Month: September 2009

In Which I Get Defensive About Princeton, Again; or, Ivy League Admissions from Across the Rubicon

I usually think Kevin Carey is really smart and spot-on when it comes to analyzing higher ed policy. And given the poor decisions Harvard has made recently in doing damage control on its endowment losses, I thought I would really appreciate his most recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education (you might need to have a subscription/be on a university network to access that link):

Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.

That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits.

I have my issues with the first paragraph, but I find the second one far more problematic. Carey states as fact that “the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process.” I know, I know, there’s been bestseller after bestseller that has attempted to demonstrate the extent to which Ivy League admissions are unfair to the earnest but non-connected student who just can’t get into Harvard because s/he doesn’t know people in power. I’m sorry, but that’s just not the case. You have to meet a basic standard of academic competence to be admitted to Harvard. Or Princeton. Or any of their peer institutions. I know, I know, George W. Bush, but since about the late ’80s family connections have begun to be far less of a point on which college admissions turn. If you’re worried about nepotism, you should be taking your concerns to politics or journalism and publishing, not colleges.

One phrase of Carey’s stands out to me—maybe, if you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve already figured out which phrase I’m referring to: yes, it’s “underqualified children of legacies.” First of all, that’s not the right phrasing: “legacies” are the children of alumni, so unless Carey’s referring to third-generation admits (and yes, they exist, but are no more dangerous than second-generation ones), he’s at least a little confused. But to make an actual point, alumni children are not de facto less qualified than other admits. In fact, if anything, they are likely to be a very academically well-qualified constituency: their parents received a very high-quality education. They probably went on to become middle-class, if they weren’t already. The children were probably raised with encouragement to academic pursuits. They probably had a certain number of environmental advantages.

You probably know that I’m the child of a Princeton alum. And I find the insinuation that I am less entitled to be here because my mother spent 10 years on this campus pretty insulting, frankly. I wouldn’t have lasted very long here if I couldn’t engage with my professors and my peers on a higher level, and I worked very hard both throughout high school and in the admissions process to get here. I find it very hard to believe that all this places me at some greater advantage, or suggests I’m less qualified to be here, than the kid whose parents also both have graduate degrees, but got them from different universities than mine did. If there’s anything that places me at a disadvantage here at Princeton, it’s the fact that I went to a crappy California public high school with no funding, while some of my peers went to excellent public or private schools. My friends who went to Andover or Exeter or Deerfield, or Stuyvesant or Bronx Science or Boston Latin, or even Princeton High School itself, had a better secondary education than I did. That’s a pretty big leg up. And so we all have our advantages and disadvantages, and we all come here with different skills and weaknesses. But to say that the fact that my mother was here 30 years ago gives me less right to be here today? That’s just plain unfair.

I don’t hide the fact that I’m the child of an alum partly because I don’t believe it’s something of which I should have to be ashamed, but also partly because I think that, now that I’m here—however I got here—it gives me an interesting perspective. Because I know a great deal about my mother’s experience here, I can see the contrast between my Princeton and my mother’s Princeton. I see how, in the intervening 30 years, my Princeton has become much more in-line with modern progressive America. And I see how my mother was a part, however small, in making that the case. If I didn’t want to further that legacy—if I didn’t want to do all I can to make Princeton the best possible social/cultural and academic environment—I wouldn’t think very highly of myself. There’s a way to say “legacy” without ritually spitting over your shoulder. Someone ought to tell Kevin Carey.

On Knowing; or, the NYT Lends Itself to Yet Another Personal Rant

In a sentiment that is hardly unusual, some New York Times readers express surprise that their children and other teenagers they know could possibly have any knowledge of their sexual orientation at such a young age:

My question is about the Q (Questioning) subgroup of L.G.B.T.Q. Youth.

Surely most teens will be in this group at least until they experience a “full” sexual relationship with another person?

[…]

Teen years are so full of doubt and confusion about self and identity. Teens are suggestible, peer pull is strong as is the desire to forge an interesting and individual social identity for themselves.

My concern is for all those teenagers experiencing doubt and sometimes a lot of hidden angst and silent but very real suffering in a world which is incredibly difficult to navigate at their age.

“Don’t worry, they will know if they are gay” is a standard answer. This may be true for adults who have had some experience, but is it really true for many teenagers? It seems too simplistic and inadequate. Any guidance and thoughts would be much appreciated.

I’ve heard this before, of course—I came out for the first time at 14, and over the past few years I’ve heard this many times. I mean, now I’m old enough and enough of a professional queer that folks don’t question the labels I assign myself or allow to be assigned to myself perhaps even as much as they should. But back in early high school, I heard things like this a lot. “You’re too young to know.” “Most teenagers go through a phase of same-sex attraction.” “You’ve never had a relationship.” Well, yes, the last two things were true. But facts B and C do not imply fact A. I don’t see, given the structure of our society, how you can possibly be too young to know.

Our society is very, very clear on what constitutes a normal or normative sexuality. I’m not too long out of high school, and I have friends and a sibling who are still there. I know that when teenagers ask each other “So… who do you like?” they expect you to answer with an opposite-sex name. I know that it is not easy to ask, and then take, a same-sex date to the school dance. I know that there is pressure after pressure, be they from students or parents or teachers or general cultural forces, to define heterosexuality as normal and all other sexualities as abnormal.

And so when you’re different, you know. Believe me. You see it if there is something powerfully and fundamentally (if amorphously) different about the way you interact with people both of the gender to whom you’re supposed to be interacted and the one to whom you’re not. You see it if there is something different about the way you understand and express your own gender. To teenagers, that line is very clear. You know if you’re not like your peers, just like you know when you don’t have the same stuff they do or talk the same way they do or have the same cultural values they do. The lines of difference are very strong in adolescent culture, as are the undercurrents of sexuality. If anything, it is more obvious that your understanding of sexuality is different from your peers, than any other contrast.

Literature shows us this, of course. I’ve read many memoirs—from men, mostly, because that’s what I read, but also because of how adolescent male sexuality is less repressed than and also homoerotic in a different way from female sexuality—in which the writers all say that they knew their queerness from the instant puberty set in. And even if they didn’t know any gay people, or if they were growing up before “gay” became a thing that you could be, they knew there was something different, something strange that made them not like their peers. It’s an undeniable fact of this entire genre, that you start in adolescence with this vague sense of not-belonging and go from there.

I’ve tried on many labels in the past five years. I’ve gone through bisexual and gay and queer and asexual and I don’t know what else. But it’s always been “different” and “other.” And sure, I envy anyone who can make it through adolescence without squirming in desperate confusion when yet another crowd at a lunch table or a birthday party asks, “So… who do you like?” But when you don’t know how to answer that question, or you fear to answer it honestly, you at least know, as I did. And you begin to construct an identity based on that knowledge, however old you are and however much sexual experience you’ve had.

(cross-posted)

QOTD (2009-09-28)

Rousseau, On the Social Contract, trans. Donald A. Cress:

In Europe there is still one country capable of receiving legislation. It is the island of Corsica. The valor and constancy with which this brave people has regained and defended its liberty would well merit having some wise man teaching them how to preserve it. I have a feeling that some day that little island will astonish Europe.

What a delightful non sequitur. Of course, then there was Napoleon, who probably came as close as anyone to putting Corsica on the map.

QOTD (2009-09-25)

Wikipedia can often be intriguingly and entertainingly blunt. On Chopin’s The Awakening:

Kate Chopin did not write another novel after The Awakening and had understandable difficulty in trying to publish stories after its publication.

That’s so blunt, so depressing, and so no-nonsense about the hostile attitude towards women writers at the turn of the 20th century. It’s even almost dismissive, though I presume whichever anonymous Wikipedia contributor wrote the sentence didn’t mean it that way. Women’s literature strikes me so much as a historical narrative of struggle (as a side note, I need to stop with this “historical narrative” thing. Someone accused me of Whiggishness the other day). And if there is anything particularly dispiriting about the struggle of a group with less power against a group with more, it’s that there is so often this assumption (even from the powerless group itself) that however hard they fight, it is not going to be possible to win. “Understandable difficulty”… what an assumption. What an assumption of hopelessness.

Heteronormativity, Again; or, The Experience of Reading Twilight

I may have mentioned to you by now, dear reader, that my English professor lectured this morning on Stephenie Meyer’s novel Twilight, and that our discussion section in the afternoon also dealt in large part with that book. I read it (okay, most of it) earlier this week, after spending the past few years trying to avoid doing just that. As I read the reviews of Twilight, its sequels, and the ensuing movie, I remained profoundly troubled by something amorphous about the way the series portrays its protagonist’s relationship to sexuality and to other non-sexual interpersonal reactions. When talking to others, I repeated the reviews’ sentiments: Bella (said protagonist) is not a real character; she’s just a conduit for desire. The books push pretty hard some themes about chastity, traditional notions of feminine motherhood, male chivalry, and other aspects of a conservative construction of gender, sexuality, and family. I said again and again, particularly when thinking of girls I know who are in the books’ target age range: is this the sort of universe, with the sort of values, that we want to encourage our girls and young women to take pleasure in?

Being asked to take the books seriously for class this week, and to consider them as a work of literature and a social statement, did revise how I thought about them. Actually reading them did, too. My impression of Bella is not entirely that she is a conduit for male desire: in fact, her identity as a shy know-it-all, who becomes obsessed with not just Edward’s charm, but a smartness and quickness that can match her own, came perilously close to echoing my own adolescent experience. In fact, I became profoundly uncomfortable with just how much I could recognize my own teenage fetishization of that one kid in my classes whose maturity, exoticism, eccentricity, and wit would always stand out to me. The knowledge that I might have been like that, like the Bella the reviews demonized, was enough to make me stop reading at points.

By contrast, when my professor lectured this morning, I hung onto every word (she is such a brilliant woman). She had some interesting things to say about how race and class are represented in Twilight, but what really grabbed me (of course) was her discussion of sexuality. She dwelt on the way that bodily fluids and bloodletting play out in this novel about vampires: Twilight dwells on childbirth, but there is no mention of menstruation (which you would think would be a pertinent issue in a universe where blood is something of a sexual stimulant). My professor discussed moments of defloration, comparing Bella’s impregnation to the point at which she is turned into a vampire. She brought up a very interesting and kind of disconcerting point about what Bella’s “change” into a vampire could be saying about menopause and the loss of fertility. And, she said, Twilight is oddly hygienic, for a universe that should revolve around blood. There are no sexually transmitted diseases in Twilight—a fact that stuck out to me for the reasons this blog probably demonstrates. There is no threat of AIDS.

My professor went on to talk about the polymorphous perversity (best phrase EVAR) of vampiric sexuality, its infantile nature, the inherent necrophilia in loving a vampire (which Meyer describes as “a walking corpse”), the oral sadism of the vampire’s bite. But, of course, there is no homosexuality in Twilight. Despite the obvious ambiguity of Edward’s sexual appeal, there are no gay couples in Forks, WA. There are no explicitly gay vampires. Bella herself doesn’t experience same-sex attraction. My professor suggested (and I thought this was really interesting) that closeting a standard social construction of homosexuality and gayness in the Twilight world allows Meyer to be freer with the polymorphous perversity, and with the other transgressive aspects of vampiric sexuality.

But I still feel as if the degree to which key aspects of sexuality are omitted from Twilight problematizes the aspects which are left in. And that’s consoling, in a way, because it means I don’t have to fear relating entirely to Bella and her experience of sexual awakening. Bella has no crisis of sexual identity. Neither do her vampire friends and lovers (but maybe that’s just because they’ve had hundreds of years to construct an identity). There are no labels in Twilight. There are no communities of sexuality. And when my class was discussing this series of books, and some folks in my class were talking about how much they could identify with Bella, I didn’t—entirely—feel as if I could contribute. For all that it confuses clear-cut sexualities; for all that it builds upon and complicates our traditional notion of the innocent love story, it is still profoundly and aggressively heteronormative. It excludes those who acknowledge anti-heteronormativity, and only includes those for whom transgressive sexuality unravels along with the thread of Meyer’s plot by the time the fourth book comes along.

Some of my fears about what this book says about our culture were allayed by reading it. I think I might moderate my ranting against it from here on out. But in other ways, I’m still very confused and somewhat disconcerted by what aspects of human sexuality Stephenie Meyer has chosen to put in, and what she has chosen to leave out.

(cross-posted)

Course schedule

Every semester I try to give you every opportunity I can to allow you to stalk me. Here’s what I’m taking (and doing) this semester, and when:

schedule

There’s actually one precept waiting to be included that will drastically shorten the length of my Thursday lunchtime, but c’est la vie.

In Which Rachel Maddow and I Have Something in Common

Jason Mattera (of kicking your faithful correspondent out of the Young America’s Foundation conference fame) didn’t limit his comments about his political opponents’ physical appearance to the Campus Progress editorial intern with a relative lack of power or social capital who wanted to cover his conference this past summer. He also thinks he’s going to win back conservatism’s power by making remarks about the appearance of one of the most popular news hosts on TV, as Sarah Posner reported on Monday:

But targeting Millennials through pro-life appeals mixes sexuality with chastity. During the panel, Mattera took the David and Goliath metaphor another perverse step: If conservatives (David) smite liberals (Goliath), they will be rewarded with the hot conservative women, just like King Saul promised his daughter to the warrior who slew the evil giant. “You know his daughter must have been beautiful because there’s no guy whose gonna die for an ugly girl,” Mattera chortled. “Our women are hot. We have Michelle Malkin. Who does the left have, Rachel Maddow? Sorry, I prefer that my women not look like dudes.”

Mattera, who doesn’t seem to see the inherent problem with criticizing women’s appearances instead of their ideas, responded on his blog:

Okay, okay. I’ll admit it: Not all lib women look like dudes. I’m sure there are some who don’t. Maybe. But folks, can we at least agree on Rachel Maddow? Some bipartisanship, people?

Posner refers to the college activism panel that I participated in at Family Research Council’s conference over the weekend. What did hot women have to do with my talk? Not much, actually, despite Posner making it the basis of her piece. It was just a casual reference—me noting that even if I weren’t an activist, I’d probably still wander to the conservative camp because our women don’t look like the picture [of Maddow] above.

Rachel Maddow is an extraordinarily talented and successful woman, and it’s not too often that I get to be in the same category as her, so I’m sort of perversely excited that Mattera thinks I’m as worth calling a guy as Maddow. Seriously guys, I’m milking this for all it’s worth.

But what I find interesting and puzzling about folks’ reaction as I’ve told them about this is how eager they’ve been to assure me that Ms. Maddow is incredibly attractive, or that conservative women aren’t attractive, or to insinuate that the fact that Mattera put me in the same category as Maddow says something good about my physical appearance. I’m interested and puzzled because I would have thought the answer to this would be to challenge Mattera’s (and the conservative movement’s) sexism. This conversation shouldn’t be about which side of the aisle has the nicer-looking women. This has nothing to do with “Newsflash! Dykes can be hot too!” This has to do with the fact that we all—Maddow, Mattera, myself, Michelle Malkin, and everyone—should be judged on the basis of our ideas, not our appearances.

I think there are plenty of interesting things to be said about how confused the conservative movement (as represented by Mattera) seems to be about engaging with women on an intellectual level. Mattera seems rather challenged by the notion that women could contribute more than their appearances to the political sphere, and doesn’t even address the ideas of the women on his own side. It’s as if we’re mascots in his universe, and that speaks volumes about what his universe consists of and how he interacts with it. That’s a social phenomenon we could analyze at great length if we wanted to.

But I really have too many other papers to write to bother with unpacking that one, and I think maybe our time could be better served in the long run by not letting Mattera make this a discussion about physical attributes. Yes, it can sometimes be challenging to sit there and watch someone make sexist and implicitly homophobic comments about you, without challenging him on his premise. But if we don’t void the premise entirely, we’re not going to get anywhere. I think I’m going to focus on hoping that one day Rachel Maddow and I will have something in common that isn’t the length of our haircuts.

UPDATE: Ironically, Maddow has one of the best summing-ups of this whole “conservative movement” thing.

(cross-posted)

A Discourse Concerning Being a Generalist

I’m doing my first reading for my first class to really examine the Great Thinkers of Western Civilization, which, because the class is about political theory, happens to be Rousseau’s Discourse Concerning Inequality. The reading list consists of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, and I’m struck as I read Rousseau how contingent developing any type of theory about the nature of human existence is contingent on having a really broad general intellectual knowledge. This was particularly true in the 18th century, when “natural philosophy” hadn’t yet wholly split off into the natural sciences and philosophy, and these two branches hadn’t yet split into the present sorts of disciplines you can major in at your average American research university. I’m sitting here thinking that my political theory reading could easily be relevant to my anthropology class on human evolution as well, and while it’s awesome when it’s not just my departmentals that inform upon each other, but my other random classes as well, it’s probably more interesting to consider what this brings to bear upon the Era of the Academic Hyperspecialization.

The education press is full, of course, of discussion of the fact that academia these days is highly specialized. It’s common to see folks complaining at Inside Higher Ed that newly-minted PhDs come out of grad school so much trained to think solely about a postcolonial reading of the work of an obscure Jamaican author or the role of a single gene on the X chromosome that they’re ill-prepared to teach undergraduate survey courses for which there’s the highest need, like 20th Century American Literature or Intro to Evolutionary Biology. This is particularly a concern in an era in which more and more newly-minted PhDs will not get jobs at places like Princeton which are looking for theorists with an expertise in Caribbean literature or high-powered researchers who can benefit from well-funded lab facilities. Those kinds of jobs simply don’t exist, and instead what the profession is looking for are people who can take on a 6/6 load of intro-level courses and teach them all well. But we know all this. And what, exactly, does it have to do with Rousseau, who never had to adjunct a semester in his life?

There’s probably very little relationship behind the kind of generalist Rousseau (or, to pick a more modern-day example for the sake of demonstrating diversity, Foucault) was and the kind of generalist a community-college job posting expects you to be. One is an essentially elite category (according to society’s measure of these things), and the other isn’t. One can often seem entirely devoted to appearing completely incomprehensible, and one is entirely devoted to making academic subject matter comprehensible—frequently to an audience not used to deciphering incomprehensible things. But the intellectual development of our culture wouldn’t get very far without people who are capable of synthesizing all its disparate aspects—whether that be a Rousseau drawing on what we would term the disciplines of history, politics, philosophy, anthropology, biology, sociology, and maybe something like cultural studies to advance a complex diagramming of the nature of human interaction; or a skilled teachers who can make American literature relevant to the stay-at-home mom taking a night class and biology accessible to the business major who needs to pass a science requirement, neither of whom has any particular humanistic background or inclination. A generalist who can understand why and how Rousseau can impact the life and worldview of a student who sees no point in politics or philosophy or cultural and social theory is as necessary to our intellectual culture as the transdisciplinary vision of Rousseau himself.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we have no business locking ourselves in the ivory tower if we can’t poke our heads out every once in a while to inform the discourse of reality as well.

(cross-posted)

In Which I Lose My Patience; or, The Princeton Social Scene, Continued

Yes, I (very clearly) enjoy two-clause post titles. At this point, I think you’ll just have to cope.

The Princeton University Press Club is a long-standing institution that has made the names of more than a few professional journalists. They have a slightly less long-standing blog which occasionally picks up an interesting story not covered by the Prince, but which more often than not is really quite fatuous. I’m sure all the writers are solid reporters for the local, state, and national papers where they string/intern, but on the blog, quite a lot of them are frequently guilty of either not understanding snark or of assuming that everyone on campus comes from a privileged background and thus fits totally seamlessly into a dominant culture that further privileges privilege. The most recent offender, wherein the author argues that Princeton’s twice-yearly bacchanalic prepfest isn’t alienating at all:

Lawnparties was never really about the band. It’s a wonderfully weird celebration of Princeton, honoring both what it is and what it could be.

Yes, Lawnparties is an anthem to the Princeton stereotype – loud music, louder pants, drinking before 10 a.m., and preppy bacchanalia. But it’s not just day drinking that makes Lawnparties a special day.

For all its elitist trappings, Lawnparties is Princeton’s egalitarian party. For one day, it doesn’t matter who you know, or what club you’re in. For one day, the bouncers don’t care if you’re on the list, or have two salmon passes. If you go to Princeton, for one day the eating club lawns are your lawns. Seniors and freshman stand shoulder to shoulder in the sun, drinking warm champagne and rocking out to Journey.

The writer of this post, of course, misses the key point that letting anyone listen to a band in the backyard of a usually-exclusive bicker club is only an act of egalitarianism if someone who is usually barred admission from said bicker club fits well enough into the culture to feel welcome there once admitted. Thinking this while reading, I got frustrated enough to comment on the post:

Egalitarian? Since when? Lawnparties elides the stratification between bicker and sign-in, between the haves and have-mores, the populars and the more-populars. But it doesn’t do anything to include people who don’t own a single pastel Lacoste polo or sundress, who don’t like to get shitfaced, or who for a variety of other reasons are just disgusted, not entertained, by the preppy Ivy League stereotype. Believe it or not, 30% of this university’s juniors and seniors aren’t in an eating club. And for many of them, all the clubs could be on PUID and they’d still feel like losers and outcasts. For some of them, Lawnparties is an excuse to go out of town for the weekend, or else an insufferably hot weekend spent indoors with all the windows shut, trying to drown out the sounds of someone else’s party to which, supposed “egalitarian” nature aside, it’s still perfectly clear that those who don’t conform aren’t invited.

Last spring, I went and sat in the basement of the library to work during Lawnparties afternoon, knowing that I would feel awkward and miserable and outcast if I dressed up and went down to Prospect Avenue to stand in a yard getting drunk, but also knowing that if I could hear the strains of Lawnparties music from my room, I would be so tortured by my outcast status that I’d be unable to work. This past weekend, a trip I’d planned happily coincided with Lawnparties weekend, so that I didn’t have to watch debauchery going on all around me to which I am implicitly not invited. Instead, two friends and I high-tailed it to Rhode Island to visit another friend, and I had perhaps one of the best weekends of my life. (While I am given to hyperbole, this is not hyperbole. At all.)

If it hadn’t been for Princeton, I wouldn’t have met the friend I was going to visit, nor the friends I made the trip with. If it hadn’t been for Princeton, I wouldn’t have managed to parachute into a subculture that isn’t interested in what the rest of Princeton is doing Lawnparties weekend. This school has a lot screwed up with its culture, but it also gives you the tools to subvert that culture, the resources to make your own choices, and of course some of the best academics in the world that you can take solace in whenever (if you’re like me) your essential state as a loner can get just a little too depressing. And that’s why I’m a Princeton evangelist, and why I care enough about Princeton to invest my time and efforts in making it a place where I and people like me are as much at home as the people who feel like Lawnparties is the great equalizer.

But for all that to work, the people who feel like Lawnparties is the great equalizer need to realize that although they are the dominant force in Princeton social life, they are not the only force. They need to realize whom they’re alienating and whose insecurities they’re reinforcing. They need to recognize that they speak for a world of privilege and social posturing that is inaccessible, undesirable, or flat-out disgusting to a lot of people with whom they share a campus.

And with that, it’s back to work: I have to read Rousseau’s Discourse Concerning Inequality for tomorrow.