Matthew Yglesias often writes about the conservative penchant for anti-anti-racist stances. Today, for example:
What we’re seeing is episode one million in the American conservative movement’s passionate attachment to the cause of anti-anti-racism. Relatively few conservatives are interested in expressing racist views, but virtually all conservatives are united in the conviction that anti-racism run amok is ruining the country and almost no conservatives are interested in combating racism.
I think a better way to put it is this: contemporary conservatives are determined to rewrite history as to who was/is on the side of the angels in major civil rights struggles. Conservatives accept that equality for blacks and women is a good thing and that real social and legal progress has been made on these fronts. Conservatives freely admit those on the losing side of these civil rights struggles were in the wrong. What they resist is the admission that theirs was the losing side. Glenn Beck, wrapped in the mantle of the civil rights. Sarah Palin, feminist icon. Conservatives are fine with civil right victories, on the condition that these are victories for conservatism, and reproaches to liberalism and progressivism. Feminism is great, so long as it puts the feminists in their place. (Seriously, conservatives now like what feminists were saying all that time, pretty much. It only bugs them who the messenger was.) [click to continue…]
While busying myself with this and that, I began listening to the new Belle and Sebastian album, Write About Love. The first track, “I Didn’t See It Coming”. But! I didn’t realize iTunes was on shuffle, so the next track up was, naturally, Iron Maiden, “Prodigal Son”, off their second album, Killers. I wasn’t focusing, didn’t instantly recognize the track. But it gradually impinged on my sphere of phenomenological awareness that I could not possibly be listening to the new Belle and Sebastian album, however cheeky these twee English (Scottish?) monkeys might be trying to be. So I ask you: at what point in “Prodigal Son” does it become metaphysically impossible that this is a Belle and Sebastian song? (Now, of course, given it actually is an Iron Maiden song, in a sense it’s a trick question. But never mind that.)
A) 0.01. From the very first second it just couldn’t be Belle and Sebastian.
B) 0.10. These arpeggios.
C) 0.16. Those drums.
D) 0.27. When it rocks.
E) 1.16 The vocals.
Or is there in actual, possible fact some Borgesian/Lewisian counterpart to our world in which Iron Maiden never recorded this song, in which Belle and Sebastian write and perform an identical song on their new album, Write About Love, with the help of some guy’s guest vocals. And how’s that working out for them?
UPDATE: I guess this is somehow related to the general issue of British austerity measures, but I couldn’t say how.
Karl Marx in the Preface to vol. 1 of _Capital_ : “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future. ”
Here’s “part of an interview from IHE”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/20/schrecker with Ellen Schrecker, author of _The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom, and the End of the American University_ :
bq. Reduced support from state legislatures and the federal government’s decision to aid higher education through grants and loans to students rather than through the direct funding of individual institutions forced those institutions to look for other sources of income, while seeking to cut costs. In the process, academic administrators adapted themselves to the neoliberal ethos of the time. They reoriented their institutions toward the market at the expense of those elements of their educational missions that served no immediate economic function.
bq. As they came to rely ever more heavily on tuition payments, they diverted resources to whatever would attract and retain students — elaborate recreational facilities, gourmet dining halls, state-of-the-art computer centers, and winning football teams. At the same time, they slashed library budgets, deferred building maintenance, and – most deleteriously – replaced full-time tenure-track faculty members with part-time and temporary instructors who have no academic freedom and may be too stressed out by their inadequate salaries and poor working conditions to provide their students with the education they deserve. Meanwhile, rising tuitions are making a college degree increasingly unaffordable to the millions of potential students who most need that credential to make it into the middle class.
bq. Unfortunately, the competitive atmosphere produced by the academic community’s long-term obsession with status and its more recent devotion to the market makes it hard for its members to collaborate in solving its problems. Institutions compete for tuition-paying undergraduates and celebrity professors who can boost their institutions’ U.S. News & World Report ratings. Faculty members compete for tenure and research grants. And students compete for grades after having competed for admission to the highly ranked schools that will provide them with the credentials for a position within the American elite.
“Clive Crook on his blog today”:http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/2010/10/the-intelligent-use-of-experts/
bq. idolizing experts and disdaining the supposedly ignorant masses is at least as dangerous. The intelligent use of experts is not straightforward. Technical expertise tends to be narrow, sometimes extremely narrow. Many policy-oriented experts are only too pleased to exceed their limits, pronouncing widely and authoritatively on matters they understand hardly any better than non-experts.
My immediate reaction while reading this was that even if the underlying claim is right, it still sounds a bit rich when it comes from someone whose paid job is every week to pronounce widely and authoritatively on matters where he does not possess any obvious expertise. And then I read the next sentence.
490,000 public sector jobs to go, and just wait for the multiplier effects.
“Here’s Joe Stiglitz”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/19/no-confidence-fairy-for-austerity-britain :
bq. Thanks to the IMF, multiple experiments have been conducted – for instance, in east Asia in 1997-98 and a little later in Argentina – and almost all come to the same conclusion: the Keynesian prescription works. Austerity converts downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions. The confidence fairy that the austerity advocates claim will appear never does, partly perhaps because the downturns mean that the deficit reductions are always smaller than was hoped. Consumers and investors, knowing this and seeing the deteriorating competitive position, the depreciation of human capital and infrastructure, the country’s worsening balance sheet, increasing social tensions, and recognising the inevitability of future tax increases to make up for losses as the economy stagnates, may even cut back on their consumption and investment, worsening the downward spiral.
There’s a qualified defense of the recent NRC rankings of universities by the rather magnificently named duo of E. William Colglazier and Jeremiah P. Ostriker in the “Chronicle today”:http://chronicle.com/article/Counterpoint-Doctoral-Program/125005/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The exciting Berkman Center (where I spent the 2008/09 academic year as a Fellow) is accepting applications for both its Academic Fellowship program for an early/mid-career academic as well as its open Fellowship program. It is a fantastic place to spend some time so I highly encourage people with interests in Internet and society types of topics – very broadly defined – to look into these opportunities. Please spread the word! Berkman is genuinely interested in having a diverse set of voices and perspectives represented among its fellows. To achieve that, it is important that this call is circulated widely.
Anyone interesting in debating the future of the (European) universities may be interested in knowing about a symposium on “The University as a Business: Disaster or Necessity?”:http://www.fondationuniversitaire.be/en/forum9.php#prog. This will take place on the 18th of November in Brussels. I will be there, with some of my students.
On the same topic, Chris just posted a link on FB to a paper by Bruno Frey, called “Withering Academia”:http://www.iew.uzh.ch/wp/index.en.php?action=query&id=512, which is well worth reading too.
(Preface: if you, sensibly enough, want to avoid my rambling and get straight to the point, just go and read Richard Rothstein on the Rhee/Klein manifesto now. Update: a nice related post, which will now be followed by interesting discussion, at Laura’s).
I’ve managed to resist seeing Waiting For Superman so far. The trailers promise me that I won’t like it much. My wife gets a free showing on Wednesday, so she can report to me. Ironically, the book on which it is apparently based, Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes, is really not at all bad. It is true that, as a friend of mine said, “He has drunk the Kool-Aid”. But unlike many Kool-Aid drinkers (and there are a lot of them, I gather), he displays pretty clearly all the evidence you need in order to judge its toxicity. His account of the social science around low-end academic achievement is pretty careful, and entirely readable, and the narrative is well paced, and the story informative. For Tough, urban school districts need more Promise Academies and KIPP schools. I tend to be in the, “lets try it and see if it works” camp myself, though with an emphasis on actually trying to figure out whether it really does work. More than any academic study I have seen, Tough’s book makes me sceptical. He makes clear that Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, became obsessed with driving up test scores. Remember “test scores” means “math and reading test scores”. From a low base it is not that difficult to drive them up — simply restrict your attention to driving them up and allow math and reading to be the more or less exclusive focus of the curriculum. This is what he did, with modest effects on reading scores (which are harder to manipulate by teaching to the test) and greater effects on math scores. It really may be that for these kids improving their math skills somewhat and their reading skills slightly is the best thing for them (though, whereas there is a correlation between test scores and later success, we don’t have any evidance that improving children’s test scores improves later outcomes, and we have lots of evidence that these bumps in test scores from grade-specific interventions typically fade pretty quickly). Maybe, maybe not. Whether any child in that school actually learned more, or anything more useful, as a result of this, we have no way of knowing.
A lot of US-based bloggers are speculating about who is going to win or lose in the Congressional mid-terms. Myself, I’ve nothing much to add to that discussion. What’s more interesting to me is the potential transformation happening within the Republican Party. Parties – like most other organizations in advanced industrial democracies – depend on money. And it’s pretty clear that the sources of fundraising are changing. Take a look at this “Sunlight Foundation”:http://blog.sunlightfoundation.com/2010/10/15/court-rulings-change-elections-independent-spending-dwarfs-party-spending-in-midterm/ post on the balance between spending by traditional party committees and by outside groups. Or just look at the key graphs.
[amazon]. 
, is really not at all bad. It is true that, as a friend of mine said, “He has drunk the Kool-Aid”. But unlike many Kool-Aid drinkers (and there are a lot of them, I gather), he displays pretty clearly all the evidence you need in order to judge its toxicity. His account of the social science around low-end academic achievement is pretty careful, and entirely readable, and the narrative is well paced, and the story informative. For Tough, urban school districts need more Promise Academies and KIPP schools. I tend to be in the, “lets try it and see if it works” camp myself, though with an emphasis on actually trying to figure out whether it really does work. More than any academic study I have seen, Tough’s book makes me sceptical. He makes clear that Geoffrey Canada, the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone, became obsessed with driving up test scores. Remember “test scores” means “math and reading test scores”. From a low base it is not that difficult to drive them up — simply restrict your attention to driving them up and allow math and reading to be the more or less exclusive focus of the curriculum. This is what he did, with modest effects on reading scores (which are harder to manipulate by teaching to the test) and greater effects on math scores. It really may be that for these kids improving their math skills somewhat and their reading skills slightly is the best thing for them (though, whereas there is a correlation between test scores and later success, we don’t have any evidance that improving children’s test scores improves later outcomes, and we have lots of evidence that these bumps in test scores from grade-specific interventions typically fade pretty quickly). Maybe, maybe not. Whether any child in that school actually learned more, or anything more useful, as a result of this, we have no way of knowing.
[amazon]: 
