November 2006 Archives

K and K (see previous entry) offer brief comments on the two interviews.  They write that for respondent A:

 
            …the problem itself is not a perplexing one; it is one for which a correct answer exists or will exist.  Finding the right facts will lead to certain knowledge.  Interpreting the facts is not mentioned as part of the process of arriving at a decision. (3)

 Of the second respondent (B), they write:

People who use this reasoning style acknowledge the uncertainty of knowing, but even though they accept the uncertainty they also argue that a judgment that is “reasonably certain” can be constructed on the basis of available data and existing methodologies

These seem remarks seem adequate summaries of the epistemologies implied in A and B.  But what, if anything, can the remarks of A and B tell us about their psychological development. 

Looked at in this way, I think it worth noting that A is involved in a contradiction.  First A says she cannot know because she did not make it (chemical additive) and later says that a final absolute answer is possible and will come forward.  This though may not be so much a logical contradiction as it is an expression of the individual’s embeddedness in time.  I, at present, do not know, but, in my opinion, in the future an answer will be forth coming.  Additionally, A’s attitude towards knowledge appears relatively passive.  Some one with the guts to examine all the data will produce the answer; but A will not be that person. Further, A appears to equate the knowing of a thing with the making of it.  I don’t know, she says, because I did not make it.  And, finally, A seems to feel that knowledge is the product of the efforts of individuals.

B is not however involved in even the appearance of a contradiction and shows no sense at all of being embedded in time or of knowledge being generated in time.  This may be the case because her response, as K and K suggests, rests on an acceptance of “uncertainty” which as part of the attitude of skepticism is perpetual.  Uncertainty has not and will not be resolved at any particular moment.  While, in other words, A approaches the question with the attitude that an absolute answer is possible, B approaches the problem with the attitude that no absolute answer is possible.

Further B does not believe that the person who knows a thing is the person who makes a thing.  Or, more precisely, B does not believe that the person(s) who make a thing necessarily know the effects of a thing (whether it is safe or useful or lives up to its claims).  And B knows that one cannot necessarily trust the claims (tobacco) of those that make the thing.  B’s attitude towards “knowledge” or “expert opinion” is much more active.  Indeed, one might say that for B “knowledge” is “expert opinion” as generated by certain assumptions and methodologies.

How does one get from A to B.?  Well, one might logically answer, by going to college and onto graduate school.  To which, I might answer quite logically, why yes of course, but that makes education simply a social or socializing process and doesn’t tell us anything about what an individual might have to go through emotionally to move from position A to position B.  Additionally, if one takes a social approach, as do K and K, one is unable to tell if B is able to apply the uncertainty principle to areas of life other than the epistemic (are chemical additives safe), or if, indeed, she should (do you drink beverages with NutraSweet).

More on the issue of opinion and individualism.  In their Developing Reflective Judgment, Patricia King and Karen Kitchener offer a number of interviews with students to clarify the idea of reflective judgment.  In the following two interviews, students are asked to express their opinions (italics are mine).

“The following comments were made by a high school student.

I: Can you ever know for sure that your position that Nutra­sweet is safe is correct?
R: No. I don't know for sure because I don't manufacture it.
I: OK. Do you think we'll ever know for sure?
R: If somebody more or less had the guts to stand up and go and do all the research on it and find out.
I: So you think someday we'll know?
R: Yes.
I: When people disagree about the safety of chemical addi­tives [in foods], is it the case that one opinion is right and the other is wrong?
R: Some people's opinion is right, and they can more or less prove that they are right, and the other people that are wrong.

The following excerpt from an interview with a graduate student illustrates this reasoning style.
I: Can you ever say you know for sure that your point of view on chemical additives is correct?
R: No, I don't think so. I think given that any theorem has to start with assumptions that are not necessarily true, then even if the internal argument in your system is completely consis­tent, it might be that the assumptions are wrong. So, just from this standpoint, we can't always be sure. I think we can usually be reasonably certain, given the information we have now and considering our methodologies.
I: Is there anything else that contributes to not being able to be sure?
R: Yes. Aside from assumptions, it might be that the research wasn't conducted rigorously enough. In other words, we might have flaws in our data or sample, things like that.
I: How then would you identify the "better" opinion?

R: One that takes as many factors as possible into considera­tion. I mean one that uses the higher percentage of the data that we have and perhaps that uses the methodology that has been most reliable.

I.And how do you come to a conclusion about what the evidence suggests?

R: I think you have to take a look at the different opinions and studies that are offered by different groups. Maybe some studies offered by the chemical industry, some studies by the government, some private studies, a variety of studies from a variety of different areas. You wouldn't trust, for instance, a study funded by the tobacco industry that proved that cigarette smoking is not harmful. You wouldn't base your point of view entirely upon that study. Things like that have to be taken into account also . . . you have to try to interpret people's motives and that makes it a more complex soup to try to strain out.”

End of quotation.  That’s a bit of a read, but I think that two distinct attitudes towards opinion are illustrated here.  They are worth looking at in some detail.  But for the moment, I ask: “How does a student get from position A to position B?”  My answer is that the student must develop intellectually and emotionally.

Well…to continue…a while along the path of “individualism.”

Individualism, as ideology, as symbolic of  standing on one’s own two legs, separates person from person just as the mobility of the child, when he or she begins to walk, makes possible the separation of child from mother.  Individualism separates by voiding one’s relationship to groups, to the group of one’s ethnic heritage, to the group of one’s religion, to the group of one’s class, or to the group of one’s gender.  The individual is no one of these things, and before the law at least, the group memberships of the individual should make no difference to one’s judgment of the individual.

Most teachers of writing, I expect, have talked with a student who complains, because of something the teacher has said or written on a paper, “But I have a right to my own opinion, don’t I?”  Well, of course, one tries to say, but while one has a right to one’s opinion, there are different kinds of opinions.  One is looking, one says, for reasoned opinion, opinion backed up by some evidence and argument.  Of course, it’s hard to say this without implying that the opinion of the student is somehow inferior to one’s own.  This, of course, is what the student hears.  That his or her opinion is inferior, and that you the teacher are saying, in effect, I am the teacher and you are not.

I don’t think it would be better to say this—not if one wishes to educate—but I have wanted to say, “Look, you call this your own opinion, and you have a right to it because it is your own. But I don’t think your “own” opinion is your “own” opinion at all.  No, it is but the feeble echo of the opinion of several million other people who have the same opinion that you have.  In what sense is it your own if millions of others have it?  Did you buy it?  As one might a pair of jeans. 

No, an opinion is something a person has to earn.  And if I had any sense at all that you had earned it, I might not have spoken as I did. In fact, had I felt that you had earned your opinion, I might have responded to it conversationally, engaged you in dialogue about it, but when I feel the opinion has not been earned, I don’t think I am talking to an individual at all but a mob, with a single idea in its head.  And really one cannot engage a mob in meaningful dialogue.”

My reasons for not saying this to the student are multiple.  I guess I would rather imply that students’ reasoning is not so hot, than say outright they are not individuals, but sociologically speaking apes of others, strange somnambulists wondering around mumbling things that they have heard their minister or their father say.  Many of my students have been told that they are “special” from day one, and being told that they are by no means special, at least in the realm of opinion, could hurt their feelings.

Also I have found that students who baldly state their right to their opinion, with no caveats, qualifications, or other people might see something different since everything is relative, can be gutsy.  Perhaps, and who knows, they feel very strongly about this cliché that they consider their own opinion..  If so rather than insult such students, I think it better to try to check it out, and see what possibly, even if unexpressed, might give it force.  Of course, one could be dealing with a bonehead.

Education today, I claim, fails to cultivate the personality or develop the individual.  Understanding this requires a look at the vexing notion of individuality.  One is not likely to understand education’s failure to develop it if one does not know what it is.  In Generation Me (2006), Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., writes of people now in their twenties and thirties:

            Two of Generation Me’s most prominent characteristics are our individualism and our lack of political engagement. We firmly believe no one is going to help, so we have to stand on our own. (229)

To be clear, “individualism” is faith, a belief, or ideology like, as the “ism” implies, socialism, communism, or capitalism.  Acting in accord with this “ism” does not mean a person is, psychologically speaking, an individual at all.

            Many of the students, with whom I work, believe in this particular “ism.”  I am not saying, of course, that they know they believe in this “ism,” but they certainly act as if they do. They seem, as Twenge says, to feel the personal sphere and the political sphere are distinct.  This explains, why, according to Twenge, many young people don’t vote.  But, as I am suggesting, the “individualism” of today’s young people is itself an ideology or a politics.  Not voting does not mean one does not have a “politics.”

            That the young people of today might believe in such an “ism” of course makes sense.  During the period of their growing up, more and more individual Americans, some few of them at least, have become richer and richer.  Such people might appear to be able to stand on their own.  And as some few individuals have acquired greater and greater wealth, less and less money has been put into the public sphere, into repairing the roads, or building up parks, or into education.

            Standing on one’s own two legs is a wonderfully significant stage in the development of the child.  But it is by no means the final stage in the development of the individual.  The bottom line ethic however of bullying capitalism makes the ideology of individualism appear somehow heroic.  Being able to stand on one’s own in a world of dog eat dog indifference appears the stuff of struggle towards liberation.  Twenge writes, “Many young women said their mothers explicitly told them to act as individuals. ‘My mother has always encouraged me to be independent and never depend on anyone but myself, wrote Melinda, 22.’” (192)

            The young women whom I teach appear much like Melinda.  When I ask I find that most intend first to acquire a career.  Marriage will come later, if at all.  And whether or not one will have children appears a very open question.  These young women, whether they know it or not, have benefited from the feminism of the 60’s that aimed at the liberation of all women.  But these young women do not regard themselves as the heirs of that feminism.  They do not see themselves as feminists and do not like being identified as such because they see feminists as “women who hate men.”

            If I felt being a feminist meant “a woman who hates men,” I wouldn’t want to be one either because being one might make one appear to be a not very friendly person doomed to a life of consumed by hatred.  Feminism as the liberation of a group has been changed by well meaning mothers and fathers into the “ism” of individualism.  This supplies the young women with the meaningful goal of standing on her own two legs and becoming independent and, at the same time, obscures the profoundly deep and ongoing conflict between men and women.  Individualism liberates at the cost of deep repression.

Somewhere—maybe in Man’s Search for Himself—Rollo May says the modern age is particularly the age of anxiety.  I don’t remember his reasoning, but I expect it went something like: never have individual human beings been so exposed, so vulnerable.  Physical ailments, aging, disease, the loss of a loved one, the loss of love itself are the common stuff of life, but now the individual increasingly lacks the means by which to sustain his or her self when struck by this common stuff.

Before individuals had, for example, marriage till death did you part, for good or ill, or sickness and in health.  Or one had family, for better or worse, located around and about, but relatively nearby that could be called, or just showed up at your door whether  one wanted it or not, in moments of crisis.  One might have hated as much as loved their faces; but all were familiar and there was comfort in that.  Just as comfort was to be found in the relatively unchanging aspect of the old neighborhood.  And of course, in a pinch, one had religion and the comfort of a shared faith.

But marriage is in trouble.  The family is breaking up and taking new shapes.  One has had, to make ends meet, left the area completely.  Family is not around and about or nearly.  And having left, when one returns, the old neighborhood is hardly recognizable.  And religion now offers the threadbare shared faith of a fast food franchise. Never, ever has it been easier to buy your way into heaven.

This is the life now, beyond vocation, to which Sanford refers.  A life, lacking the supports that were once there, the familiar comforts and the comforts of familiarity that blanketed the individual and kept him protected against disaster in the prospect and disaster already afflicted.  The individual is left exposed, then, to an indifferent universe.  At an extreme, or for the more imaginative, one now knows the universe is very huge, unimaginably huge.  The earth that holds us down is less than a speck, less than a microbe in that great space.  And if the earth is not struck and destroyed by a meteor that’s only a matter of timing, only a consequence of the duration of human consciousness being—from its beginning to its end—less that a tick in the expanse of geological time.  There’s a lot of time for us to be gone and for the meteor not to appear.

This is indifference—and not merely a metaphor for it—at its most abstract.  Like the music of the spheres, one can just barely imagine it.  But more up close and personal, one can perhaps imagine pulling out from the intersection to be struck by thousands of pounds of metal hurtling at 60 miles an hour, and you live and wake to find yourself paralyzed from the waist down and your wife carried off to whatever kingdom is to come. 

 But even that is too abstract really; for the indifference of which May speaks is woven into the fabric and texture of our daily lives.  We try to give it a face by calling it such things as “terror.”  This is the world beyond vocation, and education as it is currently practice does nothing to help individuals hold together in the face of it.

I found, with mixed feelings, while reading around the writing of Nevitt Sanford on education.  He writes about some of the things I tried to write about in my Self-Development and College Writing.  For example:

            Today’s college student needs preparation for a world in which he must play a variety of roles and even adopt new roles perhaps several times during his life; an impersonal world in which nonetheless he must manage to remain an individual and accept his individuality; a world with awesome potential for either utopia or disaster.

That’s from Sanford’s Where Colleges Fail page 8.  My feelings are mixed not only because he manages here a sentence with greater clarity than any single sentence I was able to write but also because this sentence was written or at least published in 1967.

            For Sanford education is not about getting a job; it’s about preparing the student as a person and an individual for life beyond, as he puts it, vocation.  And for this life beyond vocation, education must seek to develop the personality of the student, to impart to it, and bring forth from it the qualities of flexibility, openness to experience, and responsibility. He says clearly that education, as he means it, imparts values.  Today of course in the modern megamultiversity the idea of “education” for job or career has seemingly obliterated Sanford’s and my conception of what education should be.

            A number of years back I sat on a committee given the charge of reporting on, at the institution where I work, the Freshman Year Experience.  I took the whole thing pretty seriously, though looking back I see now the report, written as part of an accreditation review, was pretty much a formality.  The accrediting body was not going to deny accreditation, no matter what the quality of its Freshman Year Experience, to an instruction with a couple of Nobel Prize winners in its faculty. In fact, the chair told us  pretty much up front that the committee was not to produce a document that might upset our Chancellor or make him think he ought to do something about the Freshman Year Experience.

            The report had a number of parts or sections to it on, for example, the Freshman Year Experience and the social life of the student, as well as health of the student, and at one point, a section was to deal with the student and his or her ethical development.  I was particularly interested in this last section, and sat there somewhat stunned to see that my colleagues, faculty and staff from student affairs and counseling across campus, begin to compile a list of the various religious institutions located near campus as resources for the ethical development of the student in his or her Freshman Year Experience.

            Even understanding as I did by then that the report was not to be taken seriously, I was troubled to realize that for my colleagues that idea that the course work itself, the curriculum and the knowledge imparted, might be part of or in some way related to students’ ethical development simply did not occur.  I waited for somebody to bring up that idea or make that connection, but nobody did.  And, understanding that the report was not to be taken seriously, I pretty much just gave up at that point and psychologically, so to speak, threw in the towel.  I wasn’t about, as a lowly lecturer and writing instructor, to lecture my learned colleagues on the true nature of education and their blindness to it.

I am not sure what this has to do with anything, but yesterday Roland Barthe’s Pleasures of the Text, I think it was called, came to mind.  I bought it in paperback up in Berkeley some time in the 70’s.  A friend was with me, and we sat down on the spot and read through it, laughing all the way.  He was telling the truth we thought.  That people read those dull old books to be bored and to find odd things as they read along maybe just an word, turn of phrase, or unfamiliar convention.  Those were the real pleasures of the text.

For example, I remember chewing over this oddity—or at least it was an oddity when I first read it—that appeared in Dostoevsky.  He would introduce a character first by name—say Svidregailov-- and follow that with “from the city of XXXX in the Province of XXXX.”  It seemed as if that he was seeking to imply with those XXXX’s that he was writing about a real person, somebody somebody might know, and so as not to give the person’s identity away he was covering up possible clues to the person’s identity with those XXXX’s.

I found this strange since the book I was reading, in this case Crime and Punishment, was clearly a work of fiction.  So why would he bother to cover up the origins of a fictional chacarater.  Then I thought that perhaps Dostoevsky put in those XXXX’s to encourage the reader to think that he was writing about REAL people and that he, Dostoevsky, the author, was trying with those XXXX’s to treat those real people with some politeness or to perhaps protect himself from charges of slander.

That made some sense because, while I am not sure if people would call Doesteovsky an author in the tradition of naturalism, that’s the sort of convention naturalists use to imply they are not making up what they are writing about.  But then I wondered if Doestoevsky really had known or at least read about in some provincial newspaper of a person who had performed actions not unlike those performed by Svidregailov.  In other words, Dostoevsky, was not using those XXXX’s to make the reader think the character was real, but to encourage the reader, as an astute reader, to see the XXXX’s as a fictional convention and thus to imply that the character had no relation to anyone living or dead, fictional or non-fictional, as they like to write at the end of movies.

I don’t know if this is what Barthes meant exactly or if anybody other than a few oddball literary types, otherwise known as English majors, would find any pleasure in thinking about such a thing.  But if one does think about such a thing the only reason for doing it, I think, would be the pleasure of doing so.  For as far as I can tell I can find no way whatsoever to resolve the questions I have raised about Dostoevsky’s use of those XXXX’s.  Somebody might say, of course, oh you are just lazy; you could do some research and find some answer to your questions.  But really I don’t think so, though thinking about such an issue might be something a lazy person would do or perhaps a somewhat less than serious person might do.

I would rather resolve the question by saying simply that the oddity of the XXXX’s is an unfathomable “ambiguity.”  But if one declares a thing ambiguous, what happens to the idea of objectivity.  What’s the point or why would it be worth the effort to be objective about an unanswerable question.  To this a person devoted to the idea of objectivity might reply, why the hell would one expend any energy, mental or otherwise, on a question so transparently trivial and of no real interest to anyone living or dead.  One has much bigger fish to fry than this sort of silliness.

Well, yes, of course, but is there not some pleasure in being silly?

So what’s objectivity?  I guess I don’t know anymore.  But that’s sort of what I tried to be way back in college or, let’s say, I saw that as a task intimately allied with the pursuit of Truth.  I think Freud equated objectivity with the attitude of the surgeon relative to the person being cut open.  Given my limited experience with surgeons, I think that a bad analogy.  Or perhaps he equated objectivity with the determination to look at the truth however gross, ugly, and morally repellant it might be.

I think I once thought of it that way—objectivity as the means to pursue the ends of truth, requiring a kind of emotional willingness to look at ugliness and moral decay however repellant and with the determination too to try as hard as possible to make myself aware of the beliefs and assumptions and perspectives that might shape my perception of the truth however ugly it might be.  Or perhaps it was only some unseen or unquestioned believe or attitude that made it seem repellent.

Who knew.

I felt in any case that I had a duty to look at myself as I looked at the object to see, if I could, how my self shaped what I saw.  But I guess I had a pretty high faulting notion of the truth or something like it.  I sat through lectures by professors that were very biased and apparently the professor felt no need to point to the bias or identify it as such.  And I am not speaking of something here as super-subtle as that business of constructing disciplinary distinctions.

I sat through a political science class that was devoted to international relations and the study of revolutions. This was a GE course and intended I guess as a survey of a couple of big topics.  The international relations part was informed entirely by the realist perspective I have previously mentioned (though not announced as such).  

The revolution part was quite amazing because the professor, no matter what the revolution—Russian, Chinese or Vietnamese—made it out, one way or another, that Communism had not won.  No, the pre-existing order or the mélange of parties that arouse during the revolutionary turmoil and opposed to the communists had failed to rise to the occasion.  If Communism won that as not because they had a positive agenda or appealed to the hearts and minds of the masses but because the opposition had proven inept and admittedly at times quite corrupt.

Over and over the pattern repeated itself in the analysis of this particular Professor who was Chinese and born in Taiwan.  Perhaps this Professor lacked any introspective powers or actually believed what he said.  I don’t know.  But the context of this theory—that is, himself—in his origins and attitudes was never addressed as a possible contributing factor to the Professor’s particular take on Communism and on theories of revolution more generally.

 I was appalled but didn’t mention the Professor’s possible bias to my students because I was busy trying to keep them for ridiculing and complaining about the Professor because his spoken English was, how to say, rather foggy.  The students just didn’t like the Professor it seemed, and I remember one student perturbed because the Professor had given her an A- on her first paper because he said it was “over-organized.”  What the heck, the student wondered, did that mean; and frankly I had to say that I had never heard that particular criticism of a student’s paper before.

I suggested that she visit the Professor in his office hours and ask him what it meant.  She did and her grade was changed to a straight A.

Over organized?

Again with the objectivity thing.  I don’t want to kick a dead horse, but too often I am suggesting students are taught things on the basis of a theory or perspective that they are unaware of and can’t get their heads around.  Take that ethic’s course.  Ethics was presented entirely thought the lens of analytic philosophy, but students didn’t know that because they didn’t know there was any other way to think about ethics. 

Or let’s say some students did have a different way of thinking about ethics but that way was based in religion and was the expression of morality and not really ethics at all.  In short, the ethics course defined itself, dialectically speaking, against a) matters of fact and b) religion.

For example, whoever taught the course, somewhere in the first couple of lectures Socrates’ “Euthyphro” would pop up. In this dialogue, Socrates establishes the possibility of the rational discussion of values as something distinct from morality or what the gods might have to say.  He asks, is something good because the Gods feel it is good and only because of that or do the Gods assert something is good because it is good (independent of the God’s judgment).  If the former, something is good because the God’s say it is, then what a God says is good is potentially arbitrary.  I say it’s good so it’s good, period.  But if it is good independent of the God’s judgment, then it is possible to discuss why it might be good using reason and without committing an act of impiety.

Students of rhetoric might call this a disciplinary  move by which the discipline establishes the boundaries of the discipline itself.  If one follows Socrates, one can in this ethics class discuss values rationally and without recourse to what Gods might or might not think (as handed down by tradition or religious texts, such as the Bible).  And that’s what we are going to do in this class.  So out with Morality and Religion.

Similarly but along the lines of matters of fact, a clear distinction was drawn between ethics and manners.  For surely, whether or not an innocent person should be killed for the greater good was not simply a matter of manners.  Ethics as manners was ruled out because then the study of ethics would become a study of the socialization of the individual into certain ethical views.  Also, with this distinction made, one did not have to confront Schopenhauer’s claim that morality is just advanced animal training.  So much then for good old Nihilism. Or the Irrational.

I came to read the ethics course as being less about something called ethics and more as asserting the defining disciplinary boundaries of the study of ethics as if there were something to be studied other than the disciplinary boundaries of this particular way of defining ethics.

I think most of the students did not think about the ethic’s course in this way.  Instead they brought with them feelings about ethics and morality that did not necessarily fit the study of ethics as defined by the class.  And since these other ways of thinking about ethics were not directly addressed, but pushed as it were simply to the side, the result for students was confusion, a sense of futility, and boredom.  And since these things were not directly addressed either by the students themselves or the instructor students set themselves to do what they could do: memorize and regurgitate.

I attended the lectures for that class on US-Soviet relations for four years perhaps and then the Berlin wall came down.  I doubt they have a class now on US-Soviet relations in political science; perhaps it’s covered in history. The collapse of the wall produced one of the more authentic teaching moments I have seen.  The professor who taught the course came in, sat on the table in front, and said that the collapse of the wall had really screwed up his course.  He was clearly nonplussed.

As I have indicated, objectivity seemed in those general education classes pretty hard to come by.  Such was the case with US-Soviet Relations.  The professor had been schooled by Henry Kissinger and his whole analysis of the situation was based in the realpolitic of, as we fondly called it, BOP or Balance of Power.  When the wall came down, the BOP between the US and the Soviet Union dissolved, and so did the Professor’s course.

Boy, did those realists gloat.  They wrote that the fall of the Soviet Union proved the realist philosophy since, in balancing against the USSR, we had forced them to collapse.  Professors, I mean guys with Ph.D’s, actually wrote, “The USA won the Cold War.”  To which I can only say, BS.  I mean who wins Armageddon. 

The Cold War was an incalculable waste of human energy, talent, lives, and money on both sides of the BOP equation.  The USSR, scared to death of being invaded given its history, spent 20% of its GNP on war and preparation for it.  They didn’t have money for other things—like consumer products—except maybe to send some poor lonely guy into outer space. I mean is the guy who comes out standing after a total debacle the “winner” and of what exactly, the debacle sweepstakes?

Mostly though I kept my opinions to myself.  So the students came out hearing nothing but the “realist” perspective.  True, the Professor did assign a book on something called the “reformist” position; but he did not lecture on that position and the book was a terribly written mishmash of this and that. 

What I gradually came to see was that, at least in the world of academia, the realist position was a way of establishing the disciplinary boundaries of political science at least in the realm of international relations.  The real enemy of the realpolitic in that realm was not something called “reformism,” but “liberal economics” (or more exactly, the Economics Department).

At the heart of the realm politics was and is the “nation-state.”  That’s what is balanced in the BOP; nation states in various entangling alliances against other nation states.  But liberal economics, following good old Adam Smith, opposes limitations on the free flow of goods from any one place to another.  And one of the limitations to that free flow has been and continues to be people who believe in the nation state and who might erect therefore economic policies designed to protect and favor the members of its particular nation state.

So the realpolitic wasn’t about nations fighting nations, but about political science asserting its right to study the nation state when liberal economics says most of that is just stuff that gets in way.  What this has to do with objectivity, I don’t know.

I am not a fan of Henry Giroux, but somewhere he says teachers ought to be “intellectuals.”  I guess that’s what I am.  Once I went to an on campus talk by Richard Rorty.  Very few showed up.  Hardly anybody from philosophy, but a few people from English.  One of the English professors saw me and said, sort of dryly, “I might have known you would be here.  You’re an intellectual.”

Perhaps being an intellectual is like being a perpetual learner.  While those biology lectures I attended for my research writing class were boring, especially after hearing them five years in a row, I did enjoy learning about the biological stuff.  But maybe I was able to enjoy it because I didn’t have to memorize and regurgitate it.  I didn’t take notes.  I listened and day dreamed.

Somewhere Paul Goodman says all true learning arises from need, desire, curiosity and imagination.  Biology can excite the imagination.  I noticed for example that some of the viruses looked a good deal like the lunar landing module.  They had amazing shapes. And my colleagues got a bit sick of me because I would spout biological stuff and went around saying that we were all going to be killed by some microbial disease, and if we had any social conscience at all, none of us would use those soaps that say they kill bacteria.

The only right way to kill bacteria is with something like alcohol.  That causes the cell wall(s) of the microbe to burst. Bam! They are dead. Alcohol is a true bactericide.  But that store bought stuff you squirt on your hands kills the bacteria, not by blowing them up, by screwing with its DNA.  You just don’t want to screw with a bacterium’s DNA because those critters are very, very adaptable.  You end up killing off 99% of them but the 1% that remains may have a resistance to the bacteria killer and those suckers will only grow stronger.  Bacteria actually swap DNA.  I mean they are swimming along and for some reason one bacterium just swaps DNA with a bacteria like itself.  It’s like, “Hi how are you.  Let’s swap!” That’s how they adapt.  Constant swapping.

 So I told my colleagues every time you use that drug store bacteria killer you are acting out of your own selfish interests (your desire to not get a cold or flu) and not thinking of the future of the human race.  And on top of that when you use the drug store stuff, you may kill a number of them, but most you don’t because bacteria aren’t stupid.  They flee!  And the bacteria that are on your hands end up on the face of the person sitting across from you.

Also we have several hundred different kinds of bacteria and microbial creatures living right inside of us.  Each human being is a complex ecological system.  Many of these bacteria serve vital purposes, vital to us I mean.  They are essential to the digestion of some vitamins and minerals.  We can’t live without them.  Over millions of years mammals have developed symbiotic relations with a whole host of bacterium.

I had a friend for example who had a really bad ear infection but had to fly somewhere.  So the doctor gave her some powerful stuff to kill the infection so she could fly.  But the anti-biotic ended up killing off all of one type of bacteria.  My friend had horrible headaches and even flashes of temporary blindness.  The bacteria the antibiotic had killed off fed on another and without it there, the other bacteria had gone ape-shit crazy, and my friend was suffering from the “feces” or byproducts of the crazy bacteria.  So they tried to restore the ecological balance by having my friend eat noting but PROTEIN for six months, since the bacteria that had gone ape-shit crazy was dependent upon starches (sugars) for its survival.

Maybe it’s just me.  But this sort of thing excites my imagination.

A paradox here—as you may have noticed.  And one troubling for me, is that, as I have said, the ethic’s teacher was contentious.  He wasn’t the only one.  I remember especially a professor who taught in the biology course that had to be taken by all biology majors.  The course covered a lot of ground and was team-taught.

Usually, the course kicked off with a foray into the microbial kingdom.  I enjoyed learning about the complex array of microbes.  The course concluded with a section on botany taught by a man who ran the local botanical gardens.  He had a Ph.D. and was well qualified to teach the course.  But I had to wonder, since they had to bring in somebody from the outside, that botany had fallen into such low regard that the Biology Department didn’t have a single botanist in it. .  Every time, the local botanist taught the course I waited for him to say the word “naked,” because he was from Texas and he pronounced naked as “nekked.”

One time to my amazement when he said nekked for naked nobody laughed or even snickered.  I brought up the “nekked” word in my writing course and found out that nobody had laughed because they didn’t know nekked meant naked and thought he was referring to a particular kind of seed called the “nekked” seed from the “nekked” bush or tree.

 Late one afternoon I went to a meeting in the faculty club about how to teach the large lecture.  I didn’t teach the large lecture but having sat through a good number of them I was interested to hear what people had to say.  The turn out was not great; it started with a multi-media pep talk and then people broke into groups.  I happened to be in a group with one of the professors who taught part of the biological course.

I wasn’t surprised to see him there.  But I was saddened to see how troubled he was by the large lecture, by the low turn out, by the exam results, and he really wanted to know what he might do better.  He taught the middle part of the course about the cell, and while the other male biology teachers dressed in t-shirts, with cuts offs and sneakers as if Indiana Jones-like they were just coming from or going to the field, he had worn a suit jacket and tie.  His lectures were some of the clearest and most complex.  This guy knew the cell inside and out and when it came to microtubules he was a whiz.  You could feel it in the guy’s voice—he had a passion for those microtubules and I think he felt bad that he couldn’t seem to convey that passion to his students.

 The ethic’s guy wrote his dissertation, and when he was done with that, he asked me if I would write a letter of recommendation for him about his abilities as a teacher.  I was happy to do so and it was glowing because he was contentious, responsible, committed and smart.  But, as I said, for me doing this was paradoxical because I couldn’t say that he or the biology professor were educating students one iota.  I could write a positive recommendation, I guess, because relative to the system and structure of things, the ethic’s teacher did a good job.  So did the biology professor.  He cared; he was committed, responsible and smart too.

But there was no way on God’s green earth that these people could begin to educate a single student given the “philosophy” of the system in which they operated.  I at least refuse to see memorization, repetition and regurgitation, however caringly or committedly facilitated, as anything other than a torturous and deadening initiation rite. 

The ethic’s teacher who liked to mix it up with his students used overheads too.  He was pretty contentious, and the second year I attended his class, he announced he would be putting the overheads online.  I want you to listen, he said, to what I am saying and not writing down what’s on the overhead.  Also, he was a quick talker, and I think he was tired of having to stand there and wait while the students copied what he had just been saying before he could move to a new overhead (he didn’t have two overhead projectors like the biology guys did).

He went a step further and had one of the teaching assistants take notes for the class.  These were then taken to the note taking service where students could buy the notes if they wanted.  These notes—I bought some of them—were interesting because they could serve as examples of how notes should be taken and perhaps because the note taker was himself a philosophy major a tiny bit of interpretation of the lectures crept into the notes.

So the students had three sources to use to memorize and regurgitate: the lectures, the online outlines, and the note taking service.  Actually they had four sources since the course also had a reader featuring selections from Kant, Benthan, Mill, and up to date articles on abortion, euthanasia and capital punishment. But they didn’t do any of the reading.

One immediate result of the teacher’s conscientiousness was a drop in attendance. Students came to the lecture to copy the outlines, but they didn’t need to do that anymore since the outlines were online.  To the teacher’s credit and a testimony to the sturdiness of his ego, this drop didn’t bother him. Possibly, he felt that the students who came to lecture were really interested.

I did wonder what those biology teachers felt.  The first day of that class every one of the 800 seats would have a body in it and the aisles too would be full.  But by the end of the second week, a drop off had already distinctly occurred, and towards the end of the quarter, attendance had dropped to about a third of its original total.  At one point, possibly in my second year of attending the course, they must have just given up on attendance because they started videotaping the lectures, and if you were biology major you could go online and view the lectures.  The technology was relatively new so all you could see was this little, tiny stick figure in the middle of space in the middle of the screen, but the sound was good.

Another result, though, of the teacher’s contentiousness was not as immediate but more troubling in its way.  The TA’s for the course read the first paper and the midterm and said, perhaps because the teacher had so effectively communicated his outlines, that all the papers were alike.  One after the other.  True, a very few papers that were exceptionally well written registered as A's; and true a few were very poorly written (usually by students whose first language was not English) and stood out as C’s.  But in between, they could find nothing but a grey and indistinguishable mass.

So when students came to question their grades, the TA’s didn’t know what to do sometimes because, upon rereading the paper or parts of it, they really couldn’t remember why they had given that section four points rather than five.  One TA just threw in the towel and gave every student a B+ on the second paper.  This took the students a while to figure out but when they did they were pretty annoyed.

I guess the lessons derived from the online outline experiment became known.  The last time I sat through the course, the teacher had moved to laptop and data projector.  She didn’t however put the outlines on the web.  Indeed, on more than one occasion, she stopped the class and told a student to put away his or her camera because students were not to take pictures of her outlines and distribute them on the web.  Now with the cell phone camera I doubt she would be able to stop outline pirating.

The pain though—as I said—is probably mostly mine.  An occasional student, with some sort of authority issue, might be hurt at the idea that the university professor could give a hoot about the students’ view of nearly anything.  In any case, if they are hurt, the pain doesn’t last too long; they buckle under and get busy mastering their regurgitation skills.

I attended part one of the introduction to biology sequence for four or five years.  This was a few years before the laptop and the data projector came along  The lecture was held in a hall that could seat 800 and was used for dance troupes and public speakers.  The biology professors had a double barrel shot gun two overheard projector approach.  The professor would talk though his overhead projected on the back of the huge stage, and when he was done with that overhead, he would walk clear acrross the stage and put it on another data projector, so the students who hadn’t been able to keep up with his speaking of the first overhead, could continue to copy from the first overhead as he launched into the next one.

This course started at 8 in the morning and was ungodly boring.  The lights were usually dimmed, and I think that was the first time I observed a student reading the campus newspaper in the dark. I sat there consternated.  Why, the hell was this student sitting there in the dark trying to read the newspaper.  (A) why was he sitting there and NOT taking notes because (B) I could see no other possible reason for being there.  And (C) instead of taking notes (C) why was he reading the student newspaper with (D) inadequate light when (E) right outside one could find plenty of light if (F) one wished to read the newspaper.

This student’s strange behavior made less sense than that of the student, a couple of rows, back who, his head flung back, was sawing wood.  Sleeping in the dark made sense though certainly sleeping in one of those seats didn’t.

One morning sitting in this class I became aware of clicking sounds.  Many, many clicking sounds.  I thought, oh my god, perhaps the clicking sounds are the beginning of some sort of student rebellion.  Perhaps a form of passive resistance or protest against the miserable lectures.  The faster the professor talked the more the clicking went on.  I wondered if the professor could hear the clicking and interpreted it as a sign of rebellion.

Boy was I stupid.  Because when I asked biology students in my research paper class about the clicking, one of them took out a pen, and clicked it.  Red ink, he said.  He clicked it again.  Blue ink.  And another click produced yellow ink.  And final click: black ink. So somebody had made a pen for hyper diligent students that allowed them to use one pen to take their notes in three different ink colors.  No they had not been rebelling; they were honing their memorize and repeat skills.

I didn’t want to tell those students in that class linked with ethics that their job was to memorize and repeat the professor’s lectures.  The pain though was probably more mine than theirs—the idea that writing should be reduced to that, to the “regurgitation,” of the lectures, to nothing more or less than a form of test irritates me no end.

Still, one student said, you mean they don’t want to know what we think.

What was I to say, “Of course not, you addled child.  What planet have you been living on?”  But I didn’t say that:

“Well, some do I am sure.  But you have to be able to speak their language and if you can’t do that yours thoughts make little or no sense to the Professor.”

“But,” the addled child persists, “it says right here in the question (for the midterm) that in the last part they want to know what we think about (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc).”

“Alright then what do you think?”

This always tends to stump the addled child because he or she has not stopped to think that he or she may not have any thoughts on the subject…

“Well, I think,” says the addled child who then goes on to repeat in a more or less mangled form something the professor said in class as an objection to (utilitarianism, Kant, Bentham, etc)

I say, “Well, then, so you agree with the professor when he said “X” because you are saying the same thing (X) he said.  That’s clear.  But what do you think?  Can you think of anything else?  If not, I would strongly recommend that you memorize and repeat as your thoughts what the professor says.

Listen.  It’s not that I don’t think something is horrendously wrong with utilitarianism.  I mean what the hell is a “hedon” and how the hell do you measure it.  As far as I know nobody has developed a “hedonic” measurement devise.  But honestly, I have no objections, coherent ones, to utilitarianism that others have not had or that have not been brought up in class. I mean, what have you got.  I didn’t make this system up.  I don’t like it either.  But the deck is stacked against beginning students especially when it comes to saying what you think.  Maybe it’s better to know that memorization and repetition is required.  Knowing that might save you time beating up the wrong bush.  Wait, I mean, barking up the wrong tree.  I am just trying to be straight and not beat around the bush.” 

And just as I am getting warmed up, somebody says, “What IS a hedon?”

According to JP Sartre, there is no such thing as an isolated individual.  Robinson Crusoe was not isolated; he brought the values, customs and mores of his particular society with him to his lonely island.

The “individual” is best pictured as a nexus or node for a highly complex and frequently contradictory relationships with people, institutions, ideals, values, mores and particular objects (such as a car or watch). 

The self is best pictured as the fascia or connective tissues that hold the diverse, highly complex and contradictory relationships in a relatively stable configuration.

The relationship of the self or fascia to the relationships that it holds in place is dialectical.  The fascia of the hand holds the bones of the hand in place and makes possible the function of the hand as a hand.  The fascia of the foot, while making it possible for the foot to function as a foot, will not help the hand function as a hand.

The fascia of the self, however, is not fixed.  Rather its shape and design varies with the function and functioning of the diverse and contradictory relationships of the “individual” to its “objects” (ideals, values, morals, ambitions, skills, and particular material objects).

If the fascia of the self becomes rigid and/or calcified, any changes in the complex and contradictory relationships that it seeks to stabilize and hold in place will be experienced as painful.

 If the fascia of the self becomes rigid or calcified it will not be able to develop in relation either to its internal impulses or relative to changes in the social sphere.

That the fascia of the self is capable of change or more properly of development makes the self susceptible to fragmentation or breaking up as previously concealed, for example, contractions between relations come to the fore. The fact that the fascia will fragment and break up on occasion does not mean however that, as some have concluded, that there is no self.

The capacity of the fascia (self) to withstand contradiction and the pains of development is dependent upon the biochemical makeup of the fascia.  This make up and these elements remain and are continuous throughout the lifespan of the fascia.  While then the fascia may break up or become rigid or change relative to development, the essential elements of the fascia do not break up or change.  That iron may be liquid or rigid or appear in a variety of shapes does not mean that it is not iron.

Change does not mean development.  A hand, for example, may be hit by hammer; this blow may permanently cripple the hand.  The fascia of the self may calcify in a form of scar tissue.  But just a blind person may correct to a degree for his or her blindness by the development of the other senses, so the fascia of the hand may correct or adjust to permit the hand a different form or kind of functionality.

Perhaps to clarify my thinking about education as self-development, I should state—although I find lists tedious—several propositions concerning the developmental process.

Proposition 1. All developmental steps must be phase appropriate.  When it is a phase appropriate for a child to crawl she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to walk she will; when it is phase appropriate for a child to talk, she will.

Proposition 2. Developmental phases build upon and incorporate skills and goal setting established in previous phases.  A later phase does not wipe out or obliterate an earlier phase; rather had the earlier phase not occurred the later phase would not occur either or if it does so occur, it occurs as a compensatory structure. 

Proposition 3. One phase is not “superior” to another.  An adult is not superior to an infant.  An adolescent is not superior to an adult.  If as Wordsworth said, the child is father to the man, which is “superior.”

Proposition 4. The movement into and out of a phase is necessarily attended by momentary disequilibrium or de-stabilization.  One needs only to remember puberty to understand the kinds of destabilization attendant upon development.  One used to speak of “growing pains.

 Proposition 5. The frustrations attendant upon destabiliation must be optimal.  If the frustrations prove either traumatic or chronic, the challenges of the developmental move may not be met.  That particular impulse towards development will remain undeveloped in an unconscious and archaic form.

Proposition 6.  If frustrations prove traumatic or chronic, the individual may be forced off the developmental path.  His or her psychological energies go into erecting defenses against possible self-fragmentation and de-stabilization.  As the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott has said, there may exist in our society a gap greater than that between the social classes and that is the gap between those capable of continuing development and those who are not.

Proposition 7.  The possiblities of development are most likely to be realized if they occur with an overall “empathic milieu.”  This fancy phrase is intended to suggest that development is most likely to occur if the trials and tribulations of the person undergoing destabilization are recognized, affirmed as necessary, and understood.

Proposition 8.  Currently, institutions of higher education, while they serve to destabilize the individual, do not recognize the potentials for development implicit in higher education and do not afford students an “empathic milieu.”

I think I could write more propositions.  But these afford a rough outline and eight is a round number.
 

Buying my theory that students might want to learn something requires buying a number of propositions that people appear disinclined to buy these days.  One of these propositions might be that people want or desire to develop.  I think it generally accepted that infants and children go through a pretty regular developmental sequence; and that one step in a sequence builds upon and around the one that came before.  But these developments one might say, along with the developments of puberty are biologically driven.  About 21—once the adolescent mind had gone through its hormonal changes—development stops.  Adulthood appears, de facto, the end of development.

But not all developments are purely biologically driven; the opportunities for such development are dictated by the social sphere.  Adolescence, as an emotional and moral state, has been significantly prolonged in the industrialized western world.  People are living much longer and that in turn changes one’s perspective (or development view) of life’s stages.

I think that higher education—along with other “real life” situations—poses the possibility of a developmental at the level of cognition or, since I dislike that world, intellect.  The mind, as LeRoi Jones put it, is a muscle.  It can be worked out and further developed.  This is the promise of higher education.  But it remains largely a promise.

 Students at Duke a while back sported a t-shirt that said, “You can lead a student to college but you can’t make him think.”  One might be inclined to infer from this that students don’t want to think.  But that’s not what the t-shirt says; what it says is true: you can’t make anybody think.  Thinking requires that the individual take a step, make a leap, however dimly and unconsciously that step or leap might be felt.

Taking that step or even dimly wanting to take it can be psychological disturbing and unsettling.  A lot goes into taking that step.  In the current system of higher education this is what remains unstudied, and unrecognized.  It takes a lot to develop the intellect, and institutions do absolutely nothing to support students in taking the step.  They can hardly even begin to do so if they fail to acknowledge that taking the step can be unsettling and disturbing.

The institutions of higher education do their part, as I have indicated, to disturb and unsettle students by beating them upside the head with the misery, injustice, and ugliness of this world.  No doubt the human race is pissing and shitting itself.  The full recognition of this fact, however, is bound to be devastating, more indeed that any individual could truly bear.  And with no support in trying to face it, with professors talking about the most horrendous things in detached and surgical tones, students repress and eventually numb themselves to the drums of despair, decay, and final destruction.

No wonder, as I have said, students become pre-mature cynics most especially about the realm of the intellect.  Why think about these things?  They are far too unsettling.  Denial is a much better route, along with concluding that most of what the university teaches is bullshit.

Today’s students may be characterized in brief as lazy, drunken, lascivious, self-absorb, materialistic, wayward louts.  And, one might add, lemmings.  I think here most especially of middle class students.  I have taught a writing course several times for persons who wished to become doctors.  And I must say the idea that 98% of these doctors-to-be should ever treat a patient fills me with terror, especially since I could well be one of their “charges” in my lay away rest home.

This characterization would appear to run counter to the one I have just suggested as their being something like dogs howling at the moon, longing for what they know not, yet longing still.  One is not inclined to think of today’s student as such pansy like wilting violets.  Certainly most students would not admit to harboring any sort of profound desire to learn anything, just for the sake, that is, of learning it.

But pointing to the moral flaws of students is a nice and convenient way of not looking at how the current educational system may contribute to the problem.  What if some of their loutish, boorish, and vulgar behavior is the way their repressed desire to learn something expresses itself.  Repressed desire, as Freud has told us, can result a great deal of odd and untoward behavior.

One might hazard, though, that, even if at one time students did want to learn something, by the time they have reached college certainly this desire has been completely flogged out of them by their prior educational experience. Admittedly, this may be the case.  But no matter how mundane and ho-hum college might be for today’s student, it is still, for however brief a period, something new. Something a little bright and shiny.

That this moment is very short isn’t entirely students’ fault.  Sometimes, I think, at the college level, the professorial desire to fill up these empty vessels as quickly and thoroughly as possible leaves many of them feeling beat up about the head and rendered pretty much deaf to any learning that might come after.  For while the secular university does not teach “values,” it certainly does seem to feel itself the designated spokesperson of the reality principle.  It’s as if, having failed to educate by other means, some are driven to rub students’ faces as deeply as possible into the ugly muck of this ugly world.

I don’t know what else to think, when a colleague whom I respected in many ways, had the students in his introduction to ecology course, itself a general education course, read, as their primary text, a book that outlined seven scenarios by which the world, by the end of this century, is sure to come to an end from some ecological disaster or another.  Or, if that is not enough, one may learn about the ongoing, persistent treatment of women throughout the world as the “second” sex.  Or perhaps one would like to hear about how the United States persistently and consistently exploits the poor people of the world so that we all have more trash to buy at Wal-Mart.

There is shit enough.  We are all up to our necks in the muck; not one of us, as Sartre said, without les main sales.  And the shit must and ought to be taught.  I do question however the way that it is taught and the dosage.

During one of those ethics classes, I sat through one of the strangest “discussions” I have ever heard.  The course was taught for a couple of years by a good guy who liked to mix it up a bit with the students and was pretty quick on his feet.  I don’t remember the overall context of the discussion, but at one point he said, in effect, a person cannot be said to have or be given a right if the person cannot exercise that right.  For example, it makes no sense to say a person has the right to jump over a building if he or she cannot jump over a building, or to say that a dog has a right to read when I dog is not capable of reading.

A bit later, as the class came towards it close, the instructor entertained questions and it became clear through a little give and take that some number of students did not agree with the assertion that a dog does not have the right to read even though it cannot read.  The instructor cleverly turned his questioning this way and that to get at the core of the students’ objection to the assertion.  But the core was not forthcoming.  I was caught up in the mystery and, having raised my hand said, perhaps people are thinking that, while a person does not the right to drink till he or she is 21, clearly he or she can drink and therefore ought to have the right.

My attempt at opening Aladdin’s lamp however seemed to fall on deaf ears.  I had thrown my bread on the water but nobody rose to the bait.  The instructor plodded on until finally, he uttered one of the strangest sentences I have heard uttered in an academic setting, “We all do agree, don’t we, that dogs cannot read!”

“Well,” they do look at the TV set, one student dumbly replied.  Yea, intoned another, “How do we know dogs can’t read.”  I am convinced that people can get trapped in a web of words, of false distinctions and empty jargon, of such power that they are sometimes led by the “logic” of that “discourse” to say and to believe the most amazingly absurd things.  We all tend towards the solipsistic; only ongoing vigilance, effort, and the exercise of imagination keeps us from succumbing to it completely.

But this was something different.  This approached something like a willfully and defiantly maintained delusion.  I chewed on this case for some considerable time off and on over the years after.  Eventually I came to understand the event more psychologically.  The students clearly identified with dogs.  Were they saying, as if from the depths of their unconscious, we are, in this class, like dogs.  We cannot read either; we cannot make out any meaning in what we have been asked to read.  We cannot understand a word of this, but, even if we are dogs, we have a right to understand, a right to grasp it, and that right should not be taken away from us even if we lack the capacity to do it.  And who knows, you may not see it or grant it, but how do you know that I, like the dog, do not understand in my own way.

This was before the time “dawg” replaced “dude” as a casual appellation.  That it—that one’s buddy is now a “dawg”—is worthy of some thought.  But I infer from the above that students feel not infrequently like dogs in the halls of learning.  I infer also that many students want to understand; but the method by which learning is delivered has so beaten them down that they can only sit in front of the TV quite wordlessly.

Apparently, Judith Jarvis Thompson argument for abortion was de rigueur.  It popped up each time I sat through the ethics course in all its bizarre and gothic detail.  This damn long and detailed thought experiment to my recollection involved a person, of a certain blood type, being kidnapped by a group of music lovers.  As you may note a thought experiment need not have any relation to any known reality; I can personally think of no group of people less likely to kidnap anybody than a group of music lovers.

But let us say these music lovers have fallen under the spell of a fanatic music lover, and high on crack, kidnap this person, whose blood type they have in some mysterious fashion previously learned. The person apparently makes no attempt to resist the weenie music lovers and is taken and strapped down to a bed where the person is connected up by tubes to a famous musician who will die unless he or she receives a constant infusion of blood from this very particular person. 

Why the famous musician is not in a hospital, as usually would be the case, is not explained.  Nor is it explained how a group of music lovers would know how to hook a person up with tubes.  Apparently, one of them had at one time been pre-med.  Nor is it explained what makes the fanatics think they have the right to kidnap somebody even for the purpose of preserving the famous musician’s life.  Finally, no one apparently has bothered to ask the famous musician if he or she approves of this particular method of saving his or her life.

If one may plow through all the absurdities and improbabilities of the set up for the thought experiment one gets to the crux.  The kidnapped person wakes up.  The situation is explained to him or her, and he or she is told that if he or she stays hooked up to the musician for nine months that the musician will live, miraculously, and be able to resume a normal life unattached to anybody.  According to Thompson all rational persons would agree that the kidnapped person has a right to unattach him or herself from the musician without bringing down upon his or her self any moral onus whatsoever.

As the reader has no doubt guessed, the thought experiment is intended as an analogy to a forced pregnancy, the result of rape, and we are to conclude that just as it would be OK to detach one’s self from the musician so it would be OK for a woman to detach herself from an unwanted fetus. Additionally those who would oppose such a decision must be a group of totally insane musical fanatics, senile fans perhaps of Keith Richards. And this is not the end of the experiment either.  It goes on and on to cover other instances of unwanted pregnancy, including a bad condom that allows buds of some kind to leak into a house and become rooted in a rug. 

 My students couldn’t make heads or tales, though, of this experiment.  They seemed unable or perhaps unwilling even to memorize the basic set up for the experiment. They just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And the whole thing did seem insane: to find ourselves talking about fanatical musicians as we supposedly investigated the right of a woman to control her own body. 

 I found the whole thing and the considerable time devoted to it infuriating because I think the experiment trivializes the pain and suffering involved in a forced pregnancy and the decision to terminate it.  Further, it all seemed ass-backwards.  Whether or not a woman has the right to terminate a pregnancy is not an ethical question, but a political one.  Rather than being asked to think about fanatical musicians, I think it would have been better for students to examine the political and economic reality of women still being very much the “second sex.”  But this would not be doing ethics, since as we can see actually matters of fact have nothing to do with ethics.

The instructors for the ethics course were all devotees of “thought experiments.”  These were rather fanciful affairs designed, as far as I could see, mostly to throw students into confusion concerning their “moral intuitions.”  They involved trains going down tracks and people tied to the train tracks and someone standing by a lever and having to decide whether to switch the lever so that one or three people died, even if the one was your brother and so on and so forth.  They also involved people getting stuck in caves and having to drive over people to save people stuck in caves.

The questions these thought experiments are intended to evoke involve such matters as whether or not it is ever morally right to kill an innocent person even if killing that person might mean saving many lives.  Also involved, in the experiments I heard was the attempt to make the distinction between killing and letting die.  The amount of mayhem and mutiliation evoked--all spoken about in a very light hearted manner complete with stick like illustrations drawn on the black board--for the purposes of philosophic speculation was quite amazing.  The thought experiments, as one can see, along with discussions of capital punishment, abortion and euthenasia all involved, in one way or another, the topic of death. However, death, as an issue of some subjective importance to the individual, was never addressed.

For a number of years I also taught a writing class linked with a course international relations. At that time, the mid-80’s, the course concerned itself with US and Soviet relations.  A full three lectures were devoted to nuclear war and the possibility of nuclear disarmament.  The different forms of nuclear destruction, whether from air craft, submarines, or rockets, was quite amazing.  Additionally, rockets differed considerably in “throw weigh,” some had multiple war heads and some didn’t; some were in cased or hardened silos and others weren’t.  The discussion was very complete and designed to show that disarmament was probably impossible.  

Every time I sat through these lectures I got a headache.  Also amazingly, though I had heard the lecture three or four times, each time it seemed I had completely forgotten everything I had previously known about the subject.  I didn’t at first understand why my head felt all abuzz after these lectures; but one day it hit me that basically we had been discussing mass destruction, and the possible end of civilization as we knew it.  And once again death was never directly addressed as a matter of some possible significance to the individual.

I have long wondered what academics mean by “objectivity,” because as far as I could tell, especially in the social sciences and humanities, none of them remotely approach it.  Perhaps this is what they mean—talking about death, pain, misery, mutiliation all as if they had no relation to anybody in the lecture hall, as if it all were happening somewhere out there in a kind of giant thought experiment.  Talking about sticking or not sticking a needle of poison into somebody’s arm as a way of distinguishing between killing and letting die.

Personally, I don’t call this objectivity.  I call it repression, systemmatic and unconscious repression.  Boredom is an odd thing.  Sometimes it is a mask for anxiety; perhaps that’s why the ethics class seemed at times to drag on endlessly. Anxiety is timeless.

I am not an academic philosopher so I could be mistaken, but I think, for every one of those six years, that, while the “Introduction to Ethics” course was taught by different people, that all taught ethics under the heading of “analytic philosophy.”  Perhaps as a consequence of this dry as dust approach, my students, almost to a person over the six years, reported, when the class was done, that they would never again be caught dead taking an ethics course or anything else in the philosophy department.

Richard Rorty has written about the plague of analytic philosophy and pretty much described it as serving best—given its hair splitting and logic chopping—as preparation to be a lawyer.  And Bernard Williams, a relatively famous ethicist, argues that moral philosophy, while generally boring. today has become particularly boring.  If this is the case, then I do think the teaching of ethics should be removed utterly from the hands of academic philosophers.  

This might at least be a step in the right direction.  How it should be taught, I don’t know.  But I know it shouldn’t be taught in such a way as to turn students away utterly from the study of philosophy.  For my part, I found the course only mildly boring, even a bit soothing in its boringness.  But I have studied philosophy and through my education have come to learn to think in ways that allowed me to appreciate at least mildly the pure amount of brain power and the considerable cleverness that had gone into the construction of endless and absurd arguments.

The students however were perplexed and frustrated.  First, it’s this argument they said, and then it’s that argument that says the first argument is wrong, and then the second argument itself is said to be wrong.  What, they wanted to know, was the point, if all of it was wrong. Knowing that all of ethics up to that point had been a mistake might be liberating for that rare and aberrant student who could then think, hell, if it’s all wrong, maybe I will be the one to get it right.  But the average student certainly was not encouraged to think in this way with the result that they felt they were stuck memorizing and repeating stuff either completely wrong or significantly flawed.

They didn’t see as I did that for the academic philosophy whether an argument is right or wrong is not the point; it’s an argument and as such material for making another one perhaps later in one’s career for a professional journal.  I tried to explain to my students that their philosophy teachers were in love with what they taught (however aberrant that love might be); that they ate, drank, breathed, and shat that stuff; that what they were trying to do in their own bizarre way was to make students love it too.  Consider the lectures, I said, rather clumsy foreplay.

But my students were unimpressed and I guess there was no reason they should be.  After all they were freshmen with some sort of naïve idea that ethics was about the study of right and wrong and not young academics in training, young academics already completely caught up in a vast web of arguments and counter arguments about which those beginning students knew absolutely nothing.  My students didn’t even know that they were being taught ethics from the perspective of analytic philosophy; and the teaching assistants did nothing to enlighten students on this critical point, as if analytic philosophy was the only way to do philosophy.

I think I taught a writing course linked to that ethics course six years in row.  Every time the course was taught by a teaching assistant who had been elevated for that particular course to the status of something called an associate.  This status allowed a second year graduate student to teach 250 undergraduate students and to act as the boss of two or three other TA’s who read the papers, midterms and finals for the course.  

I was rather amazed when I heard about this.  250 students seemed a pretty big responsibility especially for teaching assistants who had never taught such a course before.  I learned later that, if a TA was going to be elevated to the position of an instructor for an upper division course in a major special paper work had to be filled out, explaining why this substitution was necessary (the usual professor was on sabbatical usually) and indicating the TAs qualifications to teach the course.  But no such dispensation was necessary for a teaching assistant to teach a General Education course.

This seemed to me another indication of the low regard for and the little thought given to General Education courses by the departments that offered them.  And because no paper work was necessary, nobody knew how many General Education courses were serving as teacher training sessions for teaching assistants rather than educational situations for students.  I found this all the more troubling given that many of these General Education courses were money makers for the individual departments concerned and that some departments would have trouble making ends meet without their General Education courses.

I do not suggest the Teaching Assistants were necessarily bad instructors.  They tended to make up for their lack of knowledge, their lack of confidence, and public speaking skills by a good deal of enthusiasm. Still, I wish could forget the General Education course devoted to the Civil Rights movement.  For some reason, the usual dynamic instructor, a lecturer like me was not available, and the course was handed over to a young graduate student.

She showed a lot of video.  Additionally, the instructor was teaching a revisionist version of the Civil Rights movement with emphasis upon the role of women.  Alright, I guess.  But none of the students knew that was what she was doing because none of the students knew anything about the history she was revising.  The intellectual force of the course was thereby considerably blunted.

Also she had technological troubles.  One day she was attempting to show slides.  But every time she clicked the slide clicker the slide machine would go backwards.  I don’t know how long she clicked and re-clicked.  I was in the back row.  So I got up, went to the slide machine, readjusted the carriage of slides, and for a few clicks it worked.  Then with another click, the whole machine sort of leapt up off its tiny perch and flung itself to the floor in apparent death throes.  I was embarrassed to death for the poor instructor.  

This embarrassment was trumped however by what I felt when one day she said she was going to play a tape of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream" speech. The tape started splendidly, with Kings sonorous “I have a dream….” But was followed abruptly by Walter Cronkite saying, “Yes, he had a dream.”  This was not what the TA wanted.  This is not what anybody wanted.  But the teaching assistant had failed to preview the tape.  She persisted by having the tech guy in a little booth in the back try to fast forward through the Cronkite parts to get to the King parts.  This proved impossible.  The speech was rendered a horrible mish mash of King plus Cronkite.

I swear I was ready to crap with embarrassment.  But looking around, the students seemed their usual selves, yawning, sleeping, reading the paper, picking their noses and generally acting completely unperturbed as if this kind of screw up was simply par for the course.  And who knows, maybe it was.

That writing class with ethics was in the fall quarter.  I hate it when the clock changes and it gets dark earlier.  Maybe in addition to my normal depression I have seasonal affective disorder as well.  The writing class was late afternoon, early evening, and while we were sitting there the day would close down, light would go away and dark would come on.

I remember sitting there in that ugly room with the students all spread out against the wall.  Some in front of me, and some sitting purposefully to the sides to stay as far out of my range of sight as possible.  One of the Latino guys was big and brusque; he talked a better line than he could write.  One of the Caucasian guys was clearly a serious stoner, and I heard the next quarter that he was in danger of being kicked out of the dorms because he kept bringing kegs into his room.  Another of the Caucasian guys was incredibly neat and appeared to be perhaps a minister in training. He wore his ink black hair in a version of what used to be called a flattop.

One of the Asian guys loved to play basketball and the other one had glasses and pimples.  The Asian women all seemed to have names I couldn’t pronounce correctly.  They were all small and thin and polite and refused to say anything.  English was the second language of half of the students in that room.

They were going to complicated lectures on ethical issues and they had been assigned portions of Mill and Kant to read.  This was horrible.  I sat right in the middle of the room and asked, well, what was discussed in lecture today.  I made them take out their notes.  Reviewing your notes is a way to memorize the material I said.  I mentioned the student who thanked me after taking a midterm because if I had not made them go over the material he said he would have gone into that midterm completely unprepared for what awaited him.

We sat there and I just made them go over it and over it.  But I couldn’t keep up with all the lectures.  We couldn’t do that every class.  To spice things up a bit, I on my side assigned for their first paper a bit of Machiavelli from the Prince.  I guess this wasn’t technically “ethics,” but ethical issues were involved and I thought too that they might be able to argue with or against Machiavelli and that in turn would give their papers a bit of organization.

This is academic writing, I told them.  People might argue, but I think academic writing might be defined as writing about the writing of others or writing as a form of reading.  They said they had read Mac, but when I asked questions I got nothing.  If you had to argue it, what’s Mac’s central assumption?  Central assumption about what it means to be a Prince?  Central assumption about the human race?

I broke them into groups of three and gave each group a bit of Mac to read, and when they had read and discussed, they would tell the rest of the group what their part had been about and what was the most important sentence or two in it. I sat there stretched out in my seat with my hands jammed into my pockets.  I didn’t want to visit the groups because I was afraid to hear what they might be saying about what they had read.