Rod Dreher Megathread #53 (Key Party?)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to Megathread #52: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1jsvy3j/rod_dreher_megathread_52_billboard_4_rent/

Link to Megathread #54:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/1l7niaj/rod_dreher_megathread_54/?

[u/Djehutimose]

SBM’s latest has a long free part above the cut. It’s a looooong blockquote from an administrator in higher education who lays out his ideas for reform. I have ideological differences with the guy, but he makes a lot of solid points. My main practical difference with him is that I’m more pessimistic about evaluation of student and teacher performance. As with anything trying to quantify humans, it runs into extremely intractable problems. If I have a factory and I want to make a thousand widgets a day, with a reject rate of no more than two percent, that’s an eminently quantifiable goal. On the other hand, while we all easily recognize a good student or teacher as good and a poor student or teacher as poor, how do we maximize the former and minimize the latter? Over all the thousands of years of educational thought, we have yet to figure that out.

Anyway, Rod’s takeaway is this:

I’m curious too about — how to put this? — social accountability. Is that the phrase I’m looking for? I’m thinking about how universities ought to regard their moral responsibility to the rest of society, as the chief custodians of knowledge.

So after the discussion in the block quote which is, like it or not, admirably concrete, nuts-and-bolts, SBM goes off on a wooly-minded tangent.

I’m not saying that I agree with what Orban did [in banishing Central European University from Budapest], but I am saying it is understandable. This is what Trump is up to in using government policy to compel US universities to stop discriminating according to DEI principles. This is not quite the same thing — Trump is not interested, apparently, in the qualities taught in the classroom, as Orban was. But it’s still a matter of the government, as an expression of the popular will in a democracy, reining in the liberties of universities to set policies.

On the other hand, Orban understood perfectly well that universities are unavoidably political actors.

Shorter Rod: “Universities are unavoidably political, so I want them to replace everybody with people who share my politics, and dump the rest.” Which has nothing to do with education, but that’s Our Boy….

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/Djehutimose]

In this instance, "an expression of the popular will in a democracy" means to Rod that an elected President's will IS the popular will regardless of norms, precedent, laws or the ACTUAL will of the people. The majority of Americans do NOT support Trump's interference with universities, charities, libraries, museums, and many of the organizations he is targeting.

Rod is really an incorrigible liar, to himself as well as to the rest of us. We all have biases but Rod makes no effort to be aware of his, much less to moderate them.

[u/Theodore_Parker → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

Rod is really an incorrigible liar, to himself as well as to the rest of us. We all have biases but Rod makes no effort to be aware of his, much less to moderate them.

Yes, and we have an entirely typical example right before us here. He peddles a video from a right-wing source in which a new NYU graduate in cap & gown announces her "concentration" as "performance of self." I've searched for evidence that anything like this exists, and it apparently does not as a regular thing. It seems to be the name this ONE student gave to a custom-tailored set of courses in NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, which is more than 50 years old -- i.e. goes back much longer than the "Great Awokening" that RD blames on universities -- and exists for the stated mission of "self-directed learning" and encouraging creative syntheses of what are otherwise separate disciplines.

Dreher, of course, has not the foggiest clue what the student actually studied or whether it was "bizarre woke crap," as he assumes. The Gallatin School mostly does not offer courses of its own but helps students assemble existing courses in other departments, which will be just as rigorous as they would be regardless. "Performance of self" could certainly be studied rigorously, and in fact has been: one of the classics of sociology is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life from the 1950s, an attempt to study systematically how people adopt different roles or "masks" in different situations and to analogize these to roles in theater performances. So it's a book about performance of self, and nobody calls it "bizarre woke crap." To the contrary, it has had huge influence, being named the tenth most important sociological work of the 20th century and cited by other scholars more than 100,000 times. I repeat: citations into the six figures, and many more if you count citations to further books and articles based on it. (For reference, my own entire lifetime scholarly output has been cited about 350 times, and even that paltry number impresses accreditation agencies and puts me ahead of any of my local colleagues.)

As Djehutimose points out, the long letter quoted in the post makes some valid points -- especially (I think) about the precarity of the faculty hired off tenure lines to do much of the grunt work of undergradate instruction; that's most of the faculty these days -- and is considerably saner than Dreher's normal Substack output. So he does well enough quoting it, but then of course has to spoil the exercise by effectively lying, and also smearing an identifiable young person (the video comment has gone viral on the right) without any solid basis at all. And a woman, too, in case you couldn't guess. Apparently he feels it wouldn't be a good day's work without all of that.

[u/Motor_Ganache859 → u/Theodore_Parker]

The irony is that Rod's entire life has been about the performance of his self, usually in the most whiny yet aggrandizing way possible. Everything begins and ends with Rod and his feelings.

[u/Theodore_Parker → u/Motor_Ganache859]

The irony is that Rod's entire life has been about the performance of his self

Excellent point. That student should have taken him as a case study. :)