site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

6
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Recently in Compact Magazine: How Professors Killed Literature. Perhaps relevant given the other recent posts on contemporary media and writing:

English degrees have declined by almost half since their most recent peak in the 2005-2006 academic year, despite the student population having grown by a third during the same period. Romance languages—my area of specialty in a teaching career spanning more than two decades—have done little better. German departments are in free fall. Doctoral students from departments that used to concentrate on literary studies are confronted with a frightening absence of jobs.

In one common account, the responsibility for this collapse falls on the shifting preferences of students, who no longer want to read, and, by extension, on the shifting media landscape in which young people are now growing up. This explanation lets professors off the hook too easily. Students may be turning away from literature, but we abandoned it, too.

It's a fairly standard lament about the decline of the English major, the kind of which has been in circulation for at least a decade now. There were a few points in particular that I wanted to elaborate on and respond to.

[...]“The last time I taught The Scarlet Letter, I discovered that my students were struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb.”

Reading this statement, I was struck by the dispassion of the dean: Far from the horror with which similar things are uttered in private conversations, she is understanding of and even sympathetic to this surge of illiteracy on one of the most elite campuses in the world. Claybaugh seems jovially resigned to the fact that “different capacities” of her students don’t allow them to access those things to which she presumably devoted her life: literature as a practice, as a set of exceptional texts, as a tradition, as a celebration of language.

The assertion that the texts of the literary canon are "exceptional" is, of course, not an unassailable axiom that is beyond the purview of critical inquiry. I believe I have remarked here previously that the social prestige enjoyed by literature as such (that is, written narrative fiction, without the use of audiovisual elements, in something that at least resembles the form of the novel) is somewhat arbitrary, and in need of justification. I don't think there's anything intrinsic in the literary form that privileges it above film, video games, comic books, etc, in terms of its ability to accomplish the sorts of things that we generally want artistic works to accomplish. (For a critical examination of the institution of the "English major" from a leftist perspective, see here and here).

I don't think it will be a severe loss for humanity if undergraduates don't read The Scarlet Letter. Although the fact that they might find such a task difficult is concerning for independent reasons.

Three solutions were attempted in an earlier phase of this crisis, all guided by the assumption that students abhor the strange, the ancient, the remote, and like the familiar, the modern, and the close.

I believe I'm fully aligned with the author's sentiment here. If an education in the humanities means anything, then it has to involve exposure to the strange, the remote, and probably the ancient as well. Whatever specific form that might take.

Already in the 1990s, the standard graduate seminar in literature departments comprised several chapters of books or short essays of some of the new (primarily French) authorities that were summoned to provide the clues for another, generally smaller, list of poems, essays, or narratives. Back then, we called it “theory.” Often, in practice, it was philosophy read outside of its native disciplinary context and thus understood in somewhat nebulous terms. Derrida’s work was elaborated in dialogue with the great representatives of the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas. There is no reason to expect a doctoral student in literature to be able to reconstruct this lineage or adjudicate the complex debates between these figures.

Ironic that he calls out Derrida specifically here. In The Truth in Painting, his longest sustained treatise on art as such, Derrida raises the question of why the philosophical tradition has perpetually subjugated the image to the word, the poem, the logos - a gesture that the author of the current piece appears content to recapitulate.

Meanwhile, political talk largely edged out discussions about narrative structure, textual sources, or the sheer beauty of a given author’s prose. Faithful to an idea of the intellectual as overseer of social decency and as a moral tribune, literature professors took on the grand history of our time, the march of freedom incarnated in the struggles of one group or another, and the quest for emancipation and the resistance it met from reactionary forces.

At a basic level, there's nothing wrong with analyzing a literary text from an explicitly political angle. Politics is both very interesting and very important! Frequently, the politics of a work (both in terms of its immanent content, and in terms of the political context of its production) is one of the most interesting things about it. Questions of race are important, questions of gender are important, these are things that we can and should be thinking about when we talk about art.

The issue that we find ourselves confronted with today is that the very concept of "politics in art" has been colonized exclusively by one side of the political divide (I'm reminded of the joke about how presumptuous it was of the LGBT community to think that they could claim something as universal as "refracted light" all for themselves), and this side has the virtually unchallenged authority to enforce their point of view in academic institutions. A priori, we should be all for politics in art. But when "politics in art" comes to exclusively mean "going book by book, explaining how they were all written by evil white men to oppress women/browns/gays/etc, and thereby concluding that the way forward is puberty blockers and mass immigration", it's understandable why the right would want to throw in the towel on the whole discussion and retreat to a position of castrated neutrality.

A genuine, honest inquiry into the political nature of a work of art has to allow for multiple possible conclusions. Maybe the book is ultimately about how great white men are, and that's a bad thing. Or maybe it's about how great white men are, and that's a good thing! There's a certain repetitiveness to works of "critical theory": the conclusions are always predetermined in advance, the line of argument predictable, it always finds exactly what it set out to find. Which raises concerns about how "critical" it is in the first place. If you always know the answer in advance, then you're not actually engaged in critical inquiry; you're just grandstanding.

Universities went from being places where autists can engage in niche hobbies to being to taking most people and people who have no real interest in the subject. How many english majors really want to spend four years engaging in bizarre books? They are there to party, please their parents by getting a degree and get an office job.

I met an older pol sci professor who talked about the shift in his field. Back in the day doing a PhD in international relations meant becoming an expert in a part of the world. This is a monumental task as the student has four years to go from barely being able to find a country on a map to being able to advise diplomats and large corporations on intricate details of that country. It meant plowing through vast amounts of text and being able to quickly gain an understanding of complex systems.

The increasingly popular alternative was to chose a theory as a PhD. Thesis: investigate how some feminist theory views women's education in developing countries. Conclusion: more education in thrid world countries will liberate women. This PhD is much easier to write than one trying to explain the geopolitics of the middle east.

Having one political theory makes it even easier, furthermore the current woke dogma is fairly simple as an ideology. It doesn't take much to become proficient in it.

A part of the reason why alterntive ideas are met with immediate rejection is because they would reveal a lack of knowledge and arguments by someone with alternative views. It is shocking how many academics don't have cursory understandings of explanations other than their own. I have met profs at education departments who have minimal knowledge about heritability, which partially explains their defensive stance when probed with questions on the topic.

This isn't a very realistic model of academia.

"Back in my day" is one of the easiest and most natural criticisms to make in any field. I think you should take what this guy said with a grain of salt.

Universities were, objectively, massively expanded in that timeframe. "We increased the number of students tenfold, but this did not change quality or composition or culture" is just not a very credible claim. On the other hand, it's just common sense that if you try to take in the top 5% vs the top 50%, the average student will necessary be MUCH worse, even if your measure of competence is unreliable. Likewise, if a professor suddenly has to teach a multiple of the students he used to, the quality of the education almost necessarily suffers (not to mention a similar effect to the students, in which people are given increased responsibilities to handle the load of teaching that in the old regime would never have been given such responsibilities).

Pretty much all older staff reports roughly the same story: In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment. This includes a lot of busywork that can't be too hard since - and here is some divergence - one side says the students are just way worse but we don't want failure rate of >50%, the other side says because it would require more personal interaction for struggling students which the professors simply can't supply anymore. To keep the appearance of excellence, this busywork is also often more time-intensive for the students than the technically harder assignments that students would have gotten in the past. The few professors that don't standardize but keep open-ended problems often don't manage to teach anything and end up having to just pass everyone. The style of political courses functor is describing fits into the same mold imo. It's just really convenient to reduce everything into a one-dimensional political analysis and works very well as a standardized approach.

In fact, I'd argue that most older staff even underestimates the scale of this process, since a large part happens through the generation of new fields that have minimally trained professors and low to no enforced standards. My university for example almost doubled its student body since I started studying here, went away, and came back. All the original courses, however, still have almost the same size. Instead, we have A LOT of new courses that frequently are just thinly-veiled ways of enrolling marginal students that didn't make it in the original courses ("media informatics", for example), and almost universally have very low standards. My wife had to work together on a project with a newly-created "midwife professor", head of the newly created "midwife university course", who is just a practicing midwife that went back to university, did a PhD with a single publication, and instantly got her professorship. She doesn't seem to have any idea how science works whatsoever, and nobody can make her since she has an ultra-safe position as the original arbiter in our university on what "midwife science" even is. And there are multiple new courses like this from which I have not directly heard anything yet, but also no reason to believe it's any different. And both my wife's and others report on existing collaborations that they often try to hide their ignorance behind moralistic grandstanding.

In general, another thing that I have been perceiving myself also is that there is zero pressure to make things harder for students and a lot of pressure to make things easier. If I pass everyone, literally nobody will complain as long as I went through the motions of designing some very easy assignments. On the other hand, if the assignments are too hard and too many fail, firstly it's just extra work for me since I see them again next year, and at some point I have to do an oral exam which is even more work. Then you have the students themselves complain. Then if you fail too many the university admin staff will complain as well. My natural attitude is normally "if they fail, they fail", but even I actively work towards making assignments easier for the students just to spare myself the hassle. It just seems extremely obvious that such a system will only ever get easier over time. And once you have little to no meaningful standards, it's easy to bring in politics, because why not?

In the past, professors had reasonable loads of students, which they could handle on a more individual basis, and which were mostly capable of acting independently. Nowadays, the professors have so many students that they had to transform everything into a standardized, school-like environment.

What time frame do you have in mind, exactly?

This report suggests doctorates surged in the late 60s as the Space Race and related investments peaked. But that was tracked by similar ramps in number of institutions, amount of funding, etc. so I wouldn’t expect the professor:student ratio to crater.

I was pushing on this because it didn’t match my grad school experience. We still had wide latitude, minimal make-work, very specific classes with low headcount. I’m willing to believe that’s an artifact of engineering and wouldn’t hold for humanities, but my instinct is skepticism.

I agree that this isn't fully universal. I also was lucky, as the first PhD student of a newly minted group leader in a subfield of applied math (population models, in particular cancer) I had both great latitude and lots of attention if I needed help. My course when I did my Bachelor's and Master's also was still quite restrictive in comparison - 40 people at first, of which 20 dropped out in the first years. So our classes were also quite small.

But I also have shared some classes with medical or biology students, which would often be triple-digits, and worked quite a bit with medical or biology PhDs. Some institutes had rooms full of PhD students who had the same supervisor (though support through mentors did lessen this a bit). My wife, who used to be in neuroscience, had a supervisor who spend no more than 15 minutes on meetings with her - once per month. Her project was more or less entirely pre-defined, and the adjustments she took were due to her own stubbornness, not because the Professor really wanted to give her the latitude. When I had my defense (in the UK, you talk multiple hours, in detail, about your work with two independent reviewers), one of the reviewers positively noted that not even once I said I'd have to ask my supervisor, that for every thing I did I had a ready-made explanation on why I focused on this and where the approach comes from; According to him, his own PhD student would competently carry out his directives, but he was very frustrated how often they'd not actually understand why they did the things the way they did it. Unsurprisingly, he was a medical doctor, and this is something I've heard from multiple Profs in medical sciences. By my wife's account - and some personal discussions I've had with acquaintances -, the situation in psychology and sociology is much worse yet.

You also have to keep in mind that PhD-student do not spring into existence from nothing, and that supervisors do not spend all of their time only on PhD students; Universities as a whole have been steadily expanding since the beginning of the last century in most western countries (see for example this report though I don't think this controversial), albeit at different rates and with different timing of the surges & plateaus, which means this has been the experience of pretty much all currently living Profs independent of the exact timeframe.

So what impact does the expansion of the universities have on PhD students? First let's assume you're a specific PhD student: The professors get more teaching duties, so they have less time for you. Then, because they barely get their other duties done, they more or less need to push parts of the teaching duties on you, which means you also have less time for your PhD itself. Also, there may be more professors to deal with the increased burden, but these are those that wouldn't have made the cut. In the worst - and not even that rare - case, you have a situation as I described for the "midwife professorship", which is someone who might not even have gotten a PhD at all in the past getting a full professorship for essentially political reasons (and thus it's no surprise she tends to be more political than scientific in her attitude).

Of course, it impacts the PhD students themselves as well: As described in the earlier post, they are more likely to be used to a more standardized environment from their bachelor's and master's, making it more difficult to suddenly work independently. And similar to the professors, the additional numbers are more marginal PhD candidates, so they're on average worse to begin with.

I’ve often considered that university should be separated from job training. The university is being tasked with so many things that it cannot do anything to a decent standard. Research suffers because it’s no longer hiring people on just being good researchers. Now they must teach. And they must hand-hold the students who simply want to grade grub. And they must know what industry wants and fear their coursework to train that. It’s an impossible task made even more difficult as more and more students with middling IQs and very poor study skills must be shepherded through university in courses designed for minimum effort and maximum course satisfaction ratings when university level coursework cannot be dumbed down to the level of what would have been a high school sophomore level in 1945. It doesn’t work, and until you have an academy separate from job training midwits there’s not much chance of reintroduced rigor. We’re producing phds who should have flunked out of undergrad.