised immediately that he was a sort of mirror of what I wanted to be: a normatively committed and informed social scientist who would never allow his values to guide him to empirically convenient results. We had a two hour break on the first afternoon and Sandy, who had never seen (or, I am sure, heard of) me in his life casually asked if I was busy, and would I like to take a walk with him. I managed to overcome my awe, and, well, Sandy was totally brilliant, and its not that he didn’t know that, but he seemed to be able to find whatever was most interesting in whatever you said to him so that the gap between you was irrelevant to the matter at hand. He didn’t seem to care what you status was — he talked as enthusiastically and openly with college presidents, other scholars, students, staff people, receptionists, interns. He could, and did, put anyone at their ease. I quickly saw that he was either determined not to observe, or, quite possibly, completely oblivious to, the iniquitous status hierarchies in academia: his democratic outlook was entirely authentic to him. (Now, reading what that sentence, I realise it’s exactly what I might just as well have written about my dad).

I’m an intellectual outlier in the worlds I inhabited with Sandy. Usually if we were at a workshop, conference, or meeting together (and we often were) I was the only philosopher in a room full of social scientists. But over the years I gradually observed the vast informal network of scholars who were specifically indebted to Sandy for his seemingly-effortless but vast kindness and support. You meet people and gradually realise they are connected to Sandy and when you reveal that you know him too their faces light up and they tell you some story about him that is always delightful and different. The NYT obit doesn’t really capture this. To match his intellectual brilliance and reach is unachievable for most of us. But to leave this world so aptly loved by so many is something we could all aspire to.

The eminent sociologist Michael Burawoy died on Monday, after being hit by a car while walking near near his home. I’ve found a couple of tributes: this from Marta Soler Gallart which tells a story I didn’t know but surprises me not in the least, and this from Oleg Komlik. There’ll be loads of tributes to his remarkable intellectual contributions, and I’ll have nothing to add to them. So I’ll just say this. I didn’t know Michael that well really, but he was a very close friend of my very close friend Erik Olin Wright, so over many years I saw him briefly, and occasionally, always in the most convivial of circumstances. I discovered very quickly that I adored him and his company. He was generous and kind to treat me as an equal — he probably did that to everyone. I loved that somebody could combine a level of energy even into his seventies that I, personally, have never had, with a commitment and passion for all the right things and still give the sense of being permanently slightly amused with the world. When he and Gay Seidman were preparing the memorial volume for Erik Olin Wright, Michael was determined that I would contribute, despite being a complete outlier intellectually. I was resistant to writing a contribution (because an outlier and not thinking I had much to say), and Michael pressed me to write an essay which, in the end, I was really proud of. I realized after I’d finished it that he knew I’d produce something good, but that the reason he had pressed me was that he predicted (I’m sure correctly) that if I didn’t contribute I would regret it.

A great intellectual, yes, but I hope the tributes place that second to the fact that he was a lovely, generous, man.

Gina’s post about David O’Brien’s chapter in The Art of Teaching Philosophy reminded me that I should tell you about the class our department (Philosophy) has for all beginning Teaching Assistants (beginning at Madison, whether or not they have already taught elsewhere). The focus is pretty relentlessly practical: providing them with strategies, techniques, and advice that will enable them to do better instruction in discussion sections. We do readings that we think will help them reflect on their teaching, but discussions of those readings are designed display the strategies and techniques we are trying to teach them. We also spend a fair amount of time trouble-shooting problems that they encounter over the course of the semester. And the instructor observes one section from each TA and gives feedback to them (fire-walled from any evaluation, to encourage honesty and authenticity).

Last week colleagues on the instructional resource team in our college asked me to give them a short document listing the 5 or 6 things I most wanted every TA to know and know how to do by the end of the semester and having written it, I thought it might be useful to post it here: feel free to direct your new, or not new, TAs to it (it should be useful whatever their discipline). Obviously it draws on and links to things I’ve posted here on CT over the years. And it is not supposed to be exhaustive: it’s just what I happened to prioritize when they asked me to give them something. Here goes:

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Once you know my age my musical tastes as a teenager are very easy to guess. Obviously Dylan, Mitchell, the Kinks and the Beatles – equally obviously not the Stones or the Who. Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Fairport, Steeleye Span, Roy Harper, The Watersons, Carthy, etc, etc and more than any of them, Kevin Coyne. It was hard to hear any of these on the radio, and, addicted to Radio 4 from the age of 3, I turned to Radio 2 only for Folk on 2, the weekly Jazz hour, and the Sunday lunchtime comedies (when I was 15 Steve Mulliner told me to listen to Peel on Radio 1, which I probably did twice a week). I never listened to top-40 music deliberately: obviously I heard plenty of it by osmosis as it were, and especially during wet school breaks in which I remember one girl in particular whose desk was in front of mine always tuned to Radio 1. When punk started I enjoyed it, rather than being enthusiastic about it: and that was easier to hear on the radio than other stuff I liked because of John Peel (who was also the main location for the other stuff I liked, just less frequently).

But I love a lot of the music now in which I had no interest at all at the time. When I notice a band is playing nearby that I am curious about, and whose members I suspect might be on or near their last legs, I often go, usually taking at least one of my children with me. So last week it was the turn of my son to accompany me to see 10cc. At school my more musically adventurous friend Guy owned one of their albums, which I must have listened to, but I’d never really paid much attention to them. After buying the tickets I started sort of listening to their (voluminous) output, though without really paying much attention.

Seeing them, on their first US tour in 47 years, I discovered they are nothing like I thought. As presumably all of their fans and everyone else who was actually paying attention in the 70’s know, they’re basically an extremely sophisticated comic song band. They opened with The Second Sitting of the Last Supper, and followed up with Art for Art’s Sake, both of which had more or less passed me by, and both of which are very funny. Even the songs with unhumourous lyrics are often musically funny (a lot of pastiche). Graham Gouldman has a huge smile on his face when performing, partly just because he’s doing what he loves, but also because it’s all sort of a joke. The set goes on from there. Even their biggest hit [1], the one song that even I know by heart, sounded so different live. I’ve always assumed its at best a sad song about self-deception with a little cruelty thrown in, but live, in context, I got the feeling that not only does the subject know perfectly well that he’s in love but that she knows it too, and he knows that she knows it, both of them are happy about it, and the song is actually an exercise in elaborate Gricean implicature.

The boy didn’t enjoy the show as much as I did. But he did enjoy it enough, and is now regularly humming Life is a Minestrone. They’re touring the UK and parts of Europe in the Fall: highly recommended.

[1] A friend says that as a teenager she used to dread “I’m not in love” being played at parties. I think I went to a total of 5 parties as a teenager (4 of which she must have been at) because I gradually realized that there was no specific aspect of parties that I dreaded.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the Center of which I am director produces a podcast called Ethics and Education which is about… ethics and education. Just to be clear: the producer/director/voice artist/supremo is Carrie Welsh, and my involvement is mainly as a sounding board about topics and how to approach them, and doing whatever she asks for any given episode.[1] I’ll link to a few episodes over the next few weeks. This week: we recently produced an episode about sex education (via spotify; via our website, and here’s a taster on headliner), featuring the authors of a new book about the ethics of sex education by Lauren Bialystok and Lisa Andersen called Touchy Subject. It’s a terrific book, in a series of topical books each co-authored by a historian of education and a philosopher of education. They cover the (often surprising) history of sex education in the US, and discuss much more subtly than in most discussions both the values that ought to lie behind sex education and how to make trade offs with parental interests. You shouldn’t use the podcast as an excuse not to read the book, but it does stand alone well: you can tell that our student producers had a lot of fun finding the vox pops (going up to people cold in the street and asking them how they learned about sex turns out to yield interesting results), and Lauren’s and Lisa’s discussion is genuinely illuminating. Feel free to recommend it to your friends.

[1] I emphasize this because I really think the podcast is excellent, and want it to be clear that the only credit I deserve for that is that I helped hire Carrie and fund extremely talented undergraduates to work with her on it.

It’s more than 5 years since Erik died which, for those who knew him, is quite hard to believe, as he is still a strong voice in many of our heads. Because I know many of our readers knew and admired him or his work (or both!) I thought I’d let you know that a couple of days ago Verso published a volume of essays focusing on his work, edited by Michael Burawoy and Gay Seidman. It contains essays by friends and students who’ve been influenced by him and his work over the years, and the essays engage with, as the subtitle suggests, work done over the whole span of his career. The contributors are: Michael Burawoy, Gay Seidman, Greta Krippner, Kwang-Yeong Shin, Joao Peschanski, Marta Soler-Gallart, Jacob Carlson and Gianpaola Baiocchi, Ruy Braga, Rina Agarwala, Rodolfo Elbert, Peter Ramand, Stephanie Luce and me (I trailed an earlier version of my occasionally rude (by my standards) essay here).

The kindle edition is remarkably well-priced!

Gina’s post on Indiana’s DEI-related law came at a fortuitous time for me, because last week I participated in a panel about State Legislatures, Academic Freedom and Public Universities. The panelists were given about 6 minutes to present some prepared remarks’ and discussion ensued. As far as I could tell there was just one state legislator present, and one administrator; otherwise the audience was students, faculty, and members of the public.

I did write out my remarks, but then I didn’t say exactly what I wrote, so below the fold is an attempt at a rough transcription of what I actually said:

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My paper with Kailey Mullane on what’s wrong with free public college has been published in Educational Theory, open access so anybody who wants to can read it. Obsessive readers of CT (are there any?) will know that I’ve had a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the issue for quite a while, and the arguments we’ve had here helped me and Kailey refine our views and develop the paper. What we did in the end was look at and analyze a hybrid of the Warren and Sanders proposals from the 2020 primary, evaluating it against two relatively simple normative criteria – equity (which we explain) and whether it would raise the average level of educational outcomes across the population. (Later in the paper we consider other values that might also be relevant).

Free public college might sound great if you ignore the cost and compare it with what we have now. But given the way public higher education is actually funded currently, and given the persistent patterns of enrollment (and even on very optimistic assumptions about how those patterns would change if public college were free), for various structural reasons almost none of the new spending would be on students from the bottom 50% of the income distribution and most of it on students in the top 25% of the income distribution. Some people (here) have defended this by saying that under these plans the funds would all come from taxes on the super rich. Even if you believe that, mightn’t there better feasible alternative ways of spending those funds in education? We compare the proposal with i) spending those funds in k-12 (which, unlike higher education, is a universal program) and ii) spending the funds on expanding the Pell Grant program (a very popular and successful program for supporting lower income students). Either of those will be much more equitable (in any reasonable sense) ways of spending the money, and will probably (there’s a caveat to this that you can see in the paper) in raising the average level of educational outcomes.

I can’t speak for Kailey, but I was (naively) a bit shocked when reading the Warren and Sanders proposals how thin and lacking in detail they were, and how clear it was that they had not consulted anyone who knew anything about higher education funding as it currently works. For example, they seem not to understand within each state public colleges and universities are unequally funded, with much more government funding per student going to institutions attended by more affluent students, and much less to those attended by less affluent students; they also seemed not to understand that low income students usually pay very low rates of tuition at the institutions they attend: for those students the financial barrier to college is not, usually, tuition, but living expenses, which eliminating tuition does nothing about at all. Sanders’s requirement that states participating in the free public college not spend any more money on administrators, if it is serious as opposed to crowd-pleasing, reveals that he doesn’t know what administrators do (or what “administrators” means). As things stand the US government (all sources) spend about 30-40% more per student/year in higher education than in k-12, and both candidates (considering their overall education policy offer) were proposing to increase that differential considerably. When I pointed this out to my dad, who was a veteran observer of ill-considered political decisions, he said “That’s not really what they care about. It’s just that nobody in their campaigns has bothered to do the calculation that you have done”.

Because discussions here at CT have had such an influence on my own thinking, I thought some of you might be interested in reading the whole thing so here’s the paper. Please share it with your friends, and feel free to comment!

The text telling me Tim had died came through a few minutes before a series of meetings with students. After the feeling of sickness and dread that hit me I wondered whether to go ahead anyway, and then thought what a strange thought that was. But my stepmum told me later that when my dad learned of my grandmother’s death he proceeded with the talk he was about to give to a group of teachers. I am pretty certain that if I’d been about to teach a class I would have gone ahead with that. But knowing neither meeting was urgent, and worrying that the students would be horrified to learn, later, that I had met them in such circumstances, I postponed. And to be fair, whereas he knew he could drive to where my grandmother was straight after the talk, I knew that I had to decide very quickly, and get ready, if I was going to leave that day, or have to wait another 24 hours (which, in the end, I elected to do anyway).

(Note: this is very long and probably self-indulgent. But I know plenty of non-regulars will want to read it, and I think writing it has helped me some. There’s a lot below the fold. That’s sort of an apology, but of course you can just ignore it!)

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Well, you know that, thanks to Maria’s lovely post earlier this week. I’ll post a long, maybe self-indulgent, remembrance in a week or two (I’ve been overwhelmed by things this week, including the kind of staggering outpouring of affection ad memories on social media, in my inbox (Among the many messages came a lovely email from a headteacher my own age I last saw in 1970, and whom dad, of course, kept up with). Even the Daily Telegraph did a rather good obituary. Now I have to finish my grading by tomorrow, and get ready for Christmas, which dad loved, and I think we’ll all enjoy remembering him). But for now, if you’re interested, here are three things to read/listen to/watch.

The formal, detailed, Guardian obituary is here.

The Radio 4 obituary show, Last Word, is here. David Blunkett is excellent, the clips of my dad sound unnervingly young, and I liked that they took the parts from the interview with me that are about my dad’s appearance. He would have been genuinely horrified by all this fuss, but, bracketing that, he’d have been delighted by the first segment, about Maureen Sweeney, to whom he would have been intensely grateful (as we all should be).

Finally Rachel Johnson of PiXL, whose dad Sir John Rowling worked with Tim at the London Challenge, wrote a lovely tribute, which includes an extended video interview (half way down the page) that she just made available free, here.

The chap serving me at Pret in Heathrow the other day asked if I was going somewhere special for Christmas, and for the second time since Tim died I faltered, and said “I’m going home to Wisconsin, I’ve just been visiting because my dad died on Friday”, and berated myself inside for making him uncomfortable. But he smiled, and said, you know the usual things, and then said “Did he have a good life?” and I found myself grinning widely and said “Yes. He had a great life”, to which his response was “That’s really the best you can ask, isn’t it?”. It was lovely, like something out of the kind of movie that neither my dad nor I would ever willingly watch.

This is my marmalade-making time of the year. Not because it’s the only time I can get hold of Seville oranges – I can get hold of the MaMade tins any time of year, and have only ever gotten fresh ones to use one time that I happened to visit a friend in Arizona who complained about the fruit trees outside that produced oranges that were inedibly bitter (I picked 10lbs and brought them straight home). It’s actually because of the grapefruit.

Only being able to get hold of MaMade (very inexpensive, at Amazon, makes excellent marmalade) gives rise to a problem. MaMade is only sold in a thin cut version. So, what if you like thick cut? I finally figured out the solution, which is to buy two white grapefruit, that are only available, here, December-February, and chop the rind roughly. You simply add that to the marmalade and you have a rough cut Seville orange marmalade with just a hint of grapefruit flavour, but really just a hint.

I’m not finished with the regular marmalade yet. I specifically like Oxford marmalade – once you’ve had that its hard to go back. And I like it bitter. Conventional recipes tell you to substitute black treacle or molasses for some of the sugar, but no recipe has gone far enough for me. And the 4lbs of sugar recommended to accompany a tin of MaMade makes for too sweet a result. So – I use 2lbs of sugar and 1lb of treacle/molasses, which gets exactly the flavour I want.

Still there’s a problem. With only 3/4ths the recommended level of sugar, how do you get the marmalade to set properly? One way is to add phenomenal amounts of pectin. But almost as good is just to simmer the concoction for much longer than recommended, just to reduce the liquid, until you have something that, while runny, is adequately viscous to stay on toast (or if you are Paddington or the late Queen, in a sandwich). I generally cook for about around 3 hours, most of it on a very low heat, but occasionally boiling it while stirring vigorously. You’ll end up with less than 5lbs of marmalade, but with an intense flavour so you use less at a time.

A student the other day revealed her obsession with grapefruit and that prompted to me attempt fully grapefruit marmalade.

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If you haven’t yet listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story, you probably should, now. It’s brilliant, if profoundly depressing. Very brief synopsis: the methods routinely used to teach children to read in the US don’t work well for large numbers of children, and the science of reading has been clear about this for decades. Three academics in particular — Lucy Calkins of Teachers College, and Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell of the Ohio State University — are responsible for promoting these bad practices (which are pervasive), and persisted in doing so long after the research was clear, and have gotten very rich (by the standards of academics) from the curriculum sales/speaking circuit.[1] Hanford’s documentary has single-handedly changed the environment, and in the past couple of years State departments of education and even school districts throughout the country have been scrabbling to reform, often under the eye of state legislators who have been alerted to the situation by the amount of chatter that Sold a Story has generated.

Go and listen to it.

Although a great admirer of Hanford’s work, which I have known and followed for many years, it took me a while to listen to Sold a Story. By the time I did I was familiar with the basic narrative which, I think, freed my mind to wonder about something that Hanford doesn’t discuss. The role of academic bystanders. People like me.
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BBC obit here.

I have a very fond memory of Parkinson.
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Twenty years and a few months ago Chris asked me to join a group of bloggers who were going to create a group blog so as to reduce the pressure on each to post frequently and combine audiences.

First I asked him what a blog was.
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