The new puritans, less fun that the old

puritans....We just spent at night at the Marin Youth Hostel in the Headlands less than ten minutes from the Golden Gate Bridge. It was cheap, $72.00 a night for a private room with no bath, and sounded rustic -- no restaurants, no TV, bring your own food, and enjoy the hiking! Well as it turned out, the place is magical. Located next to the Headlands Center for the Arts and two minutes from one of the most beautiful black sand beaches in California, the place could not have recommended itself more in terms of location. The atmosphere was disturbing: in the OC, we have a lot of anti-environmentalist behavior, fake smiles and plastic behavior, but the authenticity of the hostel guests was exaggerated in the other direction. Perhaps a vow of silence had been taken before we got there, but my eight year old's natural exuberance was thrown for a loop as he cringed every time he cracked a century old floorboard. Awe at the natural beauty of the place doesn't translate necessarily into sanctimony and disapproval...for me at any rate. Can vegans be more carefree? Does deep ecology make you deeply depressed? Just asking...I would recommend it despite my rather ill-tempered complaint. It is only twenty minutes from SF, and the whole area is gloriously beautiful. Perhaps I seek an impossible middle ground between the drunken revelers on Union Street, on a bender at 4 pm on a Sunday, and the sobriety of monastic hostellers composting their coffee grounds and beard clippings (I compost too- obsessively, but without the big plastic tub).

what I learned in Shanghai

Government controlled media in China gives detailed analysis of the global economy, global stock markets and currency and commodity trading. It is more in depth than NPR. Of course it's biased, but it's also informative. Our working class neighborhood masseuses understood that Americans are bankrupt because all Americans do is consume.

Street urchins may seem straight out of central casting, off the main boulevards Shanghai has so much character, I weep in the OC for it.

Shanghai Diaries

From July 14 -- a message I wrote, but was unable to post since China had blocked access to Facebook, Twitter, Blogger and other social media sites because of the unrest in Urumqi, Xinjiang province

Friends,

It is 95 degrees Fahrenheit today. Our walk to lunch and a pedestrian area called "Special Characteristic Zone" ended up with Peter pale from the beginnings of heat stroke and a brief and confusing visit to a "museum" of antiquities which also advertised itself as a Research Center of the prestigious Fudan University. Inside the "museum," we discovered that the hundred year old wooden lattice windows, the ancestors altars and wood carved aphorisms that traditionally go over the courtyard of Chinese homes were all for sale. Three young women were on laptops, drinking tea. There was a small stage with a "guzhen" or butterfly harp covered with cloth. I asked if they held concerts and one young lady gave us a business card and urged me to call her, saying that special performances could be arranged for a price.

Yesterday we went to a fabric market and had Leo measured for a suit. His suit will cost $60.00 US. The market is in the Old City of Shanghai, which contains a warren of stores selling knock off crocs for three dollars. I doubt that the next time we are here that any of this will exist as the old markets are surrounded by gigantic holes in the ground alternating with high rises named Golden Harmony Horse, or Lucky Double Happiness Rabbit Foot. Peter and Michael claim to have seen something resembling a bear claw during market day in these streets. The testes of the bear are said by Chinese medicine to be a sort of ancient Viagra. Next time you think the Orient is so Zen, think again.

The seamstresses cooed over a pale and slightly feverish Leo, and one asked if I thought Chinese or American education gave children a deeper knowledge of academic subjects. Ashamed to tell her that most Americans don't know where Iraq is, or how to calculate variable rate mortgage, much less differentiate between Warring States Period and the Spring/Autumn dynasties, I said something anodyne like, children have less pressure in the US since there are more places at University available to them.

Leo has had a low grade fever for the past five days. I am a bit worried, since it seems to be a literary affliction. Perhaps his normal temperature is just slightly above normal when exposed to the neo-colonial circumstances of our summer vacation. (Did I mention we are staying in a Golf Villa?) Leo is otherwise cheerful, but his slight febrility makes me reluctant to engage in strenuous activities in the heat. Englishmen and mad dogs notwithstanding. Peter avoided heatstroke by a small margin this afternoon. I don't think I could have carried him back to apartment if he had collapsed after lunch, but he had this very funny look on his face.

We have seen some very funny examples of Chinglish -- direct translations of Chinese signage. One of them was in the North Pagoda in Suzhou, and it read "Watch out, Knock Head" about low rafters. At the exit of a hotpot restaurant, the door sign read helpfully, "Watchout Landslide." I believe it is about the slippery tiles and the monsoon rains, but it could also mean that there are invisible mountains nearby. Slippery Floor and Landslide are homonymic in Chinese.

I talked to my aunt this morning and told her that we wouldn't be coming to Shandong. She was very unhappy about that, but before the onset of this heat wave, I was floored by a kind of psychic inertia, and so I had delayed making any decisions about going out of town. Talking to her made me regret my choices. She told me to tell Peter that the entire Liu clan was eager to see the "foreign son-in-law."

A preserved warren of back alleys off Taikang Road boasts expat bars, boutiques and art galleries and small speciality shops, which haven't entirely displaced the locals. A few old guys had their beautiful mynah birds out in tiny cages. The alleys are lined with concrete sinks, where the original residents still get their only running water. A young and old man were mixing concrete for the pavers to be newly installed in the alley and they sat casually on the ground as if it were their living room. They took their time. Two Shanghainese beauties in tilted porkpie hats fanned themselves languidly and an impromptu photo shoot was taking place as a young woman in bug-eyed, Paris Hilton sunglasses posed for her Pygmalion in front of drying laundry.

Slick and stultifying malls are everywhere and they boast stores with strange names like "Kuhle" (German for cool) and other variations on Western brands. During interminable cab rides through forests of high rises, each one it seems, built by a former people's commune or factory that has made it big and is speculating on real estate in Shanghai, we think about starting our own brand consultancy here to come up with Teutono-American sounding names for things.

I've always been deeply disturbed by this place, too much so probably for my own good, but we will come back, only not in July/August.


--

higher ed cuts in california

This is a copy of an Op Ed I just sent to the LA Times

As the entire UC system looks to cut its faculty salaries by 8% as of August 1, 2009, we are looking at the dismantling of one of the best public Universities in the world. When Clark Kerr drew up his ambitious Master Plan, he worked with a governor, Pat Brown and a state legislature willing to commit to providing the best possible public university to the citizens of the Golden State. Of course, their motivation was not completely idealistic: Cold War anxieties about competitiveness with the Soviet Union certainly shaped the liberal consensus about the importance of accessible higher education. Governor Schwarzenegger and this legislature will have the dishonor of undoing the UC: the are applying the shock doctrine along to California’s university, forcing the UC administration to raise tuition 9.3% while lowering faculty salaries by 8%.

According to Josh Keller's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "California's 'Gold Standard" for Higher Education Falls Upon Hard Times," it seems that nearly all of California's educational policy wonks dismiss the Master Plan as hopelessly obsolete, applicable only to 1960, when 90% of the state was white and "coffers were full." But rather than reformulating a plan that could galvanize public opinion and promote commonly shared goals - to address the needs of the state's growing Hispanic population and to improve the dismal place California now occupies in comparative educational capital (it ranks 25th among states in the proportion of its residents age 26-34 who hold bachelor's degrees, well behind New York, Illinois and Virginia), the leadership of the State has refused to do what is necessary to guarantee access and excellence to today’s students.

At UCI, some of our most brilliant students come from rural California, or coastal immigrant enclaves: they are first generation college students who are at least in part economically responsible for hard-working multi-generational families. What do we say to them about their job prospects in a state that devalues the very education for which they have struggled? As higher education cuts sink in, you will see the demographics of the Ph.D. pipeline become even less diverse. You will see lower income undergraduates struggle ever harder to pay their bills while attaining high levels of academic achievement. You will see the flight of top ranking professors from their posts to private universities, leaving our best students behind. One of the historically specific mandates of the UC in recent years is to hire and educate graduate students so that the California industry and culture of the future will be able to reflect the demographics of this rapidly changing state. By cutting the UC system to this degree, this goal is implicitly abandoned. How can faculty as a group honestly encourage our most outstanding working students and/or students of color to pursue Ph.D.'s?

Looking at other public universities in financially beleaguered Sun Belt states, it is worth noting that salary cuts are not being implemented - Florida's higher education is being cut 10.5% but without salary cuts (Chronicle of Higher Education May 29); Arizona seems focused on administrative efficiency and limited program closures, again not resorting to salary cuts (CHE March 27); Nevada cut 12.5%, but even there, salary cuts won't go above the 5-6% proposed for other state workers. UC alone appears to be hell-bent on the anti-stimulus of cutting pay for the state's workforce.

One of the major issues at work here is inability of the UC, the Cal States and the Community Colleges to work together to force California's dysfunctional legislature to support higher education. This is the dark side of Kerr's Master Plan: a clear educational hierarchy. However, post-secondary education in California cannot afford competition between these interests for an ever shrinking part of state funding. There are critical and distinct roles for research universities and Cal States as well as Community Colleges to play in educating students, and promoting a healthy civic and public culture in our state. Higher education cuts in the state of California do direct damage to the condition of our democracy. Democracy and education, as John Dewey once suggested, are intimately related, their fates inextricably entwined.

In the meantime, years of poorly framed public policy have made it possible for for-profit outfits like University of Phoenix to tap into public and federal funding in order to provide their students with on-line courses taught by contingent faculty. This for-profit model of higher education stands to benefit from the undermining of the UC system, where central administrators, in a dive for the bottom, are suggesting we standardize all our courses and give them on-line.

Californians have chosen to invest in bubbles while shrinking government and public services. The time for that is past. Joan Didion deplored the destructive short sightedness of her beloved home state's institutions and politics, which always lagged far behind the state's changing demographics and its shifting needs. We are at a critical juncture in the history of public higher education: we can either rewrite a new master plan to educate not just a fantastically diverse workforce, but a truly diverse citizenry, or we can decide to destroy a public good that has been the envy of the world.

pretendo

What about a game of pretendo? wherein I purse my lips, speak in an extremely arch way and offer you a fun fact about whatever you're talking about so that you are entirely, and utterly stumped? Why don't I speak in long sentences with many subclauses while tilting my head back slightly?

It's much more than a computer game, it is a way of life. I tried to snap myself out of academic pretendo the other day and the only way I could recover my ability to speak normally was to express myself with a version of wtf? Still, once some one near you starts to play pretendo, it's pretty hard not to get drawn into a competition over who can be the most pretentious!

obama's speech in cairo

was extraordinary, but I take issue with an idea that would seem a no-brainer -- I would push him to expand the idea that education serves to help each individual reach his or her full potential -- this growth model of Progressive Education and the meritocracy that followed should be discarded for a notion of education that binds us more deeply to a common cause and shared sense of intellectual value.

20th anniversary of Tiananmen Massacre

China Beat has interesting coverage of protests that were happening outside of Beijing in 1989.

In the past twenty years, I was figuring out how to be American -- and rejecting my parent's preoccupation with the country they left meant trying to figure out what being American really was all about...now I look on the China question with greater detachment -- but also more like an American...and I find it the whole situation baffling, sophisticated, inspiring, terrifying...

Kaya to Reissue Oriental Girls Desire Romance

After neglecting the blogging thing for a while, and celebrating privately how wrong I was during those dark days of Sarah Palin, I a glad Obama is president, but still troubled by how easily we accept the meritocracy as gate keeper to elite institutions of higher ed and guarantor of the equal distribution of economic justice.

The California budget upheavals have been rocking our world, but Kaya Press is re-issuing Oriental Girls Desire Romance, which will be out at the end of the summer.

The revolt against meritocracy, or why Obama won't win in November

No amount of spinning is going to make either Barack Obama or his wife average Americans. He is no everyman, and why should he be? He is an extraordinarily gifted member of his generation who was offered every opportunity for success by the Meritocracy, a system of social promotion of high scoring students. Obama has known adversity, but he has always been smart. He was an A student.

I benefited from the same system of promotion. High SAT scores and an Ivy League education permitted me entry into a cultural, if not economic elite, and even if I chose to get a Humanities Ph.D. and not a law degree.

Why does meritocratic make Barack Obama fundamentally unpopular with white working class Americans?

Because meritocracy was designed to overturn the principles of economic and social justice, replacing redistribution of wealth with rationalized distribution of opportunity. I am writing about this in my next book, which I hope will find a publisher soon. Meritocracy breaks the promise of social and economic justice and replaces it with a form of allegedly transparent and progressive scholastic triage.

What we are experiencing, what we have experienced in the past twenty years, is a populist revolt against this system, one that Labour Leftist Michael Young mocked in a satire in which meritocracy as a neologism was coined.

Rather than offering working class Americans free tuition to our best institutions, we tracked students according to their scholastic aptitude so that we could channel the best and the brightest out of their communities and into the elite institutions that would divorce them from local relations. A return to community organizing is characterized as a sacrifice of the fat corporate lawyer salaries that Obama and his wife could have earned.

We have only elected one meritocratically promoted President – Bill Clinton. Every other President was culled from the economic elites or the school of hard knocks. For some reason or other, the Republicans have become the party of the “averaged American,” and he or she will resent Obama’s polish and poise. The average American will identify with John McCain’s blunders and his C average – once again.

James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard, promoter of the SAT’s as a general college entrance examination and persecutor of our fellow travelers and Leftist professors is responsible for reshaping the way in which we think about higher education and democratic values. Rather than arguing for the best education for all, the College Board, under his direction, implicitly promoted the idea that best education should be reserved for the meritorious few. Average students would have to settle for less.

As we pick up ourselves up after this election, we should be thinking about Nicholas Lemann’s and Walter Benn Michaels’ ideas that a truly democratic and just country, quality education should be a right and not a privilege.

No comments

I haven't been blogging almost a year, and some one has been trying to post anonymous comments on a year old post, accusing me of "stereotyping."

I think that I can be accused of being "unfair" -- which i am, occasionally, and which I try to correct, but I can't go into the details of why an admittedly critical observation is not stereotyping. This blog is merely an archive of my thinking out loud. Some of it is catty, some of it funny (I hope), but I am not working on it intensively, so it is merely an archive of past musings. Let's leave it at that....Thanks for your observations and comments....In the future, if I do this again regularly, there will be no anonymous comments allowed.

The Real Obama analyzes Reagan Revolution

The Clinton Machine spun me yesterday, right round, right round...until I saw what Obama did say in an interview in which he ANALYZES and interprets why Reagan and the Republican Party APPEARED to contest the conventional welfare state wisdom during the 80s and 90s, I believed the Bill and Hillary spin machine that Obama had praised Ronald Reagan.

The Real Obama Quote

Now if you look at the video above, you'll see that Obama is saying that Reagan was able to crystallize and ride public discontent, turnin the country away from (I'm adding this -- Keynesian economic policies) welfare state bureaucracy driven social solutions to the appearance of a dynamic entrepreneurialism that Bill Clinton did not fundamentally disagree with. Obama is saying, but in perhaps too subtle a way that a moment for a real change of direction in government has arrived where a political RETURN to progressive economic policies can be made, and that Hillary won't be able to make good on it. Obama says that he isn't invested in the political struggles of the 60s and that he can galvanize cross-party consensus in much the same way Reagan did.

It's hard to encapsulate in a 30 second sound bite -- but the Clintons are acting as if they are "encapsulating" Obama's position -- they're playing dirty and if that's that they think they need to do, we need to denounce it. If my experience in academia holds, those post 68 Boomers, the Clintons will not cede their false vanguardist position to younger, less radical peers who are less ideologically impatient and dishonest.

my plug for Obama

I've come back to blogging to make the following plug for Obama -- I do this as a private citizen, exercising my right to freedom of political expression. Many have expressed ambivalence about his lack of substance and experience.

I concede some part of truth to those objections. That said, I will say that Obama represents the first possibility of a radical remaking of the Democratic Party. He talks about the powerful ethics of national unity and the positive potential of solidarity rather than the language of "pride" and ethnic difference. He represents the real possibility of breaking the back of the identity politics of cosmetic diversity in Democratic politics, which has alienated the white working class, as well as young people, and he has at least in rhetorical terms, taken on progressive national affirmation, and progressive political renewal.

I know the Devil is in the details and the Democratic Party is a juggernaut. Nothing is going to move it quickly. But with Edwards populist economics and Obama's rejection of divisive and false "pride" -- we may see some hope for political mobilization.

And yes, I am no fan of Hillary's establishmentarian politics. I read that her campaign spent 2 million dollars polling Iowa, which barely boasts more than two million inhabitants...

break from blogging

I'm thinking of shutting down the blog...life and writing have gotten the upper hand...as well as a new office "Director the UCI Humanities Center": I don't want to compromise the voice here, but I also don't want my readers to mistake any statements I make here as emanating from that office.

Thank you to my readers! And feel free to email me and send me stuff you think will be of interest. I will do my best to reply and respond. I hope to finish the manuscript -- Modernity and its Discontents by December!

LOL theo

2008