To lech in the lab may be rude, but to lech in the THES is obscene

Well, for starters Kealey seems to have read a different Tom Wolfe novel than the one I recall reading. If he got that wrong, what else does he get wrong?

I call Poe.

Clearly the University of Buckingham is a fictional entity, like the Universities of Poppleton, Rummidge and Limerick.

Didn’t J K Galbraith have a view about this? (Relationships with students, that is, not leching, a word which I’m not sure I’ve ever seen spelled before, and would have assume had a t in it, but I’m inclined to think that DD is a better speller than me as well as a better thinker).

Many V-Cs are entirely intellectually serious and sensible. Its a bit of a gift that this one’s from University of Buckingham (for those who don’t know, its the UK’s only private university, and was for a long time a home of ultra-right and ultra-libertarian types).

You may enjoy JK Galbraith’s take on this (there’s a longer version of this letter, and the full exchange, in A View from the Stands, which doesn’t seem to be available on Google Books).

The article comprehensively fails on just about every count. It’s offensive, not funny, and hard to even get inside the head of someone who thought it was funny to write it. It’s just rubbish.

He needs to watch Husbands and Wives.

I find his encapsulation of Middlemarch deeply weird.

For the benefit of us Yanks, by the way, what is a Vice-Chancellor exactly?

Yes, as soon as I thought about it I realised you must be right about the spelling.

And even though you’re absolutely right, if it is possible to be righter than absolutely right, DanH (#7) is that.

What’s the sell-by date on the cans? There was an offy on the Cowley Road in Oxford which used to have all sorts of interesting Ukrainian pivo and the like, all out-of-date, conceivably because they’d come over by irregular means.

Two adults having sex is fine. But I thought the article (or one part of it) was about female students that try to get better grades using sex, which is something else.

for anyone who cares, btw, the title comes from a piece of doggerel about the Profumo affair:

Oh what have you done, belle Christine?
You’ve broken the party machine!
For to lie in the nude may be rude
But to lie in the House is obscene!

DanH; of course! slightly fuller version

@mollymooly:

@BrendanH:

Is your ignorance of the University of Limerick sincere, or Bielefeldesque irony? David Lodge’s one was “University College Limerick”.

I can’t answer that question without compromising my carefully maintained anonymity.

I didn’t think the piece was entirely contemptible on first reading, partly because I have known students to dress to impress and linger at the end of seminars. But not many, not often, and I didn’t enjoy the experience (let alone enjoy them, as Kealey charmingly puts it). The power relations are always in the room – fundamentally an approach like that doesn’t say “hey handsome”, it says “I’m needy and I’m struggling a bit at the moment”. Jeremy Hardy said it all on the News Quiz this evening – “She says she admires you and asks for help with her essay – what do you do? You help her with her essay.”

Also (while I’m being perilously frank), I think it’s quite common to find certain students ferociously attractive, to the point of really regretting being far too old to hang out with them. Being unusually clever and hard-working generally does it for me. But no, of course it’s not a question of “look, don’t touch”. “Talk, don’t chat up”, maybe – but that doesn’t really apply either, as it wouldn’t occur to me to chat them up in the first place. Ugh. On second thoughts, you lot are right about Kealey – that piece is entirely contemptible. (Or else Mary Beard is right and it’s terrifically clever satire, and we all fell for it. Maybe.)

roac@11:

“Vice-Chancellor” translates as “President” (or sometimes as “Provost”, depending on context). Brit and Oz Universities have a separate head of state (Chancellor) and head of government (Vice-Chancellor).

So to bring this back around large-ish circle, just to be rascally, what’s the chance we’ll get to see a Youtube of Kealey getting egged on the sidewalk? Young rascally folks of the world unite, here: We can emphasize “egg, but don’t stone” as the constraints on our behavior. If we egg him while he is acting in his official capacity, we can tell him it’s “a perk of the job.” If questioned later, we can emphasize the crudeness of the act was to underpin the inappropriateness of regressive puffery and that this is a conventional protest device. Egging is not fun and is not a legitimate source of vindication but it is legitimate to use eggging to illuminate the ways that Buckingham aggravated the dissonance between what is publicly acceptable and what he admitted he desires.

Oh, and if we are sternly asked why o why did we throw eggs at Mr. Kealey, we can pertly answer: “because that’s where the rubbish is.”

Throw your eggs while you are young, but share your scorn — and only your scorn — when you are older.

To be honest, I doubt that this article would generate so much heat in this forum, if Kealey wasn’t such an outspoken libertarian and the VC of Britain’s only private university.

I always love these interventions of yours, Steve, where you accuse other people of bad faith on the basis of no evidence. How does it feel to be the only pure-hearted man in the world, bravely defending the science of intellectual design with only occasional breaks to sneer at the PC hypocrisy of the academic left?

If Kealey wasn’t a right-wing ballbag, he probably wouldn’t have written such a crass and mockable article, so this is trivially true. But the whole point is that a man’s politics are not unrelated to his character, so it was always massively more likely that such an article would come from such a character.

‘To be honest, I doubt that this article would generate so much heat in this forum, if Kealey wasn’t such an outspoken libertarian.’

Funnily enough, you can substitute the word ‘twat’ for ‘libertarian’ in that sentence with no real change of meaning.

One possibility you are all foolishly ignoring is that Steve Fuller IS IN FACT GOD. The evidence:
i. He knows what is in the hearts of men…
ii. He is justifiably proud of His Design-work, which He so carefully constructed EXACTLY to resemble how it would have come out via Darwinian evolution, recognising this latter as the only INTELLIGENT solution to the problem of adaptation for fitness and etc, and adapting his own Acts accordingly. He is understandably hurt that you are all so mean and dismissive, and appears in select venues to make His feelings known.

Perhaps it’s a way for the centre-left liberals to make it with the ‘ladies’ by harumphing on their behalf.

… because no-one who posts here could be a woman, who can get angry on her *own* behalf, thankyouverymuch. Or does the mere fact of being centre-left make us “women”, who are not “ladies“?

Thank you, Steve Fuller, for making it clear that, like Dr Kealey, you do not actually consider women to be human beings. Clarity is so useful.

NB – I don’t want the inverted commas in the post above to make anyone think that Buckingham’s somehow not a legitimate university. It is – it’s just a very small one.

Steve, if you’re “in stitches” one moment and then two sentences later announcing that the same thing that had you “in stitches” is “boring”, you might want to consider switching to decaff for a while. It’s just not normal to have moodswings that volatile.

dsquared,

I’ll switch to the decaff, the day you go for a brain-boosting drug — anything with caffeine would help for starters.

But I’m glad to see that your memory is long enough to remember Judge Jones. But memory does not require thought. As I have said many times before, you need to try harder.

As I’ve said before to people who persistently come back in order to “hold up a mirror” to Crooked Timber and its commentariat to remind us of our manifold flaws, this is a battle that can have only one winner. Steve has to make a conscious effort in order to annoy me, while I annoy him by being superficial, partisan and tribal. All of which I can do 24/7, even in my sleep, without expending any effort at all – when it comes to writing mocking posts about reactionary misogynist ballbags, I even enjoy doing it, plus it gains me points with the laydeez. So in other words, this conflict is an chore and a bore for Steve, but an effortless pleasure for me. Give up, Steve.

Did those of you not from Planet Troll find my analysis confusing/confounding/obscure? Reader response analysis can be very useful, if the responses come from people who can actually *read*.

You have to remember that the Vexed Deity FULLER doesn’t have our evolved path-brain advantages, socially or otherwise — indeed, He can’t even grasp that they ARE advantages. He imagined Himself into Sempiternal Omniscience from NOTHING, and that unimagineable Self-importance can’t be scaled down effectively. Being an All-Knowing God too often means you just don’t get it…

‘ Turning Terence Kealey into a punching bag for everything you don’t collectively like about libertarianism, privatisation, lechery (perhaps sex itself—who knows!), misogyny, etc., brings blogging into disrepute generally’.

Well that’s certainly got my number. The only reason I have any objections to Kealey’s views is because I don’t like sex. I’m so glad this is now out in the open.

Nothing baffled the Vexed Deity FULLER as deeply as the consequences of his invention of sex: throughout all ages He had cast around declaring His Rules for its management; throughout all ages the little mortals snickered at His Godly silliness and ignored them.

How is it possible to “bring” blogging into disrepute?

Frankly, you should welcome Trolls as occasionally providing a reality check on what the hell you people are arguing about.

I don’t generally welcome people who treat me with hostility, disdain, and contempt. Frustration with me, e.g. with my ignorance or foolishness, I can understand and accommodate; I can appreciate terse and biting corrections to my sundry stupidities. But I welcome this under the implicit common understanding that interlocutors and I respect each other as human beings who share an interest in catching our own mistakes, discovering our own BS, and comprehending each others’ perspectives.

When it’s in evidence that no such common understanding exists — when someone expresses contempt for me, to me — I have no further reason to interact with that person. It just wouldn’t be productive, or even healthy, for me to do so. Far from being “a reality check” on my presuppositions or blind spots, it would expose me to arbitrary degradation and expression of contempt. I cannot trust that such a person is communicating with me in good faith.

Kealey’s piece was commissioned by the FEMALE editor of the Times Higher, who does not regret having done so, in spite of all of your harumphing.

I don’t comprehend why the amusement of one woman would, or should, invalidate the complaint of another. Is the idea that individuals ought not hold their own standards for what they consider to be offensive?

I also don’t see why men couldn’t be offended by Kealey’s article on their own terms, not on behalf of women (or on behalf of anybody). After all, Kealey’s article could be easily interpreted as insulting to men.

But don’t rise to the challenge too quickly, as that would demonstrate the efficacy of ‘deus ex machina’!

Sorry, I don’t understand this statement. I’ll be happy to avoid reading the article you linked to “too quickly” — but it’s quite short, and not at all densely constructed, so there’s no reason to anticipate that quick responses would be unreasoned or uncomprehending.

Responding to that article: I get that Kealey’s article was an attempt at grand satire. I understood that in a first reading. Mroz says: “If people are offended, that is their right^1^ and they also have the right to express that.” Steve, you seem to disagree.

^1^It strikes me as weird to conceptualize the experience of an emotional state, or a state of being generally, as a “right” — what does it mean to have a “right” to an internal response to a stimulus?

I’d like to share a little anecdote from my college years. I had a Roman History prof who would frequently make comments on my appearance, in front of the gathering class, as I made my way to my seat in the front row (because I was a very diligent student!). And at a gathering of students and faculty I decided to leave and put on my coat, but then got sidetracked into a discussion with him and said I needed to take my coat off. And he said, you can do that but if you do I’m going to stare at your breasts–but anyway you knew that when you got that tattoo there. (The tattoo is like 3 inches below my clavicle anyway, thank you.) He actually said that to me! And then, when I was applying to graduate school, I had to approach my advisor with a problem, because normally I would ask this prominent scholar who gave me an A+ (which, I may say, I thoroughly deserved) in Roman History to write a recommendation, but I knew from previous experience that I didn’t actually want to be alone with him in his office. And so my advisor had to convince another professor, of equal status, to write me a recommendation that was somewhat fictional, on the assurance that when I did have a class with him that term he would find me everything promised, etc. He kindly did so and didn’t regret his decision. So where I’m going with this is, that fucking sucked and was a terrible experience for me, and Dr. Kealy is a fucking asshat who is even now making the lives of his attractive female students needlessly miserable. And just FYI, dsquared’s reliable, not-making-a-big-deal-out-of-it, stand up feminism makes him infinitely more sexually appealing to the leftist ladies of the world. That shit is like catnip. It is only the strict, sex-hating conventions of Crooked Timber, under which fraternization between co-bloggers is totes banned, which keeps us apart right now. And the happily married thing.

Salient,

Perhaps you mean well, but you write as if you were born yesterday — at least as far as this blog is concerned. All of your questions and remarks, like so many blog postings in general, display a complete lack of context beyond what has been going on in the immediate thread. I am actually someone who has been treated with contempt here in the past, having had to defend myself from hostility that was not of my own creation (i.e. I suddenly found myself subject of a blogpost here). I also see that this is part of a pattern, which I think is especially disgraceful coming from a blog that claims to be of the centre-left. I realize that it may be fruitless to fight fire with fire in this context, but that’s how I’ve been proceeding here. I am sure that in some other life — indeed, perhaps even real life (insofar as it still exists) — we could be friends.

SF, re “context” you’ve gone too far.

_I am actually someone who has been treated with contempt here in the past, having had to defend myself from hostility that was not of my own creation (i.e. I suddenly found myself subject of a blogpost here)._

Our first interaction with you was to invite you to participate in an on-line seminar on Chris Mooney’s _The Republican War on Science_. Hardly a mark of contempt or hostility.

Subsequently we discovered that you were posting insulting personal comments about members of our collective under a pseudonym. Comments which (a) might put some of your comments in this thread in perspective and (b) were contrary to our comments policy about sockpuppeting.

We warned you, but allowed you to continue to post comments here. Pretty generous of us, I thought.

We thought one of your books was crap (hence: “I found myself the subject of a blogpost here”). Sorry, but when you publish something, you open yourself to the evaluation of the public. Get over it.

magistra:

bluff no-nonsense, ‘well we know what we’re supposed to say, but that’s not really what we think, is it?’ A kind of consciously politically incorrect self-confessional session.

I contend that there is in fact no such animal. What you describe is not confessional in any meaningful way, it is self-praise. In Kealey’s case, it is the self-praise of the powerful: he is being “bluff, no-nonsense .. politically incorrect” to make it clear that he in fact has no respect for the feelings or humanity of the less powerful.

Kealey’s article, as others have pointed out, is even more about power than it is about lust. From his POV, it’s funny that the sub-humans ever imagined that he thought of them as scholars instead of meat. It’s funny the way this LOLcat is funny: those goofy women! they’re sitting at the table of learning like *people*, thinking they’ll get fed! lolz.

Doctor Science, I’m just guessing that you have the good fortune not to know who Jeremy Clarkson is. magistra was one-upping belle and daniel and everyone else on the thread, all of whom now sound, by comparison, like Kealey’s fans….

All of your questions and remarks, like so many blog postings in general, display a complete lack of context beyond what has been going on in the immediate thread.

Well, that might be… intentional. Water under the bridge, right? It sounds to me like Chris laid out the context of which you speak with even-handed clarity and frankness (and I say this having watched it all unfold in real time, and having taken some incidental participation in the drama at various points).

I did interpret your comment #30 as a more or less direct response to my comment #29, which is why I responded. I was the one to (playfully) call for egging (since I don’t have any knowledge of Jeremy Clarkson, I will have to trust that I’ve been well and truly 1-upped).

So, out of everyone at that point, I was the one most straightforwardly susceptible to your critique (perhaps everyone but Doctor Science). I still don’t accept “but a woman commissioned it and liked it” as a valid negation of the offense I took.

Really? I’m assuming that by “grand satire” we mean “as in Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal’”, the gold standard for satire.

Well, absolutely anything could be called a “attempt” at grand satire (see below). I do agree comprehensively and categorically with your judgment of, and your interpretation of, the article. The piece is not coherent as grand satire.

Yeah, Salient, if you are not aware of the entire commenting oeuvre of Fuller, you have no place commenting here.

Heh. Alright, I’ll get my coat.

The Collected Works are available at a Google Search near you.

Actually not, or at least not completely, ever since the Great Server Collapse of 2009. The bytes of History got bit!

If one wants to get a better handle on Steve Fuller

But isn’t the theme du jour “look, but don’t touch” ?

“Oh wouldn’t you rather be fucking’em”
said vice-chancelor Keeley of Buckingham,
“than pretending that they
had more things to say
than ‘here you are, Terence, start sucking ’em'”