The Universe of Power is Lumpy, and Identity Is Complex (4 Feb. 2014)

 In academic jargon from the late 20^th century, I can put the Basic point here fairly succinctly: Outside of the simplest societies, and in ways highly sensitive to context, human beings are multiply and complexly situated, with different status- and power-positions in a number of hierarchies of class, caste, age, profession, etc. — in modern times (say 1500 CE-present) often including race.
            Coming down out of high abstraction, this means that if you're Oprah Winfried, you could be refused a close look at a $38,000 purse at the Trois Pommes boutique in Zurich, Switzerland, because you are Black; and it may've taken you longer to become a billionaire than if you were a man — but you can find yourself at a boutique for the upper .01% in Zurich, and you can conceive of a handbag running $38,000. It means that if you're Carlos Estavez visiting Oxnard, California, from the Santa Barbara Film Festival, you're less likely to be shot or beaten by our local cops than if you weren't also Charlie Sheen.
            Putting the matter in terms of my personal experience, this —
            One winter holiday season a couple decades back, I was happily surprised to find a card in my mailbox from my editor at Miami University student newspaper, The Miami Student. "Happy Holidays!" the card company wished me, and my editor added a few lines of her own. "Hope all goes well, blah blah. So happy to have had your column for The Student. I'm dropping your column." And then she ended with a sentence or two that I shouldn't worry about the newspaper because she'd found another member of the faculty to replace me, and he was, as I well knew, just a great guy, an incredibly popular teacher in my department, and, she was sure, a most excellent writer.
            Over the next couple of days, I showed the card around, and one of my colleagues joked that she'd probably ask me for a letter of recommendation, and I said I just might write one for her since she showed the tact and sensitivity I'd come to associate with editors. (Like many authors, I saved and occasionally savored the more notable of the rejection letters I'd received. The most memorable is still the one I got at the very start of my scholarly career: the editor of PMLA was kind enough to include some comments from the first, and only, reader of a long essay I submitted, a comment that began, "Very interesting opening paragraph, before the whole thing falls flat.")
            As you've probably anticipated, I soon received another letter from the editor of The Miami Student — a note, anyway — requesting a letter of recommendation.
            I was at my office typewriter, I think (it may've been a computer keyboard), composing my response to her, when she stopped at my door, put her head in, and asked me in person for the letter; and I told her to come all the way in and repeated to her what had been the joke that I just might write the letter.
            She was somewhat taken aback, and we get to the point of this story for my point here. "Oh," she replied. "It didn't occur to me I could hurt the feelings of a" (White male?) "professor."
            So I explained to her, in nonfigurative terms, how rejection hurts coming from just about anyone, but that "The universe of power is lumpy" and in this context she was the editor, I was — had been — a staff writer, and she the person with power.
            The upshot, if you're interested, is that I think I did write a brief "RecLet" and (I'm almost positive) she got whatever the RecLet recommended her for. The colleague whose column replaced mine was indeed a hotshot, and sufficiently one that he soon stopped submitting columns to The Student and then moved on to a better job.
            In a similar line, as English Department Student Mediator — i.e., the guy who handled complaints from students — I had to deal with a couple of young women teaching assistants brought up feminist in the era stressing the all-pervasive power of patriarchy. And they couldn't believe that they could hurt, or mess over, a male student. Whether or not they had done so is something I wouldn't reveal if I remembered, and I certainly don't remember. And it's irrelevant. "The universe of power is lumpy," and in their classrooms, most immediately embedded in the student/teacher relationship — most especially as in grades — they held the upper hand.
            Furthermore, at that place and time if their students had threatened them outside the classroom, relying upon the students' status as Whites and males and large and (in one case) a jock, the full police powers of the University and State would have enforced the power of the TA's. However much the cops and coaches might have held them in contempt as women and "civilians," academics and intellectuals, their status in the classroom would have trumped other concerns: the Establishment protects the Establishment, and as Miami U teachers they were part of the local Establishment.
            Centrally, though, were the grades, which were assigned by "The Instructor of Record," which — short of some very fancy and difficult-to-execute bureaucratic footwork — even a lowly Teaching Assistant was. And, once assigned, the grade was the grade, and only the instructor of record or a court order could change it.
            While explaining that they were the power-holders here, I could identify with these young women. I hadn't believed it my first couple semesters as a TA: it took me a while to realize The Power of the Grade.
            As a new teacher in my twenties, my previous experience dealing with freshman had been in my fraternity, where we kept the pledges somewhat uninformed on just who could do what to them — and most of them suspected that I, as a chapter officer, could have them "racked out": with a "rack-out" an extended periods of late-night strenuous Physical Training of the sort Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Full Metal Jacket would immortally formalize as, "I will PT you all until you fucking die! I'll PT you until your assholes are sucking buttermilk!" Additionally, some suspected — as I learned from a really drunken pledge who pleaded with me not to — some thought we might paddle them. Actually, we didn't paddle pledges, and I personally lacked authority to order a rackout, although I probably could have arranged one if I worked at it, and I certainly could have had a pledge put on one of our nastier work assignments. ("There is more than one way to skin a cat; none of which are pleasant for the cat" — and the grease trap in a large kitchen often needs cleaning.)
            My previous experience dealing with frosh was with guys who thought I could punish them, possibly significantly, and that is what counts: they showed me respect, or at least took care to be deferential outside of ritualized "Saturnalian" pledge entertainments, where they were invited to insult actives. What I had never encountered from pledges in the fraternity was servility, and when I encountered servility in the classroom, it disturbed me.
            I finally said to a class, "Look, I'm maybe five, six years older than most of you; I look younger than half of you; I'm 5'2" tall and 135 pounds, and most of you can beat me up — why the servility?!?" And they reminded me about my giving them grades.
            And I told them that I was an ethical person and really wanted them to argue with me and did actually grade "blind," not looking at the names of the students who'd written the essays and I respected integrity … and, yeah, I gave the grades.
            "The universe of power is lumpy" and a little Jew who got asked to show multiple ID's in bars that sold my students beer without question — I had to work to keep a fair number of students from high-power, hydraulic sucking up.
            Later on in my career, when linguistic "morÄ“s" loosened, I had my students consider the implications of expressions like "to brown-nose" and "suck up to" and consider the fact that if they prostituted their ideas for a grade that made me (figuratively) a professorial "john." But that was later, about the time of my "mediation" service at Miami U and having to explain to a new generation of teachers, especially young women, the variation on the theme by Stan Lee that even with a little bit of power comes responsibility, starting with the responsibility of admitting that in some contexts even members of otherwise oppressed groups can have power.
            Larger issues are involved, though, with that lumpy universe of power, some of them depressing.
            At my fraternity, some wise-ass (who might've been me) illustrated the principle of seniority and hierarchy with a posted drawing of a multi-storey outhouse, imaging the bureaucratic and more generally sociological meaning of the adage "Shit flows down hill."
            That principle can move into the horrific in contexts like the Jewish Police and community councils in too many cases during the Hitlerian Holocaust, or the problems slave women would have found looking for sisterly solidarity from the wives of their masters or even their widowed mistresses. Or with gang leaders in ghettos and barrios having tremendous local power, even if they might have trouble hailing a cab (if their armored Humvee is in the shop) and probably won't apply for membership in "The City Club" — although their children or grandchildren might well be asked to join.
            And here I will stop on that line of thought since it leads back to European ghettos and those Jewish police, death camp Kapos, and tales of survival and complicity I can only think about briefly. So I'm going to tone down the emotional stress and put things a bit more positively —

            If not all, then at least most effective politics is coalition politics, and in an era of "identity" politics effective coalition building is helped by reminding people that their identities are complex and that identity itself is malleable and contextual.
            My personal personal story here is a quick one, from a time I had been about a week in Tokyo and caught myself looking for Black people. Why was I looking for Black people? Well, as an American in Tokyo, I was definitely gaijin, a foreigner, and I found myself feeling like a foreigner and looking for other gaijin, and for sure a Black person would (1) stand out in a crowd, (2) be gaijin, and (3) likely be American. I wasn't the only one feeling that way. A South Korean businessman sort of picked me up and bought me dinner. He was interesting to talk to, but I wondered what the agenda here might be. It was simple; he'd been in Japan for several months was not just gaijin but Korean gaijin, and he just wanted to talk to a fellow foreigner and someone who wouldn't view him with just a touch of something hard to pin down. The people he'd dealt with hadn't been racists, exactly, nor xenophobes nor jingoistic; it was just that for them there were Japanese and gaijin, and Koreans were definitely gaijin, and that was that. Random Blacks on the street, this South Korean businessman, and I were in the same group.
            Another story is less personal, but still low-key and small-scale.
            There was a radio interview I can't cite but recall well in which a young feminist scholar studied a Black church where young women were trying to change things and were running into resistance from their elders, women as well as men. Why would the older women side with the men and oppose an attempt to democratize the church in ways that would give women an equal voice in running the church? Why would the old women reject a voice in hiring ministers and establishing the liturgy and, well, moving the church into the future?
            Why wouldn't these old women join with the young ones to gain power to innovate, or just to do things?
            If you've ever dealt with a group of organized old women, you have guessed by now that they knew exactly what they were doing.
            The reforms that would've given church-women in general more power would have given the old ladies of the "amen corner" less, more exactly, less where it mattered to them. They liked the church the way it was, thank you, and didn't want changes. They lacked the power to innovate, but they had the power to block: a near-absolute power to veto. They couldn't hire the minister — or get a female one — but they sure as hell could get a minister fired, and the one after him and the one after him until they got a leadership that knew not to cross them.
            Increased democratic power for women in that church generally would've meant less of the power for the old women particularly.
            On the other hand, moving from a memory of a sociological story to a memory of a fictional one — there's a minor but important theme in Suzy McKee Charnas's searing feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World (1974). The book shows a world ruled by men in which women are enslaved. That's literally enslaved and brutally enslaved. Still, Walk reminds us that patriarchy isn't rule by men, as such, but rule by some men, the patriarchs: older men with power. It's inferable in the world of Walk that the majority of men would find it in their interest to ally with the enslaved women to depose the patriarchs and democratize their world.
            That ain't gonna happen in Walk to the End of the World. Even as poor Whites and poor Blacks in the real-world USA rarely allied to resist the plantation owners and other power elites, the oppressed young men and the women we see in Walk aren't going to ally. "The universe of power is lumpy" implies that those with power who stay in power keep themselves united and keep opponents or just serious competitors from getting together: divide et impera as they used to say in Latin, "Divide and rule"; if you're already ruling, break up every threatening concentration of power as it forms, preventing competing "lumps."
            More exactly, if you are ruling and wish to continue doing so, you prevent concentration of power that might compete with you. The ideal is to maintain your big lump of power while those below you form groups that you get competing with each other: slashing up and grinding down each other.
            And powerful groups will continue to divide, conquer, and rule so long as so many people, even highly educated and politicized teaching assistants, are unconscious of most of the game.
            So, MORAL to all this: power clumps in weird ways and anyone sufficiently privileged to be literate and reading an essay belongs to some groups who have power and other groups that don't. Ethical political behavior is largely using one's positions of power to help get power and the goodies it brings distributed more equitably. The beginning of such ethical behavior is understanding that the universe of power is lumpy and figuring out where in it one is privileged to be in an empowered lump.

            Next comes a "Basic" not worth an essay, but the one thing I ever said liked by an ethicist colleague of mine: "A lot of morality is learning to direct your aggression up the hierarchy, not down it" — with, I'll add, occasional angled and lateral shots going for appropriate "lumps."

"You're Only Cheating Yourself" — and Some Other BS (6 Feb. 2014)

"You're only cheating yourself" — 20^th-c. Teachers' Cliché

"Sent my kid to college for a degree, and she came back with a bunch of ideas." —

Purported to have been spoken by a parent of

a student at Miami University (Ohio), 1980s

 
            It shouldn't, but it still sometimes surprises me how often people who like to hear themselves talk don't really listen very carefully to what they say, or, perhaps, don't think they'll get questioned about what they've just actually said.
            Even smart people.
            There was a brief exchange on a fairly recent TV comedy — it might've been Modern Family — where the father or father-figure quotes to a kid, "That which doesn't kill us makes us stronger," which is from Friedrich Nietzsche, who should've known better. The kid answers wise-ass and wisely by noting that the grandfather of a friend of his survived a stroke, which made him, the grandfather, a whole lot weaker. If the script writers had wanted to push the point (and it is well for the scene that they didn't), they could've had the kid note that Nietzsche's tertiary syphilis or "manic–depressive illness" or brain cancer or stroke or whatever he had toward the end of his life didn't kill him for a long time and certainly did not make him stronger.
            Or there was the spokesperson for President Obama who noted that in 2014 the President would get some proposal or other through the Congress of the United States, necessarily including the Republican-dominated House of Representatives, "by any means necessary." Uh-huh. I forget what the proposal was, but it was part of the long, long list of measures that would never get past the Republicans, a proposal I suspect should be approved, and one possibly crucial for the well-being of the Republic.
            President Obama has amply shown his willingness to use as means to important ends such means as drones, small missiles, and a SEAL assassination team. Still, however tempting, he's not going to send a Predator drone to launch an AGM-114 Hellfire into a meeting of the House Republican Caucus.
            Obama will not use "any means necessary," and, as in many cases when the phrase is thrown around, that is a good thing.
            So sometimes people just aren't listening to what they say. Other times, they may not be quite so bright as Nietzsche (not even the brain-damaged Nietzsche), and still other times people might reveal more than they intended.
            Which brings me to my headnote quotations and the theme in much of my writing of education and other school activities.
            "You're only cheating yourself" if you cheat in school if, but only if, your primary purpose in school is getting an education and if, but only if, you're cheating yourself out of some education if you cheat on some exam or test or exercise in school.
            And/or your cheating only cheats yourself if your cheating undermines moral training as a primary goal of education — and if you ignore that your cheating may cheat of your classmates as well as "the System.
            For most of the time I taught in the US higher ed system (1960s to 2006), yearly surveys were taken of incoming US frosh on what their goals were in going to college and there were periodic studies by diligent scholars of student attitudes, behavior, history, etc., etc., etc.: college students were and remain fuckin'-a fascinating to workers in a whole little academic and journalist industry. And in good sociological fashion, scholars and reporters have documented in detail the screamingly obvious fact that students go to college for all sorts of reasons, of which education is only one — and have made clear that goals beyond education and instead of education are just peachy keen, fine and dandy with all sorts of parents, legislators, taxpayers, and others interested in the system.
            For example, there was the line I quote above from the father of a college student (my source here is a sign on the door to the office of a colleague of mine, quoting the man). His daughter had gone to college and perhaps got a degree but, to his chagrin, had also picked up a bunch of ideas.
            Over the history of higher ed, relatively few students have been actively hostile to ideas and education — and not that many parents and politicians openly admit to such hostility — but still fewer students have had "the life of the mind" as their only goal. Since the time of the medieval universities, many students have gone to college primarily to rise in the world: which means nowadays a degree from a good school with a good transcript, and if cheating will help you get that, then the cheating is helping you get exactly what you want, not cheating you.
            Many students also desire, strongly, to have a good time, and if cheating frees time up for fun and games ("F&G" as we used to say), then it is to one's advantage to cheat.
            The issue can get complicated in other ways.
            Not so much in college, or most of my classes in high school, but I had a couple high school courses taught by certifiable whackos and some of the assignments were, let's put it, unproductive if not counterproductive. To cheat a bit on them — which we pretty much all did — didn't significantly cheat anyone. More complex was the couple instances when I (and others, I'm sure) cut some corners in an excellent class and "dry labbed"a preliminary exercise or two in Qualitative Analysis. I forget the details, but the basic dry lab strategy was to figure out what the results of the experiment would be and work back to report a plausible series of steps leading to those results — your results couldn't be too close to theory — and then write it up as a lab report.
            Since my lab technique was already competent, and since it turned out the only real lab work I went on to do was in microbiology and physiology, not any kind of chemistry, this cheating really didn't cheat me very much in terms of my education: I learned the theoretical material working up plausible results. And I really didn't cut enough corners to harm even saintly students who put in more time in the lab than I did and got the same or a lower grade. Well, I didn't harm them unless you believe that grades should very exactly reflect student effort. Trust me on that, however: grades should not be tied too closely to effort. People with talent and background in a subject find it easier and can produce better results with less work. (It may be annoying to pay a professional plumber a lot of money to come in and do in a couple minutes a job that might take you hours, but you got what you paid for: the pro has a whole lot more talent and experience than you've got and deserves good payment; not as much as plumbers usually demand, but that's a different issue.)
            There is, though, cheating which doesn't harm you at all but significantly harms others: cheating in an academic sense of "rat fucking," a term of art in politics for dirty tricks to mess over an opponent. Except in student life, "rat fucking" can be more direct, down and dirty — worse — than in politics.
            There were rumors of such things in law schools, where students at, oh, say, University of Wisconsin, Madison, couldn't leave out their notes in the library without getting them stolen and where books on reserve might have pages torn out. I didn't encounter such behavior until I found myself a mid-year-entrance Specialized Chemistry student at the University of Illinois (Urbana) in courses with pre-meds.
            One course was Zoology 101, where I couldn't figure out why during "practical exams" in labs we were numbered and went through identifying body parts of dead amphibians moving from station to station in line, in numerical order. Since I was helping the lab instructor get through Organic Chemistry, I just asked him why, and he said that before they started formally numbering us, unnumbered, unidentified students 1-12 (for example) in line would more or less correctly identify "right ventricle" and from 14 on it'd be pretty consistently "left knee"; some schmuck moved the pin. In Qualitative Analysis or Organic Chem lab, I recall stepping into the aisle and announcing to the group, "Hi, guys. I'm Rich. I'm in Specialized Chemistry; I'm not in pre-med competing with you for a place in med school — and the next guy who throws my 'unknown' down the drain is going to get a face full of hot acid." I doubt I'd have actually have done such a thing, but before Richard M. Nixon gave the policy a bad name by practicing it while armed with nukes, there was something to be said in many guy-cultures for a small person to be thought mildly psycho (I got knocked around once in high school in a random bit of street violence, but I was never bullied [then again, I also cultivated large friends]).
            Anyway, no one threw my "unknowns" down the drain after that, or contaminated them, and I came to my second conclusion of what I'd do if I ever taught (and teaching seemed increasingly in my future as an alternative to going to Vietnam or going to jail). The first conclusion was that I'd grade "blind," not looking at the names of students I was grading. The second conclusion was that screwing over other students was one form of cheating I would not tolerate.
            I ended up teaching English, so my practical rule was that plagiarism wasn't that big a deal with me: I told my students saw catching plagiarism as a game, and if my students wanted to try some theft here and there I would see if I could catch it and flunk the paper (later on, plagiarism had to be reported, and the cheater might flunk the class). If I caught them messing over another student, however, I'd do my best to get them thrown out of school.
            There I was indeed serious. With plagiarism my students were cheating themselves a bit, since I really could help them improve their writing; but plagiarism was mostly cheating themselves, if only a bit, and gaming the system; and they were playing against a guy — me — with more experience than they had plus an "ear" sufficiently non-tin to hear, e.g., a shift in voice from 1940s Ivy-League or U of Edinburgh professor to early 1909 Oxford U lecture to 1970s undergrad from greater Cleveland. (Although one student did confess to me about cheating I hadn't caught — as part of some sort of rehab program — and I'm sure I missed many others.) Cheating by bringing down other people's grades — stealing someone's notes, not returning reserve books to the library, messing over others in group work — that was despicable.
            Just sliding through school, though, cheating as necessary to get the "paper" — the diploma and transcript — without cutting into "F&G" and a four-day weekend: well, I couldn't get too upset.

            Still, students cutting a lot of corners are cheating the state a bit where states still subsidize education, and they may be cheating their parents a lot. Especially in courses where grades are "curved," they do harm more honest students. And they are also cheating, somewhat, if less that others, themselves. They've missed an opportunity to come back from school "with a bunch of ideas."