Social Text is a post-modernist humanities journal published at Duke, perhaps best remembered for its gullibility in the hilarious hoax perpetrated on it by physicist Alan Sokal in 1996. (His article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was purposefully written as nonsense, but the editors fell for it.)
An article soon to be published there by University of Minnesota English professor Ellen Messer-Davidow is also nonsense, but of the unwitting, unpurposeful variety. (This is an advance copy, pointed to by an article about it today in the Chronicle of Higher Education.)
Reading an article in Social Text, at least this one, suggests that a much better title would be Anti-Social Text. Ms. Messer-Davidow, for example, attempting to explain our “arriving at the conservative conjuncture” in the period of “late capitalist dynamics,” criticizes “the conservative bloc” for its effort to “instrumentalize academic institutions for their own purposes.” And all that was in the first page or two.
Aside from the pretentiously turgid language, the article is a fairly conventional diatribe against conservative opposition to affirmative action, etc. One of Ms. Messer-Davidow’s errors, however, is significant, and interesting.
The conservative movement’s organized assault on affirmative action went public around 1990 when the DOE withdrew its support of minority targeted scholarships as a measure that opened higher education to excluded groups and a federal court ruled on Podberesky v. Kirwan, crafted by the Washington Legal Foundation for Daniel Podberesky, a white student who challenged the University of Maryland’s Banneker program for awarding merit-based scholarships to deserving African American students.
I’ve referred to Podberesky several times, most recently here. Ms. Messer-Davidow describes Daniel Podberesky, the plaintiff, as “a white student,” but if she had read the Fourth Circuit opinion, or other commentary about the case, she would have known, as Judge Widener wrote at the beginning of his majority opinion, that
Podberesky is Hispanic; he was therefore ineligible for consideration under the Banneker Program, although he met the academic and all other requirements for consideration.
Maybe Ms. Messer-Davidow has no problem with Hispanics being excluded from a state benefit because of their race or ethnicity. She can certainly have no principled objection, since much of her article is a heated defense of “race-sensitive” and “racially targeted” programs that exclude many varieties of people on the basis of their race or ethnicity.
Along the way, Ms. Messer-Davidow makes an entirely conventional, even criticism
Policies that limit the access of low-income and racial-minority students will trap the growing underclass in poverty and turn back the clock on the centurylong struggle to democratize higher education. [Emphasis added]
This tiresome cliché, a staple of “progressives,” implies that all change is in the right direction. It isn’t. Indeed, as I’ve just had occasion to note (in this comment to this post), whenever “progress” has been in the wrong direction, “rolling back the clock” is the right thing to do. When your hard drive has become corrupted with viruses (as our civil rights policies have become corrupted by racial preferences), “rolling back the clock” by restoring a clean, virus-free backup of an earlier version is the only sensible thing to do.
Doesn’t Ms. Messer-Davidow realize that by “turning back the clock” we actually gain something valuable? When we set clocks “ahead” for Daylight Savings Time we lose an hour and in the fall when we “turn clocks back” we are gaining an hour of time. It seems that all right-thinking people would be in favor of gaining an hour rather than losing an hour.
There ought to be legislation against the abuse of metaphors.
God, what prose! I waded through the whole thing, though admittedly by the end I was skimming. One interesting nugget is in the second graf:
Not only do these [“conservative bloc” — surely that demands caps, like “Israel Lobby”?] initiatives make it difficult for academic institutions to achieve the diversity by class, race, and nationality that brings different experiences to bear on research, on student learning inside and outside the classroom, and on the nature of democratic society […]
Now, this is the first mention I’ve seen in the (ahem) “progressive” end of the spectrum of diversity of nationality in academia as a desideratum. I’ve brought the subject up a few times myself, because it’s obvious that if diversity of perspective and life experience really are important to higher education, one way of boosting is obviously to give preference to people born and (ideally) raised in other countries — i.e., to discriminate against native-born citizens in favor of immigrants and/or students from other countries here on student visas.
Naturally, I went through the article expecting to see some evidence that a university had tried something like this, only to be thwarted by the insidious “bloc.” Nope. The only reference to nationality I could find was a passage about English proficiency testing, not for academia but for such things as driver’s license tests. Now, even there I think that demanding some English proficiency makes, dare I say it, a certain amount of sense, given how quickly a car can become a lethal projectile merely because someone has misread a road sign. But academia? If you can’t read, write, and understand English at the level you’re likely to encounter in an American college classroom, you do not belong there, and you will be contributing to the classroom’s “diversity” principally by reinforcing whatever clueless-foreigner stereotypes were already floating around Or generating new ones.
Re Podberesky, I am sorry to say that the lady probably assumed that no one named Podberesky could be Hispanic, any more than, say, “A. Fujimori” could be Hispanic. People are so eager to leap to conclusions based on externals. They used to call that “prejudice.”
(That said, “Hispanic” is not a race, and isn’t incompatible with “white.” It’s possible that calling Podberesky “white” was correct [insofar as any racial designation can be], just evasive. I doubt it, though, because she makes much of the “wedge strategy” or whatever involved in both the Michigan plaintiffs being female.)
Incidentally, one of Messer-Davidow’s footnotes says that Jeb Bush “banned affirmative action in Florida.” What, all by himself? Everywhere?
The word “progressive” is one of the more problematic terms I’ve ever encountered.
Progressives are supposed, of course, to be on the right side of the future. Unfortunately, the progressive faith is yet another attempt to rename Marxism, the great failed God of the 20th century.
So, in the 19th century, the “progressives” were announcing that they were duly annointed standard bearers of the future. The Bolsheviks proclaimed the era of the “new man” in the 1920s. Back then, the progressives didn’t attempt to disguise their Marxism. Then, along came Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and all the other tyrants. You’d think that this would lead to a renunciation of the faith.
But, no… the problem, we are told again and again is that we just haven’t implemented the religion properly. Capitalism, which seems to work in practice, is offensive as theory. Marxism, which routinely produces poverty, despotism and genocide, doesn’t work in practice, but it’s a great theory. And, it’s the wave of the future!
Funny thing about English teachers: They are the crappiest writers, and they invariably presume to pompously lecture others about fields they obviously know absolutely about. What kind of psychological insecurity underpins that?