Macintyre on protest

Protest as virtue-signalling:

But protest is now almost entirely that negative phenomenon which characteristically occurs as a reaction to the alleged invasion of someone’s rights in the name of someone else’s utility. The self-assertive shrillness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure that protestors can never win an argument; the indignant self-righteousness of protest arises because the facts of incommensurability ensure equally that the protestors can never lose an argument either. Hence the utterance of protest is characteristically addressed to those who already share the protestors’ premises. The effects of incommensurability ensure that protestors rarely have anyone else to talk to but themselves. This is not to say that protest cannot be effective; it is to say that it cannot be rationally effective and that its dominant modes of expression give evidence of a certain perhaps unconscious awareness of this.

After Virtue, ch. 6 (p.71)

In which Piers reads about accountability

In examining the news and my email today, I have noticed three items that are far apart in space but conceptually adjacent:

First, it is reported that the professor at the center of one of the uglier scenes at Mizzou this past fall is being charged with a misdemeanor.

Second, I read with interest that the Georgia state legislator in charge of education appropriations has told university administrators that unless they enact due process protections for their students, they can get to work on some serious (and state appropriations free) budget revisions.

Third, I read the acceptable use policy for my university owned computer, and the reminder that every single email sent on a university account is searchable, readable, and should by no means be thought of as private.

None of these developments qualify as what I would call pleasant, but that’s not the point. What they do show is that the university as a broad institution - especially in the realm of publically-funded education - should always be accountable for its actions and the actions of its administrators and faculty. I am free to do anything I wish in this job, pretty much. But I should be ready to answer for what I say and do. So should my colleagues and my multitudinous bureaucrat-administrators. If we will not embrace that notion wholeheartedly, it’ll be done for (to) us.

In which Piers and Family experience snowstorm time dilation

And so, in an unusual development for NWTN in mid January, we had a bit of a snowstorm at the end of last week. This on top of a minor sleet-fall that left the kids out of school on Wednesday and Thursday. They were out on Friday while it all piled up to about 6-8 inches, and then today while the rest of the ice melts off the roads. Thank heavens the temperature climbed up above freezing.

So what. It’s just a typical southern snowstorm — not even that uncommon these past four years. We usually don’t get ours until late February or early March, though. It is instructive to observe, however, the reactions of adults and children to the novelty of snow on the ground, especially when one is laid up recovering from surgery and the other is stuck between the world of parenting and the world of studying. What ends up happening to me is that I forget the studying almost entirely and devote myself to dealing with the kids. Lots of clothes on and off. Lots of making of hot chocolate and feeding them various foods. Lots of running the dryer. All of it fun, but strange in that the rest of the world is continuing to move while our little house becomes a snowbound fortress of solitude.

Eventually, though, cabin fever takes over and makes it hard. We just aren’t the sort to be constantly taking the children all over the place.

In which we have a happy ending to recent events

The Triathlete returned home to NWTN yesterday evening, a little earlier than we had anticipated. All tests, all indicators, all reports from the doctor put her in great shape. She has some resting to do, and the hardest part for her will be the taking it easy part, but we will take that; the main thing is that she isn’t sick. She just has to finish her “laying in."

Being a husband in the case of a thoroughly and intimately feminine surgery like this one, albeit minimally invasive for the sake of her recovery, puts me in a strange position. Women tend to retreat into a space that doesn’t exactly shut men out on purpose, but they do make for themselves a space where the man seems . . . superfluous. I do what I can, getting drinks and fetching blankets and what-not.

And she settles into something like a cocoon, waiting for the strength to come back.

Interstellar

I don’t watch many movies as a rule. Not that I don’t want to — it’s just that by the time I get around to thinking about catching a given film, it has usually left our local theater and then it’s an even chance whether I’ll catch it on Netflix/AmazonPrime. I did make a note to catch this one, though, because several people had mentioned that it is really remarkable.

Even though I’m a sucker for hard sci-fi like this film, I enjoyed it for what I think are legitimate reasons. As is always the case with Mr Nolan the atmospherics were perfect. I expecially appreciate the way that the film sets us in a world where there’s a lot going on, mostly bad, but neither bogs down in exposition nor merely settles for the grey goo of a dystopia (itself a pattern wherein writers often expect to gain credit for deep thinking without actually doing the deep thinking).

Two details that stand out to me: the film’s utterly silent scenes in space, where of course the various movements of the spacecraft would make no noise; and the film’s attempt to take seriously the relationships between mass, time, and space — where there are no short trips in the cosmos, and where the weight of long isolation must be dealt with forthrightly.

And a beautiful but non-conclusive ending.

Parts of the Job that I may not love

I am not particularly good at writing recommendation letters, though I understand quite clearly how important they are. And in most cases, the students who ask are the sort that I want to help out.

But this kind of thing makes me want to pull my hair out:

Thank goodness for Safari’s “suggested password” feature.

WW

Tomorrow we will leave NWTN for Nashville the weekend so that The Triathlete can have surgery. A few weeks ago she got back a blood test with some worrying numbers, so after a consultation with the same oncologist that treated Honey, she set up a procedure for a full hysterectomy. She will have the procedure laparoscopically on Friday morning, and will spend the remainder of the MLK weekend hopefully getting in good enough shape to make the drive back on Monday.

We are all a little tense about it, though not particularly worried that this will turn into a long term cancer battle. The main thing is minimizing her risk and taking out the parts that would be most likely to cause trouble.

To her credit, and unsurprisingly, she has spent this last week ministering to her friends and keeping up a pretty active schedule. I think she wants to get as much living in as she can before she has to be sedate for a while. The 15-20 days of taking it easy may make her crazy.

I have many reasons to be thankful for her and to admire her, but the energy she is able to muster and spend on other people is astonishing.

Adventures in Parenting, Vol. 51

There was snow on the ground when the boys woke up yesterday. I had seen it before I went to bed for the night, so it wasn’t all that exciting for me, but it was thrilling for them. I enjoyed very much how excited they got.

Which brought these thoughts to mind, as an antidote for the gloom from last week:

I enjoy Number One Son for his zany sense of humor, his gentle spirit, and his gift for impressions and remembering movie dialogue (not that he can quote all of Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music like his mother, but he’ll get there). When he’s not at the house, it just doesn’t feel quite right.

I enjoy Little Red for his tender heart, his outgoing friendliness to everyone, and his tendency to be a smaller version of his mother. And that husky voice and raucous laugh of his. I am fortunate that he has chosen me to be the recipient of so much affection.

I enjoy Lefty for his sprightly cheerfulness every morning, how he is almost exactly identical to his oldest brother, and how he is an entirely different child when he’s not around his older brothers.

Every day that passes, I remember that they’ll never be this little again. I’ve started taking breaks from what I’m doing when they ask — because I know that each phase of life has its own pleasures. I don’t want to miss these.

"To choose what is difficult all one's days..."

Joseph

Through cracks, up ladders, into waters deep,
I squeezed, I climbed, I swam to save
My own true Love:
Under a dead apple tree
I saw an ass; when it saw me
 It brayed;
A hermit sat in the mouth of a cave:
 When I asked him the way,
He pretended to be asleep.

Chorus[off]

Maybe, maybe not.

But, Joseph, you know what

Your world, of course, will say

About you anyway.

Joseph

Where are you Father, where?
Caught in the jealous trap
Of an empty house I hear
As I sit alone in the dark
Everything, everything,
The drip of the bathroom tap,
The creak of the sofa spring,
The wind in the air-shaft, all
Making the same remark
Stupidly, stupidly,
Over and over again.
Father, what have I done?
Answer me, Father, how
Can I answer the tactless wall
Or the pompous furniture now?
Answer them . . .

Gabriel

No, you must.

Joseph

How then am I to know,
Father, that you are just?
Give me one reason.

Gabriel

No.

Joseph

All I ask is one
Important and elegant proof
That what my Love had done
Was really at your will
And that your will is Love.

Gabriel

No, you must believe;
Be silent, and sit still.

—Auden, “For the Time Being”

In which Piers Spies Some Gaslighting

As I sat in yesterday’s magic workshop, looking at the faces around me (I am an incorrigible scanner of the room), I saw the faces of many of my colleagues drained of energy and will. I saw bewilderment, resignation, and fear.

I am afraid that what I saw was by design. For scholars accustomed to working in the liberal arts, the bureaucratic and technocratic language employed by administrative units and their representatives is painful to endure. . . it begs too many questions, depends on murky definitions, and reveals far too much magical thinking. And it does so in huge quantities without letup, so the careful thinker is browbeaten into passivity or submission.

For example, one of the issues raised by a philosophy professor yesterday was the issue of the use of grades. The facilitator, who claims her faculty background for rhetorical purposes but who long ago traversed the gap to professional administration, asserted that grades cannot measure “student learning” and are thus inappropriate for outcomes based measurement. What she said was undoubtedly true, because she had already defined “student learning” and “outcomes based measurement” not explicity but implicitly - and in such a way that her assertion could not be disproven. The question has already been answered by the very terminology that has been made available. To question the premise, as a philosophy or literature professor should, is to place oneself in opposition to self-evident facts that are incontrovertible because there is no language provided to dispute them.

There is no changing things for us; we faculty members (especially those of us in the humanities) have no power and no leverage to use in any negotiation. Events like yesterday’s magic workshop, and the further events and directives that will follow, are intended to break our will and keep us always on the defensive. It works; we have limited reservoirs of energy to pull from and cannot possibly stay ahead of the relentless pounding of administrative demands. Those of us who also wish to tend to our families and our teaching demands, to say nothing of whatever slivers of research and intellectual development we can manage, will submit . . . as we are intended to.

SACSBS, Volume 3

Part of the panicked response to this campus’s recent accreditation trouble has been, as I have documented, a more deliberate effort on the part of our campus administrators to coerce our cooperation in the invocation of the magic words “assessment” and “institutional effectiveness.” More on the magic words in a moment, but today there was a “workshop” devoted to explaining in detail the assessment rubric that accreditation agencies are working from, and explaining (to many of us, for the first time) what exactly is expected of campus units both big and small. The presenter was a professor of psychology and, more importantly, a vice chancellor of Institutional Effectiveness from a campus somewhere out of state.

That the session was led by a woman who makes the bulk of her living doing this sort of thing was not lost on me. From a practical standpoint, though, she had many useful suggestions and a relatively painless procedure we could follow to help get our individual departments into compliance. Inasmuch as she could do an adequate job, she did so. Still, one can also tell that despite her protestations to the contrary, she is a True Believer.

Initial considerations after sitting through an exhausting 7 hours of work:

a. It is stunning how thoroughly the TQM jargon (think Senge’s The Fifth Discipline) that was actually current about 20-30 years ago in the business world has filtered down through the layers of educational bureaucracy to be presented as “best practices.”

b. It is also clear that the purpose of SACS and other accreditation agencies is to provide work, a carrot, and a whip — so that we can be certified able to do more work for SACS. The implicit threat today (of suspension) may be real, but it is also clear that there will always be new criteria for compliance so that we have to keep generating new paperwork and new positions to handle that paperwork. Such as vice chancellors for institutional effectiveness. It’s clear that there is a fairly powerful figure on this campus whose eyes are firmly set on grabbing that position for himself.

c. The magic words “institutional effectiveness,” “outcomes,” “assessment,” “closing the circle,” and “data” were used so many times that the humanists (especially those of us who are of the literary and philosophical bent) were pained to hear so much begging of the question. But as we were reminded, “assessment is here to stay.” Until the new set of carrots and sticks are promulgated.

d. this is all pretty clearly a first step in removing more and more curriculum and instruction decisions from the hands of faculty and placing them in the hands of administrators who will be answerable to the feds. The K-12 model will be applied to the four year college (some already use the term “K-16”) and standardization of assessment and evaluation tools will make the college experience unrecognizable to even those of us who were in school ten years ago.

e. our campus leadership has shown itself to be bumbling in other ways, and many of them have paid with their jobs, but it is still infuriating to think about how none of this was communicated to us with any clarity two years ago, when it would have made more sense. We were told, in fact, by one of the faculty shills for the whole process that none of this would shape instruction in any way. Well. It was a poor and bald faced lie then, and that insistence has hurt us all.

f. if I didn’t have a family to support, I would be looking for a job overseas. Anywhere overseas.

Visions and Revisions

Settling in for a new semester of work in the midst of what seems to be a dangerous storm of turmoil, both personally and in the world I see around me. Still, attention to what sits before me:

1. I will be spending the next few weeks attending to the medical needs of The Triathlete, who will be having some major surgery next week to confront a very real cancer risk. We are glad to take a decisive step, but a surgery is what it is, and will require some time for recovery.
2. I have some pretty significant academic opportunities open to me if I can remember to keep disciplined enough to write and research on a regular basis. The regular effort has been the thing that has bedeviled me for my entire academic career.
3. This institution is in for a nail-biting year, and I expect all kinds of panicked initiatives, such as the all-day workshop to be held tomorrow, to distract us from the teaching and research we need to be doing. It is immensely frustrating, but I must grit my teeth and participate so that I can offer the critique that I expect to be justified.
4. I’ve recommited myself to spiritual and emotional engagement with the children, especially as I realize that their childhood won’t last forever. Number One sometimes acts like a child . . . but then there are those moments when he is not one at all. I don’t want to miss out. I may be a pushover.
5. I’ve withdrawn almost completely from social media platforms, especially Facebook (I gave up on Twitter years ago). I recognize that I don’t have the time or the energy to devote to them that I once did, and do not have the desire to contribute to their business model of noise. There is a kind of loss I feel, especially because I know I’ll lose contact with many people who have been important to me, but the software experience, and the discourse the platforms seem to generate by their nature, has put me off for good, thinking of interaction with them as a chore rather than an opportunity.
6. Exercise? indeed?