Items of Interest, No More Teacher's Dirty Looks Edition
"If you want to feed hungry people, get involved with a food pantry."
Dick Bauer, The Woke University’s Servant Class. “Debates about American colleges typically center on culture war battles over woke versus anti-woke curriculums. But if you want to understand how the university system got to be so broken you have to look at the underlying infrastructure of higher education. The best place to start is with the adjunct system.”
Gary Kamiya, Monumental Stupidity. “Are we Americans really so fragile, so aggrieved, so one-dimensionally moralistic, so easily manipulated by guilt that we cannot live with reminders of our flawed, complicated, and glorious past?”
Numa Saisselin, a comment upon “De-DeSantitizing Florida Will Depend on the Nonprofit Arts Community, Like It or Not” by Alan Harrison. “If you want to improve voting rights, get involved with a voting rights organization. If you want to feed hungry people, get involved with a food pantry. I don’t believe that life would be better if the entire nonprofit arts industry decided to tackle all of these issues together. I believe that then you’d have an industry so far removed from its purpose that it would collapse, and what good would that do anyone?”1
Mike Gonzalez, No Half-Measures on Higher-Ed Reform. “Education has become perhaps the most hotly contested arena in American politics, and there’s good reason for that. America is now in the midst of regime politics—two divergent ideas of how the country ought to be constituted are in an epic clash for primacy, which is the source of our current polarization. So naturally, schools are drawn in. All regimes have reigning sets of beliefs, and schools and universities are where this worldview is transmitted to the next generation. Thus, education is the new battlefield.”
James Hankins, A Centrist Strategy for Higher Education Reform. “A liberal-conservative politics might be a good thing to transplant to America amid our current travails. Nowhere would a centrist strategy be more useful than in educational policy, where polarization is now so extreme that the true functions of higher education have been crippled. This is hardly a surprise. The groves of academe cannot flourish when rival herds of partisans are charging through them. This is why state policies have to accommodate a broad political spectrum if they are to enjoy the trust of the professoriate, not to mention society as a whole. We’re not in a good place when half the country sees higher education as the willing servant of a single political party.”
John Jiang, To Hell With the Universities. “At its essence, the twenty-first-century college degree is frequently an exercise in social signaling rather than education. Unfortunately, status is relative, and if the majority of society attains a particular status symbol, then it must necessarily become banal and unprestigious. The result is a prisoner’s dilemma: both everyone going to college and no one going to college produce the same relative social standing, all else being equal. But because your fellow spreadsheet wranglers go to college, so must you, lest you fall behind.”
, On Teaching Online. “[A]s I’ve kept doing online courses, I’ve found that there were some practical advantages to teaching online. For example, having a camera filming my desktop directly enables students to see clearly the physical mixing and handling of the brush and paint—something that I usually don’t spend as much doing in front of a live class because there are too many people who might be too far or have an obstructed view to see what’s going on. There is the very helpful ability to share documents, notes and images quickly and to everyone at once.”James Lindsay, Woke: A Culture War Against Europe. “On March 29, 2023, James Lindsay delivered a short address before a conference at the European Union Parliament in Brussels, Belgium. This speech has been widely recognized as making the nature of the Neo-Marxist Cultural Revolution engulfing the West extremely clear, with a sharp warning to Europe not to follow in the footsteps of the Anglophone countries.”2
Joe Garza, What We Can Learn from Jimi Hendrix About Race. “Hendrix’s decision to stand in the middle of a racial fight and amplify the idea of unity was a courageous one, and yet more than half a century later—when things are generally better for historically marginalized groups—it still hasn’t lost its subversive edge.”
, Decolonising the Countryside and Other News from Year Zero. “When I worked nearby, I would sometimes slink off during my lunchbreak to visit their pre-Raphaelite collection, including one of my favourite paintings, John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott…. Tough luck if you want to do the same! The painting has been purged as part of the Tate’s new rehanging which now ‘centres’ radical politics, colonialism and environmental catastrophism. Why? To provide an ‘inclusive view of art history,’ of course, and showcase ‘the growing diversity of the Tate’s collection.’”Joshua T. Katz, A Hearing for Heterodoxy. “Views that buck the orthodoxy warrant a fair hearing, but articles in a journal that is academic and general and contentious—an unusual trio—may not receive it. In the hopes that others, too, will engage with them, I offer here some reflections on three of the ten articles, as well as on the mission of the journal itself.”
Adam Kirsch, Pfitzner’s end. “This feeling of coming too late and knowing too much is part of the reason why conservative artists and aesthetes feel closer to the dead than the living.”
Bruce Bawer, The Birthplace of Woke: Identity Studies in Academia. “[N]one of what the practitioners of identity studies actually do has the slightest connection to legitimate education or scholarship. Their job in the classroom is unambiguous: to fool callow young people into thinking that they’re learning something when, in fact, they’re being indoctrinated into a fatuous ideology and trained to be fanatical crusaders for socially destructive ideas.”
Alex Gutentag, How the Teachers Union Broke Public Education. “As an Oakland public school teacher, I was a staunch supporter of the teachers union and was a union representative at my school for three years. In 2020, however, I began to disagree with the union when it prevented me from returning to my classroom long after studies proved that school reopening was safe, even without COVID-19 mitigation measures. In my experience, the union’s actions were not motivated by sincere fears, but rather by a desire to virtue-signal and maintain comfortable work-from-home conditions.”
Leslie Bienen and Christina Kennedy, Confronting the Student Behavior Crisis. “Misbehavior appears to be associated with pandemic-era school closures and their length. The EdWeek article reported that “districts in which nearly all learning was remote or hybrid in 2020-21” saw “51 percent of principals and district leaders report rising rates of student threats of violence,” while the proportion was lower for schools that had more in-person instruction. Though correlation does not equal causation, social isolation and sudden increases in screen time seem to have combined with background mental-health problems and broader social pathologies to aggravate behavioral issues that predated the pandemic.”
Just released:
, Strange Developments.On now: “Dana Gordon: New Paintings” at the Painting Center through June 17.
On now: “Simon Carr: Being and Place” at Alice Gauvin Gallery through June 18.
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Saisselin identifies herself as an arts administrator at the Florida Theater. She professionally and politely takes Harrison to the woodshed for suggesting that it is the purpose of the arts nonprofits to engage in political action on behalf of his West Coast progressivism. She makes some of the same points that I made when I wrote about Harrison previously in The Arrogance of Equity. Since this is not an Alan Harrison reaction blog, I’m pleased to let Saisselin say what needs saying.
Also of interest by the same author, How to Fight a Tyrannical Movement.