Doctor Cleveland's blog

The Logic of Electing Hypocrites

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:50:58 +0000

Q. What do you call a conservative gay legislator who's in the closet?

A. A safe vote against gay rights.

As usual, a bunch of politicians have had sex scandals recently. As usual, a good helping of them have been family-values types. And as usual, progressive bloggers have been surprised and appalled that many of the scandalous are family-values types, and even more shocked because a bunch of the conservative family-values adulterers seem to be skating. How is it that Mark "Appalachian Trail" Sanford is still Governor of South Carolina, Swinging John Ensign is still Governor of Nevada, and David Vitter, who may have qualified for a loyalty rewards card at one or more houses of prostitution, is still Senator from Louisiana? How are some of these guys running for re-election while Eliot Spitzer is out of office and Bill Clinton got impeached? How is it that the far right wing, in the person of Glenn Beck, actually made an abortive attempt to recruit Eric Massa away from the Democrats after his sex scandal broke? There seems to be a double standard here, because in fact there is. And while that's repugnant, it's not illogical. If a voter genuinely wants the government to impose public restrictions on sexual liberties, voting for a creepy adulterous hypocrite is a sound strategy.

There are two bedrock political rules in play here. First, you should always vote for the candidate based on their policies. Second, political scandals become harmful when they resonate with some larger concern or anxiety about the candidate.

David Vitter may have repeatedly broken the law in order to break his marriage vows, but you can rely on him to make the law as sexually restrictive as he can possibly manage. Now, if you're like me you might take Vitter as an example of how difficult and impractical it is to enforce sexual morality through legislation. But family values voters do not. And Vitter is a rock-solid vote for them. He votes against gay marriage, for abortion restrictions, for abstinence-only education: the full family-values list. And now that he's publicly admitted being an adulterous whoremonger, Vitter is never going to deviate from the family-values platform again. If he does, even a little bit, he'll have a God-fearing primary challenger on his hands, and won't be able to defend himself. He knows he can be a libertine as long as there's no hint of liberalism, but his voters won't forgive him any compromise on legislation. An adulterous champion of family values is like a black opponent of affirmative action: voters respond to the policies first, and once the candidate depends upon those voters, his or her personal history and identity only make it harder to deviate from the party line.

On the other hand, Bill Clinton's adultery stuck to him, in part, because conservative voters were wary of his relative social liberalism, and most of all for his fairly egalitarian and therefore "non-traditional" marriage. (The widespread vilification of Hillary in the early 90s testifies to how frightened some cultural conservatives were by a marriage where the man and woman shared power as equals.) Voters who saw Bill and Hillary Clinton as dangerous modernists who were eroding the traditional Husband-Knows-Best marriage were completely rapt when Bill Clinton betrayed that marriage. If Clinton wanted to be unfaithful to his wife, but promote the old-school vision of marriage, he wouldn't have had much trouble. Because Clinton was seen in some quarters as promoting a new modern kind of marriage, marital traditionalists viewed his adultery as part of a larger public question.

In a similar way, Clinton was dogged in his earlier career by the false rumor that he'd fathered an illegitimate African-American child (a rumor Joe Klein chose to immortalize in Primary Colors). That rumor was held against Clinton because he was perceived as progressive on civil rights. Meanwhile, arch-segregationist Strom Thurmond could actually have an illegitimate African-American child without consequences. The difference was Clinton was perceived as being on African-Americans' side in important ways, while Thurmond was for maintaining as much white power as possible. The whisper of Clinton's love child resonated with racist fears about his policies; there was no worry that Thurmond would love African-Americans in general, even if he had loved an African-American.

This, while I'm on the topic, is why it's okay for proponents of reckless military policies to avoid Vietnam service, but not okay for politicians who want to moderate our military strategy (or our military spending) to have anything less than a Bronze Star. Bill Clinton, you'll recall, was reviled as a draft dodger, but George W. Bush, who is nobody's war hero, got the full backing of the "War Now!" crowd, even when he ran against a legitimate war hero.

To end where I began, the safest vote against gay marriage or repealing DADT is the closeted gay conservative, who has to experience his (or her, but generally his) orientation as a political vulnerability which must be guarded at all costs. The more open the secret of a gay politician's orientation, the harder "family values" line that politician will hew. That may be ugly. It may be morally suspect. It's certainly very sad. But it's not illogical. Alas.

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The Best Post in the World: Daniel Larison

Doctor Cleveland — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:27:21 +0000

The best post in the world today is Daniel Larison, dismantling Ross Douthat. Douthat has whined in the times that the film The Green Zone condemns the Iraq occupation without appropriate "nuance." That's right. You read that correctly. Take it away, Dr. Larison:

If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes.

That's already got me ready to salute, but Larison takes it to the next level:

That said, I do agree that we should have a greater appreciation for ambiguity and complexity. Would that we had had more of this when the President was railing against an “axis of evil,” administration supporters were authoring absurdly-titled works called An End to Evil, and advocates of invasion were routinely claiming that anyone opposed to the war did not understand that evil existed in the world. Where was this discomfort with sharp “Manichean” divisons then? Where were the complaints against simplistic and naive “reductionism” of complex realities?

Perhaps more of a tragic sensibility would have held some of the delusions of war supporters in check. Perhaps they would have been less enthusiastic to start a war that did not have to happen. After all, the Iraq war was nothing if not a product of a comforting, false vision of a world cleanly divided into good and evil, in which “we” were liberators and “they” were villains, pure and simple. ... There is nothing quite like the relativism of universal moral standards!

I think I'm ready to carve that last sentence in marble somewhere. But it's worth reading the whole post.

The second-greatest post in the world today is, of course, by Wolfie. Signorina Cacciatore! Che bellissima!

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The Business of Universities

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:24:52 +0000

A lot of people who talk about reforming American universities like to say that they should be "run like a business." Those people seldom explain what they mean by that, because they take their "like a business" phrase as self-evident and self-explanatory. But American universities, even if they're non-profits, already run like businesses. In fact, they are businesses. The only question is what kind of businesses they should be.

(Part of people mean when they say schools should be run like businesses, of course, is that they should be run by a businessman: by a CEO much like the CEOs who run large corporations, with a free hand to use the top-down management techniques seen in Fortune 500 companies. That's a subject for another post, but at least a few universities have already tried their luck with a CEO-style President.)

But if we're seriously going to imagine the enterprise of the university as a business, the key question is what university's product is. Most people who talk about "running universities like a business" generally imagine that the core business is selling classes to the students. That makes a kind of easy, first-glance sense: the students pay tuition, so they must be the customers, and they thing they pay for, the classes and credit hours and diplomas, must be the product. In this model, there's no fundamental difference between selling courses to undergraduates and selling slices of pizza at the mall. You give the customers what they want. When you're selling pizza that means cutting your price and throwing on a little extra pepperoni.

But in a complicated business model, the most obvious place where money changes hands isn't always the heart of the actual business, and it's a rookie mistake to make that presumption. For example, thinking of newspapers as in the business of selling readers the actual copies of the paper is a mistake; the core business of the newspaper is selling advertising, not newspapers per se, and the price of a copy is only a way to recoup the distribution costs. In the same way, tuition at non-profit universities merely offsets the costs of operations. In fact, almost every university (without counting the newer for-profit schools) runs a loss on tuition. Even when a student is paying full price, that full tuition doesn't actually cover the expenses of teaching the student for a year. Maybe that's a sign of inefficient, unbusinesslike practices that require a CEO to whip things into shape. But more likely it's a sign of a different business model entirely. The wealthiest and most successful universities actually take a bigger loss on tuition than other schools, because they can afford to, and because doing so furthers their long-term goals.

The actual product of university teaching is alumni. (The university has another product, research results, but I want to keep the focus on teaching for this post.) The goal of a university, properly understood, is to produce as many educated and successful people as it can. The wealthy private schools, such as the Ivies, spend more money on their undergraduates, give out more financial aid, and keep their sticker price pretty much the same as any other private college's; the top price at Harvard or Princeton is the same as the top price at a less famous place. So Princeton, to take an example, collects less in overall tuition money than a second-tier private university does, but spends much more. Yet it keeps growing richer than its less famous rivals. Princeton's core business is alumni development; the school lives off the gratitude of its successful former students. And the more generous those grateful alumni are, the more Princeton can afford to invest in its current students, in order to maximize their later success. That is a business model, and judging by the last century or two a quite viable one. Public universities also succeed when their alumni donate to them, but the chief source of extra revenue there is funding by state governments. The current rhetoric about free markets makes any government spending look suspect, but funding state universities is a deeply rational economic decision. In effect, the state legislatures are buying in-state alumni, subsidizing tuition in order to have a better-educated and better-paid corps of adult taxpayers in the future. The question of how much to spend on, say, the University of California could be rendered, economically, as the question of how much to spend to increase California's tax base.

The difference between selling classes and producing alumni is enormous, and affects the educational strategy on every level. If you're selling classes by the slice, you keep the costs as low as you can. If you're producing alumni, you keep the quality as high as you can, even if it means taking short-term losses. If you're selling classes, you're focused on providing the customers what they want before they take the class. If you're producing alumni, you're focused on creating long-term satisfaction and long-term success. If you're selling classes, the students only have to be happy when it's time to enroll for next semester, but if you're producing alumni, they have to be happy with the education they got twenty years later. If you're selling classes, the impulse is to sell, and indeed too often to oversell, the benefits of the classes. If you're producing alumni, there is sometimes even an incentive to block students from a career path they might not be suited to; the pre-med courses at Princeton aren't designed to maximize customer satisfaction. They're in fact designed to redirect young people who think they want to be doctors, but who don't seem to have the skills or the motivation to become very successful as physicians, into some other field where they are more likely to thrive. (Princeton would rather have an alumnus become a leading art historian than a pediatrician with lots of malpractice suits; and while it allows its students to make that decision on their own, it lets them face the reality of the professional demands.) Now, that would make for very poor advertising copy ("Princeton: Where We Disabuse You of Your Less Realistic Dreams") but it's ultimately more interested in the student's success than other models of education are.

Universities are in business, right now. Their business is their students' eventual fulfillment and success. When you hear university administrators talking about building up a school's "brand," remember that universities were building their brands, through the quality of their alumni, before business types ever stumbled across the concept. You can try to build a school's brand the way you would for sneakers, or pizzas, or car stereos, with fancy logos and advertising, but at the end of the day a school's real brand is the reputation it gets from the quality of its alumni. If your old students are impressive, people will be impressed with your school; if your old students aren't, people won't be. A university's prosperity is inevitably and rightly linked to that of its former students. And in the end, a school doesn't deserve to be rewarded for anything else.

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"Down the Republicans' Throats"

Doctor Cleveland — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:00:00 +0000

It's clearly an orchestrated Republican talking point that health care reform is being "rammed" (or jammed, or crammed) "down our throats." That talking point is silly and deceptive. (After bills passed the House and passed the Senate with a 60-vote majority, the vote to make the details of those bills match is undemocratic?) But I also admit, I find it hilarious.

"Ramming [x] down our throats" is a stereotypical cri de coeur on comic-book messageboards, where it's used by fanboys or fangals who've gotten their (Spiderman-themed) undergarments in a knot over some comic-book storyline that displeases them. (Example: "Anyone who understands Batman at all would know that he could never feel the same kind of love for another woman that years of continuity have shown that he feels for Selina Kyle. DC Comics is ruining the character by RAMMING this Silver St. Cloud "romance" DOWN OUR THROATS!") So every time I hear John Boehner use that phrase, I find it hysterically funny. It's like he's some guy who's on the verge of tears about the Blue Beetle not having a monthly comic anymore.

When comic-book fans protest that writers are "ramming a story down our throats" they simply mean that the writers have written a story. That said story happens to displease that particular fans is infuriating, and a sign that, somehow, that the fan's integrity and free will have been violated. (Of course, only a small, vocal, and immature minority of comics fans are like this. But they are, alas, usually among the first ones you'll notice.) The phrase connotes a certain self-righteous hysteria, combined with a deep presumption of entitlement. The fan has not actually helped participated in creating the new Batman storyline, but (s)he feels a right to veto any storyline that is not acceptable by his or her own idiosyncratic standards. The implicit argument is that the writers should provide the fans only with exactly the stories the fans want.

When John Boehner or Mitch McConnell say that a piece of legislation is being "rammed down our throats," they simply mean that they have lost a vote in Congress. The implicit argument is that the losing side should not have to accept losing votes simply because the other side actually, um, outvoted them. And it presumes, oddly, that a piece of legislation should be designed to please all of the legislators who did not participate in writing it and who did not want it to pass. But weirdly, the people who are opposed to bills generally don't like those bills. That's how the world works.

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Eric Massa: Trial by Combat

Doctor Cleveland — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:32:19 +0000

After days of mounting sexual harasment revelations, Eric Massa has gone old school. As in 12th-century old school. First he was denying that he had any ethics problems, then he was admitting minor ethics problems, then he was resigning over those totally minor ethics problems, then he went on the attack. Those totally-no-big-deal ethics questions he was quitting Congress over? They were trumped up by the House Democratic leadership! So really, this was a dirty trick over health care! Yeah, that's the ticket.

Limbaugh and Beck run with that story. And although the story makes no sense, for three or four individual reasons, George Stephanopoulos dutifully asked Robert Gibbs about it, as the White House bore the burden of refuting this claim.

Massa's basic tactic hearkens back to Merrie England, before there was a guarantee of a jury trial. In those romantic days, when upper-class criminals were thrown into prison, they could basically start accusing everyone they had grudges against of any felonies that came to mind, and challenge them to trial by combat. And then everyone they accused, on the sole basis of the imprisoned felons' accusations, got thrown into prison too, until the imprisoned felon got a chance to fight them. This didn't get the accusers out of jail themselves. It was done purely out of spite, to hurt people. The felonious accusers did it because they had nothing left to lose, and because they were generally evil.

Massa's ploy, likewise, is not an attempt to stay in office (he's already resigned) but a display of vindictive despair. Nothing can save Massa's political career, but he's going to take some other people down if he can.

The felons back in the twelfth century could get away with this vicious trick because they were dealing with a justice system that made no attempt to verify truth independently. It wasn't just that early medieval courts didn't search for truth in the forensic ways that we have come to expect, it's that the courts didn't believe they could determine truth at all. The trial by combat system works on the assumption that no judge can find out who's telling the truth and who's lying, so you let the two parties fight and say that God has vindicated the winner. There was no looking for evidence, no use of any judge or jury's independent reason. So in the name of impartiality every accusation, no matter how wildly improbable, had to be taken at the same face value, and all of the accused treated alike.

This kind of nonsense was eventually replaced by things like the grand jury system, which attempts to sort valid accusations from flimsy or malicious ones, and generally by the rights, such as habeas corpus and jury trials, that the Magna Carta bequeathed to us in 1215.

Massa's accusations can only thrive in an environment where people refuse to exercise independent judgment in pursuit of the truth. Our current political media environment now largely operates like 12th-century jurisprudence, throwing up its hands, proclaiming moral or logical conclusions outside its charge, and calling whoever wins the brawl the rightful victor. It's a 12th-century world these days. We just live in it.

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Against the Crocodile: Amy Bishop, Joseph Stack, and the Press

Doctor Cleveland — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 20:13:27 +0000

Reading some of the news coverage about the murderers Amy Bishop and Joe Stack over the last two weeks, and some of the responses to them by internet commenters, I've had the nauseating feeling that Bishop and Stack have gotten what they want. Not what they purport to want, of course, not a promotion or a revolution, but the things that their violence was actually aimed at getting them. I've had a hard time putting my objection into clear words, so I'm going to resort to a story from history:

The ancient Egyptians had a fundamental problem: they were dependent for survival upon the Nile's annual flood, which made the flooded soil extremely fertile, but on the other hand the Nile was also full of crocodiles, who tend to eat people. How did the Egyptians deal with their intensely conflicted feelings about their perilous, indispensable, monster-filled, life-sustaining river?

They worshiped the crocodile.

Crocodile-worship is an all-too-human response to uncontrollable violence. By worshiping the crocodile-god, praying to it and offering it sacrifices, the Egyptians told themselves that the uncontrollable danger was actually in control. They could reason with the crocodile; they just had to find out what the crocodile-god wanted, and give it to him. At the same time, they built the stupid predatory animals they had to live with into figures of supernatural importance. The crocodiles were something grand and holy and magical in the way that mere human beings were not. Of course, turning the crocodile into an idol doesn't get you anywhere. The crocodile isn't magical, and it will still eat you.

This kind of idolatry is a very human impulse; we instinctively apply it to all kinds of other dangers because it feels safer than accepting that those dangers are outside our control. We apply it especially to outbursts of unreasoning violence by other human beings. Victims of partner or family abuse apply this strategy to their abusers, looking for ways to keep the abuser from being angry, and giving the victimizer increased deference. It doesn't work, of course, because the abuser will always find some pretext to be angry. In This Boy's Life Tobias Wolff describes his stepfather attacking him because Wolff hasn't scraped every last gram of mustard out of a bottle. If it hadn't been the mustard it would have been something else; there are abusive and violent personalities, who, like crocodiles, cannot be kept happy.

A lot of the coverage of Bishop's and Stack's pointless, unthinking violence has been widely colored by the old crocodile-worship instincts, by the search for reasons and the impulse to offer the frightening figure respect. (Not all of the coverage, of course, but too much.) It's too scary to accept that an anti-social personality might kill other people for no good reason at all, because if that's true, then what's to keep some lunatic from randomly killing us? So we try to find some reason for the irrational bloodshed: what did she want? What set her off? How can we keep her happy so that she doesn't do it again? Some anonymous commenters on dagblog have assured me that there had to be some reason for Bishop to start shooting when she did. One actually scolded me for "judging" Bishop. There's a deep need to find some reason, any reason, because if we can figure out the reason we can keep ourselves safe.

Meanwhile, actual journalists persist in running stories about how brilliant Bishop was as a scientist. "Brilliant but troubled," sure, but that's the formula. I can't tell you how tired I am about reading how smart Amy Bishop is. Joe Stack, too, receives deference that he surely never earned in life and would have absolutely forfeited in death. One stranger from the internet came to Dagblog quoting Stack's addle-brained suicide note as if it were Locke's Third Treatise. And I'll admit, I've found myself growing thin-skinned with some of these folks, and not immediately understood quite why. What's bothering me is the implied deference to Bishop and Stack: the atavistic urge to treat the violent with precautionary respect, even when the violent people in question are now powerless to do any harm.

This is the respect that Bishop and Stack murdered to get, the disproportionate and undeserved deference that matches their own monstrously grandiose sense of their own deserts and importance. Bishop and Stack believed they were better than the rest of us, that they are important in ways that other human beings are not, and considered themselves entitled to kill anyone they liked simply in order to express their personal dissatisfaction. Bishop and Stack are crocodiles, supremely indifferent to the humanity of their victims, but (unlike the animals in the Nile) actively demanding to be treated like gods.

They should not get their wish. I believe that violent people should be treated deferentially, and their concerns given a respectful hearing, exactly as long as it takes to get the gun out of their hands and cuff them. After that, they and their opinions should be disregarded. Crocodiles should not be worshiped, and the violent should be seen as they really are.

It's important not to give Bishop or Stack any deference, precisely because their drive for respect and recognition cost better people their lives, and because their own actions have proved how utterly untenable their claims about themselves are. Bishop killed people because she wanted to be treated as the great scientist that she has never come close to being; she used a gun because she could not succeed in the lab. Stack killed someone in a pathetic attempt to cast himself as a revolutionary hero and a rational man, rather than the serial screw-up and the petty, venal cheat that he was.

Amy Bishop is not smart. Amy Bishop is an utter failure, an incompetent scientist, a person who, given six years and her own laboratory, eventually resorted to submitting her children's science-fair projects to vanity journals. Despite the newspapers' slant, every one of Bishop's victims was clearly a better scientist than she. If those three people had not been killed, they would have produced more useful science over the next five years than Bishop has produced in her entire career to date. In fact, each of them was capable doing that unassisted. The Huntsville murders were not committed by a scientist. All of the science Bishop has ever done, or might ever do, could not balance the science that was lost to the world when she pulled that trigger.

Joe Stack was an addle-brained goofball, a chronic failure who once tried to declare his house a church in order to avoid paying his taxes, and who had the spectacular gall to complain about mistreatment when he was caught. The dense swamp of blame-shifting in his suicide note establishes how many things he failed at. Stack had some reason that he couldn't succeed (according to his own outsized sense of what he deserved) as a software engineer in California; it's California's fault. He had some reason that he couldn't succeed as a software engineer in Texas; it's Austin's fault. There's some reason that the IRS is responsible for Stack not turning in tax returns on his business, and for his personal home not being a Catholic basilica. It's always someone else's fault. Stack, like Bishop, was just a crocodile. He had stubby legs, and wallowed. He was dangerous to others, but only because he lacked the compassion and the conscience that restrain fully human beings.

It's bad enough that these failed, pathetic people took others' lives. It's too much to have to believe in their bullshit, too.

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Bipartisanship as Theater

Doctor Cleveland — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:09:52 +0000

So President Obama's health care summit didn't go anywhere it wasn't expected to go. The Democrats made noises about bipartisan compromise and asked for Republican input. The Republicans demanded the whole bill (or more accurately both the bills) be scrapped entirely. The Democrats got no concessions. No reasonable person would have expected anything else at this point. And Barack Obama, who is a fairly reasonable person, must have expected to play out much the way it did.

This was meant as pure theatrical politics. Obama was making a gesture of generosity and open-mindedness, for which he got nothing. That may sound all too familiar, but this time he made a magnanimous gesture and got rebuffed on national TV. Basically, it was a full work day of Republicans complaining that they weren't being listened to while the leader of the free world sat there patiently listening to them.

And that is what the health care summit was all about. It was designed to make Obama look conciliatory and the Republicans look churlish. The GOP didn't do as badly as they might have, but still badly enough that Obama is probably satisfied with his day's work.

The question isn't whether health care reform will be passed with "bipartisan" support or not. That ship sailed long ago. The question is whether the Republicans will be able to spin their own partisan intractability as the Democrats' refusal to compromise. That's clearly been Plan A, Plan B and Plan C for the Congressional GOP: stonewall the bill at every turn and complain that they're not being allowed any say. The televised summit was designed to undermine that plan by making the Republicans own their obstructionism and take the consequences.

It's not 11-dimensional chess. It's a pretty legible political tactic. And it was probably worth a day out of Barack Obama's life.

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Andrew Joseph Stack: Pauper with a Private Plane

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 20:28:02 +0000

So, Andrew Joseph Stack was angry at the IRS for his financial problems. So he got in his plane....

Stop. Stop it. Stop right there.

Do people in the media ever listen to themselves?

We have a person who, aside from being a murderer, feels he's being unjustly treated by the taxman. And that person, who considers his woes so unbearable that he's willing to take human life, has at least one personal aircraft. I know what you're thinking: The poor man. It's like something out of Steinbeck.

A little surfing around the internet suggests that one could buy a used Piper Cherokee plane, like Stack's, for something in the neighborhood of $100,000 to $170,000, depending on how old the plane is and some other factors. So Stack, persecuted victim of the IRS, owned a pleasure craft whose resale value was either two or three times the national median income. What has this country come to?

This is what our national discourse, our national sense of what's normal, has come to: a man so rich that he can spend two or three years of average-middle-class income on a toy still feels entitled to talk about himself as an economic victim, and that part actually seems normal to people. Republican Congressmen, people in elected office, can say, yes, it's wrong what he did but the IRS really is a problem.

It's laughable. Or it should be. But people actually base successful political campaigns and real policies and actual legislation on this nonsense. Because let's face it: a lot of the people complaining most bitterly about taxation in our public forums, the people screaming about Big Government even as the effective tax rate on the rich stays at rock-bottom lows: those are almost all Guys with Planes. Sometimes it's actually a plane. Sometimes it's a boat. Sometimes it's a summer house, or a ski lodge. Sometimes it's a boat and a ski lodge and a Jaguar and a Vicodin addiction and love nest somewhere. You know what these people call themselves?

Regular guys. Average joes. Victims. "The middle class."

It would be funny if it weren't so ugly and so mean. You know who the real privileged in America are, according to these people? Mothers receiving food stamps. Illegal immigrants busing tables for half of minimum wage. The unemployed. According to the Guys with Planes, these people are not being punished enough, so the thing to do is cut off the food stamps, kick penniless immigrants out of the emergency rooms, and cut the capital gains tax.

Conservatives have been complaining for years about the culture of victimhood. And they're right. It's ugly. Anytime they want to drop the victim act is good with me. You can put the sense of entitlement next to it.

I'm tired of being poor-mouthed by guys with their own planes. Suck it up, fellas. Things are tough all over.

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Amy Bishop, Collegiality, and Debates About Tenure

Doctor Cleveland — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:42:01 +0000

Amy Bishop's murder of three colleagues, and attempt to murder three others, looks to be even less about tenure than I originally claimed ... but it's still university tenure that people want to talk about. It's become clear that Bishop would eventually have been fired under almost any conceivable system of review, and that Bishop would almost undoubtedly have responded violently to some other setback sooner or later. (University Diaries has been the blogger who's owned this story, and deserves kudos for it.) But plenty of people, inside and outside academia, clearly have passionate opinions on the topic, and won't pass up an excuse to discuss it at length. As one contibutor to the Chronicle of Higher Education puts it:

That Professor Amy Bishop is not a tragic heroine of the tenure process doesn't mean that she's not a good opportunity to discuss it.

But the inevitable discussion of tenure is full of contradictions. I've read over the last week that the institution is all but dead, and that it is fundamentally unkillable, that it's a ridiculous luxury and a horrifyingly inhumane gauntlet, that it demands too much productivity ("quantity over quality") and that it demands too little productivity. Tenure means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, almost all of whom feel strongly about it. The key here is that almost no discussion of tenure is just about tenure; it's always bound up with a number of other issues. So it's worth it to walk through those issues and disentangle them from the tenure issue. Here's a partial list of the major questions.

1) The systematic importance placed on research rather than teaching. Many people's disgruntlement with professors stems from this, in one way or another, often from encounters as an undergraduate. Why don't they fire such-and-such a professor, who seems (at least to the questioner) like such a lousy teacher? "They can't fire him, he has tenure," is an easy answer that seems like a complete explanation, but isn't. Generally, the school wouldn't fire that teacher if he didn't have tenure. The school simply values different things than the student does.

Academics are still rewarded most for the things that the general public sees least. Even though there have been real efforts (as well as cosmetic efforts) over the last decades to increase the value put on teaching, the expectations for faculty research have gotten higher and higher during the same period. Teaching remains harder to evaluate than research, and less valued on the employment market. It's much easier to sort the A+ researchers from the A researchers than it is to separate the superb teachers from the merely very good, and the academic world operates from the assumption that effective teaching is easier to find than cutting-edge research. Whether that's right or wrong (and it would be an unhappy world where good teachers were harder to find than ground-breaking researchers), it's the way universities operate.

Some disgruntlement about this issue take the form of complaints about "specialization" and about the lack of great generalists. That complaint is as older than the PhD itself; an active research plan largely necessitates specialization.

2) The shrinking faculty. Although you wouldn't know it to hear the complaints about tenure, the tenure-line faculty in American universities has been shrinking drastically over the past years. Many departments are half or a third of the size they were a generation ago. (This applies less to very rich and famous universities, although they have seen some shrinkage around the edges, too.) I teach in a department that had five tenured faculty in my field of specialization, less than a decade before I was hired. Now there is only me.

A lot of the teaching load that tenured faculty used to do has been off-loaded to cheaper instructors, some of them graduate students but most of them part of a now-huge body of allegedly "part-time" adjunct faculty (almost all with PhDs, and most teaching "part-time" at multiple universities). Since these non-tenure-track teachers only teach, and aren't expected to produce research, they are valued extremely poorly by the universities that hire them, and have to cobble to together a living on wages of a few thousand dollars a course. This shift of labor to scandalously ill-paid teachers has taken place at the same time the price of tuition has risen faster than inflation.

Naturally, the adjunct faculty are alienated from the tenured and from the tenure-track, with their middle-class salaries and benefits. But at the same time the shrinking number of tenure-track jobs leads to intense competition and often harrowing multi-year job searches by PhDs trying to break in. Getting a PhD from Harvard hasn't been a guarantee of a job for a long time. A lot of the resentment you hear from younger (and youngish) academics about the grueling tenure process can be understood when you remember that those academics went through a fairly vicious market sorting before they began the tenure process at all, and that being turned down at one place when jobs are scarce has become potentially career-ending in ways that it was not in, say, 1970.

3) The generation gap. The vastly increased market pressure on entry-level professors has led to a drastic increase in the qualifications of newer faculty, especially in research (which remains the most easily measurable achievement) but also in areas like teaching and departmental service. And that has naturally increased the standards for tenure, too.

I teach in a department where the research expectations for tenure are now the same as the expectations were for promotion to full professor twenty-five years ago. And I know of a department which recently required applicants for an entry-level job to be at least as well published before even applying as full professors had once been in that department. They got the same enormous pile of applications that every hiring committee gets, because there are plenty of job applicants out there with those credentials. These are not exceptional stories. These are typical stories.

Where this gets ugly is when the people judging qualifications for tenure are the older faculty hired under the older market conditions, which weren't even remotely so demanding. Neither is the situation helped when some departments went fifteen or twenty years without hiring anybody (filling up the roster during the 60s and 70s, and not hiring again until the 90s or later). So in most average universities, you have 60-something professors judging the tenure case of 30-something professors, but the 30-somethings have vastly better resumes. You'd better believe this leads to resentments at certain places, and that's before you start factoring in cultural differences between the generations (as, for example, when a group of almost exclusively white men judge a younger faculty filled with women and minorities).

Female Science Professor approaches the generational question, in regards to qualifications, with a combination of realism and admirable even-handedness.

Questions of gender bias, especially, are problematic and stubbornly persistent. They get uglier when you realize that in many places (although clearly not Alabama/Huntsville) the woman who didn't "make the grade" was being graded in part by men who never had to make that kind of grade themselves.

4) The "collegiality question." One of the persistent questions inside universities has been the degree to which it's okay to judge colleagues for tenure based on the kind of academic citizens they are. Is it okay to turn down the confrontational and seemingly crazy colleague? Certainly, people would like to be free to turn down Amy Bishop. But what about people who are simply unpopular, or whose politics annoy the others, or who simply don't fit into the club? Academia is filled with stories of female scholars, and especially of female scientists, whose colleagues viewed them as "too aggressive" or "argumentative." A good deal of that comes from women behaving like, well, academics: it's hard to be demure and deferential and still land a big government grant, or to write a book that seriously overturns old ways of thinking. To my mind, the collegiality question has to be folded into the existing standards; if someone's interpersonal difficulties are actually interfering with the way they do their work, that's something very different from merely rubbing colleagues the wrong way.

Tenured Radical has a terrific and balanced discussion of this problem here.

5) Length of training. One of the classic complaints about tenure is the burnt-out old professor who won't retire, and who remains deadwood. Even when we get past the age stereotypes (and I know plenty of vigorous and engaged septuagenarians), the problems go past tenure. On the one hand, mandatory retirement ages have now (justly) become illegal, and eliminating tenure won't change that. It would also be very hard, in fields that require years of specialized training before one can began making even a middle-class salary, to do without job security.

6) Faculty, administration, and trustees. Tenure, of course, empowers university faculty to become maddeningly stubborn at times, and to resist the management innovations of university presidents, trustees, and state legislatures. This can of course be enormously frustrating, and I understand why the administrators and stakeholders long to wipe out tenure and make the faculty more tractable.

But not every faculty that resists its superiors is wrong (just as not every faculty that does so is right). And faculty are right to guard their prerogative to decide what the standards in their field are. That feels elitist and clubbish, but on the other hand, what better alternative could there be? When professional American historians decide what counts as solid history and what doesn't, that might feel arrogant, but would you let people who aren't specialists in history decide that? Should the trustees get to decide what counts as valid history, or science, or anthropology? The state legislature? The donors?

There's a reason that the Texas School Board can dictate what's in K-12 textbooks, but the Texas State Legislature can't do a thing about what's taught at U.T. There's a reason you don't hear about state universities being forced to teach "intelligent design." Maybe the geology department should be more polite when they say that the Earth is a lot more than 6,000 years old, but it isn't the university president's decision how old the Earth is, or the trustees'. Universities are difficult to manage because they're full of specialized experts who can sometimes get thin-skinned about their authority over their own subject matter. But the problem is, that authority is based on knowing things, within the limited sphere of their expertise, that other people don't know. And in the end, who are you going to believe?

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My Favorite Al Haig Story

Doctor Cleveland — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:19:21 +0000

My mother met Al Haig back in 1988, when he was under the impression that he was running for President. (Long before I was Doctor Cleveland I was the Granite State Kid, and in New Hampshire you can personally meet all the candidates, even the ones that other people won't remember were in the primaries.) Mom actually met nearly every primary candidate that year, Democratic and Republican, in a series of events sponsored by a local newspaper.

So Mom, who was a police lieutenant, asked General Haig (ret.) his opinion about women in the military. Haig responds with a story about a female war correspondent who was covering Vietnam (an irrelevant story, to Mom's mind, because it involves an unarmed woman with no military training). And Haig wound up his story with his big clincher: "As soon as the shooting started, my instinct was to throw that girl over my shoulder and run for the nearest helicopter."

Mom said, "I carry a weapon every day. Don't you call me girl."

And that's how they were quoted in the newspaper.

Rest in peace, general. I hope Saint Mary is carrying you over her shoulder to heaven.

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