When Universities Really Do Destroy the Past…

Corey, you’re one of the people I like and respect, but it’s extremely difficult for me to see any part of the naming issue as just about silliest trivialization of the problems we face collectively at universities and in the education community generally.

I’m not about to quibble about the Poe home, or the lack of historical context. Developments of all kinds, not just universities invariably involve dispossessing local flora and fauna of all descriptions, most often lower-income folks who are either forced out or bought out.

Rich young people complaining about seeing the paintings of other rich people on the walls named after still more rich people would be what I would call the very least of my own concerns, especially in universities. There are only about a billion real inequities, and problems to be addressed that have a real impact on people’s lives both in terms of income and opportunity – high tuition fees being just one.

I am utterly and completely unsympathetic to any of the ‘naming’ arguments and have to say that nothing I read in this post, or your other, does anything to suggest you have much of a grasp of the realities of life in universities not named Princeton.

Hi Corey. Thanks for this. I see these posts as exceptions that prove a general rule. I really can’t find anything to support in this issue, and I can find about a hundred much more useful and urgent matters that require the attention of motivated, caring students and faculty. Speaking only for myself, these posts sound to me uncharacteristically tone-deaf and you’re just about the last person I’d suggest would manufacture a complaint, or crisis. I think your students and your department are luck to have you. I won’t add more.

This isn’t a capitalist vs. non-capitalist issue. Similar issues come up in China or Russia all the time (and did repeatedly even in their clearly communist phases). This is an elites vs. the rest of us issue. It comes up whenever the elites get to try to control perception.

So by parity of reasoning, if one was against the appalling NYU action one is entitled to be against the Princeton renaming? This seems a side issue no?

I support the students attempt to generate a discussion about the role of racism in Wilson’s political life. It was quite central. Scholars have known this for a while, and its good that it has become part of the public debate. But perhaps the reason some thunder at the renaming is the sense that Wilson was a quite complex figure, involved in a multitude of endeavors, domestically, internationally, at Princeton, etc. Indeed, as we all know in foreign affairs Wilson is still one of the most important figures of the 20th century, even if he was a failure. It seems moralistic to reduce the man to a single dimension, his racist attitudes and actions. This is a very important dimension, and must be discussed fulsomely, but not the only one. Resistance to this reduction might be part of the feeling of resistance.

Intentional or not, I think this essay is disingenuous. There is much more politics invested into Wilson’s name than Poe’s house. This obviously transcends “name” versus “house”. We don’t really care about the collection of letters that constitutes Wilson’s name (a W here, an S there) but what the name signifies. Similarly, to kidneystones, while this fight seems trivial, it is better to treat it as an instantiation of a very large fight against racism as well as a certain historiography of America. In itself the event is not terribly meaningful (most will forget or never even know about this fight) but that fight matters. And in aggregate these small local events (some mushrooming via media coverage into something larger) will gradually erode the status quo and shape new forms of thought and practice.

Note, I don’t necessarily think that what will come to replace the status quo will be “better”, just different. On the other hand, challenges to the racial order in the US have over time lead to changes in consciousness and material outcomes for those we previously termed as minorities. And while many in the internet commentariat are ridiculing the students and their ideas/discourse, for not entirely wrong reasons, they are creating a new common sense among their generation that will shift the discussion of race even further.

>Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time

You had to go there…

ZM: You went to ACU Melbourne? I lectured there in History and Politics for several years, until it became clear that I’d never get anything beyond poorly paid and insecure sessional work. Never expected to see ACU come up on a Crooked Timber thread, but there you go. Small world.

“strike by me and my colleagues, which would be illegal in the State of New York and could possibly land us all in jail.”

Would you elaborate about it? I mean, the being illegal part.

Four years later, a nine-story, 170,000 square-foot Furman Hall was formerly opened.

If they can afford to build a nine-story, 170,000 sq. ft. building, they can fucking afford to move a 19th century house. (Buildings can and have been relocated many many times!) Failing to do so is not an ideological commitment, it’s over-dressed miserliness and greed, solidified as a commitment to being an asshole.

Not least because the thing should have been a tourist attraction which would have provided a revenue stream, plus endless intangible (but bookable!) goodwill!

we sigh, whisper an All That’s Solid Melts Into Air, and move on. If it is for the sake of knowledge and anti-racism, we say no, in thunder.

The alumni and assorted other schmucks might have to change their letterheads and/or reduce their donations.

max
[‘It greatly over-dignifies the acts and failures to act involved – pure laziness and moral cowardice actually – to describe them as commitments to capitalism.’]

Next to the Yale Campus stands the Grove Street Cemetery, whose bizarre neo-Egyptian entryway bears the inscription “The Dead Shall Be Raised”.

Local wits would add, “when the university needs the land.”

So I basically agree with Corey on this one–if we attack a member of the inner-circle, e.g. an alumnus or a grandee, then the outcry goes, “is nothing sacred?”

But if we decimate or desecrate the homes and lives of those outside the charmed circle, then it’s just a shrug and a “heh, gotta keep up with progress.”

Kinda like “sanctity of contract,” an ideal invoked whenever an executive might lose pay, but notably absent whenever workers’ pensions are plundered.

In 1964 the President of Georgetown had to apologize on local NYC TV because the GU cheerleaders at a NYU basketball game dressed as an Arab and Hitler. NY Jew is still it’s non pc nickname.

Princeton is a school where you go to become one of the ruling class. You don’t always succeed of course but that is what it is for. Naming rights to buildings is a very ruling class concern, therefore what looks trivial to us is actually very important to them. They are attacking their class where it hurts.

ZM: I worked with Ellen, splitting a class on Human Rights History (my particular area of expertise). I know Shirley from ACU and Melbourne, where I did my PhD. I was at ACU from around 2010 to 2012, I believe.

On the other hand, sometimes capitalism preserves a university’s racist past.

But what will you do Bluesmoke, to be taken seriously?

Ebenezer, look at what happened to OWS – massive violence was quite casually used against them. The economic and likes (i.e., the real ones) don’t like that stuff.

The claim that the students are raising a trivial problem cuts both ways. If it is so silly, let’s rename it Martin Luther King School of Public & International Affairs and be done with it. What’s the big deal?

p.s.: Good luck to Corey with his fight, I hope he does not end up in jail.

@34:

I’m still waiting for the Stanford kids to protest their education at the behest of that numskull. Or the U. of C. kids to demand that all that Rockefeller money be, er, repatriated.

Like the capitalist society they serve, universities erase the past all the time.

Non-capitalists have far greater reverence for the past; just ask anyone between Tsaritsyn, umm, Stalingrad, umm, Volgograd and Saint Petersburg, umm, Leningrad, umm, Saint Petersburg.

dax @38–

You may be right. Indeed, you were there, so you are more likely to be right.

But judging only from your description, what I see is not Money, but Fear.

Fear that if he does not arrange his room twice as perfectly, wear a suit twice as well pressed, and be twice as good in every other way, his trajectory will stall out at Princeton and he’ll never get another chance.

You have seen the statistics. Black kids from the middle class are more than twice as likely to wind up poor at 40 as middle class white kids. The median wealth for black households is about one-thirteenth of the median wealth for white households. When financial troubles arise, there is no cushion. Any small crisis can wipe out the generational struggle to get ahead. In the US, at the population level, race still trumps class.

So this kid, with the photo of his mom, was probably doing his very best to give the impression that “this is what Money looks like.” Maybe, as you thought, because he really was from Money. But more likely, because he was only one slip away from poverty, and lived in constant, obsessive anxiety over that thought.

I mean–there’s almost no point in my saying all of this, since neither of us know that kid’s real story, what he came from, or how he’s doing today. I’m just revealing my own assumptions by telling his story my way, and you reveal yours by telling it your way.

But here’s another of my assumptions–Money usually looks far less uptight. Money can throw its clothes on the floor and wear any damned thing it wants. Money doesn’t give a damn whether you are impressed or not, because it doesn’t have to care what you think. As another ill-at-ease Princetonian put it long ago, the rich are careless people, who know that no matter how badly they make a mess of things they can always retreat into their money or their vast carelessness. That’s not what this kid’s room sounds like.

Apropos the posts and comments concerning reappraisals of Woodrow Wilson and the student protests, some thoughts on history, myth and narrative, under the rubric of which I can say why I am indeed grateful for what they are doing.

I think narrative is necessary to history. Narrative organizes (to use two terms from semiotics) the paradigmatic order of action — the non linear, cyclonic whirl of events, an almost innumerable set of shifting intentions and experiences — into the syntagmatic order, into the coherence of “first this, then that.” Stories bring time to the chaos of events. Meaningful experience, for a mortal being at least, begins, has a duration, and ends. Stories create meaning by ordering events in this way.

But myth and writing history, though both forms of storytelling, are quite distinct. Or at least they can be distinct, particularly from the perspective of the historian. Myth is an effort to bring eternity into narrative, hence it is concerned with the relationship between time and eternity. Biblical narrative, for example, is often ‘historical,’ but human history is really a function of extratemporal agency. We mortals are, more or less depending on your reading, bit players in a divine comedy. Historical narrative, to the contrary, is concerned with human actions, not the relationship between gods and mortals. It is concerned with human relations as they occur in time, as they constitute events with beginnings, durations, and ends. History is much more closely related to tragedy, to mimesis, than to myth. At the same time it also tends to bend back towards myth, almost in spite of itself.

Myth and history are both very concerned not only with time, but with with causality. However for the historian, obviously, ‘God’s wrath’ is not a sufficient explanation for some sort of catastrophe. Good historians stay away from the temptation to invoke a transcendental signified. However, in historical writing there is a temptation to ascribe agency to impersonal processes, historical rivers sweeping the actors toward a fate they cannot seem to influence or escape. This is not myth, but at the extremis it is a genre of history that doubles back toward the comedic aspect of myth — comedic not that the outcome is funny, but comedic in the sense that the ending of the story is a function of forces, not in this case beyond time, but a reification of time itself into processes like progress or decline.

One can see a similar curvature, but in this case arcing towards the paradigmatic, in the genres of historical writing that reject big synthetic narratives. They are keenly aware of and accept the limitations of human agency without filling the void with a reified process. They recognize that people, nations, movements, armies, etc. often intend an outcome but are thwarted by chance, by folly, but most of all by being at cross purposes with other actors. But the extreme tendency here is to construe storytelling as an imposition on events themselves. ‘Let the facts speak for themselves’ is the familiar refrain, notwithstanding that all traces, all evidence of the past, must be brought, selected, curated, interpreted in the present. And the act of bringing, of selecting, of curating, of interpreting is always a narrative act, a synthesis of infinitely heterogenous facts into a coherent story. Moreover, historical actors themselves invoke stories, to rally support, to justify choices, etc. Which means that the material of historical writing, from the driest document to the most dramatic witness testimony, is itself always already a syntagmatic construction. The idea of a narrative free history is as absurd as the idea of a singular narrative that resolves all paradigmatic messiness and complexity.

So what of these radical (or as some would have it, simply over privileged) youth? What of their alleged dogmatism and desire to reshape the past? Certainly, some lack humility, in the sense that their story cannot simply be the story, any more than their facts can simply be the facts. But let the historian or observer who is without sin cast the first stone. All history writing, to say nothing of historical action, is prone to over-valuations of process, or of fact, or indeed of both. There is no sacred ground here. This is not to say there isn’t higher and lower ground. It is fair to point out that the students sometimes seem to be mired in some pretty swampy places. It is also fair for them to push back and point out the low points in any established historical topography. But this is the kind of teachable moment, for all concerned, that comes around far too rarely. People are engaged, passionate, and in action. It is not just a debate over canonical history. They are actually making history by challenging how it has been made manifest on the campus landscape. They are challenging established stories, stirring up sedimented facts, all from within the position of Ivy League privilege — and are no less remarkable for it. To assume that they are simply playing at politics is a big assumption, more than a little whiffing of resentment. I would argue that this eruption of controversy at these elite levels is a very good thing, a sign that power is not monolithic, nor easily reproduced.

Anyway, this is why I agree with the assertion of the initial post, why I am grateful for their actions, even if I disagree with some these actions at the extremes.

Val,

That is a disquieting article; I wonder what decision will be made about the names next year. I’ll feel like shivering when I go in some of those buildings now I have read that.