The Badenov Files: Teaching Students Self Advocacy Through Rhetoric

I just completed a special project in my English 102 courses, the Badenov Files. In this project, students receive a letter from their landlord, Boris Badenov. Their landlord tells them that their rent is going to increase by 500 dollars a month at the end of the month, when their leases are about to expire. Students get a fact sheet on their landlord. They also receive a rhetorical tool kit, which introduces them to tools from rhetoric such as ethos, pathos, and logos; Bitzer's rhetorical situation; and Chaim Perelman's concept of rhetorical communion. Then students had to plan a strategy to respond to Boris. Playing Boris, I responded to them.

Playing Boris was quite fun; the episode brought out my inner sadist in a few situations. More important than this fact was that students learned that rhetoric isn't just about writing a paper or two; it's a tool that can help them succeed in life and advocate for themselves. A lot of the students seemed shocked to realize that they could indeed respond to Boris and make a positive impact on their own lives.

I am going to be publishing about this project, which I think could help instructors across the nation help their students to develop both their self-confidence and their rhetorical acumen.

Strange Encounter with James Fell: NPD and writers

I normally blog about higher education and personal finance. But I had an online encounter that was so bizarre that I have to write about it.

Since the age of 22, I've worked with writers, ranging from famous science fiction writers (my teachers) to textbook authors to students to critique partners. A lot of these folks have very strong personalities. As a textbook editor for a major company, I worked with authors who made millions. They could be very difficult to work with. As a writer, I've worked with pretty strong editors. I've also had my work taken apart by readers when I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education.

So, I'm not faint of heart. But I recently encountered a Canadian fitness writer whose writing to me seemed to be filled with signs of narcissistic personality disorder. We met in a very weird way. A couple of people asked me to comment on his website. I did so. I was honest but not vindictive. What I got back from James Fell was absolutely horrifying: being called a douche bag. When I objected and said that seemed rather petulant and that I'm a professor as well as a writer and that I'm pretty educated, I got a torrent of abuse, unlike anything I've ever seen. I've seen a lot, but  I've never seen a writer who, apparently, has so little respect for human beings and who has so little tolerance for difference.

When I looked up his work, there were signs of NPD all over the place, an obsession with his body, bragging about his straight A kids, an obsession with stars and being famous, calling other people douche bags, bragging about his doctor wife, who, he told me, unlike me, is a "real doctor." Whatever. I was told by Fell that I don't have a life, just an existence. He told me I would be jealous of his most recent advance. I'm not. But I thought to myself: thinking that others are jealous of you screams NPD. Every job he talks about is executive this and executive that.  Yuck. I don't know him at all. Apparently a failed science-fiction writer, he bills himself as not being PC. I'm not PC. There's a difference between hating PC and being a vindictive jerk. Apparently, he got into some trouble saying that some personal fitness trainer didn't have the education she said she did. There was some kind of battle.

You never know what you're going to encounter in cyber world. Sometimes you run into full blown personality disorders. These folks are horrible to work with. I wish Fell well, but I shake my head at people like him. I do not envy his editor.

Blogging about James Fell

Most of the time, I blog here about higher education. Today, something very funny happened. I encountered somebody so obnoxious that I'm going to have a little bit of fun in a week or so. Let's get ready to have some fun in the next couple of days.

In Defense of the Humanities

I teach in the humanities, which have been under attack for the last fifty years. Some of the attacks have been justified: The humanities tend to skew far to the left; the humanities don’t cure cancer; they don’t create solutions to global warming; they don’t help you to get a job.

In the last fifty years—and, actually, long before that time, if you include the Leavises and Matthew Arnold—there has arisen a cottage industry of people (mostly professors) writing polemics justifying the humanities. Most of these are vague defenses. The humanities are good for you in the way Cream of Wheat is. 

They make you a better person.

I’ve always had my doubts about the study of the humanities making you a better person. Having known piles of humanities professors, I’m not sure how many of them I would characterize as particularly good people. Most of the ones I know (my teachers, former classmates, and former colleagues) and have known are basically all right. They probably wouldn’t take your wallet if you left it on the table for a few minutes. Beyond that, I wouldn’t really characterize anybody in the humanities as a moral paragon. And that includes me as well.

I won’t take your wallet, but beyond that, I make no promises.

Thus, it was with interest that I read a defense of the humanities that is not vague at all. In Why We Need the Humanities: Life Science, Law, and the Common Good, Donald Drakeman makes the argument that the humanities—at least research in them—are useful because they can help us make decisions in two very important areas of human endeavor: biomedical research and civil liberties legal cases.

Drakeman argues that we live in an age in which government agencies and private companies have to make decisions about what kinds of biomedical projects to fund. Only the humanities—and probably especially philosophy and religious studies—ask the kinds of questions about values, choices, and moral reasoning that can enable people to make wise decisions about what kinds of biomedical projects to fund and invest research time into. In a world of competing interests, only the humanities can, Drakeman argues, give us mechanisms to use to decide how to spend finite resources.

In addition, Drakeman posits that many large-scale civil-liberties cases can be decided only on the basis of historical and moral positions given by the humanities. Drakeman acknowledges one of the potential problems with using humanities scholarship as the basis for legal decision making: humanities scholarship skews very far to the left (and we’re talking the hardcore Marxist left). Indeed, Drakeman acknowledges that the humanities are so far to the left that at times they are out of touch with what most people think about social and political issues.

While I think Drakeman might be on the money in terms of two areas in which humanities scholarship could be useful, I was disappointed that he didn’t really offer any good reasons why the humanities should be taught. It seemed to me that Drakeman acknowledged the usefulness of humanities scholarship, but he didn’t really talk about why these disciplines should be taught at the undergraduate level.

Let me try to offer some reasons why I think the humanities are useful.

1        Reading people. We have to read people. Often, these people are trying to sell us something. If you’ve spent a couple of years close reading texts, it becomes easier to close read people, their agendas, and the goals they really have, not the ones they say they have.  The better you are at reading people, the more quickly you can tell what somebody’s agenda is and whether you want to have that person in your work or personal life. 

2.     

          Creating narratives.  This is a world in which narrative really counts. Being able to tell compelling narratives about yourself and the world is a very useful skill to have.

3

       Creating arguments. Most people can’t argue very well. They think they can, but they really can’t. They can’t up with a rational and coherent argument that supports their position. People can name call and be emotional, but they can’t really articulate concise positions. Reading philosophy and rhetoric can teach people how to analyze and create arguments.

      

       Understanding human motivations. If you want disciplines that teach you how to understand human motivations, try history and literature on for size. Psychology is a Johnny come lately to the party in terms of plumbing the depths of human nature. And, frankly, I’ve never thought that psychology offers very much in terms of parsing the human soul. History and literature teach that human beings are very complicated animals, possessing both beauty and real ugliness.

5

          Understanding how the world works. Most people think that what is happening now is unique and novel. Reading history teaches you that there’s very little that is new. Do you want to understand Jeff Bezos? Go read about Andrew Carnegie.  Does Donald Trump seem like an aberration? Take a look at Andrew Jackson.  As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme.”  Understand the stanzas of current events by reading the couplets of history.

6

          Developing the research habit. Students hate to write research papers. And, to be honest, reading somebody’s research paper about abortion is not a particularly interesting way to spend time. But developing a habit of mind that makes one look up things and try to know who says what on a particular subject is laudatory. Such a habit of mind can be applied to almost any human endeavor: from buying a house to selecting a financial advisor

      While Drakeman doesn’t deal with why the humanities should be taught at an undergraduate level, he does present a pretty compelling argument about why humanities research is important. It’s refreshing to see someone talk about the humanities in a way that isn’t precious or condescending.  

Springtime for Snowflakes Two

Springtime for snowflakes, Part Deux

Before I continue talking about Michael Rectenwald’s Springtime for Snowflakes, I want to lay out what postmodernism is. While Rectenwald does a good job of tracing out this pseudo philosophy (and you can look at Stephen Hicks’s work for an equally fabulous job of taking apart postmodernism starting with Rousseau and the German counter-Enlightenment), let’s take a look at it on a more mundane level.

To do this work, let’s begin with the concept of the metanarrative. A metanarrative is a broad explanation of how the world works. Metanarratives include economics, religion, science, philosophy, and, to some degree, politics. Quite simply, the postmodernists don’t believe that any of these metanarratives contain any truth. There is no truth, only perspective, identity, and power. A perspective becomes dominant not because it contains any truth but because its adherents have the power to silence or destroy those proposing alternatives.

While I could talk about Foucault and the other French postmodernists, one of the easiest ways to show a postmodern attack is to look at one of the literary grand-daddies of postmodernism in the United States. Long before Quentin Tarantino gave us Pulp Fiction, Joseph Heller launched a scathing attack against metanarratives in Catch-22.

If you will recall, Heller creates an absurd world in which the bombardier Yossarian is trying to stay alive when everybody’s trying to kill him. Is he paranoid?  Not really. The Germans are shooting at him. And his own officers, Colonels Korn and Cathcart, are in fact constantly increasing the number of missions Yossarian has to fly. Thus, given the high death rates of American aircrews in World War II, the good colonels are effectively sentencing Yossarian to death.

In this very funny and very dark novel, Heller takes down all of the metanarratives. Religion—in the person of Chaplain Tapman—is completely ineffective. Politics is corrupt. The Action Board finds Clevenger guilty of anything it wants to find him guilty of. Science serves only to create killing machines such as machine guns and bombers. Medicine is totally corrupt. Doc Daneka cares ultimately only about making money. And, finally, the science of economics is, dare I say it, bankrupt. Milo Minderbinder starts a worldwide syndicate and even contracts with the Germans to bomb his own airfield because, as Milo argues, at least the Germans pay their bills on time.

Except for individual perspectives and agendas, there’s no truth in Catch-22.

Or is there?

Well, while Heller relentlessly attacks the metanarratives of our time, he does drop his clown mask for just one line in the entire novel. Yossarian argues that the war is already won. If that’s the case, he’s done his part, and why should he die for a done deal? Another character, Major Danby, is sympathetic to Yossarian but does say that World War II isn’t World War I (a bunch of imperialist countries slugging it out) and that if the Germans did win, they would make lampshades out of both Danby and Yossarian.

This moment of truth, and it is truth, might not seem significant, but in it Heller is being honest: there was a difference between the Americans and the Germans. The Americans didn’t commit genocide. By being honest, Heller for a moment drops his postmodern conceit and admits that there is truth. Genocide is morally wrong no matter how much power you have.

 And therein lies the problem with postmodernism, the central problem: if there is no truth, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. And, ultimately, everything, as both Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus realized, is permitted. The path of postmodern thought leads to killing fields and death camps.

In postmodernism, all standards of respect for the individual are provisional and can shift with the needs of those in power and perhaps even with one’s own feelings.

This lack of right and wrong is the problem with postmodernism and its step child, Social Justice Warrior culture. As Rectenwald notes, Antifa takes the law into its own hands. Silence people? Why not? Burn them out? Why not? Beat them with pipes? Why not? 

In Antifa’s world, if you disagree with someone and think they’re vile, then they have no rights and deserve whatever you decide they deserve.

This is very, very dangerous territory.

On a more mundane level, transgenderism argues that there’s no biological truth. Our bodies simply get in the way of who we really are. My Ph.D. is from the University of Minnesota, where the Center for Sexual Health, under the direction of Eli Coleman, has been a factory promoting transgender studies. It’s ironic that in an age in which people are turned down for kidney transplants by their insurance companies, sexual reassignment surgery and hormone treatments are now routinely covered.  There seems to my mind to be something very wrong here.

Oops, I said “wrong.” How traditional and bad of me.

Rectenwald, who has drawn massive fire from NYU Liberal Studies professors, has done us all a service in critiquing postmodernism and SJW culture.

One of the few things I find curious about Rectenwald’s book and his disavowal of postmodernism is not the disavowal, but the fact that it took him a while to come to this point. He seemed to be genuinely intrigued by parts of postmodernism in graduate school.

I think that there a couple of reasons why this is the case. Part of this issue stems from Rectenwald’s background and approach to graduate school. In Springtime, Rectenwald says that he never had any real political activist experience. Most of my classmates in graduate school were similar. At the age of 18, right after high school, I worked as a door-to-door fundraiser for Pennsylvania Public Interest Coalition. I asked people for money. I solicited voter registrations. I canvassed on issues ranging from the bottle bill to Pennsylvania utility reform. During college, I also canvassed for Nader’s Raiders (the PIRGs) and Greenpeace. In graduate school, I did a little bit of fundraising for Cleanwater Action and even, on the phones, for Michael Harrington’s group, Democratic Socialists of America.

Thus, from the beginning of graduate school, I recognized that there was a huge difference between real political action (which involves outreach, lobbying, and money) and the Frankfurt School and postmodern glop that I was served up in my Ph.D. program. While I found the writings of a few Frankfurt School thinkers (Adorno, for example) interesting, they weren’t really that important to me. I think Marcuse did serve up a pretty good critique of society in One Dimensional Man, but beyond that, I was never really seduced by theory. I could speak it and did in seminar papers and articles. But I saw theory as just a technical language I had to learn to speak if I wanted publication. I went to graduate school because I liked literature and a few critical writers, such as Paul Fussell. So many of my classmates seemed to have wanted graduate school to give them a way of looking at the world. I already had that. I wasn’t looking for anything else. Rectenwald might have been. If so, he got far more than he bargained on.

I never saw theory as really connected to American politics. And I’ve known a fair number of people who have either run or worked for the Democratic Party. Most of these people really are concerned with getting concrete legislation passed. With none of these people-- including a woman who tried to take Allan Grayson’s seat in Florida two years ago—did I ever talk about Foucault. With Millennials who have been through graduate programs in the humanities and soft social sciences starting to run for office, there probably is more of an awareness of critical theory.

When I was in graduate school, I served as a paid mentor for six first-year graduate students. In our first meeting, I said, “Welcome to English, where bad ideas come to die.” When one of my charges asked me what I meant, I said, can you think of another discipline in which Freud and Marx are taken  seriously? Psychology abandoned Freud decades ago. And most economists don’t take Marx at all seriously. But welcome to the humanities, where really bad ideas really are taken seriously.

In showing us that postmodernism and social justice warrior culture are absurd at best and dangerous at worst, Rectenwald has told the truth. And in this postmodern age, that truth telling is more important than ever.  

Springtime for Snowflakes I

In Springtime for Snowflakes, Michael Rectenwald delivers an intellectual memoir and a denunciation of the current SJW culture obtaining at colleges and universities across the United States and Great Britain. He also unpacks how the left became so toxic in the United States. 

In addition, Rectenwald answers a question I’ve always had: how does an English professor become oppositional to a discipline that is itself highly oppositional?  While Rectenwald is typical of English professors in some ways, he’s very different in others.

First, I don’t think he comes from huge amounts of family money. One of the dirty secrets of the academy is that a lot of humanities professors come from huge family fortunes. Indeed, my own dissertation advisor at the University of Minnesota was the daughter of a Cincinnati department store magnate. She was financially independent. This independence seems to open up a lot of people to a lot of nutty ideas. They play at being activists because activism for some people is just a fun game.

Second, Rectenwald, before graduate school, worked outside of the academy. I did as well. When you work in corporate land, you bring a different set of skills and experiences to your work in the academy. Most Ph.D.s haven’t worked outside of the academy. You can tell. They think that it’s normal to deliver a Foucualdian analysis of just about everything.

Third, Rectenwald is a pretty good writer, and he has known personally other very good writers, including  Ginsberg. Most English professors are terrible writers, filling their work with fashionable jargon. They produce and inscribe, liminally, of course, recursive hegemonic discourse. See what I just did? This kind of writing can make your head ache and your eyes tear. While Rectenwald certainly can produce scholarly discourse, he’s a cogent writer.

Fourth, Rectenwald is Catholic. Or at least he went to Catholic school. What difference does his religious affiliation make? A whole lot of difference. Because he was raised inside a meta-narrative, he’s ok with making truth claims. And making such claims is exactly what postmodernists are terrified of doing. They don’t believe in capital-T truth. They believe all truth (including biological truth) is socially constructed.  Nothing is ever wrong because nothing was ever right in the first place. 

We’ll talk more about that problem next week. 

Finally, Rectenwald comes from Western Pennsylvania. So do I. When you grow up around poverty, the real poverty of areas of the country that have dying factories and landscapes destroyed by strip mine coal companies, you understand that activism used to be about fighting for living wages in Carnegie’s steel mills, struggling for safety measures on the Pennsylvania Railroad, and striving to ensure that old employees can retire with dignity. All of that kind of activism is gone. That activism was based on a notion of class struggle, of the absolute dignity of human beings. Today’s activism is based on trendy notions of sexual identity and, often, the protection of upper-middle class values and the creation of safe spaces and trigger warnings.

Now that we know a little bit about his background, next week, we’ll talk about his explication of social justice warrior culture.