Thompson writes as if he knows about higher education and he’s building a case against its liberal elements. Like anyone who’s been to school and can read a paper, he knows something about it. The problem is that his case depends as much on not knowing things as it does on knowing them. It’s a problem for me, I should say—I may be coming at it with the wrong standard. If the blog is meant as nothing more than entertainment with a political slant, then I guess he has a pretty good formula. The post I’m looking at probably wrote itself once he had the quotes, and like-minded readers get a nice little buzz off the righteous indignation. To have that impact there has to be an appearance of reasoning. A lot of actual reasoning with real-life complexities and ambiguities would be counterproductive, though—more effort for less effect. Thompson’s not an academic decision-maker, so I suppose he might as well write whatever he wants. Still, his criticism is supposed to sound smart but it makes a virtue of ignorance, and that really bugs me.

The theme of the post is “classroom political advocacy.” Thompson starts by invoking a scene from the documentary Indoctrinate U. about a professor who faced “a campaign of harassment by left-leaning colleagues.” That sounds like a matter of professional intolerance, not classroom advocacy, but it makes the point that bad things are happening to good people in the halls of learning. Cut to “[a] recent post on classroom advocacy at Crooked Timber, a site popular among left-leaning academics….” Thompson picks out three passages from the comments, arranged from ridiculous to reasonable. The first is from a person who thinks the world as we know it will end if McCain is elected, and since the other side doesn’t play fair why should his side? The comment starts with a disclaimer: “I’m not an academic nor a purist.” But never mind that—the site is still popular with left-leaning academics. And that’s the basic strategy: Pick up statements from here and there, brush off the reservations and qualifications and clarifications, then post them under a banner that says “leftist academic.”

The context for the next pair of quotes—the ones from Johnson’s editorial—is “Grover Furr of Monclair State’s English department,” and “Rhonda Garelick, an associate professor of French and Italian at Connecticut College.” In other words, left-wing professor from a certain kind of department—neither seems to have a public reputation, so the names are irrelevant. In effect it’s about the same as “popular with left-leaning academics,” though less a matter of guilt by association, and it adds a gender and a department. [After posting I see that Furr is somewhat notorious, though not with anything like the name recognition of, say, Ward Churchill.]

The problem isn’t that the quotes are taken out of their textual context, it’s that all context beyond that it’s from the pen of Dr. Lefty is treated as irrelevant. Readers are free to follow the links and soak up all the context they want, and it seems to me that anyone who’s curious or who wants to understand the problems that Thompson is exercised about would want to do just that. Garelick and Furr are both articulate people writing from personal experience (especially Garelick—Furr’s discussion-group post is pretty dry), so whether you’re pro or con there’s more to be gleaned from their writing than how outrageously wrong they are. But to really understand what they’re trying to communicate would require careful reading with the judgmental filters turned off, and I don’t want to be responsible for any harm caused by unprotected exposure to dangerous and offensive ideas. We are, after all, talking about an unreconstructed feminist and a man who disdains conservatives in favor of Marxists. Some plain old realism wouldn’t be so much to ask, though—a vaguely realistic model of college instruction that puts the political issues into perspective, some scepticism towards friendly sources like Indoctrinate U., and a better model of the relationship between what’s thought, said, or written and what’s done.

Garelick turns out to be the richest target, especially after Thompson spices her up to suit his taste. In his view, she “loftily dismissed students who objected to her use of French lessons to express at length her opposition to the war in Iraq.” I’m not sure what makes her dismissal lofty—maybe any opinion printed in the New York Times is by definition lofty. It’s a tone that’s more from his imagination than from the page, in any case. A purer figment of his imagination is the idea she went on “at length.” He returns to it a couple of times in the comments—first referring to French lessons “interrupted with lengthy screeds on the alleged evils of capitalism, ‘imperialism,’ ‘hegemony,’ etc.” and later to the “agitprop monologues” of French professors who “indulge their own political vanities at enormous length.” This is probably just a fact of life—left-wing professors drone on and on when they’ve got the indoctrination bug. She might have done just that, for sure, but all she says is that she “broached the topic of Iraq.”

What business does a professor of French have setting aside her syllabus to critique the war? I’m inclined to doubt that she has any business doing it. It’s a good question, anyway, and I don’t blame anyone for finding her presumption annoying or even offensive. The essay as a whole is grounds to wonder what goes on in her classes, where her priorities are, but it’s not grounds for any conclusions about those things. If, when she says she wants to “teach[] ‘wakeful’ political literacy: the skills needed to interrogate all cultural messages,” she’s sincere about the “all,” willing and able to take up feminist orthodoxy as critically as war-on-terror orthodoxy, that would make a big difference. If she’s at least ready to listen to her students as she is to lecture then, that would also make a big difference. The overall impression I get is of an attentive and responsible teacher. It’s not something I’d bet a lot of money on, but the clues are there and they clearly didn’t make a dent in Thompson’s armor of preconceptions. He found what he wanted to find—a stand-in liberal blowhard.

Thompson’s commenters take him up on the implicit invitation to sound smart sounding off, comfortable that even if they know very little, they know all that really matters. The setup is about the same as on Durham-in-Wonderland, where the posts often give the stamp of approval (Harvard PhD-certified) to irate ignorance, and the comments follow suit (with a vengeance). I saw the same sad dynamic on the Volokh Conspiracy, again engineered by a professor. Thompson chimes in in the middle of his comment thread with an opinion about the cost of liberal bias: because students are being “spared serious and thoughtful contact with opposing arguments, their own views can easily become lazy, reflexive and glib.” He and his crew do a superb job of modeling the problem.

Overall the comment thread has a clubhouse atmosphere—the reactions are not as vehement as on DIW, I guess because the evildoers are more generic and their offenses are not so fresh and outrageous. The tone is also not as vindictive as DIW tends to be, though several commenters relish the thought of suing the pants off that inexcusable professor of French (can you say faux juridicalism?). The prevailing sentiment at its most tasteless and overwrought comes from the clever fellow who’s about to send his kids “down the “large intestine of the university system” where they “may be exposed to this gibberish from incompetents who would be more benefit to society if they were waiting tables.” That’s not to say the comments are uniformly ridiculous and uniformed—they aren’t. What’s most notable, anyway, is what’s missing—there’s no inclination to either look into a mirror or take on more challenging targets than the inflatable monsters in the kiddie pool.

When I finally clicked over to Crooked Timber I was surprised to find a deliberative post questioning the ethics of devoting 45 seconds as students were gathering before class to encourage them to register to vote. That’s some perspective right there, and if you set this post and its comments next to Thompson’s, the idea that our universities need more conservatives to moderate the feckless liberal ideologues doesn’t come out looking so good. On Crooked Timber, Brian poses a real-life moral dilemma, elaborates some arguments on either side, and opens the floor. Mixed in with the usual comment-forum posturing and chatter are positions pro and con that are more reasoning that rhetoric—it’s almost like an honest-to-goodness debate. Thompson and company, on the other hand, prop up some stick figures and then bowl them down. It’s just a random comparison that, in the big picture, proves nothing. But it’s hard to take criticism seriously if the people pushing it (often pretty smugly) can tolerate that much dissonance between their rhetoric and the example they’re setting.

Thompson’s thoughts about students being spared from opposing arguments was a response to one of the few readers’ opinions with straightforward real-life implications:

I have three kids in college. In every case they have encountered a stereotypical liberal professor who indulged in the type of teaching I like to call “regurgitative learning”. They like to hear THEIR ideas, THEIR opinions and THEIR political views written down as mantra by their students. Opposing views are not acceptable and can be cause for failure.

In the same vein, another commenter with a kid in college says that “[she] told [her daughter] to lie, if necessary, to get through classes. Just give them what they want to hear…. [Her friends] all routinely lie on exams or papers, just to please their profs.” The fact that she thinks of lying as an option shows that something is seriously wrong (including her signature, “hermeneutics,” which, incidentally, is why I’ve arbitrarily made the person a “her”). Exams and papers are about knowing things and being able to reason and write—if the student has to take a position on some issue, it should be completely irrelevant whether it’s their actual opinion. Lying or not is beside the point (or at least should be). I don’t doubt that some professors are confused about this, but if it’s typical or even common where “hermeneutics” sent her daughter, then she chose the wrong school. Grades given to writing that backs up an opinion depend on overall impressions that can’t be quantified. That leaves a lot of room for misunderstanding. I suspect, though, that the more clueless and indifferent students—the ones who don’t really understand or care what it means to line up an argument in support of a conclusion—are the ones most likely to imagine that the trick is to just regurgitate. Anyway, what I’m most likely to conclude from a paper that parrots my opinion is that the student can’t think for herself, and that’s the practical problem with that parent’s advice—it might work well with a few bad professors, but the others might decide her daughter is a dimwit. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who gives a damn about education would give such advice to their child.

I do believe that there are preachy liberal professors out there. Based on the bitter and sarcastic comments I’ve come across, it seems that they leave a lasting and bad impression. As a student I never experienced any overt campaigns of indoctrination in the classroom, and it could be that I’m unfairly downplaying the complaint because of that. But anyone who’s more interested in taking full advantage of the better professors than in fooling the bad ones should read Chris Goff’s no-nonsense effort to “dispense some advice for students who want to remain true to themselves while turning in rigorous academic work.”

Focussing on that editorial makes a great deal of Johnson’s subsequent blogging seem redundant. Probably that has more to do with 20-20 hindsight and my poor opinion of DIW than anything else. The blog went on and on, though, accumulating a lot of detail but very little depth. I might feel differently if the editorial had been about the criminal investigation. In the three posts Johnson wrote for Cliopatria in April 2006—the start of what would become Durham-in-Wonderland—he touched on Reade Seligmann’s convincing alibi, the flawed line-ups, and Nifong’s political opportunism and the pandering that went with it. Those turned out to be good indicators of how the prosecution would go (how it would crash and burn, that is), and Johnson read the signs more accurately than many of the rest of us. The stakes were high, and there was every reason to keep a close eye on what Nifong was doing. But as the title says, the editorial is about “Duke’s Poisoned Campus Culture,” and the problems with the investigation are only mentioned to show how clouded and agenda-driven the judgment of many professors at Duke had been. Based on DIW, Johnson seems to have been as prescient about those professors as he was about Nifong. But within the frame of such a sprawling narrative, prescience and tunnel vision can be hard to tell apart, and when it comes to Duke’s campus culture, it’s tunnel vision that dominates in DIW.

Johnson was already blogging and editorializing about academic culture issues when the charges against the lacrosse team hit the news. The ideological skew of Duke’s faculty figured in a piece he wrote for Inside Higher Ed the previous summer. From it he recycles a bad joke about stupid conservatives told by the chairman of Duke’s philosophy department, giving it vastly overblown significance as stage-setting for the lacrosse case. His glaring evidence of poison, though—the foundation of his ongoing critique of Duke faculty—is the “listening” statement, which he’d written about for the first time about a week earlier. Along with the statement came the so-called “Group of 88” (his term, I believe) who endorsed it, professors he found so transparent that he casually extrapolates their collective thinking to its “logical, if absurd, extreme”—some lacrosse players should be convicted for rape just because of who they are, no matter what they did or didn’t do.

After the editorial, the only significant change I see in Johnson’s picture of Duke’s campus culture is his assessment of Brodhead and of the lacrosse players, which quickly becomes morally simplistic. In fact a key passage is different in the version of the editorial posted on DIW (overstruck words are on Inside Higher Ed and the italicized word is in the blog):

Few would deny that several players on Duke’s lacrosse team have behaved repulsively badlly [sic]. Two team captains hired exotic dancers, supplied alcohol to underage team members, and concluded a public argument with one of the dancers with racial epithets. Brodhead appropriately cancelled the team’s season and demanded the coach’s resignation.

As far as his trumped-up “Group” goes, things remain the same without even changing much. In the editorial, Johnson writes, “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for [Houston] Baker and many others who signed the faculty statement, the race, class, and gender of the men’s lacrosse team produced a guilty-until-proven-innocent mentality.” It was hard for him to escape the conclusion, that’s for sure. Fast-forward to “Legacies,” his final post before putting DIW on hiatus in December 2007, and he highlights the “race/class/gender extremists” who jerked the administration’s chain and were “only too willing to advance their personal, pedagogical, or ideological agendas on the backs of their own students.” Another major legacy he chooses to reinforce is “the pernicious effects of academic groupthink,” a theme that he first brought up in DIW in late May 2006 (the legacy he doesn’t mention is DIW’s remarkable success at fostering its own little groupthink community, part of a gossiping network of like-minded sites).

On the face of it, it’s hard for me to see how a historian could spend a year and a half analyzing an ongoing controversy and find nothing that poses a significant challenge to his earliest firm impressions of it. It’s a record that suggests that the project isn’t really analysis, and in fact it turns out to be more like prosecution. There’s no denying that the most prominent and vocal of the faculty he criticizes did nothing overt to break the mold—they stuck close to their issues or were silent, so Johnson is fully justified in sticking to his guns as well. Still, there’s a lot of filtering out of things he apparently doesn’t want the ladies and gentlemen of the jury to be thinking about. And filtering alone isn’t enough to support the one-sided case he seems determined to make. It also requires quite a bit of what I’ve described as misrepresentation, manipulation, distortion, etc. Now I realize there’s a better word for all that, one that really captures the spirit of Johnson’s anti-academic crusade—bullshit.

It was a reader’s comment that got me thinking about how useful the word is (I’ll get back to the comment later), and then I remembered a little book I bought a few years ago called On Bullshit, written by Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt. One of my favorite lines from it—part of a discussion of whether bullshit is analogous to “carelessly made, shoddy goods”—brings out the book’s quietly surreal juxtaposition of subject and style.

Excrement is not designed or crafted at all; it is merely emitted, or dumped. It may have a more or less coherent shape, or it may not, but it is in any case certainly not wrought.

The “essence of bullshit,” according to Frankfurt, is a “lack of connection to a concern with truth—[an] indifference to how things really are.” That sets it apart not only from truth-telling but also from lying, because you have to consider the truth before you can tell a lie. In a helpful review of the book in Slate, Timothy Noah gives as an example the claim the famously surfaced in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address, about Saddam Hussein’s efforts to buy nuclear material from Niger. The possible basis for that claim is murky enough that it might not be the best example, but assuming for the sake of argument that it was as bogus as Bush’s critics believe, it does seem more like indifference to the truth than like a conscious decision to peddle outright falsehood.

Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the way things are may become attenuated or lost.

Noah’s example brings out a limitation of Frankfurt’s schematic analysis, though. In many real-world situations even the most honest person can’t be sure about “the way things are.” What I think stands for “the truth” in those situations is honest, dispassionate analysis, even though it might lead different people to different truths. With respect to national security matters like the yellowcake from Niger, the uncertainty and inaccessibility of the evidence seems to be a standing invitation to bullshit—one that’s frequently accepted by politicians of all stripes. The Bush administration seems to find it especially irresistible, and even compared to other political machines they’re way out of the “normal habit of attending to the way things are.”

It isn’t just a matter of “what it suits one to say,” though. First of all, bullshit isn’t likely to work if it isn’t plausible and/or appealing to the intended audience. And it usually serves some purpose or furthers some agenda—justifying a war, for instance. Johnson treats the lacrosse case as a battlefront in the culture war, so even though he approaches the fight more like a prosecutor than a general his purpose isn’t so different from Bush’s. His analysis is thoroughly agenda-driven—scratch the surface, and you’re likely to find some bullshit. And it can be pretty easy to identify. He’s covered the scandal from a distance, drawing on essays, interviews, news reports, and the like. Often in DIW all you have to do is follow the helpful link to the original text. There’s a fair chance that it’s been manipulated to show that the person who said or wrote it has exactly the values and beliefs that you’d expect from a race/class/gender extremist, or else it’s been fudged to bring out the topsy-turvy irrationality of Wonderland, where the crazies and cowards are running the show. Some of Johnson’s bullshit is generated in other ways, but the end it serves is pretty consistent.

I made a list of some of the more obvious bullshit I’ve come across in DIW, but it’s gotten so long enough that I’ll post it separately, within a day or two. [Here it is.] Much of it comes from earlier entries, though: What Mark Anthony Neal supposedly hears students mutter at the beginning of the new semester, the persecution of Steven Baldwin, and just about everything Johnson wrote about Karla Holloway’s article “Coda: Body of Evidence.”

It’s one thing for a self-appointed pundit to churn out bullshit—it’s practically the job description. Even a moderate amount of bullshit from someone backed by the power of law enforcement is a much more serious thing. Nifong seems to have been a copious, shameless bullshitter, and the consequences were disastrous for the people who ended up under his thumb. The silver lining is that in the end it all came back to haunt him. In the first flush of news coverage he spent hours and hours feeding the beast what it wanted to hear. Speaking to N&O reporter Joe Neff, James Coleman starts off sounding a bit like Frankfurt:

“Either he knew what the facts were and misstated them, or he was making them up,” said James Coleman, a Duke law professor who has publicly requested that Nifong remove himself from the case. “Whether he acted knowing they were false, or if he was reckless, it doesn’t matter in the long run. This is the kind of stuff that causes the public to lose confidence in the justice system.”

A line of bullshit that was all too effective in rallying the Duke community and neighbors against the lacrosse team was the bit about how they were stonewalling. It seems to have been largely the work of Durham Police Cpl. David Addison. Among his deceptive statements was this one, to the Durham Herald-Sun: “Addison said police approached the lacrosse team with the five-page search warrant on March 16, but that all of the members refused to cooperate with the investigation.” In fact after the search warrant was executed co-captains David Evans, Dan Flannery and Matt Zash volunteered to be interviewed by the police at length and without counsel present.

In late April 2006, a headline in USA Today announced “A perfect storm: Explosive convergence helps lacrosse scandal resonate.” Behind the storm, according to the article, was the “national flash points of race, class, gender, violence, money and privilege.” (James Coleman’s pithy reply a year later: sure it was a perfect storm, “but we know now it was based on this false notion a crime had been committed…. That generated everything.”). Duke is a sprawling institution that tries to be a great many things to a great many people, and it’s my sense that the lacrosse team became a vessel not only for the reflexive shock and disgust tied to those “national flash points” but also for various smoldering frustrations with the university. From where I sit now the collective reaction of much of the community looks like a body ejecting diseased cells that had been circulating undetected. It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.

It was not only irresponsible but a remarkable lapse of common sense if, as alleged in one of the ongoing civil suits, the message from the Duke administration to the players was “you don’t need a lawyer,” and “don’t tell anyone this is happening, not even your parents” (McFayden et al v. Duke University et al, p. 129). And it’s true, as Tim Tyson recently noted, that folks around campus were reacting to information that came from people who were in a unique position to know—the police and the prosecutor. In different circumstances, though, if the accused had looked more like the people who are typical charged with violent crimes, the word of the authorities would likely have been taken with healthy skepticism if not disdain. It seems like that skepticism should cut both ways. All in all it was fertile ground for Addison’s misinformation. Some people, including a number of professors who really should have known better, took it as an excuse to indulge in a little high-handed vigilantism, for example by singling the players out in class or in private communications and exhorting them to fess up.

No one took up the invitation to vigilantism and ran further with it than the potbangers. It took some bullshitting to fit real-life events and people to their metanarrative—another dimension to the mirror-image parallelism between the potbangers and KC Johnson that I pointed out in my first post about the case. For both, “perfecting” and bullshitting seem to go hand in hand (that’s using—maybe abusing—a term that I continue to find very apt, introduced into the debate by Wahneema Lubiano). For the potbangers, the need to embroider went beyond just “perfecting” the offenders and the “survivor.” What stands out to me is the bizarre reasoning that took a form of protest from tight-knit but underpoliced third-world communities and dropped it into the middle of a first-world media feeding frenzy.

This is a good place to bring up the comment that got me thinking about bullshit in the first place, since it puts the potbangers into sharp relief. It’s from RRH, an attorney and also a mainstay of the DIW commentariat, part of an interesting exchange we had about how and why our perspectives on the case are so profoundly different.

Attorneys have heard—or heard from other attorneys—nearly every cockamamie story there is. Thus, we have developed internal “bullshit-detectors” that are so finely tuned that they are probably exceeded by only those of cops. Thus, when I heard the first reports about lacrosse case in 2006 (on ESPN), I was skeptical to the point just short of disbelief. The story is that several Alpha-male college students were going to risk reputations, diseases, paternity lawsuits, future careers, and family shame to put their most precious body parts into a party stripper? As we say in the legal business, that story already “strained credulity”.

And that’s even without the added allegation that the sex was involuntary. A party stripper with such fastidious morals and high standards of sex partners that she was going to turn down a chance for mating with such Alpha-males? Again, the bullshit-detector is sounding like an air raid siren.

I don’t understand how the “allegation that the sex was involuntary” could be in addition to the first reports, and the pop sociobiology doesn’t do much for me. But I don’t at all dismiss the bullshit detector he’s talking about, and it seems to me that there’s more behind it than just stories. “Perfecting” clients would surely be a great way to be a lousy lawyer. To be effective in the nitty-gritty of a criminal proceeding, it seems to me you’d have to be firmly in touch with the unvarnished and sometimes unpalatable humanity of everyone involved. That realization has helped me to clarify the nature and ethics of the choice that was made by protesters who felt they needed to shout slogans as if there was no question a rape occurred. Their perspective on the accuser—at the time not really “Crystal Mangum” but the heavily filtered impressions of her from the media and police—may be more palatable than RRH’s, but those protesters could and in my opinion did get things wildly wrong without experiencing any significant consequences.

It doesn’t take RRH’s crude realism to rein in the bullshit. It seems to me, anyway, that enough mental discipline to keep the accuser in the realm of everyday, imperfect human beings should be sufficient. I understand and respect the desire to resist dismissive and demeaning efforts to put rape accusers on trial in the court of public opinion and undercut them in the court of law. There is a big temptation to put a positive spin on the accuser, but it seems to be hard to do without getting into some euphemistic bullshit, even when it’s not nearly as idealizing as the potbanger’s rhetoric. For instance, Cathy Davidson, a professor of English at Duke, asks, “Who is that exotic dancer? A single mother who takes off her clothes for hire partly to pay for tuition at a distinguished historically black college.” Her main point is socioeconomic—in different circumstances she could have replaced “takes off her clothes” with “cleans toilets seven nights a week” or “serves as a guinea pig for grueling pharmaceutical trials”—so it may not be entirely fair to single her out. But I feel like I’ve seen a number of variations on the theme of student mom reduced to stripping to get an education, and they have a sanitized feel that calls to mind noxious Hollywood fairy tales like “Pretty Woman.” The rhetoric kicked up by recent news that Mangum graduated from North Carolina Central showed that she’s still little more than a rhetorical football for both sides. It was a starkly symbolic and ironic event that could have provoked some sharp analysis but didn’t.

My feeling is that one purpose of the critical analysis and writing we assign to our undergraduates is building up their resistance to bullshit. Whether or not that’s a common opinion, it seems like professors, of all people, should be bullshit detectors and not bullshit producers. And not just detectors pointed at the other side—as I’ve shown by example many times, that’s the easy part. I can think of only two at Duke who’ve stood out for their non-partisan bullshit detecting—James Coleman and Michael Gustafson. It’s a discredit to the professors on the Left—especially but not only at Duke—that they had nothing to say about the poor judgment and poor reasoning of the potbangers and like-minded protesters. (The one exception I’m aware of is Wahneema Lubiano, of all people. I wish her reservations about “perfecting” had been less equivocal and more forthright, but those aren’t the main reasons her critics were so insistent about misconstruing her.)

The main problem on the Duke side of the lacrosse case wasn’t bullshit, it was a callous and opportunistic attitude towards the students who were facing drastic legal consequences. But the Duke faculty definitely contributed some bullshit, too. Houston Baker’s histrionic letter is probably the standout. Parts of it—“And when will the others assaulted by racist epithets while passing 610 Buchanan ever forget that dark moment brought on them by a group of drunken Duke boys?,” etc.—are not only bullshit, they’re pretentious bullshit. It’s my impression that many liestoppers would put Cathy Davidson’s January 2007 editorial high on the bullshit scale. Taken as a whole I don’t see why it’s so offensive—a lot of it strikes me as honest and conciliatory—but she does start out with a whopper, claiming that in the rhetorical climate that motivated the “listening” statement, “defending David Evans, Collin Finnerty and Reade Seligmann necessitated reverting to pernicious stereotypes about African-Americans, especially poor black women.” Not only had those three not been indicted when the “listening” statement was published, they hadn’t even been singled out from the rest of the team as likely suspects. For someone writing an editorial that purports to explain key events of the first few intense weeks of the scandal, this suggests great indifference to “the way things are” and a serious failure to “pay[] attention to anything except what it suits one to say.”

I imagine that the line that serves as Karla Holloway’s motto on DIW—“White innocence means black guilt. Men’s innocence means women’s guilt”—would also be ranked as prime bullshit by her critics. Understood in context, I think that’s debatable. It seems to me that it’s not with any particular statement that she most clearly lapses into bullshit, it’s her general failure to own up to her role in stirring up the bitter discourse that she found so onerous, and her tendency to place herself outside and on the receiving end of the university’s power structure. And then there’s the “listening” statement. For me it’s the first line—“We are listening to our students”—that stands out as obvious bullshit. They were listening to some of their students. It’s too much like the vacuous cliché about listening to the “will of the American people” that’s endlessly falling out of the mouths of politicians.

It’s a pretty good measure of the real purpose and integrity of DIW that, leaving aside Baker’s letter, which is pretty much a sitting duck, Johnson responds to most of this stuff from the Duke side with bullshit of his own. The DIW impression of Holloway’s infamous line is largely an artifact of Johnson’s bullshit. And after pointing out the factual silliness of Davidson’s mention of the three indicted players, he turns to the statement she surely meant to make, about rhetoric in defense of the lacrosse players generally.

In late March, when the idea for the Group of 88’s statement originated, who—either on Duke’s campus or in the media—was elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”? Certainly not the protesters to whom Davidson and the other Group members said “thank you”…. Between March 29 and the issuance of the Group’s statement on April 6, were members of the media or cable news network talking heads elevating the lacrosse players “to the status of martyrs, innocent victims of reverse racism”?

He starts by asking exactly the right question, then gives a non-answer that’s really just an excuse to slip in one of his boilerplate formulas for denouncing the “Group,” and finally comes to rest on “media or cable news network talking heads.” It may be bullshit to claim that there was backlash against black students, and “[t]he insults, at that time, were rampant.” I can’t say for sure either way. But I’m confident that a great deal was said and felt by students walking across campus at night, say, or down a dorm hallway, that wasn’t picked up by any “talking heads” or even in the campus paper. No doubt it suits Johnson to believe that he was getting a complete and accurate impression of events at Duke as he was following the news from several states away. It’s self-serving bullshit, though, especially coming from a historian dabbling in journalism—people in both fields are supposed to have some sophistication about the way their evidence is mediated. He could have gleaned at least a hint of what black students experienced at the time from the comments quoted in the “listening” statement. But he never treats those students as if they’re worth listening to (he does suggest in an obnoxious reference to them as “alleged students [who] can testify as to what they said” that they’d be good subjects for an inquisition).

At least two Duke professors picked up echos in the lacrosse incident of institutionalized, open, and often violent racism of the old South. For both there’s a close connection to their scholarly work. Both allude to the unproven nature of the rape allegations and claim to be setting them aside while they consider other aspects of the students’ behavior that evening, but it seems to me that the impression of the brutality of the alleged crime still filters into their judgment (see James Coleman’s comment above about the perfect storm). Tim Tyson saw the “spirit of the lynch mob” in the crowd of young men at the party. William Chafe saw a continuation of the “poisonous linkage of race and sex as instruments of power and control” that’s integral to southern history. I know that for me and many others, the impression of a gang of young white men clustered drunkenly around a couple of half-naked black women had some very ugly resonances. But that’s a gut response, and it seems like neither Chase or Tyson gave it the critical consideration they should have before they said their piece. I’ve already described my reservations with Tyson’s lynch mob analogy. Turning to Chafe, how much context, really, does Emmett Till—brutally beaten and then shot, eye gouged out, barbed wire strung around his neck—provide for that party? In both cases, there is a bullshit gap, I guess you could call it. In fact the gap seems so obvious, especially in Chafe’s case, that I have to believe that, for better or worse, the point is sincere.

Mark Anthony Neal’s comments about “racialized sexual violence” pull the same general issues into a more contemporary context—relating the lacrosse incident not to old-fashioned lynching and brutality but to the present-day media-driven discourse that holds that “black women and their bodies have little value, little protection and are accessible to anyone who feels entitled to them.” It seems to me that this makes some contact with the spirit of the party. There was, for instance, the infamous parting shot: “Hey bitch, thank your grandpa for my nice cotton shirt.” (According to KC Johnson it’s “a tasteless rip-off of a Chris Rock joke”—a widely held opinion that I find entirely plausible, but it’s typical of the mountain of self-perpetuating verbiage that’s been left by this scandal that I can’t find a source pinning the joke to any particular Chris Rock show. I did find a thread on the TalkLeft forums initiated by someone wanting to know the same thing—after 200+ comments there’s no definitive conclusion.) Being more plugged into the here and now turns out to have its dangers—it leads Neal into some speculation about how the lacrosse team may have been “hoping to consume something that they felt that a black woman uniquely possessed.” That would be blatant bullshit if it wasn’t framed as speculation—perhaps it still counts, but it’s most problematic for other reasons.

Neal is capable of writing with style and insight about the “fo’ real,” as he calls it, but in this case the elision he makes between rhetorical violence and brutal physical assault lands him in bullshit territory. RRH’s caustic perspective is again an antidote, a reminder of how animalistic the alleged acts would have been, and the deeply ingrained barriers that would have had to be overcome. It seems to me that a more incisive point of reference is the typical scenarios for alcohol- and entitlement-fueled assaults involving college students, which usually involve some mutual socializing and perhaps mixed signals as well. It’s not hard to see how the inhibition is overcome in those circumstances, and it’s not far-fetched that there could be some acting out of the kind of rhetoric Neal highlighted.

The final step in RRH’s bullshit detecting is statistical—“Single-offender white on black rapes are so infrequent that they show up usually as asterisks in crime statistics, and white multiple offender rapes of black women are barely more frequent than carjackings by Amish farmers.” It’s grounds for skepticism, for sure, but it’s just a mindless number that could be hiding who knows what biases or artifacts. There’s little if any insight in it.

It’s not surprising that DIW plays well to the anti-intellectual crowd, since Johnson is telling them exactly what they want to hear. I don’t understand how anyone who’s pro-intellectual can swallow the academic-culture side of DIW. It’s especially disconcerting that conservative academics—an embattled minority, or so they say, but presumably still pro-intellectual—are so pleased by Johnson’s dogged prosecution of the “loopy left” that they don’t care how many corners he cuts or how much he caters to ignorance to do it. As long as he’s nailing the guilt-presuming purveyors of bias and relativism, there seems to be no expectation that he should rise to a higher intellectual standard himself.

I’ve been browsing the academic blogosphere trying to understand this disconnect. A link from DIW led me to Erin O’Connor’s blog Critical Mass, where it seemed I might find a more reflective version of Johnson’s general perspective on academia. Her tone is less strident and her interests are more flexible. On the other hand, she describes her blog as “a running chronicle of cant on American campuses,” so the focus is not on what’s typical or representative, it’s on what’s outrageously or pathologically extreme (like the Aliza Shvarts scandal at Yale, which was her main topic during the latter half of April). Even if the targets are chosen from across the political spectrum, it’s a focus that’s good at generating horror and scorn but not so good at fostering understanding. And as far as I can tell, O’Connor’s radar is consistently aimed to the left—maybe she thinks that’s where cant always comes from. DIW is chock-full of right-wing cant, though it’s easy to be oblivious to it if you’re energized by the rhetoric or fooled by the smoke screens (this can’t be a right-wing blog, I support Obama!).

O’Connor posted a long excerpt of Kors’ article, adding a little commentary that highlights his role as co-founder, with Harvey Silverglate, of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). It’s an organization that seems to have a lot of credibility, and not just with the conservative set. I’m sympathetic to their stated cause, and as far as I can tell they’re above-board and effective in pursuing it. But I’m not impressed by the one-sided attention to the lacrosse case on their web site or by Silverglate’s pontification on the subject. I left a comment on O’Connor’s post wondering about some of this and suggesting that for Kors and Silverglate, as for Johnson, ideological considerations trump intellectual standards. The responses were pretty routine, though J.A. DeLater gets some brownie points for metaphorically linking career academics to cockroaches because “[they] can tolerate much higher levels of toxic radiation than humans.”

I tried to post a follow-up comment but apparently the dog ate it. For the record, I’ve attached it to the end of this post. I had the same experience with DIW a few weeks ago. I can’t see any good reason for rejecting either comment—it seems most likely that Johnson and then O’Connor decided that it was easiest to duck the challenge (but I would think that, wouldn’t I?). Given his laissez-faire comment policy and the trivializing insinuation he’d put into my mouth, it was especially questionable coming from Johnson. But nobody owes it to me to post my comments, and it’s possible one or the other was lost through an error or a glitch. [O’Connor’s explanation, which I have no trouble accepting, is that it was knocked out by her spam filter]

When I read all of Kors’ article, it seemed like the product of a split personality, and that O’Connor’s quote only represented one side. In the first part of the article, he looks back at his formative years as a scholar, gracefully evoking the atmosphere of committed intellectualism that drew him in.

The academic world that I first encountered was one of both intellectual beauty and profound flaws. I was taught at Princeton, in the early 1960s—in history and literature, above all—before the congeries that we term “the Sixties” began. Most of my professors were probably men of the Left—that’s what the surveys tell me—but that fact was never apparent to me, because, except in rare cases, their politics or even their ideological leanings were not inferable from their teaching or syllabi. Reasoned and informed dissent from professorial devil’s advocacy or interpretation was encouraged and rewarded, including challenges to the very terms of an examination question. In retrospect, professors who must have disagreed fundamentally with works such as David Donald’s Lincoln Reconsidered (with its celebrated explanation of the abolitionists’ contempt for Lincoln in terms of the loss of status of their fathers’ once-privileged social group) assigned them for our open-minded academic consideration. My professor of Tudor-Stuart history, emerging from the bitter Oxbridge debates over explanations of the English Civil War in terms of class conflict, assigned Jack Hexter’s stunning Reappraisals in Social History to us. When I opined to him somewhat apprehensively that Hexter appeared to have exposed the tendentious use of statistics in my professor’s own prior work, he replied, “You’re absolutely correct.” These were not uncommon experiences in Princeton’s classrooms, and I knew, then and there, that I wanted both to do history and to teach.

In grad school at Harvard, while a few dates left in the midst of dinner on discovering my free- market and hawkish politics, and while I did get thrown out of a party for opposing, when asked, Eugene McCarthy’s view of Vietnam (this should have been a warning), the classroom remained open and, by design, intellectually pluralistic. In our graduate colloquium, we read the major historiographical debates, in works theoretical and monographic, and critical acumen was acknowledged in the force of an argument, not in its political provenance…. In the midst of the “cultural revolution” of the early 1970s, I co-founded a College House and lived warmly with students who mostly ranged from liberal Democrats to true believers of the New Left. They loved to discuss everything, and they did so in good faith and (almost) always ad rem. My students, whom I still meet frequently outside of class, still love to discuss everything, and they still do so in good faith and without ad hominem distractions from real conversation and debate. Critics of higher education who blame students for today’s catastrophes are categorically wrong about agency. It is the faculties (both the minority of zealots and the majority of cowards) and the administrations (both the minority of ideologues and the majority of careerists with double standards) who are to blame.

The academic world I so loved revealed itself best in an undergraduate course I’d taken on the history of Europe in the twentieth century. When the professor, a distinguished intellectual of the Left, returned the midterms to the hundred plus or so of us who were in his course, he said that we’d saddened and embarrassed him. “I gave you readings that allowed you to reach such diverse conclusions,” he explained, “but you all told me what you thought I wanted to hear.” He informed us that he would add a major section to the final exam: “I’m going to assign the book I disagree with most about the twentieth century. I’m not going to ask you to criticize it, but, instead, to re-create its arguments with intellectual empathy, demonstrating that you understand the perspectives from which he understands and analyzes the world.” I was moved by that. The work was Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, and it changed the course of my intellectual and moral life. It also showed me immediately how I wanted to teach as an intellectual historian. Each year, I teach thinkers as diverse as Pascal and Spinoza, Hobbes and Butler, Wesley and Diderot. I offer courses on intellectual history, and the goal of my teaching is to make certain that my students understand the perspectives and rich debates that have shaped the dialogue of the West. I don’t want disciples of my worldview. I want students who know how to read deeply, how to analyze, how to locate the essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers, and, indeed, how to understand, with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought. I know that I am not alone, but I also know, alas, that I am in a distinct minority in my pedagogical goals in the humanities and the so-called social sciences.

Even with his admirable determination not to treat those times as a golden era—he acknowledges and deplores the racism, sexism, snobbery, and intolerance—there’s still some rose-coloring. If I wrote about my time at Reed College in the early 80s it would probably be colored in much the same way. I remember it as high-minded time and place, with some fine, challenging, dedicated teachers. What I see around me and what happens in my own classes never seems to rise to quite the same level.

Johnson has worked hard to portray a contingent of Duke professors as threats not only to students but to the integrity of the university. Those associated with African & African American Studies (AAAS) and Women’s Studies, especially, have been criticized for sacrificing academic standards to their extremist political agendas. I take the concern seriously, if not the rhetoric—it’s intellectual poison for professors to get into the business of indoctrination. Reading DIW did get me thinking about the issue, but I’ve waded through plenty of the alarmist rhetoric Johnson’s thrown at it and come up with virtually nothing of substance that’s either constructive or insightful. In three paragraphs that evoke a free-ranging dialog of ideas—an intellectual climate that’s not simply tolerant but actively seeks out challenging alternatives—Kors conveys more about the fundamental academic values at stake than Johnson has managed to fit into a few hundred thousand agenda-driven words.

When Johnson talks about the ideals of his profession, he seems to be referring to respect for due process and adherence to the faculty handbook—he doesn’t show any particular interest in the values that Kors highlights, so I probably shouldn’t expect his criticism to be guided by them. It’s harder to fathom why Kors lovingly wraps his souvenir only to toss the package out the window in order to grind his culture-war axe. He’s editorializing, not bouncing ideas around in a seminar, so it’s true that in the end scholarly neutrality has to take a back seat. But where is the spirit behind “read[ing] deeply,… locating essential points of similarity and divergence among thinkers,… [and] understand[ing], with intellectual empathy, how the world looks from the diverse perspectives that constitute the history of European thought”? If that’s the attitude that best serves students in the classroom, how is it that the readers of the New Criterion are best served by ditching it?

Turning to the contemporary university, Kors finds what seems to be an entirely new species of professor—careerists who mean no harm but are at the mercy of a reflexive ideology:

To understand why and to understand one of the few vulnerabilities of universities to actual accountability and reform, one must understand the hierarchy that predicts academic institutional behavior: sexuality (in their language, “sexual preference”) trumps neutrality; race properly conceived easily trumps sexuality; sex properly conceived (or, in their language, “gender”) easily trumps race; and careerism categorically trumps everything. From that perspective, the careerists who run our campuses have made a Faustian bargain (though they differ on which is the devil’s portion)….. From diverse motives of ideological sympathies and acute awareness of who can blackball their next career moves, they have given over the humanities, the soft social sciences, and the entire university in loco parentis to the zealots of oppression studies and coercive identity politics. In the latter case, it truly has been a conspiracy, with networking and common plans. In the former case—the professoriate and the curriculum—it is generally, with striking politicized exceptions, a soft tyranny of groupthink, unconscious bias, and self-inflated sense of a mission of demystification. Most of the professors I meet are kind, indeed sweet, and certainly mean no harm. It is profoundly sad to see what they have become.

One thing Kors and Silverglate have in common is ready access to the pathos of the decline and fall of the academy. Kors’ “profoundly sad” conclusion echos a remark Silverglate made about Duke chemistry professor Steven Baldwin—that it was “unbearably sad” that Baldwin ended up apologizing for the scathing criticism of Duke’s administration and some of its faculty in his October 2006 op-ed.

Kors’ facile reduction of a large segment of the university to a simplistic ideology brings the Baldwin incident to mind in other ways. According to Johnson and Silverglate, what happened after Baldwin’s op-ed was published was that left-wing ideologues—the group Kors is lamenting—ganging up on him because he dared to buck their agenda. That may or may not be what happened, as far as I can tell. What’s striking to me is that those who take Baldwin’s side are determined to reduce the incident to that one single thing, no matter what. They’re horrified by Robyn Weigman’s charge that Baldwin used “the language of lynching,” but they can’t seem to imagine any legitimate objections to Baldwin’s suggestion that certain (unnamed) colleagues should be tarred and feathered and then run out of the academy on a rail. That starts looking a lot like a self-serving delusion when you realize that the only trace of this onslaught against Baldwin that’s come to light is two letters—Weigman’s published response and Kerrie Haynie’s personal email—and the latter doesn’t fit the narrative of shrill pc outrage at all.

No professor at Duke was a more outspoken advocate of the university in loco parentis than Baldwin. Personally, I’m almost as bothered by his paternalistic certainty that we should all be treating our students as “our kids” as I am by his enthusiasm for summary justice. The parental overtones of the op-ed don’t seem to have been much on Silverglate’s mind, but it’s still ironic that he seems to find the philosophy laudable—he certainly doesn’t make any object to it—while Kors finds it deplorable.

It would be pretty fruitless to try to refute Kors’ sweeping conclusions, especially since they’re drawn from personal experience. I’ll pull up a few texts associated with the lacrosse case, though, to suggest that he’s chosen to face down a flock of cardboard cutouts instead of taking up the other side’s perspective as a challenge.

In the Social Text article that figured in my last two posts, Robyn Wiegman, Wahneema Lubiano, and Michael Hardt have quite a bit to say about the university in loco parentis. They see the university before the revolutions of the 60’s as an analogue of the patriarchal family. The student revolutions forced an end to that paternalism, but according to the authors the parental model has made a comeback in a somewhat different guise, serving the business interests of the institution, not the political interests of any of its faculty.

As various historians of the U.S. university have noted, the reemergence of parental logics in the aftermath of student revolts has been accomplished primarily by legal, not moral or ethical, debate. Kinship obligations manage the imaginary realm in which the university’s need to protect its students from mental health problems, addictive behaviors, and violence to the self or others arises from its need to protect itself from its students and their increasingly litigious parents. It’s a complicated negotiation: the cultivation of students as “our kids” functions in order to safeguard the university from the violence and abuse that our kids might do to themselves and to others, with the specter of lawsuits constantly looming in the background. …

The good parents of today’s university live in the student service sector. It functions as the relay between demands for the university to address the students’ needs as members of specific groups (whether gender, racial, ethnic, national, or sexual) and the institution’s investment in the renewed cultivation of the parental model. Under the auspices of student services, the new publics that accompanied student revolt can be corralled back into the cultivation of the student as the institution’s child and as its future donor. … To say, then, that student services becomes the means to acknowledge the importance of race and gender in the form of consigning them to the realm of student life is to mark the way that the force of student rebellions has been managed, in much the same way that the primary discourse mobilized by these agencies—of social justice, fairness, and equity—has been reproduced in the service of empowering those who were once its targets.

In this context, it is important to note how the early historical ties between student centers and the intellectual projects of race and gender studies have been disarticulated in this process. On many campuses, in fact, there is growing antagonism between the two entities. In the relation between women’s studies and women’s centers, for instance, it is often the stance toward sex and sex publics that generates a rift, especially when scholars who work in queer studies, human rights, and sex trafficking do not follow the reigning discourses of women’s empowerment that so closely analogize sex and oppression. University administrations have found a certain relief in the constituency languages that student services provides, in part because these languages displace the problem of attending to the knowledge challenges that rigorous attention to the study of gender and racial formation raises.

The only way I could really evaluate this analysis would be to work through some examples, taking into account the practical problems of managing a community of thousands of post-adolescents who are making their first steps into adulthood and independence. Right now all I want to point out is that what Kors portrays as a unit with a common purpose—the professors of “oppression studies” and the parental administrative apparatus—looks from the other side like two distinct things that are more and more at odds, despite their common roots.

The distinction between the corporate interests of the university and the political and intellectual interests of its faculty is an important one. History professor Claire Potter (aka Tenured Radical) sums it up well—she clearly isn’t a fan of the university’s “‘rights free’ zone.”

Johnson may have been correct that Duke did not handle the lacrosse case well… but this was not a symptom of the university’s liberalism as an institution—quite the reverse, in fact. It is the flip side of a university governance process, almost ubiquitously shared among institutions of higher education, that more or less declares the campus a “rights-free” zone. This elimination of civil rights in university processes is neither a liberal nor a conservative issue: it is a question of whether the private sphere—whether that be Walmart or Harvard—can make its own rules to protect its own interests as an institution. The law says they can, and they do.

Potter’s analysis is emphatically borne out by Elliott Wolf’s “Dude, where’s my rights…” series in the Duke Chronicle (there are annotated versions of the articles on his home page). Wolf documents eight years of steady erosion in respect for due process in the Duke Judicial Code. It’s first-rate student journalism that picks up on an issue central to the lacrosse case but without getting mired in lacrosse-case tunnel vision. He sums up his findings in the Coupe de Grace (his term):

Since 1999, the Office of Judicial Affairs has watered down or eliminated
every major due process right afforded students facing adjudication; it has so broadened
its policies and procedures that almost any student could be summarily subjected to
judicial action for any reason; it has eliminated all representative student involvement in
making and enforcing undergraduate policy; and lastly, it has begun colluding with local
law enforcement in ways that arguably undermine students’ basic constitutional rights.

Wolf’s last piece for the Chronicle, a covert look at the Student Affairs-Industrial Complex, meshes nicely with Wiegman, Lubiano, and Hardt’s observations about the “student services sector.” The overall impression I get from Wolf’s coverage is that student affairs (judicial or otherwise) is its own little fiefdom, largely independent of the faculty.

Kors works himself up to a fever pitch with a string of rhetorical questions about the “almost insoluble problem of time” faced by professors intent on indoctrination: “How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity, and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society?” etc., etc. He follows that a couple of paragraphs later with the statement of purpose that, in his opinion, would constitute “truth in advertising” for the leftist “academic enterprises” that have a grip on higher education:

Let colleges and universities have the courage, if they truly believe what they say privately to themselves and to me, to put it on page one of their catalogues, fundraising letters, and appeals to the State assembly: “This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege. In return for tuition and massive taxpayer subsidy, we shall assign rights on a compensatory basis and undertake by coercion their moral and political enlightenment.”

I’ve come across this idea before—near the end of one of the earliest comments I got on a lacrosse-case post, for instance:

Why should I increase my law practice dramatically to earn more income to support the salaries of faculty members who think the constitution does not apply to their students? I don’t like that it comes down to money but it is a consideration. I understand the faculty believes I have raised a racist and sexist child who desperately needs their education.

The person who wrote that is too articulate and thoughtful for me to dismiss, and I can see how someone who’s remote from university life could end up with the impression. It’s nutty stuff coming from a professor, though. Kors’ dire portrait goes far beyond reasonable concern about the cumulative effect of subtle, unconscious bias combined with the apparent willingness of a few professors to flirt with the line between education and indoctrination, and perhaps cross it. That may be a real problem, but in the context of the whole array of social and intellectual influences the students are navigating, it doesn’t justify the hyperbole. And if Kors is right about what an honest mission statement would look like, Duke is doing a miserable job of it.

It could be that I missed the memo laying out this brave new world of undergraduate education—I’ve never really been in the loop. But for what it’s worth, I’ll outline a few of the ways that Kors’ story clashes with my own experience. I’ve taught traditional music theory classes—thoroughly Eurocentric, if we have to use the word. I also taught Introduction to Jazz, a class that was cross-listed under AAAS. I’ve never imagined that I could arrange, much less coerce, any moral or political enlightenment from the students in my classes. I’m sure it would backfire if I tried, and I’d feel completely ridiculous in the process. If a student of mine has ever felt that they were being judged on some kind of political correctness it was either a misunderstanding or a failure on my part to live up to my professional commitments. I’ve never gotten an overt or covert message that I should teach to an approved ideology. In fact I’ve had closer to the opposite experience—in five semesters teaching Introduction to Jazz, which is a fairly large survey course, I never heard a thing from AAAS about what I should teach, or, for that matter, about anything else. From my experience if there’s a problem it’s the hands-off attitude, not pressure to conform.

As for as my own priorities, I can’t imagine wasting time and energy on indoctrination when I could be digging into the artistic and historical feast of, say, Louis Armstrong’s Dinah (check out the video!), Duke Ellington’s Black and Tan Fantasy, or Charlie Parker’s Ko-Ko, or guiding a class through the quasi-mathematical discipline of sixteenth-century counterpoint. I can’t imagine talking about Beethoven in order to dismiss him as a dead white male any more than I can imagine talking about the blues in order to trivialize it as salacious and primitive. I would hope to challenge students with either attitude to reconsider (last year I put up some thoughts about teaching classical music and the blues as well as a long post about my experience with Introduction to Jazz). I’ve never felt that I was out of step with my colleagues about any of this.

That’s just me, and I’m not denying that there’s a basis for Kors’ complaints. There’s no shortage of anti-Western sentiment in the humanities—some but not all of it is thoughtless and reflexive (it’s not too much for the edifice of Western civilization to bear, as far as I can tell). The clash of values has been heated in music departments—professors are great at turning big ideas and ideologies into a pretext for a turf war, so there’s been pettiness on both sides. But for many of us, if there’s a problem with today’s more inclusive concept of what music is worth studying, it’s that we’ve ended up with an embarrassment of riches.

Kors says, “I fight for intellectual pluralism, for legal equality, and for fairness simply because it is my duty to bear witness to the values I cherish, with no expectation of success.” It would be nice if he didn’t just bear witness but actually put those precious values into practice for the general public to see, instead of insulting them in order to fire up the anti-intellectual enemies of his enemy.

[O’Connor has now responded to this post, or at least complained about it. Her counterargument, if you can call it that, boils down to the observation that Kors is the kind of person that sensible people believe and all I’ve done is throw sour grapes at him. Natually I had to write a followup, too.]

The comment of mine that wasn’t cleared on was rejected by the spam filter on Critical Mass:

DeLater’s impression of present-day academia, even more than Kors’, seems like a comic-book version of reality as I see it. It’s great for nursing grudges and fruitless to argue with.

I read all of Kors’ article after posting my comment. The earlier part, which I liked, is a description of an intellectual climate in which professors fostered intellectualism over ideology and valued independent thought on the part of their students, even encouraged students to follow lines of reasoning that challenged their professor’s political convictions. So it seems that his ideal for the university is very close to mine. I was thinking about that kind of intellectual openness when I commented (tongue in cheek, more or less) about my own relativism.

It’s exactly those values that I can’t reconcile with Johnson’s criticism. His argument is often circular and serious challenges are studiously avoided. And it thrives on false choices like the one implicit in TG’s challenge—to criticize it is not necessarily to make a “pro-Duke 88 argument.” This comment thread isn’t the place to spell the issues out in detail. If you’re interested in the basis for my opinion, go here. But don’t bother if you’ve got the controversy neatly packaged up and you want to keep it that way.

It was a big surprise—a nice one—when I was asked to teach the class. It came with a special obligation, though, a personal debt to the music that changed my life and made me have to become a musician, and to the jazz musicians I’ve known for their amazing warmth and generosity. The only way I could see to do the subject justice was to make it a serious, challenging class. At the time I started teaching it the course had a long-standing reputation as one of Duke’s easiest, and I’m afraid it was the reputation instead of the music that attracted many of the students. Even without that history I probably went in with too little experience and too many big ideas for anybody’s good, but at first there was an especially stark contrast between my enthusiasm for the subject and the students’ interest level.

The class could be frustrating but the material was always a pleasure.

I was lucky that resources for networked access to digital media were becoming available, so instead of using a wimpy CD anthology I could put together my own required listening list and give the class easy access. I had to write a lot of listening guides, but that turned out to be a great way to immerse myself in the music. There are some fantastic old films of jazz musicians playing, too, and I worked them in as best I could. A while ago I wrote a little about my all-time favorite, Armstrong’s “Dinah,” which illuminates all sorts of musical details and relationships and at the same time shows how completely and joyfully the music animated the man and vice-versa. Though I had the students buy a book (Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz), I tried to make the listening list rather than a textbook the primary material of the course. In practice this meant that the students’ constant ongoing assignment was to listen to music, and as much as I could I organized lectures, quizzes and tests around the assigned listening. If nothing else this was my way of making it clear that it was, first and foremost, a listening-to-music class, not a reading-about-music class.

I’ve never taught a course in which it was harder for me to tell what reasonable expectations were. The first problem anyone teaching a music class to non-musicians has to face is how deep into the music to go. What I really wanted was for the students to end up hearing at least a little like jazz musicians, which meant, for instance, feeling the form of the music as it played, and hearing the musicians feeling the form. I didn’t really think I’d get that many students to reach that point, but I did expect them to have an easier time with the quizzes, in which they were supposed to name one of the assigned listening pieces when I played an excerpt (standard practice in music appreciation classes). To some extent (but how much?) this was because they ignored my advice not to put off listening until right before the quiz. Listening to great jazz has to be one of the least onerous of college assignments, but developing an ear for the music is a hopeless thing to cram. There were always some diligent students who listened and listened and still found it very hard to hear the difference between, say, Sonny Rollins on “Pent Up House,” John Coltrane on “Oleo,” or Cannonball Adderley on “So What.” I did my best to make it possible for those kids to do well in the course—often they’d signed up hoping to get over a feeling of musical inadequacy, and I hated the thought that I was rubbing it in. But it wasn’t only with musical issues that I had a hard time gauging what to expect, it was the same with basic academic skills and workload. It was especially hard to know what to make of the revenue athletes, whose papers were as distinctive as their physiques but in the opposite way. They weren’t the only ones turning in poor quality work, though. I ended up feeling like I was was asking too much and asking too little—I didn’t want to teach a class for kids who wanted some extra sleep, but didn’t want to give work that a lot of the students would resent and do poorly on.

Coming up with good assignments for a class like this is difficult enough (for me it is, at least) even under ideal circumstances. I guess the usual thing to do would be a term paper, but my experience has turned me against term papers in entry-level survey classes. Students at Duke (and most other colleges, I imagine) can easily pull together 5 or 8 pages of vague generalizations and clichés into the academic equivalent of Wonder Bread—a triumph of form over content, with very little digestion required to get from one end to the other. I hate reading papers like that, and I’d rather not give students the impression that that kind of writing has any value. Since I wanted the course to be music-driven, I decided to try to design more structured projects based on critical, analytical responses to recordings.

In the most successful of these projects I had the students compare Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” to a number of blues and blues-form pieces they’d studied. It’s funny how the idea came up. The song is on a “rock for kids” anthology my daughter liked to listen to in the car. It took I don’t know how many times through the tape before I registered that it’s in 12-bar blues form with a rickity-tickity version of a jazz swing feel (this shows how little attention I’d paid to early rock and roll). It is so not a blues though. The obvious problem is the theme of 24 hour fun fun fun but what’s more telling is the absence of the loose musical dialog that’s essential to every kind of blues I know of. Unlike a typical blues lyric, “Rock Around the Clock” leaves no space after each line for a response. The spontaneous interplay that jazz rhythm sections of that era were developing, another manifestation of the African American penchant for musical dialog, is also absent in Haley’s recording. Comparison with “Rock Around the Clock” highlights the musical sociality of the blues, something that contributes tangibly to the music’s communicative power and broad appeal and to the improvisatory richness of jazz as well. I didn’t fully appreciate the nature and importance of dialog and interplay in jazz until I taught this class, and I think it’s a hard thing to convey without presenting a clear alternative—one of many reasons not to habitually divide music classes up by genre.

As a way to compare black and white music without falling back on cliches about rhythm and “soul,” I thought the project worked well. The students who rose to the challenge wrote unusually thoughtful essays, sometimes touching perceptively on the music they knew best. Students who didn’t do as well typically had a little bit to say about everything. It seemed to me that settling on an interpretation and selecting the most relevant facts to support it should have come more naturally to more of the class. I complicated things, though, by packing too much into the assignment—by slipping in the part about modernism, for example. I may also have been expecting too much in terms of musical experience and intuition. And with such a small and arbitrary selection of music I don’t think I should have highlighted the issue of white appropriation of black music as much as I did. In spite of that, the emphasis on listening closely and responding to what they heard kept most of the class from writing broad-brush treatments of the underlying racial issues—something that comes all too easily to Duke undergraduates.

The project I assigned at the end of ever semester was similar in structure but different in tone, since it involved more controversial music and readings with some rhetorical bite—a review in which Stanley Crouch blasts Miles Davis for selling out in the late 60s (an epic controversy in the jazz world) and excerpts from Miles’s autobiography. After reading both texts, the students listened to some of the music Crouch objects to. To wrap it up they had to write two short essays—one with their own conclusions about whether the music supported Crouch’s claim of sellout, and the other with their opinion of his review. Crouch’s review is brilliantly written and persuasive, but it doesn’t take a highly trained ear to hear the discrepancy between what he’s claiming and what’s happening in the some of the music that he dismisses. Though he characterizes it in more metaphorical terms as well, Crouch repeatedly invokes the literal, commercial sense of “sellout.” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” the first track included in the project, is a rambling 15-minute-long free improvisation with nothing you could call a hook. The other track, “Thinkin’ One Thing and Doin’ Another,” is roughly 7 minutes of acerbic avant-guarde abstraction. Miles recorded a lot of very polished, commercial music in his last few decades, so Crouch isn’t even close to dead wrong, but he ignores the more challenging music in order to make the most damning case—not a hallmark of fine criticism.

(A while back I was admiring Alex Ross for dwelling on the innate qualities of the music he writes about instead of ranking it. Crouch has a tendency to do the opposite—he writes about Miles, in this case, in order to put the man in his place. He does the same thing with Ellington, though it’s deification instead of demonization. In both cases the music and musicians seem to be less important than the box he wants to put them in. He’s always worth reading but he’s at his best when he sets the pigeonholing aside, as in this more recent essay on Miles.)

My feeling is that students at an elite university should be able to write a clear and concise analysis of what Crouch means by “sellout” and how well the charge is born out by the music, paying some attention to this simple and obvious question: Does the music sound like it was written to sell? I always got some excellent papers but it took an awful lot of guidance to get more than superficial answers from most of the class. Much of the guidance was meant to bring out the strongest counter-arguments to Crouch, and it looks uncomfortably like I’m leading them by the nose to the “right answer,” but if that was my goal I didn’t do a very good job of it. The split in opinion between sellout and not was pretty even, with a number of different justifications given for each one. I made it a point not to penalize students who didn’t have the musical intuition or experience to come up with a good premise—a good essay based on a faulty premise could still get an A. But since the deck was stacked the arguments for sellout tended to be the weaker ones. Some insightful cases for sellout were made, but mostly they came down to a feeling that the two fusion tracks sounded a lot different than earlier Miles and used rock instruments, so Crouch must be right. And despite the heavy hinting, as when I had them sketch “the balance between commercial and artistic concerns” in the music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Ornette Coleman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (cited by Miles as influencing On The Corner), quite a few students making a case against sellout didn’t mention the glaring lack of mass appeal in “Thinkin’.” I still find that surprising.

In earlier versions of this project the final essay question was more open-ended—I asked them to respond to Crouch’s critique, using the two assigned tracks as their primary evidence, and suggested several approaches they could take. In that form, most of the students would make a few vague comments about the music and then devote their attention to the more provocative parts of both the texts, finally taking one side or the other. Opinion heavily favored Crouch as I remember, but either way it was mostly a matter of which point of view resonated, not what was gleaned from the music. What seemed to make the biggest difference was giving them a template topic sentence, which not only focussed them on the music but also encouraged them to skip the vacuous preambles and cut to the chase: “If Davis [was/was not] a sellout, I [would/would not] expect to hear ________ in the music, and I [do/do not] hear that.” I assume that part of the problem was the unfamiliarity of building an argument on features of a musical recording, but I suspect that the magnetic pull of opinionated rhetoric and it’s power to shape the way the students heard the music were also factors.

Not all of the differences between the first and last set of papers I got for this project were due to changes I made to the instructions—I may have let myself be too influenced by the jarring experience of the first semester. One thing that is clear to me in hindsight is that I was trying to give seminar assignments to a lecture/survey class. A lot of the guidance I had to build in was in place of the more incremental process and the feedback that would be part of a seminar. Writing about all this I got curious enough to look around Duke’s University Writing Program web site. I should have consulted with them when I was teaching the course. Things that were on my mind—treating the writing process as a reasoning process, careful, critical consideration of sources and of ones own biases and conclusions—seem to be integral to the UWP’s program. Looking over the UWP web site, and the web syllabus of a Writing 20 section on oral culture and literacy in the american south I still wonder about the emphasis on a longer papers. For a writing course to include a 15 page research paper and a 5 page term paper along with a number of shorter assignments makes sense, I suppose. The 5 page paper in that case is the culmination of a semester’s worth of work. But what about the 6 or so page paper that stands on its own in another class? Papers like that are necessary for academia to reproduce itself, but how much inherent value do they have beyond that? There were students in Intro to Jazz who could of done justice to such an assignment, but it seemed to me there were also quite a few who couldn’t.

It would make all the difference if genuine interest could be made a course prerequisite (better yet, and even more far-fetched, an admissions requirement). It was depressing to see so many students who looked at Intro to Jazz as just a few more hoops to jump through—that of all subjects. As in every class I’ve taught at Duke, there were wonderfully enthusiastic and engaged students, and if I was a more inspiring lecturer I’m sure more would have risen to the occasion. College students shouldn’t need to be cajoled into engagement, though, certainly not at a place like Duke. My reservations about longish, open-ended essay assignments may come down to the simple fact that the more they have to write the clearer it becomes when they’re just going through the motions and filling up the pages they’ve been asked to fill. All the more so if they had to sift through a body of literature to find and frame the issue or research topic, something that presumes genuine engagement. If the reality of a particular class is a lot of students who are motivated by requirements and grades, it seems better to give shorter, more constrained assignments and expect in return clear thinking and effective writing.

I’ve never had much sympathy with the point of view that puts classical music above and apart from other music. Over the past 9 years I’ve taught songwriting and a couple of music appreciation courses, one about jazz and the other quite eclectic. I’ve also taught the introductory theory and composition courses a few times. And I’ve ended up quite convinced that classical music has no special claim to make in the university classroom, at least not in courses of the kind I’ve taught—introductory classes, music appreciation, and history (setting aside theory, though—it’s a separate issue I’m not going to get into). It’s not that I’m disenchanted with the music—I’m as infatuated as ever, and I hope it always has a prominent place on college campuses, just not as the perennial prima donna.

The fat lady sings on, though, no matter how false the pretenses. And it tends to be pretty alienating. Listen, for instance, to this vociferation from blogger A.C. Douglas…

As I’ve elsewhere on this weblog noted, classical music is not “merely ‘one of [music’s many] streams’…, but music’s very apotheosis; the one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music’s other instantiations.”

That’s not a classical music fanatic’s wild-eyed rant, nor is it the rant of a cultural snob. It’s a demonstrable, objective fact. There was a time not long past when acknowledgement of that fact was implicit in the music section of the arts pages of almost all mainstream publications. When the term music was used alone it meant always classical music, all other musics requiring an identifying qualification (e.g., rock music, folk music, pop music, etc.). Today, the opposite is the normative case. It’s classical music that always requires the identifying qualification.

For a classical music critic to even by implication suggest, in an attempt to make it appear more accessible, that classical music is other than what I’ve above described it to be is to do classical music further, even irreparable, harm in the present cultural marketplace…

In the good old days Douglas evokes, classical music was even more explicitly the music of the university than it was of media. Until recently, the term “musicologist” unambiguously referred to a scholar of European classical music, and the association is still strong. The idea that classical music exists on a higher plane was self-evident to many generations of musicologists, and it’s a safe bet that a few still feel that way. I suspect that through force of habit if nothing else the idea still carries some weight in the rest of the university (in some universities, anyways—the focus and tenor of music departments varies wildly between institutions). Any half-decent musicologist who cared to could make a better case for the preeminence of classical music than the one I’ve quoted, but the premise doesn’t stand up well under close examination, in my opinion.

What I get most clearly from what Douglas says is how much music he doesn’t care to listen to and/or how little he gets out of most of it. Apparently he hears and understands music quite differently than I do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s foolish of him to make a claim about something as subjective and diverse as music that effectively dismisses experiences unlike his own. I’ll happily save my breath and send you to Alex Ross for the more eclectic, less heirarchical point of view, both in his response to Douglas and in this autobiographical New Yorker article, which may be my all-time favorite piece of writing from a music critic (the problem with Ross, in fact, is that I end up wondering if there’s anything I can say about music that he hasn’t already said more eloquently).

On most any page of Ross’s criticism you’ll find confirmation of a principle I’ve arrived at in my teaching—there’s always something more useful, interesting, or enlightening to say about a piece of music (or genre or composer or whatever) than what it’s better or worse than. With that in mind, I’ve talked effusively (at least that’s how it’s felt to me) about music from Beethoven, Monteverdi, George Crumb, a whole raft of jazz greats, The Carter Family, Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Beatles (endlessly), Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow, and many others. I expect that my over-the-top admiration for some of the classical and jazz standouts has been obvious, but I hope I’ve made each one seem worthy because of the specific things it had to offer, not more or less than anything else. I don’t think any self-respecting music professor is going to beat their class over the head comparing the Timeless Greatness of the Eroica with the silly triviality of “Satisfaction,” so I’m probably belaboring the obvious. But the message can seep in, especially if there’s a conscious or unconscious effort to convert the students (which is not the same thing as trying to spark their interest).

After teaching a traditional chronological, single-genre introductory class (Introduction to Jazz) and one that was neither chronological nor genre-specific, I’m sold on the value of shuffle mode. It has it’s risks—I’ve certainly made a mess of it a number of times—but it also opens ears. Here’s a quick example of a juxtaposition that worked well. As an exercise in focussed listening, my colleague Kerry McCarthy and I (the class was co-taught) assigned the students to listen to Schubert’s Erlkönig and “What Makes You Happy,” by Liz Phair. The connection is that in both cases the singer is channeling several characters. We asked the students to write a little about how the music conveyed dialog, character, and drama. The students seemed to hear the inherent qualities of both songs, but certainly of the Schubert, better than they would have without the pairing. I think the contemporary song helped ease Schubert’s into their natural listening space. Perhaps Schubert led them to take Phair more seriously, which is all to the good—her song wasn’t thrown in to sweeten the pill, it was there on its own merit. It also helped that we didn’t give them any build-up or background on Schubert or Phair—it’s too easy to tap into the tired, patronizing cliches that are the main impression many kids have of classical music. Much better to get out of the way and let Jessye Norman’s hair-raising performance make the case, which it does!

I cringe a little every time I write “music appreciation class.” It sounds both lightweight and patronizing, certainly a vestige of the classical-music-is-good-medicine school of thought. One reason that I haven’t been the best teacher for those kinds of classes may be that I can’t accept appreciation as an end in itself, and insist on building assignments around some deeper question of identity or values or whatever (the more glaringly obvious reason is that I’m not a particularly organized or animated lecturer). But naturally, whenever I teach a class I’m hoping that the students are more curious, engaged, open-minded listeners at the end of the semester than at the beginning. That’s more or less the essence of music professorhood. And from that perspective, what I’d most like to say to those worried about where classical music is going as other kinds of music make a greater claim to the curriculum is, let it out of the box! It will do just fine.

I’m not suggesting that eclecticism is the one and only, or a substitute for every class that focusses on a particular genre or era. Nor, when it comes to teaching, are all genres created equal. One of the most enlightening things for me about teaching Intro to Jazz was how rich a topic the blues is. It’s wonderful, appealing music that’s not hard to grasp in musical and formal terms, illuminates and humanizes some pivotal American history, has had a deep and palpable influence on the whole range of contemporary popular music, and comes with a challenging but vivid critical literature. I don’t know what more you could ask for. As a general humanities seminar topic for undergraduates it’s outstanding—for me far more promising than any kind of classical music. Classical music may be more sophisticated in formal terms and more cerebral, but for undergraduates I think the blues is a much better basis for intellectually challenging reading, analysis, and writing. That’s ultimately a personal preference—I’m not claiming it’s the perfect material and everyone should take it up. But anyone who’s worried that college courses on the blues or popular music are a sign of pandering or declining standards should be assured that, in intellectual terms, they can easily leave many an old-fashioned music appreciation course in the dust.

Not that it’s a competition.

You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard for me
You make it hard for me

It was a doo-wop number, with backup vocals played from a recording, so the double entendre had a playful, guileless feel that’s infinitely more innocent than the stuff you’ll find on top-40 radio these days. Since my 9-year-old daughter was with me, I was glad for that—she thought Charley was great, and so did I. (The thing that really got the little wheels in her head turning was the graffiti in the women’s room.)

It’s an odd thing that I ended up teaching this class. When I was in high school and should have been basting myself in rock I listened almost exclusively to jazz—my father’s Miles Davis records felt like a life raft in those days. I was completely alienated from my peers and so there wasn’t much to draw me to their music. It’s amazing how much of it seeped in anyways—thinking back, it feels like Rod Stewart’s voice permeates the whole depressing era, but at the time I’m not sure if I could even have told you who it was singing those songs. I grew more receptive to mainstream popular music as I went through my 20s and 30s, but it never developed into more than an incidental, haphazard interest. But what really mattered to Duke was that they wanted to hire my wife and knew they could seal the deal if they came up with something for me to do as well. Luckily the couple of people in the music department who could have taught songwriting had other things to do, and I guess they figured I couldn’t do much harm with it.

Whoever originated the class (I think it was a graduate student, but I’m not sure, and I’ve never seen the original syllabus) had the inspired idea of calling it “Songwriter’s Vocabulary,” making it clear that it’s about musical materials and techniques, not about the ineffabilities of self-expression. I followed the lead of my immediate predecessor, John Ferri, in structuring the class as a non-traditional introduction to music theory. We make our way through rhythm (approached as prosody), melody (scales, phrases), harmony (chords, progressions, voice leading) and form, but the assignments are mostly exploratory and composition-based. There’s a weekly lecture-assignment-workshop cycle in which I say, in essence, here is some stuff (e.g., scales or chords), here is the terminology, here are some examples of how it’s usually used, now go out and do something with it, and next week we’ll see what you come up with. The looseness of the assignments makes the students feel like they’re at sea sometimes. I try to present the theory not as rules but as guidelines, tendencies, and expectations, and for me the effort has been enlightening, though I still don’t get it across to the class as well as I should. Music theory is only as good as it sounds, and when we go over the assignments in class the theory is almost always borne out—when a student “breaks the rules” it sounds awkward. Sometimes it sounds inspired, though, and I can’t think of a better way to learn about both the usefulness and the limitations of theory.

My ideal has been to make the class accessible to anyone who has some musical facility and wants to write songs. There are a lot of fine musicians on campus who fall through the cracks in the music curriculum because they aren’t very comfortable reading music. Many students have told me that one of their goals in taking my class is to improve their reading and writing, and half or more of the typical class reads quite well, so I use staff notation on the board and in handouts all semester. But I suggest more informal and intuitive ways for them to write down their own ideas—imprecise notations that are precise enough to get the job done, especially if they’re supplemented by a recording or in-class performance. And even when they’re writing abstract musical fragments for an assignment, I urge the students to work with a lyric, no matter how ridiculous or incoherent. Words can’t convey rhythm unambiguously, but they can go a long ways towards pinning it down, both for the student who writes them and for me or my TA when we read them.

It’s been pretty easy to reach the students who sing and play the guitar, who have a rock band, or are in one of Duke’s many a cappella groups. There are plenty of students with a traditional background, from piano lessons or playing in school bands or whatever, who want to try their hand at songwriting, too. I settled into a comfortably loose amalgamation of traditional theory, graphic notation, and composition projects some years ago. In the past few semesters I’ve had several students whose orientation was more towards hip-hop than rock, and they’ve shaken my complacency. In line with most music theory classes, I put a lot of emphasis on chords, and for a vast swath of popular music that makes perfect sense—chord progressions, whether simple, complicated, explicit or implied, are the structural backbone of most every song. But the hip-hop model leans much more on rhythmic and melodic patterning, and if I was to teach the class again it would be high time to work that into the mix. As much as anything else, I’d be doing myself a favor. I’ve spent a whole lot of time talking about harmony—it’s endlessly fascinating but also well-worn ground, and another trip around it isn’t likely to do me that much good. To get myself to the point of being able to say something useful about how a hip-hop song is put together, I’d have to get out of my comfort zone and learn something.

In terms of the musical models I use, I haven’t had to venture into unfamiliar territory nearly as much as I expected when I started. I have about a dozen Beatles songs that serve as textbook examples, and I draw on some other rock classics (not quite the same thing as Classic Rock, but there’s plenty of overlap)—the students don’t seem to find them terribly old fashioned (except, maybe, for Annie Lennox). When I ask the class to bring in music they admire, they often show up with old stuff, too—from the past few years I can recall some Beatles, Springsteen, Neil Young, Led Zepellin, and Velvet Underground—and in technical terms most of the newer songs they like are in the same ball park. What I have had to do is listen more closely and objectively, even to music that’s familiar—something I’ve had to do for other classes I’ve taught, as well, and it’s always led me to a richer experience of the music. My appreciation of music that is simple and direct is definitely more genuine than it was 10 years ago. There was even some evidence at the coffeehouse that I’m conveying that to the class. Introducing his song, called “Simple,” James said that it was inspired by a comment I made, while talking about a song in class, that “simple is good.” Out of that, James came up with a classic guy-with-acoustic-guitar kind of love song that sits right on the line between simple and simplistic up to a beautifully conceived bridge that transforms it and gives it real depth. Ironically, the polish on the song and James’s self-assured performance made it obvious that he was one of the most experienced and sophisticated musicians in the class.

It’s been fascinating and heartening to hear the 100 or so students who’ve come through the class get up on stage and sing their piece (and I don’t think there’s been a single student who hasn’t been able to take part, which is pretty amazing—there may, of course, be a case or two that’s slipped my memory). The big revelation for me has been the ones who feel their way tentatively from assignment to assignment and then show up at the coffeehouse with a couple of verses and a chorus that are not only a real song, but their song—an unpolished little gem that’s both conventional and personal. There’s no denying that if I wanted to claim some credit as a teacher, it’s these kids I should point to, not the well-developed talents like James. But the only thing I really feel I can take credit for when the session is over is that I insisted that they all write a song and show up to sing it. The rest is theirs, and it feels like a window onto a musical creativity that’s disentangled from technique, where originality arises naturally from personality. It’s a great thing to remember when I get lost in the intricacy and abstraction of my own music, when I need to be reminded what the means are and what the ends are.

After hearing both versions we had the inevitable debate about which was better. Most of the class felt that the original was best. I like Lennox’s quite a bit better. It’s pretty typical that my songwriting students will have the opposite opinion of mine in cases like this, so I wasn’t exactly surprised. Still, it was surprising how strongly some of them dislike Annie Lennox. She’s iconoclastic in that she insists that she will be herself, but not (as far as I know) in a preachy way. Whatever you think about her style and her material, she’s a superb singer who’s serious and sincere about what she does. What’s to hate about that, even if the music isn’t your thing?

The opinion of most of the class was that Simon’s idea of what was the chorus and what was the bridge made more sense, which I kind of agree with, though it doesn’t make a big difference for me. And then there was the heavily synthesized sound of Lennox’s version, which bugged a lot of the class. I said that Simon’s version sounded very dated to me, more so than other tracks of his from the same period. A student countered that Medusa dated itself more strongly because of the cheesy synths. I guess the other 90s albums with cheezy synths didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But in retrospect, what bother’s me about Simon’s track isn’t datedness, it’s clutter, especially after about the midpoint of the song, when the orchestra come in. There’s flute and pedal steel and echoey string glisses, and a weird two-beat feel that starts on the bridge but hangs around for the rest of the song. Also, the flexibility of the phrasing often verges on awkward, or forced. Lennox (and her producer) streamline all of that, so the phrasing unobtrusively serves the lyric and the orchestration brings out the richness of the harmony but stays out of the way of the gorgeous singing.

I have to laugh at myself when I get analytical with songs like that in class. Parsing a pop song in terms of the distinctive phrase length and harmonic rhythm to each section? How geeky can you get?