I kind of dig this Trilling fellow. Look what he says about the reason why material objects should not be despised:

The very stupidity of things has something human about it, something meliorative, something even liberating. Together with the stupidity of the old unthinking virtues it stands against the ultimate and absolute power which the unconditioned idea can develop.

I’m not sure we have gained all that much by relinquishing the free and beautiful literary criticism of the 1950s in favor if the highly formalized 15-footnotes-to-a-page approach of today.

I know I just made myself a pariah among my colleagues when I said I don’t hate Trilling but I can’t help it, I do enjoy his writing.

“The personal claim to an historical guilt yields but an ambiguous principle of personal behavior, a still more ambiguous basis of thought.”

– Lionel Trilling.

So what would you say about a group of academics who for no particular reason and in the absence of any pressure whatsoever voted to amend their college’s operational papers to give an administrator the power to veto any decision they make for their departments?

I think they are doing this on purpose. The more they self-sabotage, the greater chance they will have to write weepy “This Job Can Kill You” posts.

I’m very very annoyed right now. We waste our time on organizing committees, voting, making decisions only to be vetoed by the administration with zero explanation given. And the only reason this can happen is because we voted for it.

My analyst told me that his analyst had a client in the 1950s who tried to conceal his past for a few sessions. Then he finally confessed that he had been a guard at Treblinka. After this, there was nothing left to discuss in the sessions because there is no dialogue possible about this. What is there to discuss? So the analyst and the patient sat in silence for the next several sessions. The analyst said it cost him at least a decade of his own life to keep sitting in the same room with this animal. But he felt he had to do it to give the former guard an opportunity to face in silence the horror that he was and that he had done.

Human beings do not debate the Holocaust. And those who think there is room for discussion here should sit in silence and face the monster inside.

Of course, the well-researched, nuanced article I linked in my preceding post will never go viral. Nobody is interested in long, detailed analytical pieces. Snappy soundbites are in vogue.

The article about Vojtko that did go viral was built around a fake outrage over her making 3 times less than a tenured professor. The pesky reality that Vojtko did not have a PhD and hence wasn’t qualified for a tenure-track position was too boring to be explored. Vojtko’s mental illness that prevented her from engaging in any meaningful form of research and service was not mentioned in the viral piece either. The suffering of the students who, instead of being taught French, were being subjected to hate speech in the classroom was of no interest of anybody. There was cheap outrage to be stoked and easy popularity to be gained, so nobody cared about facts. 

What is even more appalling is that, yet again, academia was blamed for what is supposed to be the duty of the state. Universities should not be attacked for not providing a social safety net for the disabled, the mnetally ill, the elderly, etc. We have a state that takes our taxes and polices us all day and every day. It is time we demanded that some of that money and effort went to taking care of the most vulnerable members of our society.

It is easy, popular and profitable to bash academia. Resisting this trend and realizing that the very forces responsible for destroying the welfare state are now invested into destroying higher education seems sadly out of reach for many academics.

When Margaret Mary Vojtko, an adjunct ad Duquesne University, died in poverty at the age of 83, she immediately became a celebrity among academics. Nobody cared about who she was as a person, of course. Nobody was willing to grant her reality a second of one’s time. There was a point academics wanted to make, and Margaret Mary Vojtko came in very useful for that purpose. She also allowed many of them to engage in their most favorite activity in the world: wallowing in self-pity and producing apocalyptic speeches. Posts of the “This Job Will Kill You” variety proliferated. Weepy chest-thumping continued for as long as Vojtko’s corpse could be squeezed for self-pitying juice. Then, everybody moved on to another fad in the genre of self-aggrandizing screeds.

Finally, however, a journalist decided that Vojtko deserved to be treated as an actual human being and not as a prop for other people’s exercises in rhetoric. She went to Vojtko’s hometown to research her life and discovered that Vojtko was not even remotely the abused and exploited adjunct of popular outrage. She was a religious fanatic who believed it was her duty to expose students to her homophobic and slut-shaming rants. She was also a mentally ill person who worked on her dissertation for 40+ years, hoarded immense quantities of junk, and refused all help from concerned colleagues and neighbors. As Vojtko’s mental illness progressed and her behavior grew so erratic that the university could no longer pretend everything was fine, her department started cutting her teaching load. Here is the article on Vojtko in case you are interested in learning the truth behind the hype.

Margaret Mary Vojtko was, indeed, exploited. But the people who exploited her are not located at Duquesne University. Duquesne put its pedagogic and academic integrity on the line when it employed a mentally disturbed person to the detriment of students and educators. Vojtko’s real exploitation was at the hands of people who used her death to attract traffic to their blogs and scratch their self-pitying itch.

The problems of mentally ill people who resist all efforts to help are an important issue that needs to be discussed. I hope that everybody who was creating weepy hash-tags and writing tragic posts will still have enough interest in Vojtko to discuss this subject even after she lost her usefulness for their exercises in self-importance.

I have gotten my analyst so interested in the subject of my research that now he is reading up a storm on the subject of the Spanish Civil War. Now let’s see if I can get the dentist to join the club.

What started as a discussion among my colleagues of whether it is possible to teach writing skills online degenerated into meaningless screeds about the university needing to adapt to “the free markets”, the burning necessity of teaching entrepreneurship in college*, and the suggestions that professors of Chemistry and Biology can teach writing and public speaking as well as profs of English and Philosophy with the implication that it’s time to get rid of the useless Humanities altogether.

* Yeah, whatever, I have no idea how you can teach it either and I believe nobody does.

Sorry, I’m on the run, so posts come out all choppy.

The little girl whose parents are trying to teach her to eat better is called Erela Yashiv. I’ve got to wonder whether there are really no Johnny Smiths and Jenny Peterses using this service and a little girl with a very Jewish name absolutely had to be featured in this article. I guess the stories about vicious Jews exploiting good, honest, microwave-loving proletarians will never get out of fashion.

Here is what happened and got crowds of people into a tizzy:

A wealthy Manhattanite couple feared that their 5-year-old child, Erela, was not receiving a sufficiently refined palate from her hired nanny, who, being “from Wisconsin, does not always know the difference between quinoa and couscous.” So they hired a new service that trains nannies of the well-to-do in the shopping and food preparation that their employers would prefer.

Of course, these parents are to be commended for doing something really great and valuable for their kid. My class on food vocabulary flopped because my students couldn’t name any food (in English) other than chicken.

I have noticed that Americans tend to get very upset when somebody mentions that the quality of food sold in fast-food joints and supermarkets is very bad and might something to do with the horrible rates of obesity in this country. You can criticize anything but mention food and people get very upset. Still, the degree of outrage* over what these great and enlightened parents are doing is such that I have to conclude that something else is at play. And the answer is obvious: it’s sexism that drives the anger against this couple. Many people still cannot stomach the idea that a woman works and makes very good money so they have to persecute and  police her. They can’t confess to their sexism outright, of course, so they hide it behind some completely fake concern over the fate of the nanny who is somehow supposed to suffer horribly from gaining a new skill set that will enhance both her professional and personal existence.

* Famous people openly suggest that these parents should be murdered for trying to teach their kid to eat better. Seriously, just take a look here.