Ben Margot/AP Photo
The Stanford University campus in Santa Clara, California
It’s a truism that it is easier for a writer to get a piece published if it is consistent with the prejudices of its editor. This is something that editors should be on guard for, as it naturally leads to the acceptance of weak pieces that happen to conform to one’s pre-existing beliefs rather than one that does the hard work of adding valuable insights to an existing debate. Few articles in recent memory prove that truism more than the August 2 New York Times op-ed entitled “Elite Universities Are Out of Touch. Blame the Campus.”
Its author, Nick Burns, an editor at Americas Quarterly, attempts to solve what he calls the “paradox” that “as concerns about social justice continue to preoccupy students and administrations, these universities often seem to be out of touch with the society they claim to care so much about. Many on the right and in the center believe universities have become ideological echo chambers. Some on the left see them as ‘sepulchers for radical thought.’”
We pause to note the work that the journalistic weasel word “seem” does in the above paragraph, together with “claim” and “believe” and that classic, “some.” The link to a New York magazine piece is also to an unsupported claim, albeit in a much better piece. Other words, every word in those two sentences might be total bullshit and it would still be journalistically correct.
The author continues:
“It also takes away the chance to encounter people with different roles in society, from retail workers to landlords—interactions that would remind them they won’t be students forever and open questions about the social relevance of the ideas they encounter in the university.”
As @dandrezner tweeted, “does this guy think that profs live on campus? Like first-graders who believe that their teachers live in their elementary school?” Burns also apparently assumes that they do their shopping only in campus stores (stocked only by other faculty members, presumably) and have families that include only other faculty members, and perhaps a student or two.
Hello? When I was in “elite” college, I had to deal with landlords and restaurants and supermarkets at the very beginning of my sophomore year. I had no choice given the lack of housing for all but freshmen. (Well, unless you think joining a frat is a choice.) I never ate in a school cafeteria again despite attending two more “elite” universities. (And by the way, they have an awfully nice one on the 14th floor of the New York Times building. How much do those people get out?)
Being a professor is a job; it’s not a prison. It may attract people who care a little more than is good for them about their personal pronouns and are a little too proud of themselves for which countries they allege not to buy products from. They may also get a little too excited when someone is invited to speak on their campuses in favor of something they oppose. This is all true, and as a lifelong liberal in real life but (relatively speaking) a conservative on campus—at least insofar as the humanities go—I often find it frustrating and almost always annoying.
To the Times editors, “wokeism” on elite college campuses is more threatening to the nation’s future than the destruction of our democracy.
I began writing about this weird obsession of the Times editorial and opinion pages back in March 2018. I’ve kept at it a bit more than I like to admit, most recently on Altercation in late March this year. To the Times editors, “wokeism” on elite college campuses is more threatening to the nation’s future than the destruction of our democracy, the deliberate lying, dissimulation and mafia-style threats against those who seek to save it. It’s a bigger deal than the attempted violent overthrow of the U.S. government by the de facto leader of one of its two major political parties. A few silly professors and students stick in the craw of Times editors more than people who tried to hang the vice president and those who egged them on. (And by the way, the vast majority of students who attend non-elite schools can barely be said to exist in these pages. The two students who attended Amy Chua’s dinner party rate miles more ink in this world than 275,000 students being educated in the entire CUNY system.)
Part of the reason for this obsession can be credited to the success of the nearly half-century-long campaign of right-wing working of the refs. There are no more prominent “refs” than the editorial page editors of The New York Times, and dammit, they are determined to demonstrate that they are not Democrats (even though they are). Annoying wokeism is the easiest target available with which to try to prove it, however unimportant and insignificant it is in the lives of real people. It certainly does seem to rile them up.
But I have another theory. As someone who has spent, alas, 44 years toggling back and forth between journalism and academia, I am here to report that each one is filled with people who are made to feel intellectually insecure by the other. First of all, there is an epistemological divide between the two practices having to do with their willingness to embrace the concept of truth. I wrote about that 11 years ago, here. But perhaps more important is the respective fundamental ethos of each profession. Journalists swear by the fact that one can learn everything worth knowing about pretty much anything in a week at the most. They drop into this or that country—or this or that controversy—and explain it as if the whole thing is pretty simple after all. (And they rarely credit the academics they learn from.) Academics spend years, often decades, studying just a small portion of what journalists think they know and, oftentimes, prove them wrong. By that time, however, the journalists have moved on to pretend to know everything there is to know about a dozen other topics. It’s no coincidence, as Marxists like to say, that among the worst insults one can level at an academic is that he or she is “just a journalist,” while, correspondingly, when a piece of journalism is deemed insufficiently interesting or relevant to the day’s news, it’s called merely “academic.” Each side worries that the other side looks down on them, and guess what—they’re right.
I tend to side with the academics when these conflicts arise. I mean, can you imagine living in a world where you had to form your lifelong opinions based on what they publish in Politico? (Its slogan should be: “All the News That’s Fit to Print … for the next ten minutes.”) But there’s also no question that peer-reviewed articles that take a year or more to publish are not going to save us from the likes of a Republican Party seeking to destroy our democracy, much less everything else that’s happening in the world.
The nonfiction writers who manage to bridge this divide—including, merely for instance, Walter Isaacson, Nicholas Lemann, Robert Caro, and Isabel Wilkerson coming from journalism; and Jill Lepore, Henry Louis Gates, and Paul Krugman coming from academia—are relatively rare and tremendously talented, but also worthy of emulation. Both journalists and academics have a great deal to learn from their examples of how to make journalism that stands up to scholarship and scholarship that can be consumed by normal people who just like to read and understand the world a little better. In the meantime, we can ignore nonsense like that presented by, um, Mr. Burns.
What’s (for Once) Totally Cool With Kansas?
A month ago, I wrote in a piece headlined “The ‘Dobbs’ Backlash and the Democrats’ Choice” that the silver lining in the Dobbs decision was the fact that it might “inspire the kind of passion on the progressive side that the right has consistently successfully ginned up for the past half-century. This is especially true in a period when both the Democratic Party and the resistance to Trump were—and are—female-driven.”
Lo and behold, if you click here, you’ll see the chart shows the percentage of new registrants in the state who were women (as a seven-day average). Note the spike after the Dobbs decision leaked, and huge jump after the Supreme Court handed it down. Seventy percent of the new registrants were women, and according to Wednesday’s figures, nearly 20 percent of voters did not vote in either primary but showed up just to vote on the amendment. Note also that in Kansas, registered Republicans (851,882) vastly outnumber Democrats (495,574), with 560,309 registered independents. Trump won the state in 2020 by 15 percent; abortion rights won by nearly 18 percent.
Odds and Ends
A little late to the party, I saw the Hallelujah movie this week. I was pleased by how much attention it devoted to the development of Leonard Cohen’s career that was unrelated to the song and by its generally lighthearted and informative tone. I strongly recommend seeing it in a theater with a good sound system.
I’ve never seen Shrek, but I understand from the film that it used the John Cale version in the movie and the Rufus Wainwright version on the soundtrack. This version, with Rufus and 1,500 backup singers, is my favorite, but here also is Cale’s version and the famous Jeff Buckley version. Here is late-career Leonard. My favorite of his videos, however, is “Closing Time,” which you will likely hear if you happen to be at my funeral one day (and my instructions are followed).
