Okay, it is simply more trend reporting from the Times — perhaps Bill Keller should simply step aside for Anna Wintour. Otoh, David Horowitz also would be out of work. So it’s a mixed thing for them — especially in this current economy. Does the Times really have any choice in the age of Politico? What else can the Times do? It lost the battle for commodity 24 hours news factoids. Trendism is newsprint’s last stand. The Times failed miserably with Raines’ “flood the zone”. And there is always the shadow of Blair and Judy Miller. Chatter over the LA Times’ fiery arc fills the cafeteria. And lest one forget, a mere 22% of the Washington Post Co.’s revenue comes from the newspaper/website these days.
But back to the campus thing. Is this trend a trend or even a surprise? Demographics are always shaped by their When. In the Time’s random sample (apparently talking to 50 professors equals a national trend if one can also quote an association) the lead example only turned 14 when the Soviet Union and Cold War disappeared. Kurt Kobain and shoe gazers were still hiding in Seattle holes. Her entire teenage and college Ur Kultur? The boom years of the 1990s, wealth and opportunity, and annoyance at the petty polarization of the Imperial City politics, yada yada yada.
And these are youngsters in any event. Keeping their head down and punching the ticket for tenure. Even if they did not grow up with “Do Your Own Thing, Man”, In-A-Godda-Da-Vida or K-Tel records, the Times gets a twofer — another trend piece ‘revisiting’ this sample (such a hoary media device) lies in the Times’ future. The so-called newly scrubbed faculty ‘moderates’ are larvae re faculty politics; their false consciousness soon will be torn asunder. After all, as Henry the K said and we have quoted many times, “Faculty politics are so lethal because the stakes are so low.” [Insert Monty Python Peoples’ Front of Judea, Judean Peoples’ Front joke here]. And like even the most tawdry beach, there is always another wave — the Warlord, netroots and Grand Theft Auto Generation’s is still to break.
We’ve worked with and observed faculty/scholars at the most exalted of our institutions. A favorite story involves two extremely senior, perhaps brilliant scholars and media personalities. These are the kind of people who don’t really worry about getting on the Lehrer News Hour or placing an Op Ed in the Times or Post (or a very serious hearing from them). If they have something trenchant to say, they get a platform (Charlie Rose doesn’t count). Yet these two, at the time camping out at a famous institution and by every objective measure politically coeval, were locked in a deadly scorpion’s duel. Savage. The venom and tenacity of this struggle transcended ‘obvious’ consensus physics. The battle boiled over and created institutional fissures. The core reason? Who had more dibs on their shared secretary’s time and output. And that didn’t even involve battling for grant money. We do not joke.
Jaundiced? Perhaps. Nonetheless, we’re a bit leery — if not downright contemptuous — of trend reporting as peddled by the Times et al. Even more so when promoted by alleged independent columnists discovering ‘Bobos’. If the Times needs trend ‘reporting’ to survive, better perhaps to throw in the towel. Just find within its corporate conglomerate the equivalent of textual blatantly vacant eye candy. Emphatic prose from their version of Wintour and her cohorts. The NY Post with more textual Ralph Lauren.
We obviously need hard news desperately. As a society, we are sinking in a sludge of Simon Cowell, TMZ and the Situation Room. Pulp news’ long lamented demise is truly on our doorstep even now. No obvious solution appears to solve the Internet and cable disintermediation. Or the debilitating impact of corporate ‘news’ subordinate to P/L and conglomerate voraciousness. It’s true still that the Times sets the lead for other (failing) papers. Perhaps the step above might be its final and best service to its flock.
All the vacuity that’s fit to wink. Perhaps another reason Fox might outlast them. Its embrace of the ephemeral. That, and Photoshop.
Comment says
From Wired:
” …. the site has begun posting confidential documents from the secretive and litigious Church of Scientology, and from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. Those leaks demonstrate that the site has veered from its mission to expose the secrets of repressive governments, says Aftergood, treading instead on the dangerous ground of religious persecution.
“They are close to becoming the oppressors that they claim to oppose,” Aftergood says. “People ought to be free to practice their religious beliefs no matter how peculiar they are, in privacy and without harassment, and the Wikileaks folks seem not to understand that.”
“They think all secrecy is an evil to be opposed and that is just a juvenile point of view,” he adds … ”
Aftergood doth protest too much , we thinks. First of all, it does seem an odd fact that LDS and Scientolgy often wind up in the news together ever since Mitt Romney – in a rare candid moment – said “Battlefield Earth” was his favorite novel. But that’s not important.
But we think that Blowhard Donahue makes a better case (though still bogus) that Rome is the biggest victim of persecution.
Anyway – while Comment rejects the equivalency between FARC and the USG – and we would have refrained from posting JDAM secrets (while doubting that this material is really still secret from serious militaries).
But hasn’t Aftergood posted classified info himself? Isn’t he just preferring his own editorial judgement over wikileaks?
His hysterical protective squak about Scientology/LDS was way over the top and there was something suspect about getting so upset about such wealthy growing organizations.
DrLeoStrauss says
Jealousy doesn’t become John Pike . . .
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/07/wikileaks
DrLeoStrauss says
More directly on NYTimes future as a software company from Silicon Insider:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13641_3-9984307-44.html?tag=bnpr
DrLeoStrauss says
And then there is, less considered than your conversation but not unrelated . . .
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/28/debate
Lagavulin says
Inquire: Well said. But what did you mean by “higher education may not even be a political endeavour?”
To me (and not so eloquently argued above), the core failing of American social science is that, in response to the partisan higher eduction of the mid/late 20th century, academia has adopted this posture of value-neutral/data-led social science. But the problem is that this approach is based on nothing and thus can range only between masturbatory pseudo science and well-packaged gossip/opinion. This occurred because academia lost sight of its original POLITICAL (as opposed to partisan) purpose, which is to be society’s creators and guardians of knowledge.
More simply, higher education in a free society is indeed a political endeavor, and the political cause to which it should be oriented is the Enlightenment Project. It is the collective forgetting/denial of this political core that has led to the faddishness (e.g. terrorism ‘studies), irrelevance (‘English’), and/or outright destructiveness (e.g. the Straussians) of today’s political science, sociology, anthropology,literary criticism, etc.
This is where the comparison to the natural sciences is illuminating. American natural science remains the best in the world because physicists, biologists, et al not only understand that they are political actors but also are ready and able to defend their Enlightenment politics against enemies, foreign and domestic. Natural science is not partisan, but it is very political, which is precisely why it is successful. Social science, in its desire to become non-partisan, has become apolitical and lifeless, and, like Bernie’s corpse, can be posed, repositioned, and exploited for the shallowest of interests.
inquire says
My reflections upon reading said article ‘trended’ far more towards an exercise in gloriously missing the point rather than mere banality. They true heart of the matter appeared, and disappeared, in on quick paragraph that acknowledged the existence of a non-political dimension with Alan Bloom. (Disclosure, I’ve not read ‘Closing of the American Mind’, but I’ve read his Republic, and Emile as well as a modest amount of Strauss) The lens imported to report on these academic trends (accurate or not, facile or not) is the traditional myopic one that can at least point to philosophy (or a philosopher), but cannot even fathom to engage it without clinging to the left/right dyad that exists both for the faddish social scientists that sit centre stage in this piece and its author.
The Times never questioned that perhaps the agenda of sociology and education since the 60s has entirely failed. These two fields (and ‘English’) being the paradigm examples of empty-headed faddish, historicist and questioning-for-questioning sake that has begat this very type of pablum you rightly reject in your above commentary. Why couldn’t the Times have examined the paucity of the education/sociology/lit crit fields? Why couldn’t they have begun to identify that higher education may not even be a political endeavour? That one’s ‘paradigms’ may not be defined by such fleeting and (sometimes) trivial historical circumstances as the end of the cold war? But that character could instead be cultivated by exposure to tradition of thought that has existed for millennia and nurtured the greatest minds we know.
The piece also missed the point that Strauss was concerned with; namely the status (or even possibility) of ‘value neutral social science’ or, in Times speak, ‘data-oriented sociology’. This argument, of course could not be addressed to an illiterate public, nor imagined by an uneducated reporter. Is discussing this ‘trend’ not simply a feeble gesture to the debates of the German émigrés of the beginning of the last century; specifically, the conflict between Strauss and Weber that filtered over into the US where it was thinned with the historicism of Heidegger and the nonsense of Dewey?
No mention in the times of the hollowing out of North American education system, no mention of the substantive complaints of those like Bloom. The Times, just like Hollywood, can’t see academia as anything other than the aging, reflexively leftist, social scientist raging against the system from tenure, the foppish education professor, or the stolid English prof trotting out another useless post-something theory for textual analysis. Neither Hollywood, the Times, nor academics can seem to confront the core problems that were actually addressed by their European predecessors – is it not the true tragedy that this continental legacy of scholarship bequeathed to future generations in the country where they sought refuge from European oppression, but that their heirs cannot even begin to engage in the discussions left to them by posterity. It speaks volumes to the outcome of those debates of the pre-and-post-war years that they have been washed away and are lost to the Trend-spotting, and theory generating, treadmill of shallowness we are here complaining about.
Lagavulin says
On the free press: What about McClatchey as a template? I don’t know their numbers, but they seem to succeed (defined as maintaining existence while still adhering to journalistic standards) by simultaneously a) remaining focused on the local, b) exploiting economies of scale and the internet for national/international news, and c) pursuing profit instead of profit maximization.
In this way, McClatchey is approaching BBC territory. But while old Auntie started big and worked its way down to the local (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/northeastscotlandnorthernisles/), the Clatch (hopefully it’s contagious) is local newspapers going national. The BBC has its problems and its subsidies, but it is much more like a successful news corporation than PBS.
On Academia: The tenure system is killing rational thought. These people are not politically ‘moderate.’ They are politically neutered. American social scientists generally, in my experience, do not accept the responsibility that goes along with their subject material being inherently political, i.e. informs the norms and objectives of social and political life, namely understanding and explicitly accepting the power and interests that are served by their analyses. Ironically, natural scientists are much more politically attuned and politically active – specifically in protecting the scientific method from political influence. Social Scientists on the other hand remind me of the education of Beatrice O’Hara in the Other Side of Paradise: “a tutelage measured by the number of things and people could be contemptuous of and charming about, a culture rich in all arts and traditions, barren of all ideas…”