Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 210

credit, blame, and the unrewindable tape

Most political discourse is epideictic, which is to say, it’s about credit and blame. For instance, whenever we get an economic downturn in this country, the party not in the White House will blame the President, and the President and his supporters will blame his predecessor, whose bad policies have finally come home to roost, or a recalcitrant Congress, or bad judicial decisions, or whatever. If there’s an economic upturn, the President will take the credit, while his detractors will insist that he is merely benefitting from the wise decisions of his predecessor. 

The problem with these disputes is that they are almost always irresolvable, and they’re irresolvable for two reasons. The first is that political and economic circumstances are so immensely complex, with so many forces mutually interacting, that it is simply impossible to know which ones have the greatest influence. And our inability to understand that complexity is related to a second factor: we can’t rewind the tape of history. We don’t know what would have happened if the former President had pursued policies similar to those of the current President, or if some particular judicial decision had gone the other way, or if Congress had passed the bill that the President wanted to have passed. Understanding how our ungoverned and ungovernable world works is not something we can do in laboratory conditions; controlled experiments are, and always will be, beyond our capabilities.  

But political partisans don’t understand these factors, or refuse to consider them. They construct explanatory schemes that reinforce their political preferences, and then decry all alternative explanations as fake news. And this behavior will continue no matter what Facebook does to monitor the factual status of political statements on its platform. 

teachers at the margins

Lisa Marchiano, a psychoanalyst, describing her encounter with a student who had a “panic attack” during an exam and didn’t want to take any more exams:

I asked this young patient of mine what in fact had happened during the first exam. She responded again, I had a panic attack. I lightly pressed her to move beyond the jargon and tell me about her actual experience as she took the exam. Eventually, she was able to tell me that, as the papers were being handed out, she become flushed and light-headed. Her heart was pounding, and her hands felt clammy. What happened then? I asked. She felt like running out of the room, but she was able to calm herself down enough to take the test. Though she successfully completed the first exam — and did okay on it — the fear that she might have another “panic attack” had prevented her from attempting the second exam.

What had happened here? One way of understanding this young person’s experience is indeed that she had had a limited-symptom panic attack. According to the diagnostic criteria for panic attacks in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a limited-symptom panic attack can be diagnosed based on a pounding heart, sweating, and shaking. Of course, as anyone knows who has ever taken an exam, performed in front of an audience, or asked someone they like out on a date, these are in fact utterly normal reactions to feeling nervous. I gently attempted to reflect this back to my young patient. “So you were nervous about taking the exam, but you didn’t run out of the room. You did it. You pushed through the fear feelings.” I wanted her to see this as a success, one that she could build on, that could help alter her stuck story that tells her she is too anxious to function adequately. Her response to my positive reframing was telling. She looked up at me from under her brows and held my gaze. “Yes,” she responded firmly. “But I had a panic attack.”

Reflecting on this experience, Marchiano raises a key issue: “I found myself wondering where she had learned that she ought not to be expected to tolerate ordinary distress or discomfort. How have we come to the point where we believe that emotional disquiet will cause harm, that we ought to be soothed and tranquil at all times?”

Some years ago I had a student — I’ll call her M — who came to me and said that she could no longer take the reading quizzes that I give at the beginning of many classes. If she had to take them, she preferred to do so in the office on campus that deals with students who have disabilities, even if that meant missing most or all of my classes. And M clearly, though in no way angrily or aggressively, expected that I would do as she preferred.

I ended up talking with the case worker assigned to M, and the case worker told me that M was anxious about not having time to finish the quizzes, and, further, that M had problems, not to be disclosed to me, that made it necessary for me to accommodate her preferences.

Several elements of this situation puzzled me. First, M was usually among the first to complete her quizzes. Second, she had the highest quiz average in the class, and it wasn’t even close. Third, her very intelligent contributions to class discussions about the quizzes added significantly to the value of our class time. And fourth: those facts, and my observations, had absolutely no bearing on the expectations my university had for me. M’s feelings and preferences, as interpreted by her case worker, were all that mattered — I was strongly discouraged from sharing with M any of my thoughts, no matter how positive.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I agreed to make any accommodation necessary. But M kept coming to class, kept taking the quizzes, and kept excelling in them. Why she didn’t follow through on her request I can’t say. Maybe her knowledge that I would do what she wanted was enough to relieve the pressure the had been feeling.

I’m glad M stayed in class, and that there was a peaceful resolution to the situation, but the whole sequence of events troubled me then and troubles me now. The first, and larger, problem is that we’re now in a moment at which any attempt to resist the pathologizing of perfectly ordinary experiences of nervousness or uncertainty is tagged as indifference (at best) or cruelty (at worst). To encourage students to believe that they can overcome their anxieties is, it appears, now a form of abuse.

And second — perhaps not as important but still significant to me — there is the marginalization of the teacher-student relationship. It was made very clear to me that the case worker — who had never been in my class, who had never observed either M or me — could dictate the response to M’s concerns. I didn’t push back, because I didn’t want to bring any further anxiety to a student who was already anxious, but I wonder what would have happened if I had insisted that my own view of the matter, which was after all backed by some experience, should be taken into account.

More seriously, it seemed to me that the case worker was constructing, or allowing M to construct, a narrative in which I was M’s antagonist and it was the case worker’s job to intervene to assist M in her struggle against her antagonist. The idea that I might be on M’s side and want to help her, and indeed should, as part of my job, help her was never considered.

The work done by the “bias prevention units” or “diversity offices” that have proliferated in many universities might seem to be a very different phenomenon, but that work has a similar effect on the relationship between teachers and students. A key premise — often unstated but sometimes quite explicit — of such administrative offices is that faculty are often the enemies of diversity and the perpetrators of bias, and therefore these programs must step in to correct the injustices inherent in the system. Again the faculty member is cast as the students’ antagonist, or at least as a possible antagonist. I do not know of any circumstances in which the “learnings” or “training modules” produced by these offices — which are often mandatory for all students — have received any faculty input, though I suppose some faculty may occasionally be involved. The “learnings” seem to be designed to emphasize the untrustworthiness of teachers.

I think students in general have a pretty good grasp of these dynamics. My observations suggest that disgruntled students these days rarely take their complaints to department chairs or deans, but rather to these amorphous “offices” which exist independently of the faculty structure and are typically empowered by the university to impose decisions without consulting anyone in that faculty structure.

I also think that this way of doing our academic business exacerbates, quite dramatically, one of the worst features of academic life, which is its legalism. Knowing that they are being overseen by these distant and almost invisible “offices,” faculty end up writing more and more detailed syllabuses, working to close every possible loophole which might be exploited by students to get what they want even when, from the faculty point of view, they don’t deserve it. And the more desperately faculty look to close such loopholes, the more the students search for them. It’s no way to run a university — at least if the university cares about learning.

There were certainly flaws in the old way of doing these things, in which individual teachers almost certainly had too much power. But certain experiences of learning were possible in that system that the current, or emerging, system is rapidly making impossible. The marginalizing of the student-faculty relationship is not a good recipe for addressing those old flaws.

I just love this by the Rev. Sarah Condon.

I just love this by the Rev. Sarah Condon. 

what really matters in this vale of tears

iPadOS

iPadOS has rendered my iPad unusable, with a very strange combination of errors. For instance:

The screen freezes in many different apps, usually requiring the app to be quit and restarted, sometimes requiring the iPad to be rebooted
The Smart Keyboard Folio occasionally fails to connect to the iPad
When the Smart Keyboard Folio connects, sometimes it types in ALL CAPS and cannot be made to stop doing so without a reboot
All Bluetooth connections are inconsistent and unreliable
Some iCloud folders will not sync from other devices, even after days

I’ve used the iPad a lot over the past couple of years, despite the fact that it is a far less powerful and capable machine than a Mac. I have done so because it has been rock-sold stable and everything about it has Just Worked. Now it’s going in a drawer for a few months.

(Strangely enough, while everyone else has been having miseries with Catalina it has worked great for me: in particular, it seems to have fixed the Wi-fi and Bluetooth connectivity issues that have plagued my Macs for the past several OS X releases. Go figure.)

against lectures

At the very heart of the academy we find a series of genres — discursive genres, which are also genres of social interaction — the mastery of which constitutes, more or less, mastery of the academic profession itself. Some of these are universal: that is, they may be found in all academic work. Others are specific to certain disciplines or disciplinary families. Some of them are performed in relation to colleagues, others in relation to students. Here are a few that I, as a professor of humanities, have had to practice:

the classroom lecture
the “job talk” lecture
the invited public lecture
the short lecture that you give when you’re on a panel at a conference
the conference-panel discussion
the “Socratic” seminar discussion
the symposium based on a paper everyone is supposed to have read
the peer-reviewed article
the book review
the peer-reviewed monograph

Some of these wear, over several decades, better than others. Some I will probably never do again (the peer-reviewed article, the job talk); others I will be doing to the end of my career (the classroom discussion, the monograph). Some I enjoy, some … not so much.

But I have one definitive and unshakeable opinion: I never want to hear, or deliver, another lecture as long as I live.

For one thing, lectures are very, very hard to do well. I’ve surely heard more than a hundred public or semi-public lectures in my life, and only one of them has been excellent: when I was a grad student at UVA I heard Stephen Greenblatt deliver a lecture that later became his famous essay “Shakespeare and the Exorcists,” and it was electrifying. (I was sitting next to one of my professors, and at the end of the talk he leaned over and said to me, sotto voce, “Do you still have your wallet?”) Otherwise they have been not-crushingly-boring at best. And while I work hard to make my lectures vivid and interesting, I am always aware that there are better ways to accomplish what the lecture is supposed to accomplish.

The lecture is an unfortunate holdover from the pre-Gutenberg age. It makes no sense to have me come and talk to you on a subject in circumstances in which I could write something, send it to you, and have you read it and think about it, after which you could bring me to your institution for a conversation. That would be more intellectually productive for everyone concerned. Of course, one might reply that a lecture is not as polished as a finished, publishable essay or article. Indeed: that’s a major reason why lectures aren’t much fun to listen to. Better to embrace the tentative and unfinished character of your thoughts by having a conversation about them instead. 

It is true that fewer people can participate in such a conversation than can attend a lecture. But note the difference between “participate” and “attend.” Certain kinds of intellectual exchange simply do not scale. I truly believe that if, instead of asking me to deliver a lecture at your institution, you asked me to come prepared to talk with four different groups about my published work, or even my work-in-progress, the experience would be better for all of us. (And I would be much more likely to say yes, since I wouldn’t be committing myself to all those hours of lecture-writing — a problem for me, because my conscience won’t allow me to deliver the same lecture repeatedly at different places.) 

Well, one can hope. Or lose hope. But this I am sure of: When I am lying on my deathbed, I shall heave a breath and whisper to whoever is near, “Thank you, Lord. I shall never have to attend, or deliver, another lecture.” 

all fears unwarranted

Social Media Has Not Destroyed a Generation:

Anxiety and panic over the effects of new technology date back to Socrates, who bemoaned the then new tradition of writing things down for fear it would diminish the power of memory.

Well, it wasn’t Socrates, in was a character in a story he told, but anyway, was he wrong? 

Thomas Hobbes and Thomas Jefferson both warned that communal relationships would suffer as industrial societies moved from rural to urban living.

Were they wrong?

Radio, video games and even comic books have all caused consternation.

Was the consternation justified? 

Television was going to bring about the dumbing down of America.

Did it? 

This is encouraging by Adam Silver. Maybe that NBA League...

This is encouraging by Adam Silver. Maybe that NBA League Pass is not out of the question after all?

A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for ...

A couple of months ago I told my son that this year, for the first time, I would definitely be buying NBA League Pass. Now? No. I’m not standing on definitive principle; it’s simply that thinking about the league leaves a sour taste in my mouth. The two most important figures in the NBA, Adam Silver and LeBron James, have issued their warnings against the “consequences” of critiquing the Chinese regime. We now know that if Beijing rained bombs onto Hong Kong not one word of criticism would pass the lips of anyone in the NBA. And that’s not easy for me to forget.

where the USMNT is headed

Tom Dart: 

Since Berhalter’s appointment was announced last December there have been no results that exceeded expectations against good teams; there is currently no reason to believe that the US would be anything but makeweights at Qatar 2022, should they qualify. And there is a lack of clear evidence that the team is trending in the right direction, despite individual positives such as the continued improvement of the midfielder Weston McKennie. 

Yep.

Let’s all face certain facts about the USMNT:

Gregg Berhalter has no ideas. “Bring on Zardes to score a late goal” does not qualify as an idea.  
Weston McKennie is a good soccer player. Christian Pulisic is a decent soccer player. Zack Steffen is a fairly promising keeper. Josh Sargent may well be a good soccer player someday. Nobody else on the team is any good at all. (Michael Bradley now has the mobility of a cigar store Indian and should never get another cap for the USMNT.) 
None of them, coach or players, cares very much. They are, without exception, going through the motions, without energy or commitment. 
We are at least a decade away from the USMNT playing any significant role in world soccer, and even that statement is a gesture of blind faith and hope. Berhalter has to go, and almost the entire crop of current players should go as well. Maybe there are some 12-year-olds out there who will flip the script.

The plan that the national federation established when it hired Jurgen Klinsmann was the right one, even if it didn’t work out the way that everyone had hoped. That plan was to hire a coach who had succeeded at the highest level, who could challenge American players to develop their skills in the most rigorous conditions, and who could oversee a long-term player development program. Nothing short of all that will work. 

So wake me when this country has a soccer team. I won’t be holding my breath.

Also, if you set the over/under on Pulisic-to-the-MLS at 3 years, I’ll take the under.