00:03:55.140But, you know, yeah, one thing we do notice these days is that there is, you know, a great
00:04:00.800deal of variety and diversity in America and college experiences and college life.
00:04:07.040and yet the image we have and that's kind of the topic of your essay that we have of the college
00:04:13.380and the campus is weirdly monolithic and the kinds of you know the impulse you just showed of just
00:04:20.040like explaining what type of campus you're dealing with it's the same thing i do all the time
00:04:24.520for for us inmates it's obvious that that's the first thing you have to do but it's shockingly
00:04:30.060shockingly obvious to other people that no such no such contextualization is ever necessary like
00:04:36.440we we know what college students are whether they're at devry university or at princeton
00:04:42.780in some way right like we we know what they're like we know they're privileged we know you know
00:04:46.360they have blue hair we know they live in dorms right and i i think that that that was such a
00:04:51.820brilliant way in which you open that up in your essay to sort of say like that's a phantasm
00:04:56.120this thing that an object that can contain all these things that you know so well even though
00:05:01.820you've seen one exemplar of it, that's a phantasm. Only psychoanalysis can explain to you why you
00:05:07.900have this image. Yeah. And one of the questions I was trying to ask, there are a couple that I was
00:05:12.640trying to address in the essay, but one of them that still I didn't really answer, I got at,
00:05:18.200but it still stays with me is not just why is that image the image that people have of the campus,
00:05:24.620that's what I did get at in the essay, but also why is it that students at certain kinds of
00:05:30.820institutions are able to organize politically in the way that makes them available as the image of
00:05:37.260the student. Because I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, which is one of these
00:05:43.600elite residential research universities. And that's a place where students kind of have the
00:05:50.320time. It's almost a luxury to be able to figure out what you think and then organize to try to
00:05:56.100achieve your goals. And other kinds of institutions don't facilitate that degree of mass political
00:06:03.480organizing among the students. But then at the level of media discourse, all of that gets
00:06:08.160flattened into those few representative examples. It's so fascinating to think about the fact that
00:06:14.540organizing is going on on very different campuses right now. I mean, the example I always give is
00:06:19.960Cal Poly Humboldt, which is really, that's a very different kind of school from, let's say,
00:06:26.700UCLA. But I do also imagine it means that organizing must mean totally different things
00:06:31.160there. It's just that the students are contending with very different headwinds than they are on the
00:06:36.720quad or on the South Lawn at various highly credentialed institutions. I mean, the reason
00:06:44.700why we care, I guess, on this podcast, I mean, beyond the fact that, you know, we care about
00:06:49.660the university, is also, of course, that the campus, as you described it, that phantasm
00:06:53.360has kind of co-evolved alongside a conservative media environment, obsessed with it, right? Like,
00:07:00.680I feel like the campus was never available to just sort of say, hey, what a bunch of weirdos.
00:07:06.520It was always available to be like, hey, what a bunch of weirdos, why'd you vote for Ronald
00:07:09.960Reagan, right? Like there was a, it's been part of an electoral pitch. And that's one reason we
00:07:15.360care because, you know, we're in bed with the right. And the other is that like, in a weird
00:07:19.960way, like gender and sexuality comes up again and again when we think about the coddling of the
00:07:26.180college student, the really gross fantasies about, do these students know what would happen to them
00:07:30.960if you dropped them in Gaza? And like, what kind of argument is that? You just imagine violence
00:07:36.580being done to these young people like have your head examined please you know but there is this
00:07:40.820kind of there is a gendered valence to to a lot of this and and has been uh really i think since
00:07:46.120the 1960s adrian just to jump in in some more recent iterations of this campus panic that has
00:07:51.840arisen in response to student uh gaza solidarity encampments one of the critiques you see coming0.54
00:07:58.140from the right wing is that this is because students are not having enough sex that they
00:08:02.640need to be engaged in, I guess, in this imagination, some kind of like a wholesome heterosexual
00:08:08.960levity rather than engaging with some kind of unwholesome, malignant political force.
00:08:16.200Yeah, which is in some ways kind of a turducken of campus discourse, because like every part of
00:08:20.100that is like this weird hypostatization of the campus, right? Like, on the one hand, like, yes,
00:08:25.140that's what the students are like. And then it is also this like, very weird construction where
00:08:30.700kind of opposite things are always true of the college student right they're too censorious and
00:08:37.020too soft they're too too soft too hard too too easily triggered um too insensitive too you know0.51
00:08:44.880closed-minded and too relativistic and i guess it's sort of too um yeah how to put this hypersexual
00:08:52.220and not sexual enough yeah i mean one thing that came to mind as you both were speaking was
00:08:59.180something another thing that's been on my mind i haven't been able to figure out
00:09:03.060why this is exactly but i think you're getting at it is um the the blue hair thing hair dye in
00:09:10.140general is like this weird metonym in this discourse yeah um people who are not uh i think
00:09:19.580basically it is at bottom it's not natural your hair is not a natural color and that isn't right
00:09:25.200and that means that you're also not natural and these you know quote-unquote natural these
00:09:29.160other ways. You're not sufficiently laminated into the social order as I envision it. The other
00:09:39.660thing I wanted to say is if we could just like give a sort of concrete recent example from this
00:09:45.800past two weeks that I wrote about in the essay was the Columbia president Minouche Shafik's
00:09:52.400sort of disenrolling of the campus protesters so they were suspended and by being suspended
00:09:59.400they became trespassers but they couldn't have been called trespassers previously right um which
00:10:05.360i think is um a kind of very concrete precise instance of this weird doubleness that you're
00:10:11.840talking about in the figure of the student where i think the reality is that college students are
00:10:15.820kind of weird, ambiguous social position. They're constantly infantilized, but they're also
00:10:22.980technically adults, able to do all the things that adults do, except sometimes purchase alcohol. And
00:10:29.740they therefore have a kind of symbolic instability that I think enables them to be
00:10:36.080selectively coded one way or the other way, depending on the whims of the discourse.
00:10:41.340That seems exactly right. I mean, it's fascinating to think about, I mean, several people,
00:10:45.780pointed out that like in some way we're living through the unsettled aftermath still of the end
00:10:50.520of in loco parentis right so that like in the 19 until the 1960s it was assumed that basically the
00:10:56.020school took over for the parents and that was done away with the supreme court says you can't do that
00:11:02.040but then what are they what is the university to them right like it's not non-parental it clearly
00:11:08.040has some responsibility to them and seems to be somewhat selective when it exercises that.
00:11:16.160It has some measure of control over them. But as you say, they occupy this sort of middle space
00:11:21.600and it's something that the rest of society seems to have real trouble kind of figuring out what to
00:11:27.440do with. To bring this ambiguity of the student status back to these Gaza encampments for a second,
00:11:33.580And I think, you know, to Sam's point about disenrollment of suspended students, we're also seeing sort of rhetorical disenrollment of these protesters more broadly as they some of them become labeled as outside agitators.
00:11:49.500You know, the New York City Mayor Eric Adams just this morning put out a press release about the recent like really military raids by the NYPD the other night on the Columbia and City College campuses uptown in which there were pie charts of how many of the arrestees were enrolled students and how many were not.
00:12:12.940Right. And the permeability of this student, non-student status on the campus, the idea of this like enclosed space that is at once rarefied and entitling its occupants to protection and also a crucible of potential corruption is, I think, like a really rich psychological text.
00:12:34.440Sam, I want to know what you thought about this outside agitator narrative.
00:12:37.580First of all, about that pie chart that he showed, even that chart itself is rhetorically unstable.
00:12:45.120So the top part of the chart breaks down both arrests, CCNY and Columbia, into students and non-students.
00:12:54.640And then the label at the bottom, the fine print, describes affiliates and non-affiliates of the institutions.
00:13:01.880So even the document that Adams put out can't decide whether the problem is that these people don't belong to the universities or whether the problem is that they're not students.
00:13:13.100And obviously, there's ultimately, I don't think it matters either way politically. I think people who aren't involved in any way in the university should be going to these protests. But nevertheless, there's some real stakes to that distinction.
00:13:26.780You know, one of those codes, faculty, as just as much an outsider as some random person off the street. So if we do care about institutional affiliation and belonging as a criterion of participation, that actually matters kind of a lot, whether you're distinguishing between students and non-students, or affiliates and non-affiliates. And then, yeah, where do suspended students fit into that? It's not explained.
00:13:49.400And we might add, one of the big changes in higher ed, and certainly at Columbia, I don't know about City College, I'm hoping they were a little bit more circumspect in this way, is what we call administrative bloat.
00:14:02.500That is to say, universities have large administrative bodies, some of which are famously engaged in DEI and racial justice work, meaning, who are they?
00:14:16.020Like, these are people invested in the community. They're drawing salaries from Columbia University, presumably. But by that pie chart's logic, they would, in fact, be outside agitators, right? It's like, it's a weird outside agitator if he's on your payroll, gotta say, right? But you're right, there's this like, need to police a boundary and an assumption that there is a boundary to police that like, for all of us who live on these campuses, like, what are you doing? Like, this doesn't work.
00:14:40.540Yeah, I mean, this is a larger question about the ongoing deterioration of American higher education and the emergence of like an administrative class that doesn't seem necessarily to have education as its aim, that in some ways is pitted against faculty and against students.
00:14:55.520Yeah, that's a larger battle. But also, I would note that like, to your point, more like the police raids of these institutions, what is a police officer storming a campus if not an outside agitator?
00:15:08.460It seems very clear to me that there are outside agitators in these situations, and they are people who are armed and coming onto campus to drag students off the campus. I mean, what is a PAC-funded airplane flying a banner about anti-Semitism over Harvard? That seems like outside agitation to me. If we're going to label anything outside agitators, there's all these outside actors who are getting involved in these protests, and none of them are the people protesting.
00:15:34.460well so this is something that i've i've i really sort of tried to hone in on my in my book that the
00:15:40.560fact that like the campus discourse does two things right the one hand it says yeah there
00:15:44.840there is it's essentially a long license for outside agitation it's saying your opinions
00:15:50.000belong there it matters what you personally think about columbia university like you may have never
00:15:55.200been there uh you may not be an alumna alumnus or alumna uh you might not you know be able to find
00:16:01.180it on a map right but like it it it is okay for it to matter to you right that was reagan's big
00:16:07.120pitch to californians in 1965 right you may never have been to to berkeley and it might be kind of
00:16:12.500weird to imagine people half your age like have not having a shirt on right like but that's okay
00:16:17.720like you it it is your business and you should involve yourself in it the entire campus discourse
00:16:22.740is a one large invitation for outside agitation right like half the global press corps seems to
00:16:29.060descended on these campuses in the last, you know, seven days. And like, none of them asked
00:16:34.140the questions, like, what are we doing here? Is this something right? Like, what is it that I am
00:16:38.760doing here? Like framing these people, these people that are 19, that probably for the first
00:16:43.560time are talking into a mic in their lives, we have met the outside agitators, and it is us,
00:16:48.280right? And, and, and in some way, we've been allowed to be blind to that, the fact that we
00:16:53.300are that we are voyeurs, the fact that we are interlopers, and we don't, we don't have to feel
00:16:58.320bad about it. Like, because, because we're, we're the good ones. We have to sort of come in and
00:17:02.380control these, these, you know, these wayward students. This might be a useful moment for us
00:17:07.540to drill down on what the campus serves in the public imagination, like what fears it animates
00:17:13.200and what are the stakes of that investment in there? Because, you know, I think it's one thing
00:17:17.680to just say, to quote Mean Girls, like she doesn't even go here. And it's another, I think,
00:17:23.900to try and elucidate why the campus as as an abstraction and then the campus protesters as
00:17:31.160these, you know, symbolic individuals arouses so much anxiety. There's so much to say about this.
00:17:37.140And there's so many scales at which that abstraction is working, too. So I do think that
00:17:42.960at the largest possible scale, when people hear about and when I'm using people also as an
00:17:48.560abstraction. When there is interest in what's going on on campus, that interest is also interest
00:17:54.900in like what's going on in America. And there's this, I think on a psychic level, there's a
00:18:03.020collapse happening of the campus as a figure for the nation state. That's how I've been able to
00:18:08.020make sense of it. And that's also how I've been able to make sense of the elevation of these
00:18:11.500particular elite schools to the figure of the campus. It has to do in part, in the essay,
00:18:19.900I talked a bit about the sort of architectural favoring, like why the space lends itself to this
00:18:25.040kind of imagining the quadrangle, the ivy, the bricks. But I also think that decades and decades
00:18:30.460of college application discourse feed into this, this idea that these schools pick from among the
00:18:36.100very best Americans, the most special ones, and assemble them into these curated classes
00:18:42.100of not just the most intelligent, but also the most diverse in every sense of the word,
00:18:49.020cohorts of people, that that's an exercise in curating a community, curating a citizenry.
00:18:55.300And that also, I think, really lends itself then to national level investment, where it's like,
00:19:01.000well, these are the young, these are the best young people in America, and they're all being
00:19:04.380held up for us as that as precisely what we ought to aspire to be and they're going to these
00:19:10.800institutions that are these organs for class reproduction and class mobility and it seems
00:19:15.700like it's a perfect recipe then for an isolated site the campus to be a place to work out your
00:19:23.740anxieties about what's going on nationally yeah where's the future what's the future of the nation
00:19:28.740where's the nation this strikes me as something that could be cast in a few different balances
00:19:32.960Like one is class anxiety among, you know, what we might think of as adult elites, that the institutions that produced them and that conferred their superior status might be conferring that, weakening that status by conferring it on people who are less worthy, right?
00:19:53.780There's that. And then there's this also kind of like class resentment potential among those who, you know, didn't get into Columbia, Yale, Harvard, who might see themselves as sort of excluded from this rarefied status that is now also being exposed as, you know, somehow pernicious, you know, for the wrong reasons that people like me consider pernicious, right?
00:20:15.820So like one of the things I noticed about Columbia was that there was a New York Post story about some of the initial arrestees talking about how rich their parents were.
00:20:24.960And you can read that in a couple of ways. One is that these are kids who come from privilege and thus are unworthy or insincere in their claims to radical politics.
00:20:34.760Or you can see it as kids who come from privilege and are not doing their duty to be loyal to that class status. Right.
00:20:42.840And it kind of like functions both ways about like resentment at the upper class and anxiety of the upper class to preserve its own status.
00:20:53.140And it's weird that these seemingly opposed resentments can be wielded towards the same end, which is antagonism towards the student protest.
00:21:02.180Yeah, I mean, that's fundamentally the neoconservative view of the campus, isn't it?
00:21:06.020And like Barbara Ehrenreich talks about this in Fear of Falling, that like the neocons who largely operated outside of the university but had gone, right, including City College, that they kind of felt that they had to become traitors sort of to their class in order to save that class.
00:21:22.600Because they thought like, well, what they're now teaching in college, right, this is the whole cavil about the like the dying cannon, et cetera, et cetera.
00:21:29.600They're like, well, they are not really doing the thing they need to do to reproduce the class, right?
00:21:34.820They're debasing in some ways the bases of our power.
00:21:40.500The best way to preserve it is to critique it from the outside.
00:21:43.200And so I think that one of the things that has happened since the 1980s is that that
00:21:47.360neoconservative optic has really become available to a staggering number of Americans.
00:21:51.760We're all invited to be Irving Kristol right now looking at universities, which is really
00:22:00.180Like this gesture, I mean, Samuel already kind of alluded to this, the heightening of the campus as this like utopian space or this space of like, you know, the best that we can offer as a nation is, of course, always going to be disappointed.
00:22:12.520And it is a giant stage just to stage disappointment, right?
00:22:15.620Like I was an alum and when I went here, it was like this and now, right?
00:22:20.260Like it's the whole thing is an invitation to frankly also grapple with your own aging process, you know, whatever you want to call it, right?
00:22:26.660Like the fact that like, you know, you keep getting older and they keep staying the same age.
00:22:31.780But it also is it's just like it's it's an invitation to kind of do these grand gesture of disappointment.
00:22:37.160There's a whole class of, I think, liberal pundits that probably peaked, frankly, in senior year of college and who just like seem to be like performing like, oh, well, you have no idea what it's like now at Princeton.
00:22:48.940It's like, I mean, it's probably, it's twice as hard to get in there when you went there, Bozo, but like, you know, but still they're able to like kind of perform this level of like, oh God, like, you know, what has happened to these places that were so important to us?
00:23:02.180And it's like, it's being kind of offered for that.
00:23:04.100I feel like it's like hardly anyone ever is like, oh, how inspiring.
00:23:07.380It's always like, I'm so disappointed.
00:23:08.480Yeah, I mean, it does seem like the campus is an available object for this kind of working out of one's own anxieties, whether those are political anxieties or personal anxieties, you know, at every level and from multiple directions.
00:23:23.460I think that's partially why I found psychoanalysis a useful lens for thinking about this is not just because we already talked a little bit about the sort of fantasizing about the sex lives of college students that sort of runs throughout all of this, but also insofar as the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy is something that can sustain overdetermination and can sustain contradiction.
00:23:46.680So the New York, what was it, the Post that ran that article? It's offering that article up and it does everything it needs to do for everybody, despite the fact that it appears to be towing one particular line about these protesters.
00:24:02.060that line can be read from multiple directions and that's what makes it a fantasy is that it's not
00:24:07.420just that it's one person's fantasy but that it's a space where everybody's fantasies can
00:24:12.640simultaneously be brought to bear without the discourse collapsing under the weight of all that
00:24:17.180energy everybody's obsessed with the campus and that for a variety of different reasons and the
00:24:22.080campus can take all of it yeah i mean that's that's in some way the real question here right
00:24:26.360like we've lost the ability and you can still see it in other countries and i think in other eras0.98
00:24:31.200Like we've lost the ability to just not give a shit what 19 year olds are doing, right?0.98
00:24:35.460Like there is a, which I'm not saying like 19 year olds also do significant things, but0.98
00:24:40.100like the bar ought to be kind of high.
00:24:42.140These were people who were, let's not forget, like 15, four years ago, we've divested ourselves
00:24:47.020really of the collective ability to just be like, all right, I guess that's the thing
00:25:23.240I wrote this essay kind of as a one-off thing, although the process of writing it has made me want to keep writing about it. So I may continue working in this direction. I can say as a little bit of like biographical data about me, that I got interested in this well before October 7th, which is when I sort of date it in the essay.
00:25:45.600um because i wrote my dissertation on literary theory um like the intellectual history of this
00:25:52.820thing that we call literary theory and what you learn very quickly if you look into that
00:25:57.940intellectual history is that the history of the discourse on literary theory is very much a history
00:26:01.760of campus panic um oh my god the children are not reading literature anymore they're reading
00:26:08.920Foucault. Oh my goodness, this is such a scandal. And that's, that was the first iteration of this
00:26:15.360that I started to conceptualize. And I started conceptualizing it in my graduate work in that
00:26:21.280pretty different context. But in order to figure out what was going on there, I had to start
00:26:25.580thinking about like, why people, yeah, why do people spend so much time fantasizing about what's
00:26:30.800happening in English classrooms at Yale University, a place that educates, again, far less than 1%
00:26:37.060of the american population um english majors make up even less of that one two or three percent yeah
00:26:43.380and so uh the fact that well yes maybe they're not reading the whole fairy queen anymore and
00:26:49.620maybe they're also reading you know a little bit of edward saeed you know that the idea that that
00:26:55.140might be happening is something that was being litigated in the pages of newsweek in the 1980s
00:27:01.780in the pages of the New York Times. These big journals and newspapers are concerned about
00:27:10.000a few people being assigned a few essays. That seemed so disproportionate, and I really became
00:27:16.620hung up on it then. So all I can say in answer to your question is that already in the 1970s,
00:27:22.460this was very much happening quite apart from political activity. And I think that the go-to
00:27:28.800origin point would be the 60s and anti-war protests in the 60s. And I think that's maybe
00:27:35.520right. I don't know for sure. But I think it's more salient, actually, to look at when there's
00:27:41.420not an incipient political crisis around which students are mobilizing, like what's happening
00:27:45.600right now. People still talk all the time in all of these magazines and newspapers about what are
00:27:51.100college students doing. And that's real campus panic. Yeah, I think that's so well put that
00:27:57.120that in some way right the idea that this is reactive is the first lie right like it's actually
00:28:02.040about the people doing the projecting then about like the the kids can do whatever the hell they
00:28:07.660want like that's not to say that's not to excuse everything college students ever do but it's to
00:28:11.480say it's fairly independent and just to give a a sense of what what samuel is talking about here
00:28:16.740just so that that you don't think he's making this up this is the cover from of new york magazine
00:28:43.380for those of you who did not like us study literary theory,
00:28:48.180logocentrism is a is a important concept in one seminar you took that one time in graduate school0.93
00:28:55.860i would say and the idea that it's like on the cover of the fucking magazine is like this is0.56
00:29:02.140the thing you should care about like the next i think the next issue is what like the drug war0.94
00:29:05.360right and you're like sure yes logocentrism is definitely on the same level of national crisis
00:29:11.160um like the idea that like young people say that again three percent of one percent of students you
00:29:17.400know who are whatever like 10 of americans like might know what logocentric means is a crisis like
00:29:22.000that's remarkable but also like this goes back way further than the 90s this campus panic we
00:29:29.160can historicize it at least back i think to you know william f buckley got a man at yale right
00:29:33.840this is and and that means it has been crucially central in forming the 20th century conservative
00:29:40.000imagination as positioning themselves as restoring a endangered or lost, uh, pure,
00:29:48.260like antediluvian, uh, like campus culture. And then also, uh, insulating the American mind
00:29:56.580against the threats that are emerging from this, you know, nefarious, uh, changed fallen campus
00:30:04.520of, of today. Yeah. I mean, Buckley is such an interesting case because in some way Samuel was
00:30:08.900mentioning the 80s and 90s. And so that would be sort of the Dinesh D'Souza era, Alan Bloom era,
00:30:13.440so closing of the American mind. And then the 50s, right, with William F. Buckley's God of Man at
00:30:18.300Yale. Those are actually, right, two opposed critiques of the American campus. Buckley is
00:30:23.340saying the campus is malignant because it cleaves itself apart from the rest of America, right? He
00:30:30.540says you take a bunch of capitalist, individualist boys, and you turn them into sissified, socialist0.95
00:30:37.600just atheists, right? And Bloom is really saying the American campus is getting submerged in
00:30:43.780American society. It's no longer distinct enough, right? And I think it's really, really key that
00:30:48.700even in the conservative imagination, it's not one project. It's always both and, right? You're
00:30:54.740too distinct. You're not distinct enough. You think you're not elitist enough. You're too
00:31:00.000elitist, right? And it's really noticeable that from its very inception, this discourse kind of
00:31:05.940appeals to to people who kind of have have enough remoteness from the campus to not notice that
00:31:12.240that's that that those are two diametrically opposed imperatives in some way well i mean i
00:31:16.720could add about yale specifically that one of the things that i found in my research on literary
00:31:22.420theory uh was the curious and persistent prominence of yale as the site where this all of this
00:31:29.420discourse is being worked out. And I do think that Buckley is a key in sort of offering Yale
00:31:37.400up as the campus. Yeah. Par excellence. That's not a totally determined. Obviously, we've seen
00:31:42.640and I argued in the essay that the campus is mobile. It can go where it needs to go to serve
00:31:48.120the interests of the discourse. But that when people started getting worried about literary
00:31:51.880theory in the 70s, they were worried specifically about a group of people at Yale. Right. In the
00:31:58.000Complut department and the English department who were doing something called theory. None of the
00:32:05.060four people really was doing the same thing. It was very much a kind of media creation that these
00:32:10.620four people, this is, so this is Jeffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Paul DeMond, and J. Hillis Miller.
00:32:15.820These four people are somehow doing some sort of organized project when in fact it's a heterogeneous
00:32:20.040group of people. But that group of four professors became this sort of flashpoint for anxiety about
00:32:29.640what was happening to the campus and to our students, and they're being corrupted, and
00:32:33.600they're learning the word logocentrism from J. Hillis Miller, who's getting it from Derrida.
00:32:37.840And I think that that's interesting to bear in mind just because it means that this thing
00:32:46.080called theory uh that became the object of this of fear and panic something's happening and it's
00:32:52.900theoretical uh that is like the injection of that word into conservative yeah panic discourse and
00:33:00.240that word then never goes away as the object of conservative panic discourse so whatever's
00:33:06.460happening around the imagination of yale between buckley and let's say 1989 produces this sort of
00:33:15.360meme called theory that doesn't have a content, but can get attached to any variety of intellectual
00:33:21.060projects in order to make them seem pernicious, dangerous, corruptive, foreign, foreign, certainly
00:33:28.160foreign, Jewish, often, I think now we're seeing it a particular, I mean, the critical race theory0.96
00:33:33.300panic had all these other elements in it. But one of them is that these are not white people,0.71
00:33:37.220and they're doing something and I don't like it. So now it's theory, and I don't like that.0.79
00:33:41.040Or gender theory, the attack on Judith Butler, very much.
00:33:44.660I mean, there's a wonderful article that I might plug here by Maura Weigel called Hating Theory.
00:33:48.700It's about sort of these modes of conservative half reading of like, and she says it starts really with the Frankfurt School.
00:33:54.920And it is very much the three parentheses are very much implied, right?
00:33:59.860Like it is basically theory as Jewish conspiracy against sort of a healthy thinking, which is basically just like osmotic exposure to the canon, right?
00:34:09.980You spend your time with great minds and not criticizing them or whatever, right?0.99
00:34:13.960Like submission to Socrates and Plato or whatever, but not in a gay way, just to be clear, not0.95
00:34:20.120To just give an example that I really like, give people a sense of like just the level
00:34:25.120of investment and the sustained level of investment in what students are reading and
00:34:29.400talking about that Samuel was alluding to.
00:34:32.520This is from, I picked these out from my book and I just thought I'd share them with the
00:34:37.760two of you because it's just so remarkable.
00:34:39.740So this is a quote from Thomas Short from the journal Academic Questions, which was a kind of conservative campus newspaper at the time from 1988.
00:34:49.980Quote, no one of any intelligence who reads both is going to agree that Alice Walker is as profound or artful as Shakespeare.
00:34:56.760Yet it is possible that Walker's black lesbian saga, The Color Purple, is now assigned more often in college courses than all of Shakespeare's plays combined.
00:35:04.200This is what we in the biz in literary theory call absolute bullshit or a thing that didn't happen, but still.0.95
00:35:16.000Here's Toby Young, human barnacle, writing in The Spectator in England in 2012.
00:35:21.980Inclusive. It's one of those ghastly politically correct words that have survived the demise of new labor.
00:35:27.620Schools have to be inclusive these days.
00:35:29.460That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library, though no Mark Twain, and a special education needs department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
00:35:43.260And then here is a German magazine from 2021.
00:35:46.980In the United States, some teachers refused to teach the relatively well-known poet William Shakespeare in class.0.71
00:35:52.140He represents the toxic worldview of straight white men.
00:35:54.920he is racist and must therefore be promptly replaced by diverse inclusive poets this case0.95
00:36:01.020of cancer culture is particularly remarkable because to this day no one knows exactly who
00:36:04.960this shakespeare actually was right like this is 30 years of just like imagining that the works of0.78
00:36:10.960alice walker have replaced shakespeare like visit a fucking seminar dude like this could have you0.86
00:36:18.540know this 30 year freak out could have been a quick email be like hey you guys see shakespeare0.98
00:36:24.120so yep oh cool yeah so i should take that out that could have that could have that is how that
00:36:28.940could have gone that is not how it went like the investment you're right like the investment in
00:36:32.620these disciplines that as this is happening are becoming increasingly more marginal i don't have
00:36:36.920the exact data but i would say that if i'm remembering the trend lines correctly from
00:36:40.880the mla report like the number of english majors like i think it went from like five percent in
00:36:45.320the mid 80s so when when the first of these three essays came out to something like one and a half
00:36:51.300I want to say does that sound right like it's it's a appreciable difference right and to treat
00:36:57.140and to and to treat that as then indicative of like anything it's just really really remarkable
00:37:03.820isn't it what's sort of allegorized in that in that sequence that you just read for us is also
00:37:09.800the big question of like who and what college education is for yeah is looming over it and
00:37:16.340And like the fear that Alice Walker might be taught just as someone who teaches literature out of college, I have to say, you know, one does want to teach things that students find interesting and engaging and that they will that will get them thinking about the world.
00:37:31.580And for some people, because of the totemic word identity here is necessary, for some people, Alice Walker is going to tell them more about their life than Shakespeare, especially at first blush.
00:37:47.040And that's often all college students do when they read this.
00:37:50.820Not everyone takes all the time we would love, and that's also part of this question.
00:37:56.100But the point being, the anxiety there is that like there's now people for whom Shakespeare doesn't seem important, but Alice Walker does. And that really means that there's different kinds of people now in these universities, different races of people, different sexualities and genders of people.
00:38:13.740And at the same time, the idea that everyone should read Shakespeare suggests that there's something important for becoming an American that involves exposure to the great works of Shakespeare and that you are falling short of some sort of imagined idea of what an American should be if you are not reading that.
00:38:32.300and behind all of that then there's also the question of who's going to college and why
00:38:36.840and maybe there's a reason people aren't majoring in English it's because they are increasingly
00:38:41.240settled with debt loads and there's all that there's larger conversation here but at bottom
00:38:49.440this is all being compressed into a question of what people are reading as if it's not also about
00:38:53.540why they might choose to go to college in the first place how much money they're paying to be
00:38:57.100there and and so on and so forth I wonder if this might be a good time to shift towards one of the
00:39:02.120thoughts I hope we could close with, which is I'm doing a fellowship at Stanford. I'm a journalist
00:39:07.380for my day job. So I very much feel like I'm an outsider, an outside agitator, if you will,
00:39:12.660on the campus. But I would have wondered what it's like for you guys who teach as your main gig
00:39:20.760to try and navigate all these fantasies that are imposed on the campus. When you're on the
00:39:26.200campus themselves? Does this impact your time in the classroom? Does it impact how you have to
00:39:32.320shape your syllabi? Does it impact what students come to campus hoping and fearing for?
00:39:39.140I would say it affects me. I feel the effect in two ways. The first is the mixed and contradictory
00:39:48.400messages that I get about what my relationship to a student should be? Are students, again,
00:39:55.680to sort of summon all these specters that have been haunting the conversation,
00:40:00.740are these students children who need to be taken care of? Or are my students all adults who are
00:40:09.700capable of leading their own lives and making choices about how they spend their time? So do
00:40:15.780do I need to have an attendance policy in my lecture class so that students are forced to show
00:40:20.740up? Or can I say, you choose if you're going to come to class or not, and that will affect
00:40:26.320how you do in the class. And that's a set of choices that you make. Those are competing
00:40:31.820messages that I get. Sometimes it's like you're not being supportive enough of your students.
00:40:37.660And supportive there really means you're not treating them like they're not agents,
00:40:41.380doing the agential work of adulthood for them. And other times I'm being too soft and too
00:40:46.720supportive and I need to be harder and I need to discipline them and I need to have an attendance
00:40:50.720requirement so that people come to my 200 person lecture as if they're going to, you know, as if
00:40:56.300they're going to speak in the lecture anyway. I don't know. It's, I just feel constantly being
00:41:01.220buffeted back and forth between I should be a caretaker to children and I need to get these
00:41:08.760people to grow up faster. And my own attitude is much more that they're adults and I'm educating
00:41:17.700adults and I treat them that way. So that would be the one sort of big way in which I feel the
00:41:25.940fantasy of the campus bearing down on me is the instability of the student as either too much or
00:41:32.760too little, too adult, too childlike. All of those contradictions we were talking about are displaced
00:41:37.620onto teachers as pedagogical demands. And it's very confusing sometimes to know what is it that
00:41:44.300I'm supposed to be doing here? And what really do the students want is not a question that anyone
00:41:48.660has ever bothered, it seems to be, in this conversation. Well, I mean, so, I mean, this is
00:41:55.200something I probably should know, but does it also mean, so you mentioned it's more of a commuter
00:41:58.980school. Does that also mean the students are themselves a bit older? Because that's the other
00:42:03.200thing, like, you know, people tend to picture one thing and one age bracket when they picture
00:42:07.840college students. But of course, you know, it can take a little longer to graduate from college if
00:42:12.660you're, you know, if you also are working, for instance, and I feel like at a lot of schools,
00:42:17.940that's the case. So are these, you know, biologically, are they the same age as the
00:42:25.280ones you taught at Chicago? Or are they slightly different? Definitely, there's more what we call
00:42:31.320non-traditional students i hate that phrase non-traditional the tradition there by the way
00:42:36.840is just the fantasy of the campus right yeah exactly but uh uh certainly there's more but i
00:42:42.180mean it is still a college and so the majority of the students are between the ages of of 17 and 23
00:42:48.840um but yes there's there's more than certainly at chicago i never taught um an undergraduate who was
00:42:56.440who is outside that age range um and but that also i still don't really feel like
00:43:02.680it should be affecting how i conceptualize the students no that's true um and i certainly don't
00:43:10.340think there's no difference in like ability i've noticed between an 18 year old and a 45 year old
00:43:15.400student they're all but it is certainly the case that many of my students have jobs some of them
00:43:20.520have they really can't have full-time jobs if they want to take daytime classes but many of them have
00:43:24.800multiple part-time jobs uh and that again affects like the kind of time they can devote to studies
00:43:33.560yeah so if it's a choice between taking a class on shakespeare and a class on alice walker and
00:43:38.020alice walker is more enjoyable or engaging to read why wouldn't you take yeah yeah you know yeah
00:43:43.500yeah i think and that gets to a really really important point with just to say the college
00:43:48.700student is an ambivalent site and in some way the conservative projection exploits that it's not that
00:43:53.820the that the like oh college students are perfectly simple and you know we know where they fit in
00:43:58.600society and these people are just getting deranged over it like it really is a kind of an ambivalent
00:44:02.720site it's a place where where capitalism and something pre-capitalistic kind of subsist side
00:44:08.020by side in this kind of awkward way and i i like the way you you're also pointing out that like
00:44:12.040the college right is just a massive repository of like um of capital and privilege right like the
00:44:20.320the thing that people are picturing is the residue of just money, right? The moment you withdraw any
00:44:27.420of that, the picture of the college student splinters, they get a little older, they have to0.94
00:44:31.840work several jobs, they commute, they have to travel further to campus, right? And of course,
00:44:39.200that has been the history of the last 40 years. It's been just massive disinvestment from campuses.
00:44:43.660But of course, it's also been this kind of symbolic overinvestment in the campus as a thing.
00:44:49.620And like, that's to me, this fascinating duality that like, we are really getting fixated on campus on a form of the campus that as you point out, we're also making less and less possible, right?
00:45:02.820So like there was a time probably when, you know, there really was a way to make your way through one of these campuses and have that kind of, that kind of, that kind of college experience, even if, you know, let's say it was a fairly small, it was a smaller campus, it was a secondary campus, et cetera, et cetera.
00:45:21.240that's been made impossible by by state legislatures the country over and so it's it's
00:45:26.440really kind of interesting to think about the fact that like our our image gets hardened as
00:45:31.080the reality underneath it fractures yeah i mean just look at the university of california which
00:45:37.040was a place you could go to college for free for a long time and now you have to go into debt to
00:45:43.420attend it and like city college of new york as well you know like these new conservatives that
00:45:48.940you're talking about all got free education right yeah like the new york intellectuals all went to
00:45:53.780all went to city college like there's this generation that's like the fixed image of
00:45:58.240the campus from the 50s are all people who didn't pay very much money to go to school
00:46:02.720and got excellent educations maybe this is where we end it with a call for reinvestment in the
00:46:09.820university and in public education in particular so that the campus can in fact become decadent
00:46:15.480enough in reality to sustain all these fantasies that we assigned to it that's right it deserves
00:46:21.580to be what the conservatives fear it is yeah give give us enough money so we can turn into your
00:46:26.840worst nightmare finally yeah let's realize this fantasy i mean in some sense that does seem to be
00:46:33.740what's going on when uh people panic about what's going on at columbia say and they're like classes
00:46:38.820were canceled the same people who a week before had been like what are they learning in these
00:46:43.140classes right learning critical race theory now they're like get back into those classrooms learn
00:46:47.680that critical race theory we can't have you out on the clock get get that get that alice walker
00:46:52.020we don't care anymore yeah i mean you write in your essay that the you know that now the fantasy
00:46:56.280and the material reality have of the campus have coincided and i think you you mean that about like
00:47:01.200the police presence on campus but like it's true on the several levels isn't it like they're they're
00:47:05.740kind of turning the campus into the thing that they've been wanting to hate all along the violent
00:47:10.900space of suppression that like they've imagined congratulations you just you created it
00:47:16.100in bed with the right would like to thank the michelle r claimant institute for gender research
00:47:31.860for generous support jennifer portillo for setting up our studio our theme music is by
00:47:36.560Katie Lau. Our producer is Megan Kalthus.