Dem’s Always Talkin’

An email thread from a few days ago over the Harvard Dems’ listserv, Dems-Talk:

On 2/24/2008 11:36 AM, Jordan G. Lee wrote:
> Oh Nader.
>
> On Feb 24, 2008, at 11:20 AM, Karen Aline McKinnon wrote:
>>http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/24/wuspols124.xml

Sergio Prado at 12:05 PM

I want me some Ross Perot action now.

Alyssa King at 12:34 PM

Don’t forget Ron Paul, hopefully he can suck as many crazy votes away from McCain as Nader will take from the Democratic nominee.

Me (kloncke) at 1:26 PM

Aside from whether or not he’s meddling and stunting where he shouldn’t, his presence (along with Kucinich’s, for a while) certainly shows how far right the country has shifted. From the article:

[Nader] believes none of the presidential contenders are addressing ways to stem corporate crime and Pentagon waste and promote labour rights.

Is he wrong? Is this radical? Are the voters who want to address these issues just as crazy as the Ron Paul following?

All

[Crickets.]

up.

so comparing people is the current facebook fad.

the applications “compare people,” “you are beautiful,” “top friends” and “hot list” (to name a few) facilitate people comparisons.

you compare your friends to each other on the basis of their looks, personality, smarts, artistic ability etc., and in turn, await their appraisal of you. “compare people” allows for direct comparison of two individuals. you must designate priya as hotter than sophie. the results of these dyadic comparisons are used to rank everyone within a friend group. whomever is called “hotter than” most often floats to the top of the hotness (or cuteness or smartness) ranks. other applications do not require that you compare your friends to each other, but that you vote, basically, for worthy friends. if you think greg is hot, you click on him. no need to call him hotter than blake. however the comparison still takes place, albeit indirectly. if greg gets more votes than blake, he must be hotter than blake.

and of course, the hope is, that someone out there will call you hot. or at least you’ll find out where you really stand. or that’s what “compare people” promises:

Find out who stands where in various categories: cutest, sexiest, smartest and many more. Most importantly, find out where you fit in!

or as “you are beautiful’ puts it:

Start sending beautifulness points now, and see where you rank among your most Beautiful friends!

this system presupposes that we cannot objectively judge ourselves, only others can. makes sense. if i think “gee. francesca sure is a fatty, but i’d never tell her that.” does it not seem plausible that others could be thinking “gee. erin sure is a fatty, but i’d never tell her that.”? and of course if i want to behave appropriately in the world, i need to know “where i fit in.” that’s why “compare people” says “most importantly.” i need to know what to flaunt and what to play down. i need to know what i may “realistically” pursue. i don’t want to kid myself into thinking i’ll be remembered as the next picasso when i’m just another thomas kinkade. i don’t want to want to be one of those poor bastards on american idol who thinks he has a shot, only to be plastered all over youtube as exemplary of the sucky, gong show-type audition. i don’t want to ask out that hot, brilliant TA unless i feel confident that i have something comparable to offer. conversely, i don’t want to hang my head, waste my life, if i have real reason to be proud…if i have license to go for it…whatever “it” may be.

we live in what purports to be a meritocracy. this is the neoliberal context. the individual is the molecule of neoliberalism. we celebrate the individual, because he (yes he) can do anything. he can “find his niche.” he can make the world a better place. he can get famous. he can excel. he can make his unique contribution. in fact his happiness relies on making his way in the world. if he is unhappy, it can’t be the world’s fault. he must be unhappy because he didn’t work hard enough, try hard enough, make enough money, find the right job, the right partner, the right community, the right house, the right modes of developing and expressing his talents. i mean he could be happy, right? we see it in the movies. if he’s not happy, it’s because it doesn’t have something he could get if he tried. and if he can’t get what he wishes he had, it’s because he doesn’t know his proper place. his expectations are unrealistic.

but neoliberalism does not emphasize this, the unrealistic. it’s always onward and upward! if our hero(the individual)’s expectations are unrealistic, he simply has to change tactics. he hasn’t yet found his “calling”–his particular genius. and if he’s 99, looking back on his life, and he thinks, “damn. when do i start living?” well, he just ran out of time. maybe 20 more years and he would have made it.

we’re obsessed with hierarchy. with upward potentiality. since fulfillment is “up there” somewhere waiting for us. or that’s what america’s got talent, donald trump, thevaginainstitute.com, harvard and cosmo want us to believe.

but there is no singular “you,” out there in the world who can be judged, measured, scrutinized by an all-knowing, all-seeing Other.

if i approach my art believing that only “you” can tell me whether or not it is “good,” if i subject my art to your approval, but not to my own, what kind of art can i possibly make? if i respect no one’s art (past or present) and take in no one’s criticisms, what kind of art can i possibly make? if i speak words i wouldn’t fight for, why should they be as important as i hope they are?

what makes my understanding of myself somehow less valid than your understanding of me? why should i even care what your opinion (of anything) is? do i respect your opinion? does it move me? does it make sense to me? at bottom, the only way to answer the question “how do i want to be in the world?” is to answer the question “what do i value?” this can take time and a great deal of thinking and feeling. and answers need not be in words or even fully formed thoughts. but there must be (an) answer(s).

with (an) answer(s), i am uniquely positioned to understand myself better than anyone else could. when i declare “this is what i value,” i can turn my attention and thoughtfulness to my relationship with what i value. i can observe myself. i can ask “does this action/art/idea (successfully) do what i want?” and if i value what i have declared i value (again, not necessarily in words and not necessarily singular), then i will be able to take in information, and process it, without fear…because i am not on trial. what is on trial is whether i have acted according to or furthered what i value. if i have not, that is information i can use. if i have, that is information i can use. if i respect a person’s opinion (not equivalent to whether or not i respect her), she can provide me with information i can use to clarify my values and better make real those values. if i do not respect her opinion, to HELL with her opinion! i will not let an opinion i do not respect weigh on my conscience or on my ego. what do i mean by “respect?” i respect someone’s opinion of my thinking about goodness if she has demonstrated thoughtfulness, introspection, care, kindness, integrity and appreciation for the subtly with which i approach meaning.

if you answer the question “who am i?” before you answer the question “what do i value?,” you will get an answer you won’t like.

being rests on valuing.

one can only “be” good when one values Good.
one can only make Beauty when one values Beauty.

one can only take over the organized crime scene in boston when one values power.

are you coming to see what i mean by “value?” to value something is to love it, to make it more important than “who you are.”

of course, “who am i?” and “what do i value?” are not separable questions.  (but let’s explore that at another time.)

when we send “compare people” invites to 20 of our friends, or when we make grossly reductionist claims (even to ourselves) about how our friends “compare” to each other, we use those friends as what kant would call merely means to an end–the end being the unveiling of our objective selves to us, the judgment ineligible. unless you would have me believe that in sending invites to 20 of your friends, you have their interests at the front of your mind. or that you spend as long as it takes to determine which of those two of your friends has a “better personality” or is a “more valuable friend,” and you’re sure that there’s something unselfish to be gained by making such a claim.

if perhaps something more harmful than clicking on pictures and sending invites were asked of us in exchange for this unveiling, many of us would still find it a worthwhile bargain.

in fact, that is one reason why we often hurt each other. because we want to feel okay. we want license to feel acceptable, whole, happy.  and we sometimes do things (to ourselves and others) that don’t feel very good/right/fair in order to be reassured of our okayness.  like for example, when all the cool gets in 3rd grade get together and beat up on the uncool kid, because this makes the cool kids feel like important, worthwhile people.

and that saddens me.

that is why our way of thinking about ourselves must change.

that is why we must say “i value,” such that we can be.

and when we are, we can say “sarah, you have a wonderful personality.” or “miguel, you are a good friend.” and those words will finally have meaning.

how to love

read these words slowly and listen to the meaning of each. consciousness is not bounded. we understand humans as seats of consciousness because we are mirrors to each other. i see another person and i have faith that she has an internal life, because she has a form similar to mine and possesses what i recognize as language.

and this is important. it is a starting place. how can there be any love if there is no starting place? we must learn how to love. we see that others around us love; this gives us faith. and then we feel tinh –the kind of love that is passion, that overtakes us. but we realize later on that to really love means to care, honor and respect, so we feel-enter nghia, if we choose to (hanh 59-60).and this is how we love our mothers, partners, friends.but love can be lived, practiced. love can be a way-feeling.

when i look deeply at the moon, i breathe in and out deeply and say, “full moon, i know you are there, and i am very happy.” i do the same when i see the morning star. walking among the beautiful spring magnolia trees in korea, i looked at the beautiful flowers and said, “i know you are there, and i am very happy” (63).

this is how thich nhat hanh loves…the moon, the morning star, the magnolia trees and flowers.

loves.

he says: “to love is to be there for him, for her, and for them” (63).

so the moon, like any person needs to be seen and loved, needs to be “made very real in [the] arms” of one who cares (108). or else what is the moon? and the moon can, in turn, see.

we know this sort of loving from playing a game with the clouds. this is the semiotic: you are a cloud. i am a person. i see you as a horse, a griffon, a cat. but you are just a cloud. others might see you as other things. but you are just a cloud. we are in relationship and you are born as some third thing. you change me also. this is an act of creation. this is Beauty.

all the struggle of to-exist can be found in the magnolia, the full moon, the cloud–coming into the world, silently begging for a witness, withering, and falling back into the oneness. that these things cannot speak in the language we as humans are accustomed to calling language does not mean that they cannot love us.

on faith, we can accept that their love is there, and listen with loving patience and trust until we feel-see it.

of course, many people have never known love. have never felt loved and consequently have not been able to learn how to love. how can such people love the clouds in the sky, deeply, when they feel empty inside? when they have never believed the words “i love you” when spoken to them by another person?

this, then, is a prayer, that all beings may feel loved and love.

i say “may” because it can never be.

i say “may” because it is the thing most worth hoping, working, living for.

works cited
Hanh, Thich Nhat. Teachings on Love. Unified Buddhist Church: Berkeley, CA (2007).

Empathy and Visuality

We see the diagram on the left (or visual phenomena analogous to it) and imagine, often rightly, that the line continues behind the square. Our minds seem to operate similarly in the social realm. No one of us is positioned to see “what the world is like” for all people, yet we must make assumptions about other people’s experiences in order to relate to them meaningfully. We must make assumptions about what behaviors signify politeness, taste, goodness, sloth, arrogance, ill intent. Yet we do not understand these assumptions as assumptions, just as we do not consider that in the diagram above, the two gray lines might not connect, or when “hidden” by the square, might zigzag or loop-dee-loop or take any of an infinite number of paths.

There are structures, beginning with our unique embodiments, that facilitate particular worldviews (macro- and micro-cosmic systems of logic and valuation) that we develop for ourselves. These structures allow us to see some things and not others. Our worldviews are shaped by what we do and do not see (and by “see” I mean witness, observe, experience from our embodied standpoints). The body of the individual is the sole conduit for human experience. Just as a pair of functioning eyes must reside in a body, the body is the only way we have of ascertaining the “telos” of human existence, and an individual’s body may only come in contact with so much. Our bodies limit our social “fields of vision”…and we are left to imagine what is behind the square based on what we can see from where we stand. And of course, in a lifetime, where we stand and what we see changes, as do our worldviews. We tend to assume that the evidence necessary for coming to our worldviews (in a given moment) is provided entirely by what lies within our field of vision: our own bodies, how different kinds of people respond to our bodies, the bodies around us, how different kinds of people respond to the bodies around us, what we see on TV, in day-to-day interaction, our family stories, histories, myths and beliefs, the demographic composition of our neighborhoods, billboards, magazines, toys, daily rituals, the design and locations of our homes, the food we eat, our systems of government and social organization, cultural norms and taboos…what we come to expect and take for granted as simply “a part of life.”

An example: As I drive through the suburbs of Northeastern Massachusetts I see large, expensive houses decorated sparsely in white Christmas lights, and inexpensive, smaller houses decorated heavily in various kinds of colored Christmas lights and holiday lawn decorations. I uncritically and immediately read the sparse white lights as “elegant” and “tasteful,” and the colored lights as “gaudy” and “distasteful.” Implicit in my readings of these decorations are assumptions about the kinds of people who use white or colored lights respectively, and these assumptions perform border-work that serves me, and reifies my worldview. If Christmas lights are “about” “good taste” (defined by the upper class and bourgeoisie) then not only do I have good taste when I decorate my house in white lights, but I “get” what Christmas lights are “about” while the folks over there do not…poor fools….they tried so hard. I have succeeded and they have failed to understand the “point” of Christmas lights. Now it has never, until now, occurred to me that there could be other ways of “reading” Christmas lights…other ways of defining what Christmas lights are “about.” Christmas lights could be about fun or playfulness. White lights are neither of these things. It could well be that folks are looking at houses I would consider tasteful, saying, “Broom-up-ass snots” or “Dull bastards.” Yet oftentimes, people will, regardless of the color(s) of the lights on their houses, assert that Christmas lights and decorations are about “the holiday spirit.” We do not consider that others might be imagining “the holiday spirit” differently, and therefore, we remain, uncritically, in our respective positions of judgment. A perceived common symbolic vocabulary can mask differing understandings of a common signifier. We both say “braces,” but your “braces” hold up your pants while mine straighten my teeth.

Christmas lights are of course, a light-hearted example. Classes of people and individuals within classes understand the telos of various social phenomena differently (eg the point of Christmas lights, education, family life, politeness or even society at large). And these understandings need not even be articulated or made conscious; they most often operate unconsciously.

As I have described, when we imagine what’s behind the square, we do harm. We rewrite the experiences of others to fit our paradigms, often at the expense of others’ humanness (in the broadest sense of humanness–human dignity, maybe even sentience). In the case of Christmas lights, I imagine users of colored lights in such a way as to bolster my own positive self-image. This kind of self-serving border-work is performed by the neoliberal worldview, which holds that the worthy (read “white, wealthy, Western”) get what they deserve (read “social power and comfort”) while the unworthy (read “persons of color and the lower class”) make poor choices, which land them in unfortunate, yet predictable and ultimately “just” situations. This is how people may choose not to empathize, and may in fact choose immorality, while believing (not forgivably) themselves to be moral.

Empathy is in fact, not the default. We tend not to assume that others have logical, valid ways of being that simply differ from our own. Rather, we assume that our worldviews are absolute, and judge others by them, sacrificing their humanity in the process.

Yet such blindness is not forgivable because we can choose empathy and are thus obligated to choose it. We can choose to concede the contingency of our worldviews and to seek to extend our social fields of vision.

Empathy then, is a fundamental leap of faith we must make. We must assume humanity first, even when others cannot attest to their humanity for whatever reasons (they are unable to speak back as they are disenfranchised, disempowered, disabled, or non-human sentient beings, etc.). It is perhaps most important in these cases to assume humanity, as we must understand this—there are structures (internal and external) that enable and disable worldviews, yet humanness is behind them all. Humanness is inviolable. Sentience, consciousness and the capacity for suffering are inviolable. It is not impossible to empathize with my cat Aditi. I can imagine sentience without reflexivity (that little voice in my head saying “I am me.”). I think my life as Aditi might be non-reflexive sentience–pure pleasure, pure instinct, pure fear, pure desire and huntressness, structured of course by the contours of my 1’ tall, 2’ long body, my mature cat age, my comfortable indoor habitat surrounded by an outdoor wilderness of rodents, birds and oncoming cars. Though I am overwhelmed by the differences I perceive to be between us, I can and must have faith that I could look out of a Aditi’s eyes. I must have faith that we are not irreconcilably different.

Which leads me to privilege. A straight, cisgender, well-off white man could empathize with a queer, trans, poor woman of color if he so chose…but it is amazing how often he will not make that choice in order to continue to serve himself and live in ignorance.

Some “social fields of vision” are more restricted than others. Privilege is having a restricted field of vision.Privilege is present to the extent that a person’s (or class of persons’) subjective experience is echoed by the world s/he sees. This explains the narcissistic syndrome of many bourgeois, straight, white, cisgender men who have never been otherized, and therefore, do not understand the dissociability of the world as they see it and their subjective experiences. In other words, when everything a man reads, seeks out, hears, sees reinforces his idea that his experience is definitively normal and human—containing the full range of human emotion and experience, including the definitive experiences of morality, pain and injustice—he will seldom if ever question that his experience does not represent the universal human experience and that in fact, he is implicated in the oppression of others.Those who are oppressed can “see” the reality that has allowed for the creation of the normative human’s (the aforemention man’s) worldview, and they often understand him better than he understands himself, while living lives that run counter to his experience.However, privilege is not something that exists or does not exist absolutely. Rather it can be defined through relationship: a person or class of persons can be said to experience more or less privilege than another person or class of persons.Therefore we are all privileged in some ways and oppressed in others. We are obligated to learn from those who have seen things we have not, and furthermore, to imagine beyond our peripheral sight lines. Conversely, we do ourselves and the world a great service when we make our experiences known.

Sacrificing privilege is sacrificing the absoluteness of our worldviews such that others may be appropriately human in our minds.

Rejecting the “Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa”: Justice and the Pain of the Anorexic Woman

after reading this piece, “karen” wrote to me: “I read it and posted it on the forum. Thanks so much for that you did me some justice and the world justice. I hope everyone reads this and thinks twice about ‘getting’ an eating disorder.” i’m posting it here so we can reach more people. since that’s what she has taught me to do.

Rejecting the “Enigma of Anorexia Nervosa”: Justice and the Pain of the Anorexic Woman

Erin Stephens-North
WGS 1300
1/8/08

Anorexia confuses people who have never been anorexic. As someone who has witnessed her twin sister resist recovery from anorexia with all her willpower, I know it confuses me. I spent an hour and a half interviewing the webmistress of a popular website for people with eating disorders, who I will call Karen, and she told me that recovering from anorexia would be like “losing [her] best friend.” At twenty-three years old, this woman suffers from every kind of pain imaginable—partial deafness, bi-polarity, depression and low self-esteem, Fibromyalgia, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, anxiety, chronic head pain, insomnia, extreme poverty, Dysfunctional Uterine Bleeding, Peptic ulcer disease, and other illnesses. Why would she hang on to her anorexia, the one pain that’s within her control to end? How could someone cling so to self-starvation? How can self-starvation in fact be precious?

communication

i suppose the platonic ideal of “communication” would be the successful making known of the weight and meaning of an idea.to ourselves as split subject or to others.in academic discourse or dinner conversation.in sermons or pamphlets for a political cause.and though communication rarely takes place, we often take for granted that we have communicated our thoughts and have heard others’.

this leads to tremendous strife.

this leads to mistrust, confusion, feelings of internalized superiority or inferiority, and even hatred.

i know at least one way of communicating that cultivates empathy and productive understanding. a way of listening-reading.

this way is represented by the koan–a zen anecdote (one in a progressive series) taught to a student of zen who must sit with the koan until the truth of it arrives to her. the koan resists logical interpretation. the koan shifts the burden of communication from the teacher (speaker) to the student (listener-reader). the student must assume the truth of the koan first, and bring her own understanding into accordance with that truth.

we all have truths. (whether these are as “absolute” as the truths represented by the koans is another matter).

truths compel us to communicate.

we feel guilt when we deny them.
we feel pain and anger when others’ deny them.

these truths are beliefs so strongly felt that conflict arises when we find that others disagree with them, or when we cannot express them, or when we otherwise feel unheard. family conflict is often incited by something small but sustained by the pain of feeling “unheard.” when others’ disagree with our truths, it is hard to accept that they have really heard and understood them. we can also become angry with ourselves for not adequately communicating our truths.

a truth is a text to be read, like the koan.

there is a way in which any text (meaning anything) can be read that will allow for a particular understanding of that text. there is a way in which the koan, taken on faith, can be understood that will produce the feeling of “this is true.”

truth is, after all, a feeling.

in order to hear others, we must take as given that there exists a way of reading-hearing their words that enables them to feel such certainty. only after really hearing, can we really speak back, and really do justice.

you can try it out now. trust me. take what i speak as given, and sit with it until you see my-the truth of it. hold it up against your own experience. be patient with my truth. but whatever you do, don’t give up on it. don’t say “this is bullshit” until you feel yourself click into my place. if you never click, never dismiss me.

please.

this plea exists whenever we strive to communicate.

even in the driest writing and the angriest words.

it is the plea of “‘deny not the realness of my world.”

it is the precursor to dialogue.

Economists Psyched To Solve Poverty

David Leonhardt, in a column in today’s NYT business section, laments that kids today are too frivolous. (Kids studying economics, that is.)

Unlike their groundbreaking forebears Keynes and Friedman, these young whippersnappers clamboring for ec B.A.s don’t look at the big picture. They just want to study gutless malarkey like “game shows, violent movies, or sports gambling.” Where’s the meat? Where’s the soul? Where’s the real money?

Evidently, it’s in poverty.

Hip-Hop, Black On Trial

This week at Harvard, three events on a topic beloved by all but honored by few: the hip-hop.

Tonight’s panel, moderated by alum and former BMOC Brandon Terry (a.k.a. Guess Who, Guess Why, and so forth in CC’s early days), will be hosted at the IOP Forum at the K School. Damon Dash (co-founder of Roc-A-Fella), Eugene Rivers (Black activist pastor) and Tricia Rose (prof of Africana Studies at Brown) will mull, muse, and mouth off on the ever-controversial question, “Is Hip-Hop Good For The Black Community?” Probably some routine sexism, homophobia, and your standard talk about rap as resistance to racist emasculation. [As though (a) black men are the only ones who suffer from white supremacy; (b) the best way to resist emasculation is to crank up the misogyny and materialism; (c) feminist, anti-capitalist, pro-queer hip-hop by black and non-black people does not exist, or if it does, remains merely peripheral and does not help black men; and (d) ugh.] Although I hear Tricia Rose is pretty cool — maybe she’ll have something uplifting to say.

Tomorrow, Talib Kweli, J-Live, and some other folks talk about HH and whether or not it can help solve the Achievement Gap. We’ll credit Ice Cube if the word “pyroclastic” appears on next year’s SATs. (Incidentally, I wonder if the phrase “achievement gap” can also be applied in contexts other than school performance. Like, “The middle class is disappearing, and income disparities are the widest they’ve been in half a century! Looks like we’ve got an Achievement Gap on our hands…”) In any case, here’s to hoping hip-hop can save us from No Child Left Behind. Oh wait — in order to conform to NCLB, public schools are eviscerating their arts and music programs. Mm.

Also, there’s a Div School hip-hop performance this weekend about a girl trying to reconcile her Catholicism and queerness. It’ll probably be good, but frankly I’m too depressed thinking about these other hip-hop messes to get all that excited.

And as a note on the above video, I like it because it parodies the white upper-class hysteria over gangsta rap, and makes explicit links to white supremacy and state violence. I dislike it, of course, because it’s so successfully ironic that it pre-emptively shuts down all critiques of gangsta rap, including the valid ones.

But what do I know? I’m just a light-skinned girl who loves Nina Simone.

Then and now: or, “It’s the neoliberalism, stupid”

Scott Seider, Ed School student and Currier tutor, uses the campus-wide conservative reaction against last spring’s Stand For Security campaign to prompt the question: what the fuck’s happened to college kids over the last 40 years?

The two photos above illustrate the chronological and ideological progression. In 1969, mainly white SDS dudes hollered about U.S. militarism (and their forced participation therein). At the dawning of a new millenium, Women In Business members muse that breaking the entire glass ceiling seems terribly cost-ineffective; better to use lasers and simply cut out a hole.

Seider’s study of the 2007 Harvard hunger strike backlash, which appears in the February edition of the Journal of College and Character, analyzes Crimson editorials and House lists email debates, determining that today’s Harvard undergrads “believe themselves to bear little responsibility for the well-being of less fortunate others.” Schocking, but true.

He cites a bunch of interesting statistics showing how, compared to their 1960’s and 70’s predecessors, today’s college students are far more interested in using their education to amass wealth for themselves. Whereas previous generations saw lecture halls filled with “class warriors,” campuses now swell with “organization kids,” a label conservative soothsayer David Brooks applies to co-eds who conform to systems for the sake of upward mobility.

Seider’s work is a welcome scholarly addition to the “What The Hell, Harvard?” files, but his palms-up, wide-eyed, mystified conclusion — “Well, gee, I guess the schools these days aren’t doing enough to stress social responsibility…” — seems, well, a bit obvious. And his suggested solutions, including moral philosophy classes and community service projects (e.g. Teach For America) really miss the larger picture. Yes, universities need to do more to educate students about social justice. As Natalie Portman marveled in an interview with Us Weekly (hey, it was lying around the co-op foyer while I was waiting for my ride), she made it through an entire Harvard education without once being told about the problem of ‘world poverty.’ Maybe it’s just me, but if a 22-year-old woman needs to voyage to Uganda to “discover” poverty, then I think we may have bigger problems on our hands than lackluster Moral Reasoning cores.

Like much of the feel-good community service he prescribes, Seiden’s research lacks social justice analysis — a framework that might, in this case, that contextualize the rise of college conservatism within larger historical and political developments.

How come a bunch of neoclassical Mankiw acolytes reject labor organizing and glorify the market as the best arbiter of justice, meting out to security guards precisely what they deserve?

Why, in the age that witnessed an explosion of non-profits, NGO’s, and professionalized, sanitized activism, would students eschew disruptive tactics in favor of endless diplomacy and negotiation?

What could possibly explain the newfound conservative bent among American twentysomethings raised during an enormous U.S.-led rightward shift in politics worldwide?

Gosh, search me.

Now, begging your pardon, I must return to my studies. At the end of the day, I’m just a gal gettin’ through school, increasing my earning power, so that one day I, too, may spread freedom and democracy iPhones throughout the Developing World.

—–

UPDATE: Hey! Some thieves stole my dream of saving the world. No fair.

“Rubbing his head against the college wall”

The title quote is from a passage I love in Ellison’s Invisible Man, where the blind Reverend Barbee spellbinds chapelgoers in a Southern state Negro college by recounting the mythic, bootstrappy ascent of the Founder, the man who risked death to get an education, and to whom the campus owes its existence. It seems a fitting introduction to this exciting news: on Tuesday, FAS voted unanimously to adopt an open access policy for faculty research.

Open Access is terrific for a lot of reasons, most of which I’m not qualified to explain well. Check out the blog by Peter Suber, a major advocate on the issue, for the ins and outs of this particular policy text and its implications. What’s clear to me, though, is that (a) Harvard is the first university to require its faculty to make their research available for free online; and (b) other institutions are sure to follow suit. Sounds like a reason to celebrate, which is certainly welcome. Lately I’ve been feeling anxious about my school and its many walls.

As we plunge ever deeper into the depths of senior thesis writing, a frequent topic of conversation among my friends is the seemingly inescapable elitism of our academic pursuits. We study, train, write, and learn, according to the college, in order to become “leaders.” (That’s the latest liberal ed mission; as a professor told me wryly the other day, the buzzword used to be “excellence,” followed by a brief hailing of “more excellence.”) Aside from conjuring some hilarious Brownian-motion imagery of a school brimming with leaders but no followers, the ubiquitous Enter-Learn-Lead narrative obviously suffers from some serious ideological problems. Those of us who don’t buy into a top-down model of social change — the enlightened experts leading the passionate masses — try to stick our fingers in our ears. It’s not easy. I’ve probably spent hours of my life deleting TFA recruitment emails alone. (“Dear ______, Congratulations! You’ve been identified as a Student Leader on campus. Please defer your pending acceptance to Goldman-Sachs/Morgan Stanley/random i-banking firm and come teach some needy kids with us for two years. We know you can do it — you’re a Leader!”)

Where it’s not so easy to avoid this lunacy, however, is in the content of our scholarship itself. In my case, I’m torn between writing my thesis with my evaluators in mind, and writing it in a way that might be more useful to people outside of school. bell hooks faced similar dilemmas in her bouts with the ivory tower, which is why her books don’t have footnotes. (What regular person reads texts crawling with academic conventions?)

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not waxing anti-intellectual here. There is a difference between intellectualism and elitism, though too often they go hand in hand. Many of Harvard’s characteristics — the way it conceives of a scarcity of education; the physical self-containment and border policing of its college campus; its lack of respectful integration into surrounding communities; its pedagogical impoverishment (in the social sciences, at least), not to mention its allocation of resources — shape it as an elitist and conservative institution. Want to make your scholarship accountable to extra-academic communities? Finding mentors here will be a struggle. Academic superstars get priority over public intellectuals and scholar-activists.

I’d like to think that the Open Access mandate will chip away at Harvard’s elitism. If the idea that capital-k Knowledge (in the form of research) should be hoarded within a single community didn’t seem utterly backward before, maybe this shift will reveal its absurdity. On the other hand, I’m not exactly swooning from optimism. Rubbing your head against the college wall may win you some education and cultural capital, but as Ellison’s tragic main character discovers, it will not erode the wall itself. Or gate, as the case may be.