Monthly Archives: August 2009

Aug 31 2009

>Ross Douthat’s Weekly Exercise in Inanity

>It’s Monday, people, and my favorite joke of a journalist has regaled us with his weekly effort at writing. As an educator, I feel a painful itch to find him and tell him all about the way an argument should be structured and the most common rhetorical errors people commit when writing an analytical piece. Today’s article, “A Different Kind of Liberal“, should have been titled “Why can’t liberals be as close-minded, uneducated, hateful, fanatical, and conservative as … well, conservatives?”

In this piece, Douthat laments the near disappearance of “America’s dwindling population of outspoken pro-life liberals.” What he fails to see, however, is an inherent contradiction between the words “pro-life” and “liberal.” The truth is that the mere fact of using the word “pro-life” marks you as decidedly anti-liberal. We have a whole group of society dedicated to a very outspoken defense of this point of view. Those people are called Republicans in the best of cases, and religious fundamentalists in the worst. The idea that liberals would suddenly convert to this ideology is bizarre. What next? The support for “free markets”, no gun control. no medicare, no social programs? Can we do all that and still consider ourselves liberals? Apparently, Douthat thinks we can.

One of the things I hate the most about conservatives of Douthat’s ilk is their judgmental hypocrisy. He laments the fact that “the abortion rate for fetuses diagnosed with Down syndrome, for instance, is estimated to be as high as 90 percent.” In my opinion, you have to have some nerve to judge people who honestly see themselves incapable of raising a Down’s syndrome child and choose to terminate. A truly religious person, in my opinion, can have no problem with abortion. For a believer, a mere human being cannot possibly hope to thwart God’s plans. I believe that this child will be born eventually, only without the syndrome. Or, as a possibility, it will be born to parents who feel they have the strength to raise such a kid. Douthat’s anti-abortion stance, however, has nothing to do with actual religious feeling. As we have seen many times, he is terrified of female independence and feels a profound need to control women.

Another annoying characteristic of this kind of writing is the constant effort at coopting feminism as a way of promoting an anti-feminist agenda. Douthat believes that he somehow has the right of telling women what “real” feminism is all about (in this case, being anti-abortion): “[Eunice Kennedy Shriver] knew what patriarchy meant: she was born into a household out of “Mad Men,” where the father paraded his mistress around his family, the sons were groomed for high office, and the daughters were expected to marry well, rear children and suffer silently. And she transcended that stifling milieu, doing more than most men to change the world, and earning the right to disagree with her fellow liberals about what true feminism required.” The daring of a profoundly anti-feminist Douthat in judging what “true feminism” is would bewilder anybody even marginally acquainted with his women-hating writing.

What’s so shocking about Douthat is that having failed to understand what being a Conservative means, he would set out to teach liberals and feminists what they should believe or do. He never even mastered the tenets of his own political persuasion and has the cheek to pontificate to others. People like Douthat are an insult to Conservative thought.

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Aug 31 2009

>Nina Atwood and the Chauvinistic View of Female Sexuality

>Nina Atwood’s relationship advice books have always scared me with their unapologetically chauvinistic view of female sexuality. Naturally, if she were an only unenlightened fool to produce this kind of nonsense, her ideas wouldn’t be so scary. They have, however, become widely disseminated in the media. So widely, in fact, to have become mainstream.

The main tenets of Atwood’s chauvinistic teachings are:
a) the worst thing you can do for a budding relationship “is to get sexual too soon“. A woman’s central strategy has to consist of “putting off sex until you have a real relationship with a commitment.” Atwood doesn’t explain, of course, why any sane individual of any gender would start a “relationship with a commintment” before figuring out if you are even sexually compatible. There is even less explanation for why anybody would even want to start a “real relationship” with a person who uses sex as a manipulation device from the very start;
b) after sex, the man should feel “obligated” because your “self-respect as a woman demands it“. The most annoying thing here is Atwood’s use of pseudo-feminist vocabulary to justify a decidedly anti-feminist attitude. According to her, a woman has to trade sex for commitment and obligation. In her world, sex is what a man wants, while commitment is what a woman needs. This, of course, has nothing to do with reality. The need for commitment and/or for sex is not gender specific and has more to do with the needs of a particular individual at any given time.
In order to justify this ridiculous approach, Atwood brings out the old chauvinistic myth that for women, sex is about intimacy, while for men it’s about physical pleasure: “For us, having sex creates more intimacy. We wake up the next day wanting the relationship to move forward. If we’re brutally honest, we have to admit that we wake up the next day halfway in love and thinking of him as a boyfriend. This is nothing to be embarrassed about – it is perfectly natural and normal for a woman to feel this way! In fact, it is how we are wired.” There is no proof whatsoever for these sweeping generalizations, except the vague and baseless declarations about being “wired” a certain way. And we all know how stupid such statements are.
It’s strange to me that Atwood never stops to think how insulting such a position is to women. She believes that we are such simple, one-dimensional creatures that in order to achieve intimacy with us and make us fall in love, all you need to do is get between our legs. Our souls are located inside our vaginas, so it’s very easy to get inside them. Men, on the other hand, are much more complex. It’s not enough to sleep with them to achieve intimacy or reach their feelings. I can understand why some male chauvinist would want to promote this vision of women. But a woman? It’s mindboggling. 
Aug 30 2009

>Paternity and a Weird Understanding of Feminism

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The kind of absolutely insane ideas that people often attribute to feminists is mind-boggling. Melanie McDonagh of UK’s Times Online is surprised that “feminists didn’t make more of a fuss” about DNA testing for paternity.
In her artcile “Paternity Tests Rob Women of Their Hold over Men“, McDonagh suggests that “the ability to pass a child off on a man was a potent female weapon.” For McDonagh, this was an undeniably good thing that was destroyed by mean, bad scientists and not protested enough by stupid feminists who failed to see how this scientific invention would end up by robbing women of their power: “The woman’s prerogative of knowing who is a child’s father was, when you think about it, the trump card of the sex. . . And then, all of a sudden, in our lifetimes all that changed. With the advent of DNA testing, that trump card became null and void. Men can require objective proof of a child’s paternity before they part with a penny for its upkeep. . . All of a sudden the balance of power between the sexes has shifted.“

Of course, this whining about how much “power” (for what? manipulation? lying? milking men for money? What a weird understanding of women’s power) women have lost with the advent of DNA testing tells us more about the journalist’s own self-hating vision of women than about anything else. You need to have a pretty low opinion of yourself as a woman in order to bemoan the disappearance of a possibility to cheat both men and children out of the truth about paternity.

McDonagh seems to believe in all honesty that the truth about paternity makes everyone miserable: “You have to ask: is the man any happier for knowing that his children aren’t his? Are his children any happier now that their genetic father is proven to be someone other than their familiar father? DNA testing is the devil’s tool. It has certainly made this family more miserable.”  It doesn’t occur to her that children might actually have a need to know who their real father is. It doesn’t occur to her that men are people too and, as such, should have the right to know who their children are. She doesn’t care that many women have been able to prove their children’s paternity in court, which gave them access to child support. All McDonagh worries about is that you can’t pass off your child on a millionaire or a Hollywood actor in order to get a lot of money for yourself (which is, of course, a problem confronted by every woman on a daily basis).

The most upsetting thing about this unenlightened and chauvinistic rant, though, is the picture it paints of feminists. The very fact of being surprised that feminists haven’t protested the DNA testing presents us as science-hating money-hungry individuals who want to wrest the power to cheat and to lie from men at all costs. I wonder why McDonagh couldn’t have written her piece without mentioning feminists at all. I guess the reason for that is her fear to recognize that her insane ideas are not supported by any reasonable person and are definitely not supported by the feminist movement.

Aug 29 2009

>Psychoanalysis in the US

>I was very glad to see today’s article in the New York Times on the rise of psychoanalysis in the US.In “Freud’s Adirondack Vacation,” Leon Hoffman tells of Freud’s visit to the US, the people he met, and the influence he exercised over the mental health profession in this country. In the past few decades, Freud’s name has become something of an insult in American psychology. The pharmaceutical lobby is one of the strongest in the US. It is, of course, deeply opposed to a method that deals with mental issues sans medication. As everybody knows, Freud’s “talking cure” arose specifically in response to the proliferation of barbaric methods of treating mental patients practised by psychiatrists in the XIXth century.

Today, our understanding of mental health revolves around the mindless popping of prescription pills at worst and the senseless quasi-scientific blabber offered by Dr. Phil. The latter, of course, often leads to the former. Folowing the cue of pharmaceutical companies, Dr. Phil’s first pronouncement on most psychological problems is that the problem might be caused by an imbalance of something in the brain, which requires taking prescription medication.

In a country where it has become normal and acceptable to diagnose 2-year-olds with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (medication!), where schools label students as “hyperactive” (more medication!), where people often get prescribed 2 anti-depressants at once plus medication to deal with the side effects of the 2 anti-depressants, where psychotropic meds get peddled right from the TV screen, it would be a great idea to remember Dr. Freud and his American follower Dr. Putnam.

It’s obvious that people have a vague desire for something different than prescription medication in the field of psychology. Dr. Phil’s talk show originally gave some hope of presenting the “talking cure” in a more positive light. As we all know, the show soon degenerated into recommendation of prescription meds and a collection of unprofessional platitudes aimed at placating the bored suburban housewives who make up the bulk of Dr. Phil’s audience.

Gradually, people begin to believe that medication and Dr. Phil’s idiotic proclamations are all that psychology has to offer. As a  result, the popular trust for the fieldd at large becomes eroded even further.

Aug 27 2009

>Trivialization of Literary Studies

What I hate the most about today’s language and literature departments is how easily they believe in their own irrelevance and how apologetic they are inclined to feel about their own existence. While going through my daily blogroll I just encountered the following announcement:

Professor Scott Calhoun of Cedarville University in Ohio has found a modern approach that avoids the pitfalls of Moby Dick or The Scarlet Letter. Old stories don’t have the messages that resonate with the modern college students. They’ve found other spokesmen for the current generation.All are welcome to an academic conference scheduled for October 2 at North Carolina Central University in Durham. No coincidence that U2 will be performing in Raleigh, NC, that weekend. The academic conference is all about U2.U2: The Hype and the Feedback will feature guest speakers delivering lectures that relate to English literature studies, but without the great white whale.

Academic conferences and doctoral dissertations on rock stars only turn our field into one huge joke. With all due respect towards U2, what they do has nothing to do with literature. We can “analyze” their lyrics for fun (say, at a drunken party this type of “analysis” always entertains people). But trying to milk their songs for enough content to be discussed at an academic conference is pointless.

The idea behind this joke of a conference is that students find classical literary texts “irrelevant.” This attitude betrays the pedagogical impotence of the teachers who are incapable of helping their students discover the beauty of these texts. Such professors think that conferences on rock stars and classes dedicated to analyzing the lyrics of what are in reality very silly songs will make them seem cool and hip to the students. Of course, they will achieve some easy popularity with the C-students who want a course where no work needs to be done and no intellectual effort expanded. But I don’t think that smart, motivated students who actually want to get an education and not just have a good time will be interested.

As to “irrelevant” canonical texts, I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too much here, but when I was teaching Cervantes to high school kids ages 13-16 (as an extracurricular course), I couldn’t force them to go home 45 minutes after the end of class. Even after I started walking away from the classroom, the students kept following me and trying to continue the discussion of Don Quijote. If it’s possible to make Cervantes relevant to a 15-year-old, I don’t see why it would be all that hard to make The Scarlett Letter relevant to a 19-year-old.

I hate it when people try to present the younger generation as stupid and only interested in texting and Facebook. Today’s students are great. They are smart, motivated and they are dying for someone to introduce them to the finer things in life. They are perfectly capable of finding out everything they need about U2 on their own. It’s our help with understanding Cervantes, Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Thomas Mann that they need. Let’s not let them down and substitute real education with senseless blabber about equally meaningless songs.

Aug 27 2009

>Stalking

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So today in class we had an exercise where the students had to read letters to agony columns and offer advice to the authors (to practice the Subjunctive.) One of the letters was by a young man who was jealous of his girlfriend (for absolutely no reason) and kept trying to prevent her from talking to or spending time with any other man.

What shocked me was that some of the students advised this man to spy on his girlfriend or follow her around without her knowledge. And these students were all male. They thought the advice was funny.
Aug 26 2009

>Happy Women’s Equality Day!!

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Today is Women’s Equality Day!!!

It commemorates the passage of the 19th Amendment (the Woman Suffrage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution), which gave U.S. women full voting rights in 1920.

This is a great day for all of us, women and men alike. This is also a day to reflect on how much work still remains to be done in the area of gender equality.

“The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.” (Susan B. Anthony)

“I can’t say that the college-bred woman is the most contented woman. The broader her mind the more she understands the unequal conditions between men and women, the more she shafes under a government that tolerates it.” (Susan B. Anthony)

“Our struggle today is not to have a female Einstein get appointed as an assistant professor. It is for a woman schlemiel to get as quickly promoted as a male schlemiel.” (Bella Abzug)

“Women have been and are prejudiced, narrowminded, reactionary, even violent. Some women. They, of course, have a right to vote and a right to run for office. I will defend that right, but I will not support them or vote for them.” (Bella Abzug)

“I have met thousands and thousands of pro-choice men and women. I have never met anyone who is pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is not being pro-abortion. Being pro-choice is trusting the individual to make the right decision for herself and her family, and not entrusting that decision to anyone wearing the authority of government in any regard.” (Hillary Rodham Clinton)

“Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow victim.” (Betty Friedan)

“The most notable fact our culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.” (Adrienne Rich)

“The more education a woman has, the wider the gap between men’s and women’s earnings for the same work.” (Sandra Day O’Connor)

“But the problem is that when I go around and speak on campuses, I still don’t get young men standing up and saying, ‘How can I combine career and family?‘” (Gloria Steinem)

“The truth will set you free. But first, it will piss you off.” (Gloria Steinem)

Aug 26 2009

>When it isn’t Douthat, it’s Fish

>Besides my favorite uninformed quasi-reporter Ross Douthat, the New York Times offers some space on its pages to Stanley Fish, a quasi-literary critic. Yesterday, he regaled us with one of his conservative outpourings on the nature of higher education.

His article “What Should Colleges Teach?” starts with a sentiment I actually share. Fish talks about how rare it is to see a college student (and I might add, even a professor) write a coherent sentence bereft of grammar errors and syntactic monstrosities. If only Fish could stop there! But no, he proceeds to analyze the reasons for this problem. In Fish’s opinion, the main cause of this verbal impotence is that composition courses include discussions of ideological issues. Fish believes that “all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else.“

The problem with this suggestion is that it is absolutely impracticable. I have had an opportunity to teach two such courses and in my experience, you need to a) suggest a topic that might interest the students enough for them to want to write a good piece about it; b) teach them how to create a convincing line of reasoning; c) show them the rhetorical means of supporting the argument; d) demonstrate how to put the product of their thinking in writing. Of course, we could teach our students the rules of writing by making them write only about the weather. However, you can’t (or at least I can’t) maintain their level of passion for this exciting topic until the end of the semester.

I strongly believe that the best writing is produced by people who are passionate about its content. When you are forced to write about a subject that bores you and that is irrelevant to your life, the writing will reflect your lack of interest. Bringing controversial topics into the classroom motivates the students to want to think, argue, and ultimately put their ideas down in writing.

Teaching students to write well is extremely important. If, however, they have no content to fill the beautiful form we will teach them to create, then we have failed as educators.

Aug 25 2009

>National Guard

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It’s only the second day of class and already the National Guard recruiters have arrived on campus.

I wonder why I never (not once!) saw them on Yale and Cornell campuses. Of course, the student body here is very different in terms of financial background and social class. I hate the hypocrisy of the people who use the fact that some of the students here find it extremely difficult to make ends meet in order to acquire some cheap and expendable cannon fodder.

I also wonder why the university doesn’t prohibit these recruitment efforts on campus. Shouldn’t we try to protect our students from these things while they are with us?

Aug 24 2009

>Ivy League Education

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After my first day of teaching at a smaller not very well-known (at least yet, but give me a chance, it’s just my first day here) university, I have no idea why people would pay huge amounts of money to send their children to super expensive Ivy League schools. Of course, Harvard and Yale grads have a famous school name to put on their CVs. But is that really worth upwards of $250,000?

As I observed my new students here, I discovered that in no way are they less knowledgeable and less talented than my Ivy League students. In some areas, their knowledge is actually greater. They are, without a doubt, more driven, hardworking and goal-oriented. I was truly surprised that not a single student whined at having written homework assigned the first day of class. (If you ever tried doing that at an Ivy League school, you surely know that huge collective moaning accompanies the word “homework” pronounced any time during the first week of class.)

My new students are so motivated to do well in their classes that two of them already cried today. Of course, I don’t want my students to cry but it’s great to hear them say: “I truly, really, totally want to learn. Are you sure I will be able to?” These kids are obviously less widely traveled (if at all) than my former students. Still, they have a hunger for the knowledge of other cultures that makes my job a breeze. For the first time in my life, after I finished a lecture over 20% of students raised their hands to ask a question. This is, of course, what a professor lives for.

So if you want to give your child a great higher education but can’t afford to pay for an expensive, prestigious school, send them to me (or to a similar university). I promise, you will not be sorry. :-)