Posts in category: Microblog

Shamelessly borrowing a webpage from Cosma Shalizi’s books, here is an aggregate of my casual notes on some books casually read over the summer. I have been posting these on the federated book-reading site bookwyrm: you can fedi-follow me there from any-fediwhere as agoldst@bookwyrm.social, if that’s something you like to do (sickos).

Robert P. Goldman, ed., Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India

Over the last couple of years, I have been irregularly reading my way through the Princeton Library of Asian Translations edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. I just finished this seventh and final volume. I love a good philological extravaganza, and my one year of Sanskrit in college made me particularly enthusiastic about the ins and outs of that beautiful language. So this gigantic mega-edition, with tons and tons of paratext bulking out the 24,000-odd ślokas of the epic, had lots of appeal for me. I didn’t know much at all about the poem when I started. My single college course on Indian culture (beyond the Sanskrit) spent some time on the Mahābhārata but not on the Rāmāyaṇa. I had the vague idea that the latter is, Eurocentrically speaking, the Sanskrit Odyssey, which sounds cool, and I’d read A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” because I admire Ramanujan and because it was, sigh, in the news for a while. Ramanujan also makes it sound cool and supplies a stretch of quite beautiful translation (in collaboration with David Shulman) from Vālmīki’s version (alongside his renderings of other versions).

I caught wind of some of the examples of GPT-3 answering PhD-exam-style questions plausibly. It seems to me an elegant if indirect proof that Wikipedia entries on many topics are written by current or former graduate students, or people with an excellent ability to imitate them. But it also called to mind the famous arithmetic scene in Eugène Ionesco’s La leçon, which I am sure I am not the first to think of in connection with today’s debates over “stochastic parrots.”

Violating my resolution to never click through to NYT higher education coverage, I went and read a report on the scandal over Columbia’s US News rankings. That rankings are “reactive” is not exactly breaking news (see Espeland and Sauder and Fourcade), but the article is worth it for two reasons. The first is the line in my title, which describes Michael Thaddeus, the Columbia math professor whose analysis is the basis for the story. The second reason is the link to the analysis itself, a highly entertaining exercise in checking Columbia management’s dodgy data. I recommend the analysis as an education in the value of looking things up in IPEDS, the Common Data Set, audited financial statements, and other public data sources. And as a reminder that there are many paths to radicalism, including those that go via algebraic geometry.

My colleague Jeff Lawrence has just published an essay in the Chronicle Review: Who Owns Your Academic Community? There are so many good points that I was having trouble choosing which to quote-tweet. But then I realized: I’m not tweeting. So instead of locating the most RT-able, like-able, fire-emoji-able sound-bite, I can just tell you to read the whole thing. Jeff shows that social media is a hopeless pis aller for intellectuals and the scholarly community. Two years of pandemic isolation has made it possible for the fetid outrage factories on Facebook and Twitter to appear in the guise of a righteously populist substitute for exclusionary “academe”—even to academics who should know better. But there is no salvation for intellectuals to be found in the ruins of the public sphere, least of all in the extremely limited possibilities of so-called “public scholarship.” Without scholarly institutions, there can be but few scholars.

I add as a footnote that the dynamic Jeff describes is recognized by Pierre Bourdieu as an established tendency in the cultural field. One of the characteristic positions in this field is that of “internal anti-intellectualism,” the practice of denouncing the values of intellectuals themselves as a mere disguise for self-aggrandizement. Some of the force of these denunciations comes from the fact that, of course, some intellectuals of high stature are indeed terrible people. And people who are marginalized within the intellectual field are, says Bourdieu, “well-placed to discover the contradictions, weaknesses or pettinesses which go unnoticed by a more distanced reverence….But the objectifications of the intellectual game inspired by these intellectual passions remain necessarily partial and blind to themselves: the resentment of disappointed love leads to a reversal of the dominant vision, demonizing what it once made divine.”¹ Social media has proven even more effective at disseminating this distorting and demoralizing vision than the cultural journalism of print and broadcast mass-media (or as we now call them, “legacy media”) that Bourdieu had in mind. Jeff’s point is that social media has proven far less effective as a substitute for the kinds of interaction that allow intellectuals to organize collectively in defense of their own institutions and the integrity of their own values.

Joseph Kiger, a night-school teacher in Parkersburg, called Bilott to ask for help. About nine months earlier, he received a peculiar note from the Lubeck water district. It arrived on Halloween day, enclosed in the monthly water bill. The note explained that an unregulated chemical named PFOA had been detected in the drinking water in ’low concentrations,’ but that it was not a health risk.

That was 2005. This is from a 2016 New York Times feature on the lawsuits against DuPont for knowingly dumping toxic PFAS, the carcinogenic “forever chemicals” now known to be in a lot of people’s drinking water but only very recently and selectively regulated (thanks to the cozy relationship between chemical corporations and their regulators).

From Halloween to All Saints: yesterday all the customers of Middlesex Water Company learned that PFOA had been detected in our drinking water, but, says MWC in an informational slideshow, there is “NO IMMEDIATE HEALTH RISK!”

Nonetheless Middlesex Water sued 3M back in July for the cost of building the treatment facility to filter PFAS from our water. Glad they were ahead of the game there, and if they win, it will certainly be nice for them. The rest of us are supposed to wait until 2023, when the facility will be operational, in theory.

As I sit alone in my home office, there is also no immediate health risk from COVID infection or climate change. This is fine.

Many people are confused about what neoliberalism is. Here, for their reference, is a thing that is definitely neoliberalism. I received a letter from the State of New Jersey Division of Pensions and Benefits informing me that the state employee health plan would be undergoing a “dependent eligibility verification audit.” Every NJ employee who has children or other dependents on their health insurance is going to have to prove that those dependents are eligible. The reason, says the letter, is that “the cost of coverage for dependents… is substantial, and coverage of ineligible individuals unfairly raises the costs of coverage for all members and taxpayers.”

The first thing about this that is quite neoliberal is the idea that I, a “member and taxpayer,” should be mad about the dollar cost to me of other NJ employees’ kids having health insurance when they don’t “deserve” it, and that “fairness” will only have been achieved when I and all other “taxpayers” am only sharing the cost of health insurance for people who do deserve it. But since I actually think that everybody deserves health care, I can’t get mad about ineligible dependents; what I do get mad about is the lack of universal health care. I also get mad about receiving this letter, the rhetoric of which converges with the hard-right case against Medicare for all, on letterhead with the name of New Jersey’s new, supposedly “progressive” governor on it. But that is the second thing that is neoliberal about this: it exemplifies the full complicity of politically liberal parties in transforming all social rights into private goods and limiting the state’s responsibility to ensuring “fair” trading conditions in those newly marketized goods.

But best and most neoliberal of all is that this dependent eligibility verification audit is not being carried out by state employees; no, for the state Division of Pensions and Benefits has “engaged the services of Alight Dependent Verification Services” (which of course also means that “members and taxpayers” are paying for these services; they are also paying for the time all the state employees like me are going to have to waste proving they are actually married to or parents of the people they are married to or parents of). Alight Solutions LLC, “a leading provider of human capital solutions,” has a business in helping organizations kick people off health insurance. Under neoliberalism, the state of New Jersey is just one more client, ipso facto pursuing the same goals Alight pitches to all potential clients on its website: “return on investment,” “fiduciary responsibility,” and decreased “compliance risk.”

There you go: it’s pretty neoliberal, is what I am saying. Very happy holidays to all the responsible fiduciaries in Trenton and their no doubt fully benefits-eligible families.

Just an addendum to my last post on declining humanities majors. Thinking of this trend in terms of student preferences (however formed) prevents us from thinking about which students are enrolling. That is to say, selective colleges and universities make choices about which students to admit, and there is a “political economy of enrollment”: since students are accounted sources of revenue, how many of them there are and where they go is crucial to the distribution of resources in the university. This distribution is of course not left entirely up to students themselves.

The internet moves at such a rapid pace these days that I can read and comment on a piece in the Altantic less than four months after it first appears. Having fixed my RSS reader’s link to Ben Schmidt’s blog (and yes, remarks about my RSS reader are going to be a fixture on my microblog) I now catch wind at last of his truly marvelous essay on the crisis in humanities majors from August, building on a less formal and somewhat more pungent blog post from July. Ben’s series on the issue continued more recently with a piece for the AHA magazine, The History BA since the Great Recession. This last reveals that for once history may be the new humanities crisis champs, since they have seen the largest proportional drop in majors nationally since 2011. Of course they had further to fall than long-term crisis heavyweight English; English degrees were already on the decline, having made less of a rebound from their previous trough than other humanities fields. Neither English nor history nor any of the other long-standing humanities fields have hit bottom by any means; Ben shows that the rate of decline may just be beginning to decrease, but this will be small consolation to those of us who work in these fields.

Characteristically for Ben, these are all beautifully executed pieces of reasoning with data. The Atlantic essay is also gorgeously presented (and comes with a reproduction repository!). I particularly liked, too, the idea of counting BA degrees as a share of the 23-year-old population, which avoids what is so misleading about the “share of degrees” measure most people focus on to talk about a humanities crisis, namely, that the college-age and college-going populations are both still growing. The news for humanities majors is bad, however, whatever measure you follow, even raw degree numbers.

Ben has a reasonable discussion of how to interpret this evidence. The onset of the Great Recession really is a turning point, and it looks to be the only explanatory factor with the right timing and the right scale (that is, national, across all institution types and populations). Ben quite carefully speaks of “student priorities…formed even before they see the inside of a college classroom.” Naturally the formation of such priorities does not take place in a vacuum, and it is good to remember that what students choose is not necessarily what they would choose if they felt unconstrained—and if they knew all there was to be known about what they were choosing. The choices are not particularly rational in terms of expected future earnings, but they probably do give evidence of a widespread pressure to make a “practical” choice, where this is understood to mean choosing a preprofessional, technical, or scientific major.

As usual my feeling is that “defending the humanities” is a terrible response to this situation (and not one that Ben advocates either). Free college for all would be a better one. Or—as I also always say—refunding public K–12 education.

It is not just the humanities that are losing students, and we see again the emergence of cleavages in the system of higher education that differ from the pre-WWII tripartion into humanities, sciences, and social sciences. “Fields in closer proximity to the humanities,” says Ben, have also lost majors (absolutely and by share): anthropology, sociology, political science… The field of communication has not declined in the same way; neither has psychology (where it is easy to imagine preprofessional possibilities). It’s tempting, but probably English-centric, to remark that the losers are all fields in which students read and write a lot.

Finally, however things look from the student and faculty positions, it’s worth remembering that the “crisis” in the humanities is likely no such thing from the position of ruling elites and the people who manage universities for them. To them it must look like an improvement, from the perspective of short-term economic development, in the mixture of human capital being produced by higher education. It is also indisputably a chance to dispense with some more tenure lines in disciplines whose only contribution to institutional revenue is teaching—and which tend to produce the most annoying gadflies on the faculty to boot. Even if administrators understood that humanities tuition dollars actually subsidize the sciences, they would reason that they could rake in those same tuition dollars on the backs of adjuncts and NTTs, especially if all those enrollments are people doing gen-ed requirements rather than majors.

Noted, for future bloggery. The MLA actually did follow up on the “Where Are They Now?” study I looked at last year with a report, The Career Paths of Modern Language PhDs.

It’s always a pleasure when my RSS reader brings me posts from one of my favorite academic bloggers, Cosma Shalizi. His “blogospheric navel-gazing” comes with a justifiably melancholy prefatory note about the medium and its displacement by corporate social media. I notice that the Blogging Advice to the Young Scholar genre takes a somewhat different form when its imagined addressee is a scientist than when it is a humanist. The whole question of communicating expert knowledge to a public looks different when you are not in one of those fields that everybody already knows everything about (which would be my working definition of the humanities, capturing perhaps the only thing literary studies, history, philosophy, etc. really have in common). But really my favorite Shalizi blogging is his slightly-more-than-tweet-sized comments on his voluminous reading.

I forbear commentary here on the local news related to saying things on the internet, but the national AAUP’s letter on the matter pointed me to some interesting local history which is also a key stage in the development, if that is the word, of the institution of the right-wing troll mob. In April 1965, Eugene Genovese, then a recently tenured associate professor at Rutgers (cough cough), affirmed at a teach-in on Vietnam that, as “a Marxist and a socialist,” he would “welcome” a Viet Cong victory. The young Republicans, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, and eventually Richard Nixon all went after Genovese, trying to get him fired. B. Robert Kreiser’s detailed account of the episode for the 2016 issue of the Journal of Academic Freedom is full of amusing details: “Scarlet and black bumper stickers with the slogan ‘Rid Rutgers of Reds’ could be seen on an increasing number of New Jersey automobiles” (14). The whole performance—the pantomime righteous indignation, the media scandal-mongering—is very resonant with our moment. Less resonant is the response of the senior administrators of Rutgers and the incumbent Democratic governor at the time, all of whom managed to defend Genovese pretty consistently on the basis of his academic freedom and free-speech rights, as well as the autonomy of the university. Imagine, state elites defending a left-wing professor using a public-good understanding of the university! Their stance bespeaks a kind of confidence in the standing of the university and the sources of that standing among the public that is hard to find in our neoliberal present.

In self-promotion news, I’ll be at Penn State next week to join in the Information + Humanities Conference. And all this year I am co-leading the Annual Seminar at the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis, on the theme of classification. Hoping to micro- or even macro-blog about it as the year goes on.

I may be on an extended holiday from twitter, but it struck me that blog technology is fully capable of posting links to things and commenting on them. It’s like my blog is my very own microblogging service! If you want to catch all the microupdates, just subscribe to my RSS feed! (I don’t promise that this first microupdate won’t also be the last, but for the honor of The Web We Lost, I’ll try.)

Here under my rock, I had missed the academic scandal of the hour. As Natalia Cecire rightly says, “It’s such a betrayal when real expertise becomes a warrant for demanding deference instead of a pedagogical responsibility.” Read her post and learn about learning.

I also appreciated Corey Robin’s comment in the Chronicle Review (currently unpaywalled). I find stories of academic abuse of power, sexual and otherwise, so sickening that I don’t have the energy to seek out any more details just now. But nothing ever surprises me less than senior academics closing ranks against their juniors: we are talking about a profession that has been concertedly devouring its young for half a century…. The deformation of the deprofessionalizing academic profession is another object of what Natalia aptly terms “emergency learning.”

Edited the same day: also, on my microblogging service you can edit your posts to fix typos.