One of the most disconnected accusations the right makes about higher ed is that faculty "indoctrinates" students into leftist ideas.
Certainly, lots of institutions are ideologically homogenous-- if I had to guess, there were more post-transition transgender students on campus at Swarthmore when I was there than there were people I knew that I would guess voted for Trump in 2016. But that comes about because it was a self-selecting, very left-leaning student body. In my four years, my politics, to the extent I had them when I enrolled, moved to the right. Not because I became a right winger, but because I came in quite left wing, and my professors, while with a few exceptions almost certainly not conservatives, regularly and routinely assigned and grappled seriously with conservative views and ideas.
Certainly, they weren't assigning Ayn Rand (not because of her politics, but because her writing is very unserious), but they also weren't assigning Noam Chomsky (at least not in the political science department). To the extent right wingers have a complaint about academia's "liberal bias," it's that it doesn't assign their canon. But the issue with their canon, again, isn't that it's right wing-- it's that it's unserious and doesn't meet academic standards.
I once got hit by a right-wing content farm that was doing the usual "look how ridiculous these left-wing courses are" based on titles in course catalogs, so the intern assigned to the piece picked up on my course The Whole Enchilada and assumed it was a history of Mexican food. Instead, it's a course on world history as a genre of writing and the readings included Genesis, The Muqadimmah, Spengler's Decline of the West, Fukuyama's The End of History and excerpts from Will and Ariel Durant. So I enjoyed that, but it was also a pretty typical way for them to operate (and still is).
This essay was so beautiful! My mother is a sociologist, and this reminds me of hearing her talk about her own influences and about the various strands she's woven into her own work. I think there is something deeply honorable and interesting and useful in American academia, and although lots of things are wrong with it, there is definitely a way in which it has worked and has produced useful and good knowledge!
"... Scott and Popkin were having arguments about the relative explanatory value of cultural particularism versus universal methodological individualism. Scott argued that Vietnamese peasants shared a moral vision of proper economic behavior that shaped their social and political agency, that they might choose to reinforce traditional forms of hierarchy and land tenure that kept them peasants if those forms also favored their ethical views about reciprocity and communal belonging. Popkin, on the other hand, wanted to see their choices as being rational in a universal way—that their seeming deference to cultural norms derived from the fact that in their material environment, those norms made sense, that any human beings would converge on the same norms under the same conditions."
Maybe this is obvious but this seems like a parallel universe version of the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate.
It is the prologue of it. Though I would have to look back to see if Sahlins or Obeyesekere mention it. The conversation was happening across a broad front of many works in the 1970s and 1980s.
Wow! I hope I can enroll in your course that explores “In a sense, that the scholarship in religious studies and African history was still trapped in the epistemological framework of colonialism itself.” And you brought me to think about the analogy of governing through a mic and a loud-speaker and teaching with a dictaphone. Really a splendid complex of relations and thank you for the shout-out!🤭😉🙏 PS, do you think these fields are in some significant ways still trapped?
Yes? But I think we've relaxed and understood that we overbuilt our sense of entrapment at one point, in a sense that actually made the problem worse. E.g., we were at one point evaluating African societies within categories that encoded a colonial frame of reference, but then as we developed a more and more encompassing reflexive panic about our own intellectual history, we made the epistemological problem even worse--we stopped investigating the dialogic roots of the colonial frame of reference, we started assuming that nothing was knowable but ourselves. I something think of Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt as a worst-case example of that trap--the sense that even the desire to know a non-Western society "for itself" was a colonial goal. That was empirically right in one sense--that some of us were just doing a souped-up, theoretically embroidered version of colonial anthropologists rushing to document the "pristine native" before they were polluted by modernity. But it was also massively wrong because it made Western epistemology simultaneously both all-powerful and supra-functional--able to erase everything but itself and its own purposes, and to always have its purposes work maximally to its advantage, to its needs.
Whereas I think where we are now is with a much, much more sophisticated understanding that what we overbuilt as "Western" was itself formed out of and through encounters with the rest of the world, that the concept of "the West" was read back into it by "the Rest", that colonialism was more fragmented, partial and contradictory than we previously built it up to be and also less novel and uncomparable to the pre-1500 and pre-1750 and pre-1880 pasts, that lots of ways of knowing and things we know are and have been around us all along. So the conversation about the moral, political and plain empirical need to undo, complicate, reveal, revise, etc. various ways of thinking and studying and describing African histories within the academy and beyond it now seems to me a lot more situational, a lot more particular to the instance, and a lot less dogmatic about what the right answer ought to be in any given case.
In all of which, if we're talking influence, you can doubtless see not only your own handiwork (especially your recent revisitations of your early work) but very strongly the influence of Carolyn's writing. "The Real Goat" as a paper and then a book took me a lot longer to fully process in its implications despite my instant desire to incorporate it, but I got there.
One of the most disconnected accusations the right makes about higher ed is that faculty "indoctrinates" students into leftist ideas.
Certainly, lots of institutions are ideologically homogenous-- if I had to guess, there were more post-transition transgender students on campus at Swarthmore when I was there than there were people I knew that I would guess voted for Trump in 2016. But that comes about because it was a self-selecting, very left-leaning student body. In my four years, my politics, to the extent I had them when I enrolled, moved to the right. Not because I became a right winger, but because I came in quite left wing, and my professors, while with a few exceptions almost certainly not conservatives, regularly and routinely assigned and grappled seriously with conservative views and ideas.
Certainly, they weren't assigning Ayn Rand (not because of her politics, but because her writing is very unserious), but they also weren't assigning Noam Chomsky (at least not in the political science department). To the extent right wingers have a complaint about academia's "liberal bias," it's that it doesn't assign their canon. But the issue with their canon, again, isn't that it's right wing-- it's that it's unserious and doesn't meet academic standards.
I once got hit by a right-wing content farm that was doing the usual "look how ridiculous these left-wing courses are" based on titles in course catalogs, so the intern assigned to the piece picked up on my course The Whole Enchilada and assumed it was a history of Mexican food. Instead, it's a course on world history as a genre of writing and the readings included Genesis, The Muqadimmah, Spengler's Decline of the West, Fukuyama's The End of History and excerpts from Will and Ariel Durant. So I enjoyed that, but it was also a pretty typical way for them to operate (and still is).
This essay was so beautiful! My mother is a sociologist, and this reminds me of hearing her talk about her own influences and about the various strands she's woven into her own work. I think there is something deeply honorable and interesting and useful in American academia, and although lots of things are wrong with it, there is definitely a way in which it has worked and has produced useful and good knowledge!
"... Scott and Popkin were having arguments about the relative explanatory value of cultural particularism versus universal methodological individualism. Scott argued that Vietnamese peasants shared a moral vision of proper economic behavior that shaped their social and political agency, that they might choose to reinforce traditional forms of hierarchy and land tenure that kept them peasants if those forms also favored their ethical views about reciprocity and communal belonging. Popkin, on the other hand, wanted to see their choices as being rational in a universal way—that their seeming deference to cultural norms derived from the fact that in their material environment, those norms made sense, that any human beings would converge on the same norms under the same conditions."
Maybe this is obvious but this seems like a parallel universe version of the Sahlins–Obeyesekere debate.
It is the prologue of it. Though I would have to look back to see if Sahlins or Obeyesekere mention it. The conversation was happening across a broad front of many works in the 1970s and 1980s.
Wow! I hope I can enroll in your course that explores “In a sense, that the scholarship in religious studies and African history was still trapped in the epistemological framework of colonialism itself.” And you brought me to think about the analogy of governing through a mic and a loud-speaker and teaching with a dictaphone. Really a splendid complex of relations and thank you for the shout-out!🤭😉🙏 PS, do you think these fields are in some significant ways still trapped?
Yes? But I think we've relaxed and understood that we overbuilt our sense of entrapment at one point, in a sense that actually made the problem worse. E.g., we were at one point evaluating African societies within categories that encoded a colonial frame of reference, but then as we developed a more and more encompassing reflexive panic about our own intellectual history, we made the epistemological problem even worse--we stopped investigating the dialogic roots of the colonial frame of reference, we started assuming that nothing was knowable but ourselves. I something think of Timothy Mitchell's Colonizing Egypt as a worst-case example of that trap--the sense that even the desire to know a non-Western society "for itself" was a colonial goal. That was empirically right in one sense--that some of us were just doing a souped-up, theoretically embroidered version of colonial anthropologists rushing to document the "pristine native" before they were polluted by modernity. But it was also massively wrong because it made Western epistemology simultaneously both all-powerful and supra-functional--able to erase everything but itself and its own purposes, and to always have its purposes work maximally to its advantage, to its needs.
Whereas I think where we are now is with a much, much more sophisticated understanding that what we overbuilt as "Western" was itself formed out of and through encounters with the rest of the world, that the concept of "the West" was read back into it by "the Rest", that colonialism was more fragmented, partial and contradictory than we previously built it up to be and also less novel and uncomparable to the pre-1500 and pre-1750 and pre-1880 pasts, that lots of ways of knowing and things we know are and have been around us all along. So the conversation about the moral, political and plain empirical need to undo, complicate, reveal, revise, etc. various ways of thinking and studying and describing African histories within the academy and beyond it now seems to me a lot more situational, a lot more particular to the instance, and a lot less dogmatic about what the right answer ought to be in any given case.
In all of which, if we're talking influence, you can doubtless see not only your own handiwork (especially your recent revisitations of your early work) but very strongly the influence of Carolyn's writing. "The Real Goat" as a paper and then a book took me a lot longer to fully process in its implications despite my instant desire to incorporate it, but I got there.