"Excellent Sheep": One Side of the Collegiate Coin

William Deresiewicz: The most interesting thing about that phrase ["excellent sheep"] is that I didn’t write it myself. It came out of the mouth of a student of mine, and just seemed perfect. They’re “excellent” because they have fulfilled all the requirements for getting into an elite college, but it’s very narrow excellence. These are kids who will perform to the specifications you define, and they will do that without particularly thinking about why they’re doing it. They just know that they will jump the next hoop.

— From "The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life,"

The Atlantic on line, with the subhead,

William Deresiewicz explains how an elite education can lead

to a cycle of grandiosity and depression.

             <http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/qa-the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524/>

The quotation above elicited a response from me in the Comments section for the article in The Atlantic. I immodestly repost it below, with two additions.

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            Ahem, from Jerry Farber discussing students at Cal State LA in 1968: "Even more discouraging [...] is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They're hopelessly vague about chemistry and physics. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders!"

            Get rid of the "public school" reference — or take "public school" in the British sense — and you have your Ivy League sheep.

            My experience in 40 years teaching at a Big Ten school (briefly) and then at whatever the hell Miami University is (Oxford, OH), is that entering undergrads are pretty much telling the truth on the annual national surveys indicating that most are on campus for "the full collegiate experience" — or what one of my students called "College: The Four Year Vacation" — or for the paper. Education as a goal always came in a distant third behind getting useful credentials and having their last chance for a decent experience of a social life and community before going off to the alienation of even the elite American workplace, and the suburbs.

            And such attitudes are pretty much what all the politically potent groups want except some trouble-makers (including me) that think that as long as students are spending time on campus or at least taking classes on line, they might also try to get some education. (See Murray Sperber, Beer And Circus.)

            Things have gotten worse the last couple decades because it was a particularly bright and cynical student of mine who'd come up with the essay title, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood" as opposed to nowadays when it's generally accepted that we can talk without condescending disrespect about "college kids." My slogan as a teacher was "College is for grownups," and so I see as a major reason for increasing problems in higher ed the socially-invited arrested development that renders far too many college students *kids* — and kids, of course, *should* follow orders.

            I'll throw in that talking about college kids makes clear that booklarnin' is childish and not really work for grownups (and incidentally reminds professors that what I used to do wasn't really "man's work" [the sexism on The Life of the Mind is complicated and contradictory]).

So also: Harrumph! Some of us curmudgeons have been griping in this fashion for decades. Meanwhile, though: Thanks for the article; as we used to say, "Keep the faith."

================================

            Addition #1 is a quick clarification that I understand that Miami University is a "MAC school," where the Miami "RedHawks compete in the NCAA Division I Mid-American Conference," and, since Miami has invested heavily in athletics on ice, also compete in "the National Collegiate Hockey Conference, and the U.S. Figure Skating Association." It's just that the phrase "an Ivy League school" indicates a whole lot other than athletics stuff, and "a Big Ten school" gives information about athletics and also other things. Big Ten schools usually run big-time professional (sic) sports operations, but equally usually can be found in respectable places in world ranking; there are Big Ten schools in the top 500; Miami University hasn't yet made the cut.

         Addition #2 is repeating a story of my first year teaching, at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1960s.

         I was 22- or 23-years old, 5'2" tall (I've since shrunk as I've lost spinal discs), some place between 135 and 140 pounds in weight, and greeted by one of my students the first day with "You're the teacher?!" When my students and I went out for some beers on the last day of class, my students got pitchers with no problems and nearly pissed themselves laughing when I went to buy my round and was held up at the bar with demands for additional I.D.

         Get the picture? I wasn't exactly intimidating.

         Pretty much all my students were 18-year old frosh, and my experience working with 18-year old First-Years had most recently been as a fraternity officer in a house with a newly-strict pledge policy, a policy kept threateningly vague about what horrors an officer might visit upon pledges individually and/or collectively. So I was used to "positional authority" and receiving at least nominal respect from teenagers. What I wasn't used to was servility.

         More often than I found comfortable, I was asked, sometimes with just a hint of a whine, "What do you want," usually meaning — or the question was finished with — "What do you want me to write in my essay?" I eventually ventured to answer, "What do you want?" with "Let's start with some integrity. What is it you want to say?"

         I graded blind throughout my career — not looking at students' names — and pretty frequently had Departmental jobs where I dealt with issues of the ethics of teaching. I tried to be good, and I somewhat resented thinking my students would think I'd down-grade them if they didn't give me what I wanted in terms of what they had to say. (I damn well would downgrade for unambiguous errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and in College Comp classes, issues of style aren't often ambiguous — but agreeing with the instructor wasn't a criterion for grades.)

         Anyway, I was one of the teachers who taught Farber's satiric essay, "The Student as Nigger" when it got circulated underground toward the end of the 1960s, and I asked my students now and then to consider carefully what was impled in the imagery of "brownnosing" or "sucking up" for a grade. Indeed, one of the more poignant moments in class was when a student said he'd "say anything for an 'A'", then paused and said softly, "I guess that makes me a grade-whore."

So: We have over time and in a significant number of places an instance of The Partial Karmic Balancing of Nastiness. Even as far, far too many students show disdain and contempt for their teachers, verily, even so, too many are "excellent sheep."

         That's only a very partial balancing, however: "sucking up to" is manipulation, and if a student is acting like a whore s/he reduces the instructor to a "john."

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."

Authority: Academic and Other (8 Feb. 2014)

"… you will respect my authoritah!" — Eric Cartman

            In Joe Haldeman's classic SF/Vietnam-War novel The Forever War (1972 f. — the composition dates are complicated), there's a dialog between newly-minted Major William Mandella and Colonel Jack Kynock, Mandella's "Temporal Orientation Officer" (it has been a long war, involving moving humans through the galaxy faster than light, so time within the novel also gets complicated).
            Relevant here is Kynock's discussion with Mandella of Mandella's psychology, about which Kynock may know more than Mandella, since he's seen Mandella's profile, which is too highly classified for the eyes of a mere major. Mandella questions his own competence for command, and Kynock tells him that, actually, Mandella does "have a certain potential" for leadership. "But it would be along the lines of a teacher or minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you're right, you'll made a hell of a bad officer unless you shape up" (opening of part IV, "Major Mandella").
            That is, "shape up" from the point of view of the Army.
            I found this dialog interesting on more than esthetic grounds. I had been a member of both a high school and college fraternity, had considered a military career, and I ended up teaching. The fraternity experience — the college part at least — I'll weave in and out of this essay. My potential military career story starts with my taking two years of high school ROTC, and then quitting in part because I had stopped growing at 5'2" and, at least at that time, I was two inches too short to be an officer in any of the military services of the United States. I was simultaneously, however, two inches too tall to be "4F" and "unsuitable for military service": so I still had to take two years of college ROTC, face getting my ass drafted and sent to Vietnam, and couldn't even be a cadet platoon sergeant, 'cause it'd look silly to have a platoon march with so short a man in a visible position. I did not have a good attitude toward the University of Illinois ROTC requirement.
            Still, I appreciated getting introduced to history in college ROTC, and spending a few hours a week in a quasi-military context was useful for my fraternity work. I could advise new-initiate active brothers to be alert in ROTC before they dealt with pledges; new initiates, I advised, should imitate the regular Army officers and NCOs and avoid acting like the cadet officers: i.e., they should be polite and confident and not assholes on their way to being fragged by their own troops — although a US-led hot war in Vietnam with fragged second-lieutenants mostly came later. (Not to say that a variety of unfriendly fire bringing down over-eager second lieutenants was something new with Vietnam, but "fragging" as a term was new.)
            Anyway, I took note of the behavior of regular Army officers because I was and am somewhat like William Mandella, but just somewhat; Mandella may be a nicer person than I am — and Joe Haldeman is a much nicer person. In part, I did want to impose my will on other guys, though surprised when I got away with it.
            A new initiate once asked me, "'Lich, what would you have done if one of us pledges hadn't obeyed you?" I paused and said, "Oh. (beat) That never occurred to me." And then I waited another beat until the irony became obvious, and I laughed and admitted to mild amazement each time I was obeyed. The trick, I explained to the guy, is to give an order courteously and sounding like it never crossed your mind that you'd be told to fuck off. And then I passed on that advice to emulate regular Army officers and avoid acting like the cadet variety. (The eventually fragged Doug Neidermeyer in Animal House [1978] had real-world antecedents.)
            So from the frat angle I was interested in authority, and also as a new student of history and just beginning student of human behavior. Older boys and young men are fairly easy to order around, but they're mostly used to taking orders from their parental-age elders. It takes a bit of doing to condition pledges to accept authority from other guys pretty much their own age and additional effort to get active brothers to accept the authority of people they live with, know, and have elected.
            I was intrigued that pledges would take my orders and actives (mostly) follow the rules; and when we had to come up with a new pledge policy after one particularly disastrous semester, I worked with the group devising new policies, even doing a bit of research.
            And, what the hell, I was also interested in my own psychology since I got off as much as the next guy — or almost; we had a couple or three really weird brothers — ahem, I was interested because this side of downright pathology I got off as much as most on the "S" part of the old frat-lodge S&M fun and games.
            As the 1960s wore on though, and as I started my teaching career, my concerns got more serious.
            With the 1960s wearing on, so did the Vietnam War; and, more personally, I saw violence much less deadly but much, much closer to home — I was in Chicago for the riots of 1968 — and I started reading on violence and on authority, most especially Stanley Milgram's experiments from 1963 f. studies of, as stated in the title of his 1974 book, Obedience to Authority.
            Less sensationally, I found myself "behind the big desk" in classrooms and in authority, and uncomfortable.
            I had no problem with imposing my will on pledges if I could: I never ordered them to do anything really wrong (for which the next part would not be justification), and they really did have the choice to say "fuck you" to me and follow that up with "and just fuck it!" and depledge. There was strong social pressure to stick with pledging, and moving would be inconvenient; but it could be done.
            All the courses I taught when I started teaching were required courses, and if my students dropped my section, there could be bigger inconveniences than moving from a fraternity into a dorm: like not getting into another section and slowing down their "satisfactory progress toward the degree" and, in some cases, putting in danger a scholarship or a draft deferment.
            More was at stake, and giving a low grade offered me no straight-forward Thomas Hobbesian "sudden glory" or Marquis de Sadean kick from imposing my will on — as in harming — other people. From my high school fraternity on, the bigger kick for me was to indirectly "impose […] ideas on other people," to get them to do what I wanted them to do, by convincing them to do it.
            Or getting them to believe the truth of my interpretation of … whatever.
            I wanted the students to respect and accept my authority as a teacher, but my authority, as someone who knew the material and could help them learn it and pick up some handy skills (like writing and critical thinking).
            Do note my arrogance here: I wanted to be respected for my authority, for what I knew and could do and to teach. I wanted respect for my personal authority, a variety not given me and enforced by the University and the State, but authority totally mine. I did not want subservience from students because as "instructor or record" I would assign each a grade.
            First off, subservience from students as students kind of disgusted me. I hadn't gotten subservience from pledges in either my high school nor college fraternity, and by the time I started teaching it was "been there, done that" for getting obedience. More important perhaps, in the classroom the bureaucratic "authority" of the grade (etc.) undermined my authority as a scholar and teacher and intellectual. I couldn't be sure if I'd convinced a student, or if the student went along with my ideas just to suck up.
            I suspect most of the students also couldn't be sure. Certainly, one guy said in class, looking a little shaken, "I'll write whatever it takes to get an 'A' …; I guess that makes me kind of a whore."
            Uh, yeah.
            I'm not a Christian or a Platonist, and I do not celebrate Mind over body — or even separate the two; but if it is wrong to prostitute one's body for a grade, to suck up to an instructor physically, it is also wrong — if more socially and academically acceptable — to prostitute one's integrity by pretending to agree when one isn't convinced.
            Now there's no problem if a good Christian student starts off an essay with a phrase like, "In a secular, materialist (godless and probably damnable) reading …" — and goes on to apply that approach to a literary text or an issue in history or a problem in evolutionary biology. Indeed, it would be unethical for an instructor to downgrade for such an opening: one can insist that a student know something or other, not that a student believe. As John Stuart Mill stated in a particularly strong illustration of the principle, "[…] there is no reasonable objection to examining an atheist in the evidences of Christianity, provided he is not required to profess a belief in them." Similarly, it would've been okay if one of my devout Freudian instructors insisted on my handing in a rigorous Freudian reading of, say, Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, provided s/he had no problem with a brief cover note noting that I found ideological Freudianism, let's say unpersuasive (let's not say in addition, at least not on a cover letter, "and pernicious as clinical psychology and a little creepy").
            Haldeman's Major William Mandella is a better man than I am because he would want "to lead from empathy, compassion" as a primary motivation. I approve of empathy and compassion, but I'm a bit more into the arrogance of thinking I have something to say — obviously, since I write essays — and as a teacher I was pretty sure I had useful things to teach. That is the sort of authority I wanted acknowledged. I wanted not so much to impose my ideas on my students or anyone else but to have those ideas respected: listened to, considered, thought about, and respected enough to challenge.

            I know and knew that if my teaching didn't lead to credits and grades and a diploma, that I would've had precious few students and soon no job — and might've gotten punched out on my way to be fired. Still, I didn't like that kind of external authority because it undermined authority I that is — so long as my mind holds — intrinsic to me.

The Right to Annoy and Propagandize

     I once asserted strongly — indeed, threatened to participate in a lawsuit to ensure — the right to annoy people.

      The context was the George McGovern vs. Richard Nixon 1972 campaign for US President in the 8^th Congressional District of Ohio, running into the rule at Miami University, in Oxford, OH, forbidding solicitation in their residence halls, including political canvassing.

     I worked for the McGovern campaign, and the one thing we agreed with the Nixon campaign on was that we both had the right to send our people into the dorms registering students to vote and then getting out the vote we might get for our candidate.

     It was the principle of the thing (that right to annoy) more than anything else since neither campaign intended to actually do any campaigning in the dorms.

     The State-wide Republicans knew that they didn't have to put much effort into the 8^th CD; that district is currently represented by the Hon. John Boehner, and, believe me, he was best of the reps we had in the thirty-five years I taught at Miami: discernible brain activity and no indictable offenses. And the local Republican campaign bought, I think, the propaganda on the radicalism of college students and didn't want them thar student pinko punks voting period, wherever they lived. In the 1972 McGovern campaign, there were enough veterans of The Movement ca. 1968-70 to know that most US teens are mostly conservative politically, and the ones living in the dorms at Miami U at Oxford were likely to be congenitally Republican and, if they voted at all, were likely to vote "at home" — their parents' address — and not at their campus address in the 8^th CD.

     Older students living off campus: those folks we wanted to turn out to vote, not the teenage, super-straight, WASC-ish dormies. (As a Roman Catholic priest and colleague of mine explained, a "WASC" is a White Catholic — of Irish or Polish extraction at Miami U, not Italian or Hispanic — so well assimilated that s/he's culturally WASP, and, as at many state colleges, this was our plurality demographic.)

     There was, though, that principle: whether or not we actually did it, both campaigns and the party apparati behind us asserted the Constitutional right to go into the residence halls and annoy the residents. We had the right to try to get the apathetic wankers to register and vote — and maybe even study the issues a bit before voting and listen to our arguments on why they should vote for our candidate. For their part, the dormies, like everyone else, had the right to tell us to go away.

     Nowadays, I'd insist that all mass-mailers pay First Class rates with the US Postal Service, including political campaigns, and I recommend outlawing "robo-calls" and calls made with multiple-dialing devices. But I'd still defend the right for political campaigns to send canvassers into dorms, and into gated communities and shopping malls. Citizens have the right to tell you to go to Hell, but the Republic has the right to inflict some politics upon its citizens. In that sense, and that sense only, there is a right to annoy.

Usage Note: "Adult Children" (14 Feb. 2015)

My first thought at hearing the phrase "adult child" is, "If you raised an adult child, you failed as a parent."

My second thought is that the first thought was at worst cruel, at best a bit unfair.

        If your child has serious developmental problems and emotionally or intellectually and/or physically  gets to her or his twenties without reaching adult development, then, obviously, you should be respected and complimented on your job of parenting. 

        In less somber contexts — on linguistic grounds, a fair-minded person might object that people speaking of an "adult child" understand "child"   as just "offspring," which makes the phrase mean the harmless "adult offspring." Okay, but come on! There's always "son" and "daughter" and "offspring" isn't that tough a word and works for most people who are biological parents as well as parenting parents.

         On more paractical grounds, the accusation of failure as a parent often overestimates the influence of parents on the outcome of their offspring. Most of us most of the time blame the parents for rotten kids — and we usually should — but not always. If a family is stuck with a 22-year old child, it may not be the fault of the parents.

         It may not be anyone's fault, but it is a problem.

         I first heard "adult child" and such in the phrase "adult children of alcoholics," and the usage seemed wrong. Adult offspring of alcoholics, God and Al Anon know, frequently have issues, but those issues didn't seem to me — at least from a distance — to be some sort of culpable immaturity. If anything, some people with a subgroup of ... what would be the proper term here? ... let's say some variety of fucked up parents take on adult responsibility at an early age and are adult well before leaving their teens, sometimes adult heartbreakingly too young.

         Folks out there using English should remember that children don't have the same rights as adults and should not have the same rights as adults. In the context of the 2014/15 round of the debate on mandated innoculations, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky said, "The state doesn't own your children" and clarified that "Parents own the children." There was widespread denunciation of the idea of anyone's owning children, but it is significant that a US Senator in the libertarian tradition (no less) would think in terms of owning kids and that many of those denouncing the line were of the emphatically non-libertarian strain of the Left who were far some seeing children as autonomous, responsible beings who could usually be trusted to take care of themselves.

         Let's say play alone in a city part or take the subway.

         Children do not have the same rights as adults and do need protection, and there are powerful Americans of a wide swath of political persuasions who go way, way too far in "protecting our children." (As I said when the Powers that Were in the City of Chicago introduced a teen curfew and argued it was to protect teenagers — bullshit! it was to protect grownups afraid, sometimes with justification, of teenagers — "Just do me one favor: Don't do me no favors.")

         Eric Posner recently did a fine job of provocation, arguing that "Universities Are Right and Within Their Rights to Crack Down on Speech and Behavior" of college students because "Students today are more like children than adults and need protection." Which means, of course, that the "kids" need to be not only protected from words and topics and ideas that might upset them but also from misusing freedoms we in America recognize as birthrights for grownups.

         Children may not be owned by the State or their parents, but they do need people to control them.

         If your offspring turned out all right and can do okay on their own, thank you, they're you're adult offspring; don't insult them by calling them children or share with others that feeling deep inside that they will always be your little girl, your little boy. Such feelings fine in your heart of hearts but make for a lousy idea for public policy.

         If Posner has a point and we have wide-spread arrested development among young Americans, well, that is a serious social issue to be dealt with and not to be blandly accepted. The phrase "adult child" can have some very negative implications; it should not be used casually. 

Zero Tuition: Who pays? Who profits? (1 Feb. 2015)

            It's not a name you'd know, but he's important for the current debate on zero or low tuitions at community colleges, and for reducing tuition and fees at four-year colleges and universities.
            As described in a memoir by the Director of the Bureau of the Budget of the State of Illinois in the Ogilvie administration in the late 1960s, "there was a fellow by the name of David Eisenman who had been at the university [of Illinois]. David worked the tuition issue very hard […,] and our thesis on tuition was that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then [use] the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system." 
            What State legislatures did, of course — mostly for reasons other than class equity and fiscal fairness — was reduce subsidies to public higher education, eventually drastically, with only small increases in scholarships and grants.
            And so the cost of public higher education was shifted significantly to students and their families, even while the those costs increased and then continued to increase.
            In part, that's fair, especially with four-year institutions: most Americans pay taxes, frequently "regressive taxes" like the sales tax, or often-oppressive ones like property tax; only some people go on to higher education, and the ones who go to the big, prestigious public research universities tend to be well-to-do, and even community college students aren't often the wretched of the Earth.
            In larger part, the high-tuition/high-fees system is unfair and unwise: it's depriving young people chances their elders had for inexpensive higher education — those who received The G.I. Bill, "War babies" and Boomers like me who paid only token tuition — because it's depriving the American Republic of a large body of well-educated citizens, and because it's depriving the American economy of educated people who can help America survive and thrive in what will be increasingly sharp global economic competition.
            The non-solution so far has been mostly student loans, which has been great for bankers but not even good for most others. The banks get nice capitalist profit on the loans, while the risks get socialized: your tax dollars in action guaranteeing (for the banks) at least part of the loans.
            It didn't and doesn't have to be that way.
            Here is another name you probably don't know but should: the Honorable John J. Gilligan, Governor of the State of Ohio 1971-75 and sufficiently an advocate of an alternative that it was sometimes called "the Gilligan Plan." It was more commonly known as "Pay As You Earn," or PAYE, and the idea has been around — and implemented on a very small scale — for nearly half a century.
            The version of PAYE I have pushed is one in which the Federal government advances to any qualified resident enough money to actually afford a college or university education: which can be a substantial sum for married people with families, "nontraditional students" such as we had with veterans under the G.I. bill.
            This sounds expensive, and the original outlay would be very large; PAYE would, however, save money and could turn a modest profit.
            PAYE advances are loans that must be repaid, and repayment can be through a surtax on one's Federal income taxes at a rate set by actuaries so that the basic program breaks even, with former students paying back their loans if they can afford to and as they can afford to, and with a time limit on how long they must pay.
            If you graduate and go on to make a lot of money, you pay back the loan with interest; if you don't make a lot of money — or hardly any at all — then you pay back what you can.
            But you do pay back: A well-funded IRS has shown itself to be very, very effective at getting the sovereign capital "P" People money we're owed. And it makes far more business sense to collect money from people who have been out working for a while and have money than to start dunning immediately recent graduates who are broke.
            The rates can be set so that students can pay full freight for the cost of their educations, but between market forces and government arm-twisting, students should have to pay no more than that. Capital expenses, research, public service (including providing cheap semi-pro sport), top-heavy administrations, and other frills — those can be subsidized by the States and, with luck, in some areas subsidized a good deal less.
            As a former college teacher, the major advantage I see to the plan is that it would attract more full-fledged adults to college campuses and help concentrate the minds of younger students. For sure, it will limit the weirdness of the American State's offering more or less adequate, more or less free education to people's children when those children are children, and then asking parents of legal adults to pay for further educating for their adult offspring, helping to reduce our current over-load of "adult children."
            (My slogan as a teacher: College Is for Grownups, not what a couple of my students called, in two very fine essays, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood," and "College: The Four-Year Vacation.)
            As a very-long-term US resident, I like the idea of reducing subsidies to the well-to-do while helping "to assure equal access to educational opportunity."
            As a taxpayer, I also like the possibility of driving down college costs if colleges have to compete for students who themselves have to pay for their educations, and at the same time having all taxpayers who are paying attention highly conscious that we are putting up money, at least for a while, to support those colleges and universities.
            Many banks will lose a sweet source of income, but right about now a lot of Americans might well say, "Screw the banks"; the money the banks are not lending to students they might put toward carefully-vetted local mortgages and loans to small businesses: that social-responsibilty stuff they may recall from old movies like It's a Wonderful Life.
            So my vote is for "No" to zero tuition, but an emphatic "Yes" to investing in education, but investing with high probability of high return on the investment, starting, crassly, with getting back the money.