I commented something else on the original post, but I’ll say a word here about all those quotation marks since you didn’t. The point isn’t to be sassy and snide; it is literally to indicate that, say, “homosexuality” is being dealt with initially as a semantic label rather than with the assumption that there is something called homosexuality and that we all know what it is and that the word has always been used in the same way. Is homosexuality a behavior? A lifestyle? An “orientation”? (What does that mean?) Are homosexual desires “perverse,” which implies that only a few people experience them and that they are bad, or are they “base,” which implies that everyone experiences them but that the point is not to act on them? And what constitutes a homosexual desire? Does only an active, articulated desire to have sex with someone of the same sex qualify? The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby Dick” is different from that between Maurice and Scudder in “Maurice,” and not just because the first is more subtextual. Is only the second homosexual, or are both? If we say only the second, then does that make Maurice’s unconsummated relationship with Clive not homosexual?
I haven’t read that much queer theory. I’ve read some that I think is actively bad and unconvincing. (Though even that I ultimately found valuable: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816665112/henry-james-and-the-queerness-of-style/.) But it doesn’t take that much exploration to see that categories we think of as received and stable are often not that way, and that a lot can be learned by beginning with treating them as semantic labels rather than as though one already knows exactly what they mean. One of the main things I learned from my course on the “New Negro Renaissance” was that the term “New Negro” was almost entirely a floating signifier, used between 1895 and around 1935 to refer to all sorts of black people and visions of the black future, reflecting a discourse that was highly variegated but united by a progressive impulse such that it was useful for everyone from WEB Du Bois to Marcus Garvey to Jean Toomer to be described as a “New Negro” by somebody.
Sorry, I was unclear but was referring to the original post: “ the bizarre obsession with ‘scare quotes’ … it also seems like such a presumptuous outlook … a totally conventional word like ‘becomes’ or ‘sexuality’ gets bracketed with taunting quotation marks.”
Anyway, thanks for the article. It said a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking recently.
Some of these defenses are taking charity to the professors a little too far.
For example, the Portuguese course is *Elementary* Portuguese. It would not surprise me if there are dialectal differences between, say, Afro-Brazilians and Euro-Brazilians (legacy of slavery, probably some African language substrate, blah blah). These might be worth studying in an advanced literature or linguistic course. But elementary level in any language is conversations and conjugations, not Theory. You wouldn’t teach ESL via lengthy analysis of how French vocabulary supplanted Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Shoehorning in the standard woke shibboleths into the syllabus for an elementary course suggests that the professor prefers droning on about those shibboleths (possibly in English!) rather than, you know, teaching people how to speak and read Portuguese.
Or take the Performance Studies course. I *strongly* doubt that it’s some practical guide to navigating funding for a community theatre. A course like that would probably be cross-listed with the MBA program and include a lot more words like “budget,” “marketing,” and “CRM,” and a lot fewer words like “neoliberalism” and “precarity.”
I take your point about Elementary Portuguese—if it was Portuguese for academic reading/writing I’d push back, but I think you’re right in that I steelmanned that one a little too much.
Regarding performance studies, I didn’t say that it was going to be practical—just that it was a thing that performance studies people would find interesting, and that I disagreed with Ari’s comment on it.
I think in general, I disagree with the idea that
> Shoehorning in the standard woke shibboleths into the syllabus for an elementary course suggests that the professor prefers droning on about those shibboleths (possibly in English!) rather than, you know, teaching people how to speak and read Portuguese.
I think shibboleths signal political affiliation more than they signal actual course content. It seems entirely possible to me that a professor without tenure who teaches in a humanities or social sciences department might feel the pressure to use unnecessary shibboleths to describe their course just to avoid the ire of their peers or to avoid outgrouping themselves. My larger point is that you can’t just use the presence of “woke” shibboleths as proof that a course is going to be bad or uninformative, which I think still stands (although your criticism of some of my steelmans is pretty fair imo).
I went to Yale and these courses were always deeply annoying- more a vehicle for the professor’s personal activism than anything sensible or new. I have and had better uses of my time than to be essentially propagandized at.
I’m not gonna dispute anything about the courses you took—I’m sure they were as annoying as you say they are. I’m just saying that there are probably some great courses out there that happen to have weird descriptions.
Also, not every weird course is for everyone—for example, I remember some Econ bros in my Marx classes really disliking the whole thing. (Not that that’s you, just making a more general statement)
I really enjoyed this as the parent of two kids roughly your age who are still in academia. I listen to them talk about this kind of thing with their friends and I'll say some of them are kind of with Ari in terms of sniggering at weird sounding course titles and also (which didn't come up yet) finding some profs and students genuinely insufferable. I studied feminist theory in the 90s and found it pretty insufferable as well so I feel like this has been going on a while. But! My kids and their friends also took some "weird" classes that ended up being their favorites in sea of practical STEM classes. Like "the history of psychedelics" or "the history of pop music" and also some classes like the Portuguese one you mention. Anyway this was a really good, funny, nuanced take on the world of modern academia - thank you!
No, thank you! Trying to be nuanced is often really annoying and basically triples the amount of work I have to do (writing my own arguments, putting my own arguments in check, being fair to the other side). It often feels like it’s vaguely a waste of time, but I know in my heart that it’s worth it—so I really appreciate getting positive feedback about it!
Everyone wishes someone would be the change they want to see in the world but it is natural to be anxious when it is their own kid doing the trying and heavy lifting
Education should be about more than just future employment. But depending on how much this selection of courses reflects the full menu of available classes, I worry about how much any of these courses are teaching a valuable skill. One or two of the students taking these courses will become a professor of anthropology, or ethnic studies, or whatever, where these skills are relevant. What are the other 20 students to do? No company looks at a resume for student who has experience in problematizing sex, race, and gender in an urban setting, and says oh wow I want to hire this person because they know how to think these deep thoughts. Only professors get to think deep thoughts, and even their profession is coming into question. The majority of people are paid to accomplish some task on a daily basis and not to muse on how identity is constructed.
I would personally rate networking and social connections as more important than what you study in your major. Degrees are more likely to be signals of positive characteristics than anything else. As for me personally, I’m transitioning from a physics degree into policy work, and I think I’m gonna make it!
“But to be fair to those courses, we’ve been living in the capitalist mode of production for many, many years now. Of course every facet of our culture and lives has been affected! Many of these effects are really interesting and have fascinating historical origins that have been uncovered by the professors of ages past—and if you’re interested, you can learn about them from the professors of today!”
Not saying the CMoP is ideal, nor arguing it’s evolving in a good way, but… …. Have you met people who *also* experienced a non-CMoP for many years?.. Which mode of production do they prefer?
I don’t even think I’m disparaging the capitalist mode of production in this quote. I tend to think of it like I think of democracy—it kinda sucks, but everything else is worse—but a proper treatment of my thoughts on capitalism would have to be the subject of its own post.
Out of curiosity, what did you think my take on capitalism was? I thought I made it clear that I’m no longer a Marxist, so I’m curious what you were trying to convince me of.
I was genuinely curious what your basis of comparison was, why you switched and then back. And also curious whether the instructors of these courses — who are ostensibly advocating for certain systems — talk about the subject from first-hand or close associates’ experience with these systems, or just purely theoretical basis. (The language / jargon they use suggests more the latter, but I’m particularly annoyed by such unnecessary and exclusionary academese / jargon.)
> And also curious whether the instructors of these courses — who are ostensibly advocating for certain systems
I've never had a single instructor of mine advocate for any system, openly or otherwise. Every single one of my humanities and social sciences professors has taken GREAT pains to obfuscate their own politics, even if it was sometimes guessable. Even in the class that made me more Marxist! It was just the experience of reading the book and discussing it with my peers that radicalized me. And in defense of my professor, we also read Smith's Wealth of Nations, and he gave the strongest steelman of it I've ever heard or read since (and I'm pretty sure that professor is a hippy socialist).
At least in UChicago (I suppose I can't speak for Yale since I didn't study there), my humanities and social science professors were often astoundingly epistemically humble, focusing almost entirely on my learning and education (I do think I got lucky with my professors tbh). Even when they had their own specialties, they always did their best to give us a broad overview of the subject they were teaching.
What college/university do you/did you go to? Do you have a specific one you're talking about?
Also, because I forgot to address this just now: you _have_ to be analyzing the modern world as it exists under capitalism. Even if you're a die-hard capitalism fan or the world's strongest laissez-faire enjoyer (I personally am not a capitalism fan but I am a market appreciator), you can't get a full understanding of modern anything without understanding how it has been affected by history and economics. And you can do so without coming down on any particular side: it's not like every historian who analyzes capitalism is a Marxist or vice versa.
Great post, I had the same reaction to the original article and I appreciate the effort you put into trying to describe the courses in a good faith way.
Thank you! I think that "woke" language often gets vastly overcorrected for—people can perceive it as covering up a lack of depth of opinion, but I think that a lot of people who use esoteric language or are sometimes annoying also have very good points that are worthy of consideration. I hope Ari takes away something similar!
I commented something else on the original post, but I’ll say a word here about all those quotation marks since you didn’t. The point isn’t to be sassy and snide; it is literally to indicate that, say, “homosexuality” is being dealt with initially as a semantic label rather than with the assumption that there is something called homosexuality and that we all know what it is and that the word has always been used in the same way. Is homosexuality a behavior? A lifestyle? An “orientation”? (What does that mean?) Are homosexual desires “perverse,” which implies that only a few people experience them and that they are bad, or are they “base,” which implies that everyone experiences them but that the point is not to act on them? And what constitutes a homosexual desire? Does only an active, articulated desire to have sex with someone of the same sex qualify? The relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby Dick” is different from that between Maurice and Scudder in “Maurice,” and not just because the first is more subtextual. Is only the second homosexual, or are both? If we say only the second, then does that make Maurice’s unconsummated relationship with Clive not homosexual?
I haven’t read that much queer theory. I’ve read some that I think is actively bad and unconvincing. (Though even that I ultimately found valuable: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816665112/henry-james-and-the-queerness-of-style/.) But it doesn’t take that much exploration to see that categories we think of as received and stable are often not that way, and that a lot can be learned by beginning with treating them as semantic labels rather than as though one already knows exactly what they mean. One of the main things I learned from my course on the “New Negro Renaissance” was that the term “New Negro” was almost entirely a floating signifier, used between 1895 and around 1935 to refer to all sorts of black people and visions of the black future, reflecting a discourse that was highly variegated but united by a progressive impulse such that it was useful for everyone from WEB Du Bois to Marcus Garvey to Jean Toomer to be described as a “New Negro” by somebody.
I’m not sure which question marks you’re referring to, but this is a really informative comment and I appreciate you taking the time to leave it here!
Sorry, I was unclear but was referring to the original post: “ the bizarre obsession with ‘scare quotes’ … it also seems like such a presumptuous outlook … a totally conventional word like ‘becomes’ or ‘sexuality’ gets bracketed with taunting quotation marks.”
Anyway, thanks for the article. It said a lot of stuff I’ve been thinking recently.
Some of these defenses are taking charity to the professors a little too far.
For example, the Portuguese course is *Elementary* Portuguese. It would not surprise me if there are dialectal differences between, say, Afro-Brazilians and Euro-Brazilians (legacy of slavery, probably some African language substrate, blah blah). These might be worth studying in an advanced literature or linguistic course. But elementary level in any language is conversations and conjugations, not Theory. You wouldn’t teach ESL via lengthy analysis of how French vocabulary supplanted Anglo-Saxon vocabulary in the wake of the Norman Conquest. Shoehorning in the standard woke shibboleths into the syllabus for an elementary course suggests that the professor prefers droning on about those shibboleths (possibly in English!) rather than, you know, teaching people how to speak and read Portuguese.
Or take the Performance Studies course. I *strongly* doubt that it’s some practical guide to navigating funding for a community theatre. A course like that would probably be cross-listed with the MBA program and include a lot more words like “budget,” “marketing,” and “CRM,” and a lot fewer words like “neoliberalism” and “precarity.”
I take your point about Elementary Portuguese—if it was Portuguese for academic reading/writing I’d push back, but I think you’re right in that I steelmanned that one a little too much.
Regarding performance studies, I didn’t say that it was going to be practical—just that it was a thing that performance studies people would find interesting, and that I disagreed with Ari’s comment on it.
I think in general, I disagree with the idea that
> Shoehorning in the standard woke shibboleths into the syllabus for an elementary course suggests that the professor prefers droning on about those shibboleths (possibly in English!) rather than, you know, teaching people how to speak and read Portuguese.
I think shibboleths signal political affiliation more than they signal actual course content. It seems entirely possible to me that a professor without tenure who teaches in a humanities or social sciences department might feel the pressure to use unnecessary shibboleths to describe their course just to avoid the ire of their peers or to avoid outgrouping themselves. My larger point is that you can’t just use the presence of “woke” shibboleths as proof that a course is going to be bad or uninformative, which I think still stands (although your criticism of some of my steelmans is pretty fair imo).
I went to Yale and these courses were always deeply annoying- more a vehicle for the professor’s personal activism than anything sensible or new. I have and had better uses of my time than to be essentially propagandized at.
I’m not gonna dispute anything about the courses you took—I’m sure they were as annoying as you say they are. I’m just saying that there are probably some great courses out there that happen to have weird descriptions.
Also, not every weird course is for everyone—for example, I remember some Econ bros in my Marx classes really disliking the whole thing. (Not that that’s you, just making a more general statement)
I really enjoyed this as the parent of two kids roughly your age who are still in academia. I listen to them talk about this kind of thing with their friends and I'll say some of them are kind of with Ari in terms of sniggering at weird sounding course titles and also (which didn't come up yet) finding some profs and students genuinely insufferable. I studied feminist theory in the 90s and found it pretty insufferable as well so I feel like this has been going on a while. But! My kids and their friends also took some "weird" classes that ended up being their favorites in sea of practical STEM classes. Like "the history of psychedelics" or "the history of pop music" and also some classes like the Portuguese one you mention. Anyway this was a really good, funny, nuanced take on the world of modern academia - thank you!
No, thank you! Trying to be nuanced is often really annoying and basically triples the amount of work I have to do (writing my own arguments, putting my own arguments in check, being fair to the other side). It often feels like it’s vaguely a waste of time, but I know in my heart that it’s worth it—so I really appreciate getting positive feedback about it!
Everyone wishes someone would be the change they want to see in the world but it is natural to be anxious when it is their own kid doing the trying and heavy lifting
Education should be about more than just future employment. But depending on how much this selection of courses reflects the full menu of available classes, I worry about how much any of these courses are teaching a valuable skill. One or two of the students taking these courses will become a professor of anthropology, or ethnic studies, or whatever, where these skills are relevant. What are the other 20 students to do? No company looks at a resume for student who has experience in problematizing sex, race, and gender in an urban setting, and says oh wow I want to hire this person because they know how to think these deep thoughts. Only professors get to think deep thoughts, and even their profession is coming into question. The majority of people are paid to accomplish some task on a daily basis and not to muse on how identity is constructed.
I mean, most people don’t get jobs related to their degrees anyway (https://www.luminafoundation.org/news-and-views/do-college-majors-matter-not-as-much-as-you-think/). I personally know several people who studied the humanities and are now going into consulting or management or some other related job.
I would personally rate networking and social connections as more important than what you study in your major. Degrees are more likely to be signals of positive characteristics than anything else. As for me personally, I’m transitioning from a physics degree into policy work, and I think I’m gonna make it!
I think you mean “stand-in” not “shoo-in.”
Aw, rats. You're right. I'm too lazy to change it, though.
“But to be fair to those courses, we’ve been living in the capitalist mode of production for many, many years now. Of course every facet of our culture and lives has been affected! Many of these effects are really interesting and have fascinating historical origins that have been uncovered by the professors of ages past—and if you’re interested, you can learn about them from the professors of today!”
Not saying the CMoP is ideal, nor arguing it’s evolving in a good way, but… …. Have you met people who *also* experienced a non-CMoP for many years?.. Which mode of production do they prefer?
I don’t even think I’m disparaging the capitalist mode of production in this quote. I tend to think of it like I think of democracy—it kinda sucks, but everything else is worse—but a proper treatment of my thoughts on capitalism would have to be the subject of its own post.
Out of curiosity, what did you think my take on capitalism was? I thought I made it clear that I’m no longer a Marxist, so I’m curious what you were trying to convince me of.
I was genuinely curious what your basis of comparison was, why you switched and then back. And also curious whether the instructors of these courses — who are ostensibly advocating for certain systems — talk about the subject from first-hand or close associates’ experience with these systems, or just purely theoretical basis. (The language / jargon they use suggests more the latter, but I’m particularly annoyed by such unnecessary and exclusionary academese / jargon.)
> And also curious whether the instructors of these courses — who are ostensibly advocating for certain systems
I've never had a single instructor of mine advocate for any system, openly or otherwise. Every single one of my humanities and social sciences professors has taken GREAT pains to obfuscate their own politics, even if it was sometimes guessable. Even in the class that made me more Marxist! It was just the experience of reading the book and discussing it with my peers that radicalized me. And in defense of my professor, we also read Smith's Wealth of Nations, and he gave the strongest steelman of it I've ever heard or read since (and I'm pretty sure that professor is a hippy socialist).
At least in UChicago (I suppose I can't speak for Yale since I didn't study there), my humanities and social science professors were often astoundingly epistemically humble, focusing almost entirely on my learning and education (I do think I got lucky with my professors tbh). Even when they had their own specialties, they always did their best to give us a broad overview of the subject they were teaching.
What college/university do you/did you go to? Do you have a specific one you're talking about?
Also, because I forgot to address this just now: you _have_ to be analyzing the modern world as it exists under capitalism. Even if you're a die-hard capitalism fan or the world's strongest laissez-faire enjoyer (I personally am not a capitalism fan but I am a market appreciator), you can't get a full understanding of modern anything without understanding how it has been affected by history and economics. And you can do so without coming down on any particular side: it's not like every historian who analyzes capitalism is a Marxist or vice versa.
Thanks for writing this! Should have a pretty lengthy reply out soon...
Great post, I had the same reaction to the original article and I appreciate the effort you put into trying to describe the courses in a good faith way.
Thank you! I think that "woke" language often gets vastly overcorrected for—people can perceive it as covering up a lack of depth of opinion, but I think that a lot of people who use esoteric language or are sometimes annoying also have very good points that are worthy of consideration. I hope Ari takes away something similar!
Nice work on this. Put this on our list of things to talk about whenever we finally do that lol
It'll happen eventually trust 🙏