[Rhodes22-list] Academics

[Brad Haslett]

Finally, they're creating a department just for "my people".  It may be time
to go back to school!  Brad

-------------------------------

February 12, 2008 A Department Of Hillbilly Studies?

*By Robert Weissberg*

Today's university seems obsessively compassionate about the downtrodden,
far more than the usual academic Marxist celebration of exploited workers.
Entire departments - African American Studies, Women's Studies, Queer
Studies, Latino/a Studies - strive to uplift those suffering from white male
heterosexual oppressors. In African and Latin American Studies indigenous
people are always blameless "good guys" while under-graduates are
relentlessly implored, usually with academic credit, to "make a difference"
or "work for social change," i.e., rallying deadbeat tenants against
predatory slum landlords. English Departments - even History
Departments--increasingly celebrate heretofore repressed "voices" of the
forcefully silenced. Schools of Social Work and Education now require taking
vows to advance "social and economic justice" in order to graduate.
Hard-head Business Schools are hardly immune - mandatory Business Ethics
courses might teach that cowboy capitalism must be sympathetic to those
unable to compete in cruel marketplaces.

Matters are not, however, as morally black and white as they seem. Fervent
compassion for the repressed, suppressed, disadvantaged, disabled,
stigmatized, marginalized, exploited and all the rest is selective, and this
selectivity is hardly accidental or random. In a nutshell, liberal academics
are wonderfully compassionate, caring and sympathetic but only for those who
seem eternally mired in dependency to be ameliorated via expanding state
power. If victims are disinclined to demand this expanded state power to
rescue them from misery, then their consciousness must be raised so these
newly "educated" souls can lobby for income re-distribution or some other
handed-down benefit.

A class in black politics, for example, rarely dwells on Booker T.
Washington's plea for self-reliance or recognizes that black Caribbean
immigrants prosper via hard work, thrift and delayed gratification while
shunning politics. This message is unspeakable heresy and, "inauthentic." A
would-be professor expressing such views would never even be hired. The
orthodox recipe for accomplishment is endlessly repeated semester after
semester: mobilize, vote for candidates promising government handouts,
demand new entitlements and otherwise crave measures to further deepen
dependency on officialdom. One does not create wealth; one gets wealth by
demanding it from on high. In this odd universe, a multiple choice question:
"The best route to college admission is (a) study hard or (b) take political
action against elites for stronger affirmative action" will be correctly
answered with "b."

This selectivity will, naturally, be denied. But, consider the academic
unpopularity of a group that in many ways is economically and socially
comparable to most echt downtrodden: Hillbillies (a/k/a White Trash, Trailer
Park Trash, Appalachians). Good-thinking academics despise this group, and
are absolutely convinced that these beer-bellied, ignorant, bigoted,
religious fanatics put Bush-worse-than Hitler in the White House. These are
the folk who love Stand-by-your Man country music, are avid gun owners who
hunt, drive full-sized American pick-ups, wear crude sexist tee-shirts,
follow NASCAR, drink cheap domestic beer, are aficionados of chicken-fried
steak and, most critically for our purposes, are patriots unimpressed by
anti-Americanism, post-modern theories of social reality, the primacy of
race, place and gender in interpreting texts (i.e., reality) and all the
other ephemera running wild in today's academy. Politically, while they may
be vulnerable to racist demagogues, and have been known to feed at the
public trough, they are - to use the German word lacking an English
equivalent - *unwillig *(difficult to manage). A Department of Hillbilly
Studies boggles the mind even in today's loopy academic environment.

One can only imagine a few Good Ole Boys wandered into a Duke classroom
where our liberal champion of the oppressed explains how America is the
world's number one terrorist, how soaring prosperity brings dangerous income
inequality, why the apparent free market in ideas is just a oligarchic ruse
and why the nefarious oil companies block public transportation so yahoos
can still drive their gas-guzzling vintage red/orange street legal 1969
Dodge Chargers R/T with a 426 Hemi (bedecked with Confederate flags, no
less). Unlike grade-grubbers and those admitted to reverse historic
under-representation, the Good Ole Boys not only reject this nonsense, but
this repugnance would be immediate and vocal. Bo and Cooter would be more
than "offended;" they would be downright pissed, and not shy about defending
General Lee's honor (the car, not the Confederate war hero) or America. Nor
would this outrage be manageable with the usual academic arguments - Bo is
oblivious to deconstructing texts and all the other mumbo jumbo. If the
professor offered a post-colonial interpretation of Iraq, Bo would tell him
to take his fat ass back to Russia if he doesn't like it here. Hard to top
that snappy rejoinder. They (and their many cousins) unabashedly admit that
they attend college to drink beer and fool around, not promote gender
equality. At most Cooter might mumble solidarity with third-wave feminism if
he is closing in on the kill in the back seat of his perfectly restored '57
Chevy Impala. In ways not yet understood by science, Hillbillies have been
vaccinated against PC nonsense and therefore immune to all the professorial
entreatments. (Perhaps some pharmaceutical company might want to investigate
this natural immunity.) They certainly don't want wooly-headed professors
badmouthing their patriotism and religion, let alone telling Bo and Cooter
to explore more deeply their inherently ambiguous sexual identities.

The professorial taste for promoting dependency is predictable. Today's
academics, especially in the social sciences and humanities, may enjoy
comfortable, well-paid lives, but outside the classroom they are largely
politically irrelevant. This is a far cry from the 1960s and the Great
Society when countless professors were solicited experts, running to and
fro, speaking into Princely ears. A CNN sound bite may be the high point of
one's public intellectual career today, and given the failure of past
made-in-the-academy advice, even this will be disregarded. The sprawling,
invasive EU-style bureaucratic state thus appeals to the clever but
politically impotent experts-in-waiting. They would dearly love to counsel
Ministers just how to micro-manage family life (perhaps a visiting role
model service or redefining "family") or how salaries could be made to
reflect John Rawl's egalitarian concept of justice, not arbitrary factors
such as skill and ambition.

But, government by enlightened professors is unreachable without hordes of
those forever dependent on government largess. This is, sad to say, what
made the Katrina mess so eye-catching to outraged academics - hundreds of
thousands of poor people, mostly African Americans, desperately pleading for
Washington's salvation while the evil "conservative" Republican
administration with its self-reliance talk fiddled. A perfect ideological
storm! If only FEMA bureaucrats had solicited professor expertise they would
have socially constructed a narrative to reconstruct the New Orleans 9th
Ward in record time. And the raised consciousness would protect against
future floods. Don't laugh - my obsessively trendy alma mater (Bard College)
has a student-run project to rescue Katrina victims by applying the insights
of class, race and gender analysis. When telling me about this wonderful
idea Bard asked for a contribution but this appeal, alas, fell on deaf ears
since I don't believe in money. Every professor like me knows that "money"
is socially constructed, invented by white European males as an instrument
of social control to subjugate people of color, as the current sub-prime
lending mess demonstrates.

------------------------------------
*Robert Weissberg is Professor of Political Science, Emeritus at The
University of Illinois-Urbana, and occasionally teaches in the NYU Politics
Department MA Program. *