11 NOV

This was an easy one for me. This week they belong to Frank Rich of New York Magazine, who has always had a knack for perfectly summarizing the political zeitgeist:

As much as the Republican Party is a radical party, and a nearly all-white party, it has also become the Fantasyland Party. It’s an isolated and gated community impervious to any intrusions of reality from the “real America” it solipsistically claims to represent. This year’s instantly famous declaration by the Romney pollster Neil Newhouse that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers” crystallized the mantra of the entire GOP. The Republican faithful at strata both low and high, from Rush’s dittoheads to the think-tank-affiliated intellectuals, have long since stopped acknowledging any empirical evidence that disputes their insular worldview, no matter how grounded that evidence might be in (God forbid) science or any other verifiable reality, like, say, Census reports or elementary mathematics.

The analysis is so good that we can't stop there:

At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that rejects Keynesian economics, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Laden’s death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense. It’s the GOP that demands the rewriting of history (and history textbooks), still denying that Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” transformed the party of Lincoln into a haven for racists. Such is the conservative version of history that when the website Right Wing News surveyed 43 popular conservative bloggers to determine the “worst figures in American history” two years ago, Jimmy Carter, Obama, and FDR led the tally, all well ahead of Benedict Arnold, Timothy McVeigh, and John Wilkes Booth.

It's not my practice in this blog to delve deeply into partisan politics. But when a writer writes as well as this and reveals an obvious truth about the past or the present, I'm more than willing to give that individual his or her due. Nice work.

5 NOV

To add an epilogue to my post below, it's important to point out that not only has the Romney campaign been responsible for the racial animus in the presidential race; the press has played a role as well. To wit, there's this from Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei in Politico:

If President Barack Obama wins, he will be the popular choice of Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites. That’s what the polling has consistently shown in the final days of the campaign. It looks more likely than not that he will lose independents, and it’s possible he will get a lower percentage of white voters than George W. Bush got of Hispanic voters in 2000.

A broad mandate this is not.

So it's only a mandate if white voters elect a president. Hispanics, African-Americans, women, and educated whites don't count—at least not as much as ordinary whites. Way to go, Politico, for further racializing the campaign.

1 NOV

I have a few more thoughts on the election, but in this case I want to address what for me has been a very disconcerting element: the tenor of the campaign. Much has been said about how negative both major sides have been in this campaign, but neither is this new nor unusual. Presidential campaigns have always featured massive mud-slinging; the only difference now is that given how much money has gone into campaign advertising, the negativity is impossible to avoid in our media-pervasive world. What matters more to me is the level of undue incivility seen in this campaign—evident, I think it is fair to say, more on one side than on the other. More specifically, the Mitt Romney campaign has, in a play to conservative Republicans comprising his base, executed another version of the "southern strategy" developed by Richard Nixon and then perfected by Ronald Reagan and later George H. W. Bush (think "Willie Horton"). Much of the strategy this time has focused on Obama's "othernerness," which both reflects and helps feed the half-baked conspiracies that he forged his birth certificate, that he's a secret Muslim, or that he's an anti-colonial, Kenyan socialist. To see how this has been done, one need look no further than one of the top Romney surrogates, John Sununu, when asked about Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama:

Sununu: . . . And frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that's an endorsement based on issues or whether he's got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.

[Piers] Morgan: What reason would that be?

Sununu: Well, I think when you have somebody of your own race that you're proud of being president of the United States, I applaud Colin for standing with him.

Although Sununu later walked back this statement, it was not an isolated quip. Back in July he explained, “I wish this president would learn how to be an American.” Just as disconcerting, however, is that the Romney campaign said nothing about such overt race-baiting. In fact, in August Mitt Romney himself said at a Michigan rally, "No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate. They know that this is the place that we were born and raised." His campaign later clarified that this was only—ahem—a joke.

Needless to say, all of this comes from the same, stale Republican playbook used many times over. The only difference this time is that the nation's changing demography makes this strategy less likely to succeed. This was one of Darryl Pinckney's point on the election in the recent edition of the New York Review of Books:

Though Romney, like every Republican contender since Nixon, is counting on white nationalism—even if this isn’t what courting the blue-collar white ethnic vote has been called—it won’t work for him anymore either. The Republican Party cannot revive the old atmosphere of the Solid South, and postmodern Yellow Peril hasn’t brought greater cohesiveness of US citizenry. Romney warned his frustrated Florida dinner companions that undecided voters like the president; Republicans were allowed to talk freely in their own company, but had to be careful how they spoke of Obama before independents. White nationalism is seen as retro and is distasteful, especially to white students.

I wish I were as certain as Pinckney about this strategy not working anymore. From my perspective, Romney's carrying of the white nationalist standard still might work.

And if it does succeed, much of the credit should go to Mitch McConnell and other obstructionist Republicans in Congress. Another writer for the New York Review of Books, Russell Baker, provides the appropriate institutional precursor to this fall's campaign:

. . . Republicans’ congressional leaders have so brilliantly perfected the art of obstructing the president from doing anything to improve the economy that they are now able to denounce him as a failure who has not got anything done.

The Republicans have been ingenious in using the rickety old congressional legislative machinery as a weapon for destroying the Obama presidency. Historians may find it ironic that the filibuster, one of the major devices used to obstruct Obama’s program in the Senate, was developed originally to perpetuate the nation’s subjection of blacks for almost a hundred years after the Republican Lincoln proclaimed their emancipation.

Any link between this congressional obstruction—unprecedented in its scope—and a southern-strategy campaign may seem like a stretch, but I would argue that they are cut from the same cloth. As Ta-Nahesi Coates observed, the witholding of a racial acceptance of Obama has resulted in constricting his "presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race." It should not be forgotten that denying Obama at every possible legislative juncture was to the umistakeable delight of the Tea Party, an extremist Republican faction dominated by southern and midwestern whites that happened to be in its prime when much of this obstruction was taking place. Fearing that the Tea Party would run candidates against them in primaries, most Republican incumbents in Congress were more than willing to comply with the Tea Party's uncompromising demands.

Why does any of this matter? The tenor of the campaign is a reflection of the health of this democracy. As many scholars have observed, democratic wellbeing should be measured not merely by how free and fair elections are, but also by the degree and character of deliberation that a citizenry makes before any choice is made. The racial animus exhibted in this campaign, particularly by the Romney side, suggests that such a lack of civility in our politics today is greatly damaging the process of deliberation so necessary in any democratic polity.

28 OCT

To follow up on the previous post's theme, note what Gabriel Lenz found:

In a recent YouGov poll, I asked participants about their views on abortion policy and what position they thought Obama, Romney, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party took on abortion. Only about 60% of respondents knew that Obama and the Democrats supported more pro-choice policies than Romney and Republicans. Given that the parties have had clear and long-standing positions on this issue, it's astonishing that 40% of Americans don't know this basic fact (other surveys find even higher levels of ignorance).

Lenz goes on to write, "For democracy, these patterns suggest that voters often fail to lead politicians on policy. Instead, they follow. In Follow the Leader, I find that voters exhibit a similar tendency to follow in US, British, Canadian, and Dutch elections, that voters follow across a wide variety of policy issues, and that they often do so blindly, even when they don't know their preferred candidates' or parties' broader ideological orientations."

Being poorly informed and/or an ideological lackey: not exactly the most encouraging signs that democracy is alive and well.

23 OCT

In the New York Times' Online feature, "Room for Debate," Carroll Doherty from the Pew Research Center explains that despite the massive increase in digital access to the news and current events, we remain a poorly informed public:

Information technology today – constant news on Twitter and Facebook, streaming video on iPhones – makes 2007 seem like the Dark Ages. But Pew Research’s “news IQ” quizzes have found that the public continues to struggle with many basic facts about politics and current events. In our most recent quiz, in July, just 34 percent of Americans were able to identify John Roberts as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, from a list that included Harry Reid and the late William Rehnquist.

As was the case in the predigital era, college graduates are better informed than those with less education. Yet the swelling ranks of college graduates have not led to a better informed public. Moreover, while education is correlated with increased knowledge about prominent people and news events, it may not confer as much of an advantage as it did in the 1980s.

. . . the rise of digital news sources is having less of an impact on the millions of Americans who are not that interested in the news, who lack the background to make sense of it, or who simply can’t afford the technology.

That colleges seemingly have not contributed to a better informed public is an indictment of higher education in this country. And it should stand as an embarrassment for all of us who labor in the ivory tower. Yet what does the academia that I know do to address this problem? More often than not, it's to call for more technology in the classroom. Apparently, even more distraction will magically deliver us from this scourge.

Here's a suggestion: why don't we academics entertain a little less in our classes, require extensive reading and writing a little more, lead more by example through our own research and publication efforts (thereby dropping a committee membership or two), and focus more on underscoring why academic skills are so important? As Nicholas Carr points out in the same piece, "To be informed, a person has to want to be informed, and the percentage of Americans demonstrating such motivation seems to have remained pretty stable, and pretty abysmal, throughout our vaunted information age." I submit that the motivation for ascertaining knowledge will remain relatively low in this country unless we in the academy can better demonstrate how and why taking a comprehensive approach to understanding the world—which inevitably includes the study of history—makes a difference. How do we do this? As the suggestion above indicates, setting high standards and leading by scholarly example are good places to start.

21 OCT

On account of my teaching duties and a pending writing deadline, I've had to neglect my blogging for the past three weeks or so. Still, I'm going to try to make up for it by offering several blog posts on the upcoming election. I will start by addressing the question of what is at stake in this election, particularly on the domestic side of the ledger. It seems that much of the campaign thus far has focused on taxes, entitlements, and what they mean to the federal deficit and the national debt. Recently, a number of pundits has offered some fitting analysis of these issues, including Frank Bruni at the New York Times. One credible point he makes in his column today is that both major candidates are not being candid about the enormity of the problem and the required sacrifices that will need to be made to fully address it. But to his credit, he makes clear which of the two candidates is being the most disingenous:

President Obama admits that he’d like taxes raised on households making more than $250,000. But he casts those increases as an insurance policy against any significant hikes on everyone else, and puts an emphasis on them far out of bounds with their potential impact. The implication is that extra taxation on the rich alone can solve many of our budget problems. That’s savvy marketing, smart politics and utter bunk.

But Romney’s bunk, like his pension, is bigger. Or at least seems to be. We can’t know for sure, because he won’t give us details. He says that his proposed 20 percent cut in marginal rates won’t sap the Treasury because of all the tax loopholes he’ll close, but then he won’t name which loopholes.

His vagueness serves a dual purpose. It prevents voters from panicking about a lost deduction and analysts from checking his math. There’s no math to check.

As Bruni states earlier in the piece, "With our debt soaring, our population aging and our infrastructure crumbling, we stand at a troubling crossroads. And yet politicians sell us low-tax, no-pain fantasies. They traffic in vagueness and treat us like toddlers." Therein, however, lies the perennial problem with America's political culture; we invite being treated like toddlers because of our overwhelming penchant for political ignorance and immaturity. And truth be told, the toddler treatment frequently ends up winning elections, with the mendacious victors often earning impunity in the process. Is it any wonder that there currently is so much political cynicism and distrust of government in this country?

Some pundits, though, are suggesting that what's most at stake in this election is the future direction of the federal judicial system. Over at the New York Review of Books, Cass R. Sunstein suggests that much of the election's outcome will manifest itself in the smaller judicial and regulatory battles that often go unreported, and even less noticed by most Americans. Sunstein wants us to consider what the judicial appointments over the next four years at the lower level of the federal court system will mean for this country:

However fundamental, the debate over the Constitution misses a problem that may well be even more important in American life. Many of the most significant judicial decisions do not involve the Constitution at all. Most people never hear about those decisions. But they determine the fate of countless regulations, issued by federal agencies, that are indispensable to implementing important laws—including those designed to reform the health care system, promote financial stability, protect consumers, ensure clean air and water, protect civil rights, keep the food supply safe, reduce deaths from tobacco, promote energy efficiency, maintain safe workplaces, and much more.

Here as well, Republican judicial appointees differ dramatically from Democratic judicial appointees, and along predictable partisan lines. The outcome of the election will help determine the ultimate fate of these rules in court.

Virtually the only time that consideration of the judicial system has come up in this presidential campaign is with regard to abortion, the legal status of which hangs in the balance since the victor will likely appoint up to four new Supreme Court justices. But Sunstein's analysis that lower-level judicial appointments may matter even more is spot on, which helps explain why Senate Republicans have consistently blocked or stalled President Obama's appointments to the lower reaches of the federal bench during these past four years.

Also writing for the New York Review of Books is Ronald Dworkin, who likewise argues that appointments to the federal bench will be a crucial to how the election's winner governs. But Dworkin is particularly fearful of new appointments to the Supreme Court if there were a Romney administration, in part because these would seemingly accelerate the hard-right turn that the court has taken over the past 12 years:

The great danger of a strengthened radical right-wing court is sufficiently demonstrated by the rain of legally indefensible and politically retrograde 5–4 decisions in recent years, including Bush v. Gore, which cursed us with George W. Bush, Gonzales v. Carhart, which sustained a cruel federal law outlawing “partial-birth” abortions, Seattle School District and Jefferson County Board of Education, which overturned voluntary, modest, and effective programs aimed at increasing racial diversity in public schools, and the infamous Citizens United ruling that corporations have all the First Amendment rights of real people so that they have an unlimited right to spend their corporate treasuries on television ads opposing candidates whose policies they think against their financial interest.

I often hear from even well versed and highly educated political observers that regardless of who wins on November 6, there'll be little significant change taking place in this country over the next four years. I beg to differ. Presidential elections have always been momentous, though sometimes for reasons that—at the time of the election—are totally unforeseen (think, for example, of what might have happened if Al Gore had become president instead of George W. Bush). This election is no exception. While Washington may maintain gridlock and both parties revel in the same fiscal fantasies characteristic of the current presidential campaign, who we vote for on November 6 will make a difference—even if much of the political effect will never be seen on the front page. And we shouldn't let the political cynicism au courant convince us otherwise.

27 SEP

As it turns out, the Bush Administration's foray into the use of torture was not just a curious anomaly or historical aberration. As the New York Times reports today, torture may well become a contentious issue in the current presidential race:

. . . Mr. Romney’s advisers have privately urged him to “rescind and replace President Obama’s executive order” and permit secret “enhanced interrogation techniques against high-value detainees that are safe, legal and effective in generating intelligence to save American lives,” according to an internal Romney campaign memorandum.

While the memo is a policy proposal drafted by Mr. Romney’s advisers in September 2011 — not a final decision by him — its detailed analysis dovetails with his rare and limited public comments about interrogation.

“We’ll use enhanced interrogation techniques which go beyond those that are in the military handbook right now,” he said at a news conference in Charleston, S.C., in December.

The campaign policy paper does not specify which techniques Mr. Romney should approve, saying more study was needed because Mr. Obama had “permanently damaged” the value of some by releasing memorandums detailing Bush-era techniques in April 2009.

I'm sorry, but I cannot help myself: can this presidential race get any more ridiculous? Or even more to the point, how intellectually irresponsible and internationally obtuse can one candidate's campaign become? As I have recently pointed out in my course on Crime, Policing, and Punishment, as early as 1000 scholars were writing about the futility and counterproductive outcomes of torture, whether it was being used for extracting information, instilling fear, or merely punishing. Although the practice of judicial torture—often used to force a confession from a suspect, or sometimes to find accomplices of a crime during the Medieval and Early Modern periods—all but died out in contintental Europe by the end of the eighteenth century, it was already being recognized as a highly ineffective means of establishing any semblance of fact 300 or 400 years prior to that. And thus while many today still believe that judicial torture stopped on account of the writings of the Enlightenment's Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria around 1750, in fact judges became more reluctant about using it centuries before then, in part because they recognized its multiple shortcomings.

But as incredulous as this news was, there was also this from Amy Zegart at Foreign Policy:

It turns out that Americans don't just like the general idea of torture more now. They like specific torture techniques more too.

Respondents in 2012 are more pro-waterboarding, pro-threatening prisoners with dogs, pro-religious humiliation, and pro-forcing-prisoners-to-remain-naked-and-chained-in-uncomfortable-positions-in-cold-rooms. In 2005, 18 percent said they believed the naked chaining approach was OK, while 79 percent thought it was wrong. In 2012, 30 percent of Americans thought this technique was right, an increase of 12 points, while just 51 percent thought it was wrong, a drop of 28 points. In 2005, only 16 percent approved of waterboarding suspected terrorists, while an overwhelming majority (82 percent) thought it was wrong to strap people on boards and force their heads underwater to simulate drowning. Now, 25 percent of Americans believe in waterboarding terrorists, and only 55 percent think it's wrong. The only specific interrogation technique that is less popular now than in 2005, strangely enough, is prolonged sleep deprivation.

So here we are in 2012, in an era dominated by a global preoccupation with universal human rights (fortunately), and many Americans think that using torture is not only permissible, but apparently effective. How idiotic can we be?

Yet when these two stories are combined, they start to make a little more sense. The poll results suggest that the Romney campaign believes that it has found an issue that will resonate among much of the electorate. But if that's the case, what does this say about the historical vacuousness of such Americans, to say nothing of their absence of basic human decency?

Let's study history, America—not just our own history, but also that predating the founding of our nation. We may find that as stupid and superstitious as we think those Medieval Europeans were (and I hear this all the time in my classes), at least some of them had the good sense to see torture for what it was, And that's more than can be said about many "civilized" Americans today.

UPDATE (10-1): Alex Pareene of Salon has more on the likelihood that a Romney administration would move back to a torture policy featuring, among other things, waterboarding. Why? As Pareene explains, "because Bush made it GOP policy." There's additional discussion of a potential torture policy here and here.

21 SEP

Jack Hitt has written a chronology of American History—as least as far as conservative politicians understand it—in the latest issue of the New Yorker. It's more than just satire because it includes the quotes from politicians on which the constructed chronology is based. The piece is hilarious, yet at the same time sobering because it demonstrates how much politicians take liberty with the historical record in order to promote their ideological brand. Among my favorites are these:

1607: First welfare state collapses: “Jamestown colony, when it was first founded as a socialist venture, dang near failed with everybody dead and dying in the snow.”—Dick Armey

1619-1808: Africans set sail for America in search of freedom: “Other than Native Americans, who were here, all of us have the same story.”—Michele Bachmann

1775: Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t going to be taking away our arms, by ringing those bells and making sure as he was riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be secure and we were going to be free.”—Sarah Palin.

1775: New Hampshire starts the American Revolution: “What I love about New Hampshire… You’re the state where the shot was heard around the world.”—Michele Bachmann

1776: The Founding Synod signs the Declaration of Independence: “…those fifty-six brave people, most of whom, by the way, were clergymen.”—Mike Huckabee

1787: Slavery is banned in the Constitution: “We also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States.”—Michele Bachmann

To be fair, one could easily write a similar chronology concerning liberal or progressive politicians, complete with its own share of distortion. Even so, I strongly doubt that such a chronology would skew the facts as much as this conservative one does. Should Americans be concerned with such historical nonsense? Given how much political argumentation is by necessity rooted in an understanding of the past, I would submit that this is a more serious matter than many in this country might acknowledge. But that shouldn't prevent us from enjoying a short moment of hilarity at the expense of these fabulistic ideologues. This is the kind of stuff that this blog lives for!

14 SEP

Although these words were spoken over the summer to mark the seventieth anniversary of the Vel d'Hiv roundup of 13,152 French Jews on July 16-17, 1942 (all of whom were subsequently sent to Auschwitz), I only came across them this week when they were published in the New York Review of Books. The words belong to President François Hollande, who in his role as the singular embodiement of the Fifth Republic, fully acknowledged the central role that France's government played in this atrocity. Here he emphasizes how important the study of history is to preventing this indefensible crime from recessing within the minds of the Republic's citizens:

The Republic's schools—in which I hereby voice my confidence—have a mission: to instruct, educate, teach about the past, make [the Shoah] known and understood in all its dimensions. . . . There must not be a single primary school, or lycée in France where it is not taught. There must not be a single institution where this history is not fully understood, respected, and pondered over. For the Republic, there cannot and will not be any lost memories.

I personally shall see to this.

It's an especially hopeful message for an historian like me because it demonstrates how indispensable studying history is for the present and the future, particularly in its capacity to compel a democratic polity to take collective responsibility for the crimes that either its citizens, its government, or more likely both committed in the past. Without this, such a polity remains deeply wounded and morally flawed. If only more nations—including my own—would assume responsibility for the immoral parts of their past in this way, what a much better world we would have.

7 SEP

The past keeps breaking through to the present, even as we seek to put it to rest. The latest example? New allegations regarding the war crimes of the Bush administration:

Human Rights Watch has released a report claiming wider use by the United States of waterboarding than previously reported. The 156-page report, "Delivered Into Enemy Hands: U.S.-led Abuse and Rendition of Opponents to Gaddafi's Libya" includes interviews with 14 Libyans, most part of the anti-Qaddafi Islamic fighting group, who claim they were detained by the United States in various locations including Afghanistan and Pakistan and then sent back to Libya around 2004. The prisoners described their abuse at the hands of their interrogators, and it matched descriptions of waterboarding. The report has not been verified, but counters U.S. assertions that merely three high-level terrorism suspects, all members of al-Qaeda, were subjected to waterboarding. It also suggests cooperation with former Libyan dictator Muammar al-Qaddafi, saying the C.I.A, British M16, and other western intelligence organizations delivered "Gaddafi his enemies on a silver platter." The report has come out days after the U.S. Justice Department closed the investigation of two detainees who died while in C.I.A. custody.

I don't think we've heard the last of this sordid episode in recent American History either. Not by a long shot.

30 AUG

The best words this week belong to Ta-Nahesi Coates, who posted them on his blog in reponse to his most recent article in the Atlantic (see below). Why do I like Coates so much? Probably because he is one of the few bloggers out there who appreciates history's complexity, particularly when considering the tricky notion of "progress" over time:

One thing I want to emphasize about this piece. Progress is not an either/or proposition, nor does it move in a direct, unerring straight line. One result of the Civil War was the onset of a century of racial lynching. (The lynching of black people was virtually unheard-of before the War. We were worth too much alive.) Another result was the prohibition on placing black people on the auction block and selling them off like cattle. I maintain that ending slavery still counts as progress. Likewise, the fact that Barack Obama's election didn't end racism for all time does not mean that his election was not progress. A Hillary Clinton victory would have been progress; it would not have meant the forever defeat of American sexism.

I know that a lot of historians don't like to tangle with notions of progress, in part because it can be a cookie-cutter idea that, when applied to the past, often distorts what was. It also can transform a historian from an impartial observer of the past to a cheerleader. And I get that. But what else do you call the fact that human violence is less pervasive in the world now than it has ever been, and that the recognition of what we call human rights is at an all-time high? All the same, these trends are far from absolute or linear, which is Coates' point here. I appreciate this kind of subtlety when looking at the human record.

30 AUG

Want to know how and why the reality of the past tends to get plastered over with a more sanitized and acceptable version? Consider the recent comments of Father Benedict Groeschel, the Director of the Office for Spiritual Development for the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, when asked about sexual abuse committed by members of the Catholic clergy:

People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to—a psychopath. But that's not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster—14, 16, 18—is the seducer . . . It's not so hard to see—a kid looking for a father and didn't have his own—and they won't be planning to get into heavy-duty sex, but almost romantic, embracing, kissing, perhaps sleeping but not having intercourse or anything like that. . . .

Here's this poor guy—[Penn State football coach Jerry] Sandusky—it went on for years. Interesting: Why didn't anyone say anything? Apparently, a number of kids knew about it and didn't break the ice. Well, you know, until recent years, people did not register in their minds that it was a crime. It was a moral failure, scandalous; but they didn't think of it in terms of legal things.

Stunning, to say the least. As Andrew Sullivan observes, "It's a staggering insight into how the old hierarchy viewed child abuse: as essentially the child's fault and no big deal." No matter, were the remembrance of the abuse a little less prominent in the minds of many today, and were an institution as powerful as the Catholic Church fully standing behind such garbage, Groeschel might have actually convinced many that this version of the past was true. As it is, the words were so offensive that the newspaper which first published them, the National Catholic Register, pulled the interview off its site and apologized for what Groeschel had said. Does this mean progress? With the horses already out of the barn, hardly.

23 AUG

For a placement of President Obama's first term in the broader context of American history from an African American perspective, it doesn't get any better than Ta-Nahesi Coates in his latest article in the Atlantic. To wit, there's this gem:

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police. And hence Barack Obama’s insisting that there was no racial component to Katrina’s effects; that name-calling among children somehow has the same import as one of the oldest guiding principles of American policy—white supremacy. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration. But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin [politically attacked for saying, "If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon"], he demonstrated integration’s great limitation—that acceptance depends not just on being twice as good but on being half as black. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama’s presidential potential in areas affected tangentially—or seemingly not at all—by race. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes.

Coates gets one of the highest compliments that I can give to anyone: he can write. Enough said.

23 AUG

The best words of this week were actually first read by me last week, but they were so insightful that I returned to read them again today. And like last week's "Best Words" segment, they come from Mark Edmundson in his 2004 book, Why Read?.

Once more, moreover, Edmundson is spot on not only with where university students are culturally at, but also with how universities cater to that culture:

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and preprofessional training are theirs, if that's what they want. The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that's fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they've been living in. They hardly know they left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside? . . . Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow.

As much as I agree with the analysis, I'm even more impressed with what Edmundson's response to it was:

Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that's what I was offering. But what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.

Not that any students will confuse me with Letterman or Leno, but I too suspect that many of them enter my classes hoping above all for an entertaining experience. To the extent that I give it to them will be no small factor in the outcome of student evaluations for the course. That's a fact.

I find Edmundson's response inspiring because it calls me to remember that what I do in the classroom is not about entertaining, nor even training students to become "lifelong learners," to say nothing of secondary school teachers. It's about no less than transforming their lives, and in the process mine as well. But it equally serves to remind me that I must not be afraid to ask the big questions of my students, including the most important: "How is what we are doing in this class going to change your life?"

21 AUG

Cliometrics, the study of history based almost solely on statistics and computer analysis, makes a comeback in Nature, the international weekly journal of science. In an article by Laura Spinney, the work of demographer Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut is highlighted. Turchin decribes his approach as "cliodynamics," but it seems to me like a re-hash of the cliometric assumption that number crunching can tell us all we need to know about the past:

For the past 15 years, Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

The only thing I find more problematic than a scholar who does history with simply numbers is one who predicts the future. Alas, Turchin hits the daily double in the excerpt above.

To her credit, Spinney notes that most professional historians greet Turchin's work with much skepticism. Robert Darnton, a giant in my own small corner of historical scholarship, is quoted in the article: "After a century of grand theory, from Marxism and social Darwinism to structuralism and postmodernism, most historians have abandoned the belief in general laws." Count me among them.

The main reason that I don't believe numbers by themselves can tell us much about the past—especially regarding violence, about which I know a thing or two—is that they do a poor job of taking account of culture (particularly beliefs, values, and assumptions), which is critical to the phenomenon of violence but is difficult to quantify and often takes on a life of its own.

19 AUG

Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg largely get it right in their article on Salon. What sets apart an academic historian from a merely popular one? It's not just the number of books sold:

Most everyone who transgresses on the work of historians uncritically accepts someone else’s work, then tweaks it a little. That’s how the game is played. But historians are trained differently. They are taught to be suspect of authors who come to their information secondhand. The mark of a good historian is writing something new about something old and making an original argument gleaned from primary sources.

This is something that Fareed Zakaria, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and David McCollough rarely do. If they did, they'd be spending a lot less time on television and the better part of their careers in the archives.

Take it from an admittedly fledgling academic historian: writing something original and profound about the past takes an extraordinary amount of time and effort—two things that pop historians can't afford to spare since it would take them out of the limelight for so long that they would become media-irrelevant.

17 AUG

Check out the chart below from Georgetown University's Public Policy Institute:

As my blog entry below indicates, there's a much more important reason for going to college and graduating than becoming gainfully employed. Even so, a college student should consider employment in a troubled economy one of the best fringe benefits along the way toward transforming one's life. This is not to say, of course, that college graduates aren't suffering out there. But the blue and red lines clearly indicate that for many of them, it could be much worse.

16 AUG

Welcome to a new weekly feature whereby I highlight the words of a current author that I'm reading and whose writing has some relevance to the purpose of this blog.

The distinction of being the first author of this features goes to Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia. I first came across Edmundson's writing in a New York Times op-ed piece published earlier this year addressing the question of who should go to college. Impressed by Edmundson's insight, I looked into a book that he had written and was published in 2004, which has the simple title, Why Read?. In answering this question, Edmundson echoes my own experience in the classroom and my frustration with current academic institutions:

. . . true liberal education barely exists in America now. It is almost nowhere to be found. We teachers have become timid and apologetic. We are not willing to ask the questions that matter. Into the void that we have created largely by our fear, other forces have moved. Universities have become sites not for human transformation, but for training and for entertaining. Unconfronted by major issues, students use the humanities as they can. They use them to prepare for lucrative careers. They acquire marketable skills. Or, they find in their classes sources of easy pleasure. They read to enjoy, but not to become other than they are. "You must change your life," says Rilke's sculpture of Apollo to the beholder. So says every major work of intellect and imagination, but in the university now—as in the culture at large—almost no one hears.

Edmundson probably first wrote these words almost ten years ago, but they apply no less at present. And the words are much in keeping with the author's thesis for this book: "the purpose of a liberal arts education is to give people an enhanced opportunity to decide how they should live their lives." Amen.

How and why universities lost this purpose must be left to a future blog entry and to the work of the likes of Andrew Delbanco. As I begin a new semester—after a sabbatical, no less—I'm going to do my best to keep this purpose and what it means for my teaching first and foremost in my mind.