Showing posts with label Universities. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Universities. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Six Paragraphs of Sheer Brilliance . . .
. . . from my favorite leftist, Camille Paglia. She calls for the "sweeping revalorization of the trades." I'm not sure what trades will prepare practitioners for the balance of this century, or what the century requires. But she's got the right idea on the deepening uselessness of a college education over the past few decades, arising largely from meaningless "post-structuralist" rubbish in the liberal arts and the neglected cultivation of habits of thought in those costly four-year nurseries. Only take you a minute to read.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Breaking News: This Guy Agrees with Me
In several posts I have suggested that Barack Obama does not care much about being re-elected in 2012.
Toby Hamden agrees with me in this article in the Telegraph (UK). (Astonishingly, he neglects to cite to my trailblazing posts.)
We disagree somewhat on Obama's thinking. I have written that Obama cares only about the approval of his social-justice-redistributionist academic and leftist journalist constituency, the only people he respects. These people will lionize him and hire him even if he goes down to defeat in 2012. Electoral failure in the future cannot rob him of his schoolchild's title of Our First Black President, for which he will be (justifiably) noted forever, no matter how lousy a president he turned out to be.
Hamden takes a different view, speculating that Obama is thinking ahead to becoming a figure on the world stage in a "post-American" era. In fact, these positions are not so far apart. Hamden writes:
"Obama does not suffer from self-doubt. He has long seemed so convinced of his own virtue that to question his motives is illogical. Increasingly, his pronouncements carry the tone of one who believes those who disagree are stupid or bigoted.
* * *
"In Berlin in 2008, Obama cast himself as a 'citizen of the world.' He has dismissed the bedrock notion of American exceptionalism by describing it . . . as little more than narrow patriotism. Elite opinion among liberal Ivy League types -- of which Obama is the embodiment -- holds that we are already living in a post-American world."
That's right. He is looking forward to the time when he need move only among -- and answer only to -- liberal opinion leaders. However, I don't think he will become a respected world leader. Oh, he'll be greeted politely by those who are already delighted at the weakening of the United States that began several administrations ago (Republicans most assuredly included) and that he has greatly accelerated. He is not respected -- he seems almost to be regarded as a faintly comical figure -- among leaders of Western democracies.
He is, in short, Jimmy Carter.
Unlike Carter and Bill Clinton, however, Obama will never travel to hostile countries to free incarcerated Americans in hostile lands. He'll never pound nails into a Habitat for Humanity home; he'll never co-chair disaster relief efforts with George W. Bush. That's a far too, too . . . practical a use of his grand and mostly self-imagined moral authority. Let the politicians do stuff like that.
I see for Obama a rather sad old age. Oh, he'll do fine in the decade or so after he leaves office, serving on the Harvard faculty (good luck finding him in a classroom -- this is not an industrious man), chairing left-of-center foundations (again, mostly honorarily), speechifying vaporously around the world, with that odd head-swing of his as he pivots from teleprompter to teleprompter. But in the long run, after the history books acknowledge his historical significance, the next paragraphs will note his failed promise. He will not be influential, as Bill Clinton has been (aided to some degree, in his case, by the visibility and talents of Mrs. Clinton, but mainly because of his political intelligence and resonance with voters). For future generations he won't be much more than a picture on a plate.
And the guy whose profligacy they're still paying for.
It's really too bad. I didn't vote for the guy, but there was promise there. Turns out he's just another pol who confused the title with the task.
Toby Hamden agrees with me in this article in the Telegraph (UK). (Astonishingly, he neglects to cite to my trailblazing posts.)
We disagree somewhat on Obama's thinking. I have written that Obama cares only about the approval of his social-justice-redistributionist academic and leftist journalist constituency, the only people he respects. These people will lionize him and hire him even if he goes down to defeat in 2012. Electoral failure in the future cannot rob him of his schoolchild's title of Our First Black President, for which he will be (justifiably) noted forever, no matter how lousy a president he turned out to be.
Hamden takes a different view, speculating that Obama is thinking ahead to becoming a figure on the world stage in a "post-American" era. In fact, these positions are not so far apart. Hamden writes:
"Obama does not suffer from self-doubt. He has long seemed so convinced of his own virtue that to question his motives is illogical. Increasingly, his pronouncements carry the tone of one who believes those who disagree are stupid or bigoted.
* * *
"In Berlin in 2008, Obama cast himself as a 'citizen of the world.' He has dismissed the bedrock notion of American exceptionalism by describing it . . . as little more than narrow patriotism. Elite opinion among liberal Ivy League types -- of which Obama is the embodiment -- holds that we are already living in a post-American world."
That's right. He is looking forward to the time when he need move only among -- and answer only to -- liberal opinion leaders. However, I don't think he will become a respected world leader. Oh, he'll be greeted politely by those who are already delighted at the weakening of the United States that began several administrations ago (Republicans most assuredly included) and that he has greatly accelerated. He is not respected -- he seems almost to be regarded as a faintly comical figure -- among leaders of Western democracies.
He is, in short, Jimmy Carter.
Unlike Carter and Bill Clinton, however, Obama will never travel to hostile countries to free incarcerated Americans in hostile lands. He'll never pound nails into a Habitat for Humanity home; he'll never co-chair disaster relief efforts with George W. Bush. That's a far too, too . . . practical a use of his grand and mostly self-imagined moral authority. Let the politicians do stuff like that.
I see for Obama a rather sad old age. Oh, he'll do fine in the decade or so after he leaves office, serving on the Harvard faculty (good luck finding him in a classroom -- this is not an industrious man), chairing left-of-center foundations (again, mostly honorarily), speechifying vaporously around the world, with that odd head-swing of his as he pivots from teleprompter to teleprompter. But in the long run, after the history books acknowledge his historical significance, the next paragraphs will note his failed promise. He will not be influential, as Bill Clinton has been (aided to some degree, in his case, by the visibility and talents of Mrs. Clinton, but mainly because of his political intelligence and resonance with voters). For future generations he won't be much more than a picture on a plate.
And the guy whose profligacy they're still paying for.
It's really too bad. I didn't vote for the guy, but there was promise there. Turns out he's just another pol who confused the title with the task.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Did you Hear POTUS Supporting The Cool Hot Center? Peggy Noonan Did
Faithful visitors to The Cool Hot Center will recall my two-parter of a couple of weeks ago where I expressed my view that the President is in love with the academy, that it is in love with him, and that this explains a lot about his Presidency.
If you heard his here-and-gone Oval Office speech on the BP Oil Spill a couple of evenings ago, you heard some striking evidence of that. Peggy Noonan caught it in her editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal
“[G]rowing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others 'experts in academia' on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the 'small people' in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.”
Exactly.
If you heard his here-and-gone Oval Office speech on the BP Oil Spill a couple of evenings ago, you heard some striking evidence of that. Peggy Noonan caught it in her editorial this morning in the Wall Street Journal
“[G]rowing weaknesses showed up in small phrases. The president said he had consulted among others 'experts in academia' on what to do about the calamity. This while noting, again, that his energy secretary has a Nobel Prize. There is a growing meme that Mr. Obama is too impressed by credentialism, by the meritocracy, by those who hold forth in the faculty lounge, and too strongly identifies with them. He should be more impressed by those with real-world experience. It was the 'small people' in the shrimp boats who laid the boom.”
President Obama in the Oval Office
Exactly.
Thursday, May 20, 2010
PART 2: Barack Obama -- The Definitive Explanation -- My Answer
When last we met, Your Cool Hot Center was puzzling over why President Obama would persist in pursuing a far-left agenda that a large number of people who voted for him, and voted for Democratic representatives and senators, do not like. They don't like it so much that they are banding together -- community organizing, as I suggested last time -- to vote his supporters out of office. The ever-faithful Anonymous left a comment on the previous article suggesting that people have short memories, and it is indeed the case that today's lightning news cycles can produce dramatic swings in voter sentiment in a very short period of time. But somehow, I don't think those Tea Party folks -- who frankly make me a little uneasy, although I would probably agree with most of their positions -- are going to stand down after the November elections. I think they're going to keep the pressure on for repeal of the health care bill and a halt to the redistributionist policies of this President and Congress.
There will no doubt be considerable residual fondness in 2012 for this magnetic man of history. It may also be the case that if the November elections have the effect of reining in his excesses, his Presidency will calm down, he'll turn to Bill Clinton for advice on how to navigate the new waters, and people will take a kindlier view of the man. (And, of course, the Republicans could nominate a knucklehead, or two.) Reforms will moderate, and some may be salutary. (No one -- not me anyway -- believes that some stuff around here doesn't need fixing.) Those Death Valley "strongly disapprove" ratings will ease, and he'll have his second term. But my questions is: Why is he risking that with his demand for the lightning restructuring of the American economy and role of government?
So, with thanks to Anonymous for the corrective, I return to my question: Doesn't he care about the results of the mid-term election, or his own reelection?
Well, no; no, he doesn't, not very much anyway.
His policies may appear nonsensical, even unhinged, to that big chunk of the center-to-right portion of the electorate. You know, that chunk that elects presidents. But there is one place -- and really only one place -- where his freedom-unfriendly, government-intensive policies are almost unanimously popular, and where the working middle class is held at arms-length, like a faintly distasteful family member:
The academy.
This is where the policies he is advancing came from. His administration is government by abstract theory. Take the most notorious example, health care legislation. Put aside the corruption and near-comic ignornace of its provisions exhibited by Congress. Government-run health-care has never worked, anywhere. And when I say it hasn't worked, I mean it hasn't worked as a system that expects the miracles that we demand of ours, and which it routinely delivers. (And delivers to foreigners who flock here from their own state-run systems to experience them.) The health-care bill is based, much of what he believes appears to be based, on a near-socialist (at least near-) view of wealth redistribution. The theories upon which this view is based get traction only in certain isolated islands of American geography: The departments of economics, political science, philosophy, history, ethnic studies, English and literature in American colleges and universities. (Wait, let's not forget Greece, Great Britain, much of Europe, and California.)
The president does not much care what happens on November 2, 2010, to the Pelosi-whipped represenatives who voted for a health-care reform bill they did not and could not read. He really doesn't even care all that much about what happens to him on November 6, 2012. He cares mostly about his lionization for the remainder of his considerable days by the only people whose opinion he respects: Liberal arts faculties and their products. He cares about how he will appear in the books they will write. They will celebrate his bravery in taking on those small-minded people who want to direct their earnings as they see fit rather than turning it over to a governing elite who can parcel it out based on ideas of what has come to be konwn as "social justice." "Social justice" has its modern foundation in the theories of John Rawls, expressed at tedious length and unreadable prose in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. The men and women who were undergraduates when that book had its heyday are now running American liberal arts departments.
Barack Obama's worldview owes less to his upbringing and race than it does to his association with Harvard and the University of Chicago and the academics and intellectuals he has brought with him on his rather brief journey. The academy is truly where he came from. It is where he will go when he is turned out. It will nuture and celebrate him in the decades (Jah willing) he has left, as they have celebrated and elevated him since he came of age. While the nation is struggling to undo the damage he has caused, he will be basking in the warmth of tenured fans. He has even assumed their manner -- a noticeable tendency to lecture, a growing distaste for questions, even from the press who had a big role in putting him behind the lecturn with that big seal on it.
Because he is really good at thinking, and really light on experience, he values the results of thought divorced from experience. He admires the methods of today's academic social scientists. He believes what they believe. These university guys are cool and witty and freaky smart and I'm just like them. And the hell with people whose perspective is shaped by something other than theory, like, for example, nontenured employment and income-tax withholding. Indeed, even during the campaign, he has been unable wholly to supress his discomfort with the concerns and enthusiasms of the middle class.
(There is one other island that tends this way -- unionized government employees. But they are not quite so monolithic and their intellectual contribution to the administration is negligible.)
Am I overstating the leftism of the academy? No. Study after study finds Democrats outnumbering Republicans there by breathtaking margins, and their political beliefs overwhelmingly to the left. (Scroll through the abstracts collected here.) (Yeah, Steverino, but doesn't that just prove conservatives are dumb because only smart people are professors? No, but that's a topic for another day.) Do I overstate the President's attachment to this subculture? I'm not a mind-reader, but I don't think I do. The President disowned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but only distanced himself from Prof. William Ayres's youthful violence. (The President may have other reasons not to alienate Prof. Ayres; the evidence that the latter composed the much-praised Dreams from My Father, while not conclusive, is suggestive.) And the academy has risen to Prof. Ayres's vigorous defense.
So no, I can't prove that President Obama places decisive value on the approbation of liberal arts faculties. But I am convinced that a significant element of the President's motivation is his knowledge that he is actually enacting the dreamy speculations of the academic left that no previous national leader dared promote. These are his friends, his mentors. He will move among them as their hero the many long years of his life.
The legacy he is imagining has less to do with political parties than with cocktail parties.
There will no doubt be considerable residual fondness in 2012 for this magnetic man of history. It may also be the case that if the November elections have the effect of reining in his excesses, his Presidency will calm down, he'll turn to Bill Clinton for advice on how to navigate the new waters, and people will take a kindlier view of the man. (And, of course, the Republicans could nominate a knucklehead, or two.) Reforms will moderate, and some may be salutary. (No one -- not me anyway -- believes that some stuff around here doesn't need fixing.) Those Death Valley "strongly disapprove" ratings will ease, and he'll have his second term. But my questions is: Why is he risking that with his demand for the lightning restructuring of the American economy and role of government?
So, with thanks to Anonymous for the corrective, I return to my question: Doesn't he care about the results of the mid-term election, or his own reelection?
Well, no; no, he doesn't, not very much anyway.
His policies may appear nonsensical, even unhinged, to that big chunk of the center-to-right portion of the electorate. You know, that chunk that elects presidents. But there is one place -- and really only one place -- where his freedom-unfriendly, government-intensive policies are almost unanimously popular, and where the working middle class is held at arms-length, like a faintly distasteful family member:
The academy.
This is where the policies he is advancing came from. His administration is government by abstract theory. Take the most notorious example, health care legislation. Put aside the corruption and near-comic ignornace of its provisions exhibited by Congress. Government-run health-care has never worked, anywhere. And when I say it hasn't worked, I mean it hasn't worked as a system that expects the miracles that we demand of ours, and which it routinely delivers. (And delivers to foreigners who flock here from their own state-run systems to experience them.) The health-care bill is based, much of what he believes appears to be based, on a near-socialist (at least near-) view of wealth redistribution. The theories upon which this view is based get traction only in certain isolated islands of American geography: The departments of economics, political science, philosophy, history, ethnic studies, English and literature in American colleges and universities. (Wait, let's not forget Greece, Great Britain, much of Europe, and California.)
The president does not much care what happens on November 2, 2010, to the Pelosi-whipped represenatives who voted for a health-care reform bill they did not and could not read. He really doesn't even care all that much about what happens to him on November 6, 2012. He cares mostly about his lionization for the remainder of his considerable days by the only people whose opinion he respects: Liberal arts faculties and their products. He cares about how he will appear in the books they will write. They will celebrate his bravery in taking on those small-minded people who want to direct their earnings as they see fit rather than turning it over to a governing elite who can parcel it out based on ideas of what has come to be konwn as "social justice." "Social justice" has its modern foundation in the theories of John Rawls, expressed at tedious length and unreadable prose in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. The men and women who were undergraduates when that book had its heyday are now running American liberal arts departments.
Barack Obama's worldview owes less to his upbringing and race than it does to his association with Harvard and the University of Chicago and the academics and intellectuals he has brought with him on his rather brief journey. The academy is truly where he came from. It is where he will go when he is turned out. It will nuture and celebrate him in the decades (Jah willing) he has left, as they have celebrated and elevated him since he came of age. While the nation is struggling to undo the damage he has caused, he will be basking in the warmth of tenured fans. He has even assumed their manner -- a noticeable tendency to lecture, a growing distaste for questions, even from the press who had a big role in putting him behind the lecturn with that big seal on it.
Because he is really good at thinking, and really light on experience, he values the results of thought divorced from experience. He admires the methods of today's academic social scientists. He believes what they believe. These university guys are cool and witty and freaky smart and I'm just like them. And the hell with people whose perspective is shaped by something other than theory, like, for example, nontenured employment and income-tax withholding. Indeed, even during the campaign, he has been unable wholly to supress his discomfort with the concerns and enthusiasms of the middle class.
(There is one other island that tends this way -- unionized government employees. But they are not quite so monolithic and their intellectual contribution to the administration is negligible.)
Am I overstating the leftism of the academy? No. Study after study finds Democrats outnumbering Republicans there by breathtaking margins, and their political beliefs overwhelmingly to the left. (Scroll through the abstracts collected here.) (Yeah, Steverino, but doesn't that just prove conservatives are dumb because only smart people are professors? No, but that's a topic for another day.) Do I overstate the President's attachment to this subculture? I'm not a mind-reader, but I don't think I do. The President disowned the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but only distanced himself from Prof. William Ayres's youthful violence. (The President may have other reasons not to alienate Prof. Ayres; the evidence that the latter composed the much-praised Dreams from My Father, while not conclusive, is suggestive.) And the academy has risen to Prof. Ayres's vigorous defense.
So no, I can't prove that President Obama places decisive value on the approbation of liberal arts faculties. But I am convinced that a significant element of the President's motivation is his knowledge that he is actually enacting the dreamy speculations of the academic left that no previous national leader dared promote. These are his friends, his mentors. He will move among them as their hero the many long years of his life.
The legacy he is imagining has less to do with political parties than with cocktail parties.
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