As requested by a couple of commenters, I’ve created a separate thread to discuss the issues raised by commenter “closet conservative” in response to my post on US academia. I’ll moderate, but not participate
From the category archives:
Academia
Earlier this week, I received my contributor copy of The Art of Teaching Philosophy: Reflective Values and Concrete Practices, edited by Brynn Welch.[1] It’s an exciting book, and I’m proud to have gotten to contribute to it. My chapter on advising graduate students about teaching was coauthored with an excellent teacher (and researcher), a near-former grad student, Britta Clark.
I’m eager to read all the chapters. Welch often likened the book to a series “hallway chats,” or unplanned encounters in the hallway when a colleague tells you about a new teaching strategy she’s trying out. I’ve walked away from many such chats with great new ideas to adopt, and I know I’ll get a lot out of reading this.
I also know I won’t go in order. When the book arrived, I skipped straight to David O’Brien’s chapter on “Teaching with Puzzles.” O’Brien is a thoughtful, imaginative teacher and a wonderful writer, so I knew the chapter would be great. But I was inspired to start with his chapter by something else I’d been reading. I got an early look at Anthony Laden’s new book, Networks of Trust: The Social Costs of College and What We Can Do about Them. I’ll write more about it once it’s published later this year.[2] But I’m going spoil one tiny morsel by writing about it now, because it struck a chord and—along with O’Brien’s chapter—motivated me to try something new.
I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.
The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.
But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are openly anti-science on a wide range of issues, notably including climate science, evolution and vaccination.
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Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns (NSW state) government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins, immediate legislation is needed “as a backup to negotiations and to give the government power if necessary to determine final outcomes”.
This is by no means an isolated case. The failure of the National Electricity Market, premised on the idea of competition between private companies, has led state and federal governments to re-enter the business of electricity generation, storage and transmission. The disastrous experiment with private prisons in NSW is being unwound. Plans for the eventual privatisation of the NBN, established in response to the failure of the privatised Telstra to deliver national broadband, have been abandoned.
In the United Kingdom, where the Thatcher government of the 1980s led the way in privatisation, the complex and difficult process of renationalisation has been going on even longer. Rail privatisation was partially reversed with the renationalisation of Railtrack under the Blair Labour government, further limited under the Tories, and is now likely to be completely reversed.
The UK’s new Starmer government is also grappling with the impending failure of Thames Water, privatised under Thatcher and stripped bare by its private owners. Australian readers won’t be surprised to learn that the “millionaires factory”, Macquarie Group, was a leading player here.
The end of the UK’s private finance initiative (PFI), the model for Australian public-private partnerships, is already producing huge problems. But it is now clear to everyone that dealing with these problems is better than persisting with the hopeless failure of PFI.
Even Thatcher’s greatest political success, the sale of council homes, looks a lot less appealing in light of the current housing crisis in the UK, paralleling that in Australia. It seems clear that governments will need to re-enter the business of building and operating social housing in big way.
In fact, the failures of privatisation are numerous and obvious, while unambiguous successes are hard to find. Claimed examples, such as the pharmaceutical enterprise CSL, turn out, on closer examination, to have used public money to build private empires.
Why, then, was privatisation such a popular policy, at least among those who dominated the policy debate from the 1980s until recently?
The simplest explanation is that politicians saw privatisation and private infrastructure as a way to get access to a big bucket of money, which could be spent on popular projects without the need to raise taxes. This was a fallacy, refuted many times over, but resurrected just as often in zombie form. Either the government hands over the right to collect revenue to private operators, as in the case of toll roads, or the public forgoes the earnings of government business enterprises, as with asset sales.
Even now this lesson has not been fully absorbed. On the one hand, the Victorian Labor government has begun the process of reversing Jeff Kennett’s privatisation of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria. On the other, having sold its land titles office, Labor is now poised to sell the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registry where it has already increased charges for the provision of legally required information.
Economists who advocated privatisation mostly avoided this silly error. Indeed, the NSW Treasury repeatedly warned against treating private provision of infrastructure as a “magic pudding”. But, under the influence of neoliberal ideology, they committed a subtler error. Rather than examining the fiscal outcomes of privatisation, they assumed public investments should be subject to a large risk premium to make them comparable to private alternatives. This premium was not needed to cover the actual loss from failed public investments, which has historically been low. Rather, it reflected the mysterious “equity premium” demanded by private investors in financial markets. At least until the GFC, neoliberal economists relied on the “efficient markets” hypothesis to conclude that the price observed in financial markets must be the right one. In a world where meme stocks and crypto scams are now a central part of the financial system, such a hypothesis is no longer credible.
Finally, of course, there were huge profits to be made in the financial sector from the sale process and from exploiting weaknesses in the regulation of privatised companies. The list of former politicians who have sold public assets and ended up with lucrative post-politics careers is, incidentally, rather long.
The era of privatisation is nearly over, at least in Australia and the UK. But cleaning up the mess left behind will take years, or even decades.
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.
First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.
It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one terminus. At one time, only a fortunate minority survived long enough to reach old age. But now, most people do, and it would be good if we talked more honestly about it.
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What to do when we can’t trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at.
I spoke last weekend at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the electorate of McPherson south of Brisbane, currently held by the (centre-right to right) Liberal National Party. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election.
It was a great discussion. I prepared some preliminary notes, which I’ve provided below. Comments and constructive criticism most welcome
I’ve spent many hours trying to take pictures of these over the past three years and have a large collection of indistinct blurs as a result. But I went back to basics, studied the camera setting, watched a bunch of “how to” videos on YouTube and actually managed this one:
In the UK, we’re all waking up to the prospect of a new government. The election was an oddity: Labour has converted a modest 35% vote share into a whopping Parliamentary majority; the Tories did somewhat better than suggested, on around 24%, but have lost more than two-thirds of their MPs. (The final figures were closer than most opinion polls suggested). But the election was not a story of Labour advances: they did little to increase their vote share (and neither did the Lib Dems, whose seats went up dramatically, from 11 to probably 71, on a virtually unchanged vote share). The real story was a fracturing of the Conservative coalition, with some voters locally going to Labour, some locally to the Liberal Democrats, and many going to Reform. One big question over the next few years will be how the Tories respond to this fracturing of that coalition. While they have long been divided and in decline, they no longer have Brexit to paper over their differences. Will they tack left, or right? (Answer: Electoral rationality suggests left; the demographics of their membership suggests right). Another is how Labour will attempt to sustain what is in fact a rather fragile electoral advantage in the coming difficult years, given that many wins were narrow, and given that they already appear destined to disappoint many of their voters.
Any predictions, then, about what the next four or five years hold for either Labour or the Conservatives?
In the 18 months since I quit Twitter, I can feel the atrophy of my vibe detector. I’m reading more than ever, on Substack and the FT, Discord and group chats — much of the same “content” I would’ve encountered on Twitter, in fact, but without the ever-present spiderweb of the social graph, the network of accounts, RTs and likes that lets me understand not only what someone thinks but what everyone else thinks about them thinking that.
So while I know that I’m missing the vibes, I cannot, of course, know which vibes I’m missing. Knowledge of vibes means never being surprised when someone says something: I know what kind of person they are, and I know what those kinds of people say. This is why Twitter users participate in The Discourse rather than in human-to-human dialogue: given the unknowability of another person, when we openly converse with them, we can always be surprised by what they say.
Although various Discourses now take place both on and between other platforms, the architecture of Twitter is ideal for textual Discourse and it seems to remain the hub.
The first time I was realized I was way off of the main vibe came from the response to Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation. My readers will know that I am extremely sympathetic to at least part of his argument, which I’ll split up as follows:
I’m hosting a couple of professionalization discussions for our PhD candidates and postdocs this summer, informal conversations to help them navigate the crazy academic job market. A few weeks ago we discussed job talks as the department had just had a bunch of candidates visit (very different schedule here in Europe than the US) and we’ve had quite a few such talks over the past few years. Debriefing seemed like a good idea. After that conversation, people requested that we have a session specifically about job application letters so that’s coming up next. I’m writing now to seek your input on what works and what doesn’t. I can imagine that some of this is field-dependent, but I also suspect many aspects are generalizable.
My experiences with reading letters are a bit ridiculous in terms of volume at this point. I’ve been at the University of Zurich for eight years and have served on as many search committees. These have mostly concerned my own department (communication and media research), but a couple of times it was a search in political science and now one in sociology. It is standard to have people from other departments (and even other universities) on search committees here, very different from US practice (in my experience). I had also served on several search committees while at Northwestern and have served as an external member on some committees elsewhere in Europe so you can do the math on how many letters I’ve read over the years.
One of my biggest pieces of advice is for candidates to show rather than tell committee members about their accomplishments. I always cringe when I read things like “I am a leading researcher in the area of” (especially since most of these positions are for junior scholars, but I don’t like to see this even from a senior scholar). Rather than stating that “I’m a very accomplished scholar,” applicants should list their tangible accomplishments such as “I have published in x, I have won award y, I currently hold competitive fellowship z.”