On Reading Books (almost) Too Late

I am in the thick of three books right now (four, if you include the Jack Vance collection I’m reading on my Kindle) . . . two of which I am working through very slowly because they are so incredibly helpful. They make me sad, though, because I wish I had read them years ago:

After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre

The Classical Trivium by Marshall McLuhan

The latter one would have made my doctoral thesis 100% better. It contains a wealth of information that would have allowed me to properly situate the arguments I was intuiting but not fully knowing how to explore.

The former one also explains much about what I have been thinking and experiencing; I suppose, like Willard’s book The Divine Conspiracy, it is a volume that is coming along at the time I am ready for it. . . but I mourn the years lost when I might have been so much better off for having tasted its wisdom.

SACSBS Vol. 2

The dust has begun to settle from the first few days after the big announcement. Our interim chancellor, an energetic and incredibly capable man, has said publically that this is the worst week he’s experienced in his 30+ years in higher ed.

Our college dean sent around an email with some preliminary explanations/talking points. I quote two specific passages below:

We have held 2 Degree Qualifications Profile (DQP) workshops and attendance was good but not excellent. We also held the fall workshop on assessment. But many faculty have expressed reluctance to take the necessary steps.

[…]

The second thing is that we need to get on board the assessment train. As workshops come up about assessment, we need to participate. As we are asked to work to find test questions, papers, and assignments that can be used to measure learning objectives, we need to do so.

I understand that she is correct in her description of the importance of the new assessment buzzword—not because it’s actually important in real life, but because from a bureaucratic standpoint, it’s the criterion du jour and thus has real effects. "Accrediting organizations are under pressure from the Department of Education to demonstrate that they are holding schools accountable and so we must show our work."

That said, I am mystified by this repeated insistence that “workshops” are like a magical elixir that can help solve the problem. When has anyone in any business ever found that “workshops” are useful except for the managers who use them to show “attention” and the speakers who get compensated for them? If this is a real concern requiring real action, then I need to see something more serious than insisting on workshops. Otherwise it sounds like what it is — bureaucratic make-work to give everyone in the administrative chain a reason to exist.

In which Piers is finding the language

Roger Scruton:

‘I agree there is a paucity of conservative thought. It is partly the effect of the dominance of the left. If you come out as a conservative in a university context, you will find yourself very much on the margins. But my main explanation of this is that conservative thought is difficult. It doesn’t consist of providing fashionable slogans or messages of hope and marching into the future with clenched fists and all the things that automatically get a following. It consists in careful, sceptical rumination on the near-impossibility of human existence in the first place.’

In Fools, Frauds and Firebrands Scruton attacks the left idea of thought for a cause, ‘politics with a GOAL’. By contrast, he tells me, ‘Conservatives are by their nature people who are trying to defend and maintain existence without a cause’. Simply to keep things as they are? ‘We obviously all want to change things, but recognising that human life is an end in itself and not a means to replace itself with something else. And defending institutions and compromises is a very difficult and unexciting thing. But nevertheless it’s the truth.’

. . .

‘My view’, says Scruton, ‘is that what’s underlying all of this is a kind of nihilistic vision that masks itself as a moving toward the enlightened future, but never pauses to describe what that society will be like. It simply loses itself in negatives about the existing things – institutional relations like marriage, for instance – but never asks itself if those existing things are actually part of what human beings are. Always in Zizek there’s an assumption of the right to dismiss them as standing in the way of something else, but that something else turns out to be Nothing.’

We agree to disagree about his suggestion of there being a dreadful left continuum from the French revolution to today (me being not only a fan of past revolutions but an old historical materialist who believes in seeing things in their specific contexts). However, his book does acknowledge that something important has changed about leftwing thinking: ‘Liberation and social justice have been bureaucratised.’

‘Whatever we think about the revolutions’, he says, ‘the original slogan of the French Revolution – liberté, égalité, fraternité – was just a slogan, and nobody troubled to ask themselves whether liberté and égalité were compatible in practice. Really the subsequent history has been an illustration of that conflict between them.

‘But these great ideals, for which people did fight and die, were changed under the pressure of 20th-century politics into bureaucratic processes, that are constantly equalising, constantly passing little bits of legislation to ensure that anybody is not discriminating, not standing out, not learning something that puts them in a higher category than anybody else. And, likewise, liberté has been bureaucratised in the sense that it doesn’t any more represent the freedom of people to break out, to do the thing that they really want to do. Rather it’s conceived as a form of empowerment – the state gives you this in the form of vouchers or privileges, privileges, for example, that you might have as a gay, or a woman, or an ethnic minority. So in all these ways, both those ideals have ceased to be ideals and become the property of the state, to distribute among people according to the fashion of the day.’

Monday Update, probation edition

The dominant conversation topic this past week: the decision of SACS to slap a “probation” on this campus. Lots of hand-wringing and arm-waving has transpired, but it isn’t entirely unexpected. I look forward to chronicling the further developments and responses of our leadership.

Grades have been turned in and I got few to no complaints. I got a few questions. It seems that either I give grades that are too high or I give the impression that they are not up for discussion after they’ve been assigned.

Now that the semester is done, I turn my attention to some things that need to be done at the office and at the house; it’s a sad truth that as the semester reaches roughly the 2/3 point, it becomes very hard, not to say impossible, to stay on top of all the stuff. A certain amount of disorder arises.

I also have studying and writing I need to do, but it’s awfully hard to resist the call of the nap. I have tried to remember to stay busy rather than passive; it has helped.

SACSBS, Volume 1

A campus email from the interim chancellor today highlights results of our recent SACS accreditation process. And lo and behold! We have been put on “probation pending corrective actions they wish us to address.” The predictable will result: many much more committee! filing of reports! redoubling of efforts! flagellations of the guilty!

It will be painful this coming year.

I have no doubt that this is the result of some leadership problems (and how) that we have suffered in recent years. But I also have no doubt that part of the raison d’être of the accrediting agency is to provide work for us to do so that we can look busy and file reports and provide them with more work and more power and so on.

I consider it as part of the creeping and inexorable bureaucratization that has generally throttled the intellectual life of colleges nationwide, and as such is utter BS. Hence the title of the post, and the start of a new series of posts on this blog.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 50

My Number One Son has never complained about his eyesight, yet it seems that on his most recent screening at school they caught something . . . and so he visited the optometrist yesterday and lo and behold, he needs glasses. No suprise there, really. We expected it before now.

It happens that he is ever more tweeny, so the prospect of wearing glasses makes him a bit nervous: “I’m worried that I’ll look funny.” In my attempt to assure him that he won’t look funny at all, I took off MY glasses to show him that we look more or less the same either way. Well, he didn’t buy it: “naw, Dad, you look funny . . . you’ve got these bag thingies under your eyes. It makes you look OLD.”

Touche, son.

In which Piers has a sore hand

Since the summer I have been battling a strange malady on the knuckle of my right index finger. It started when I was pulling weeds by the hundreds: a sharp pain when I made the pincer gesture with my thumb and forefinger & put a bit of pressure on it. After six months of pretty predictable pain from writing, or carrying things, or pulling weeds, etc., I have been to two different doctors to look into the matter. In both cases the x-ray and physical examination have been inconclusive. It’s strange: it doesn’t happen to the point where it is constant or debilitating, but it is regular to the point where I began to wonder if arthritis was the cause. So far, no indication. Fingers crossed. It may be just part of getting older.

The triathlete and I joke about the time after I broke my hand in Chapel Hill — the fateful Fall when I had to take my doctoral exams one-handed — when I started to have some shooting pains up the back of my right hand and into my forearm. I went into the doctor at Student Health, got an x-ray, and his comment upon looking at the x-ray, with a friendly smirk: “sore hand.” (he also cackled when I presented with a back rash and a swollen lymph node in my groin: “it’s shingles!” he laughed. I miss that doctor)

Monday Update: A Sad Tale's Best for Winter* Edition

I tried to restart my blogging this Fall, just as the doors blew off the year and just as the great majority of things in my various worlds began to look ominous indeed:

• The Triathlete and I are in marriage counseling. Yes, it is my fault.
• Number One Son has brought home numerous bad grades recently, as in the D to F category.
• Little Red is showing signs of some significant anxiety trouble.
• We have completely outgrown our house but are absolutely not ready to move or even begin the process of moving.
• This is the first holiday season since Honey passed away.
• The entire world of academia has apparently lost its collective shit.
• We are facing institutional failure at every conceivable level.
• My department is shrinking and the disarray from previous and current campus administrators remains intractable.
• My students are, on average, declining in both ability and motivation, and I’m not sure what I can do to help.
• I fell so deep into a well of passivity that climbing out of it is painful for my entire family.

I have seldom been this discouraged when not outright afflicted by the Black Dog, so there’s a lot of gut-check going on. I am having to make some hard choices about what I’m changing in my life, and I am preparing for hard roads ahead.

(*regarding the post title: check out its source in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, a play about coming to terms with the weight of experience and choice)