"Harvard students aren't normal. There is no reason our grade distribution should be."

I have many sad excuses about how I've hardly read a real piece of journalism in months, but this is the last Crimson-derived post for a while, I promise. (Unless they publish a particularly awesome sex article; then I can't be restrained.) The headline pretty much says it all: "Substantiating Fears of Grade Inflation, Dean Says Median Grade at Harvard College Is A-, Most Common Grade Is A." Sadly, I think my grading practices contribute to this phenomenon.

Facts and mysteries

Fact: Long cardigans look like bathrobes. A trend ready for its curtain.

Mystery: Has anyone ever bought clothes from Korea or China on Ebay? Are they real? Every time I search for anything on Ebay, many hideous (or hilarious) but also some extremely appealing (or moderately so) Asian versions appear. And they are cheap. The question is: can I has them?

Country music is for simpletons, part 2

Wait, didn't we just have this discussion? Why yes, a mere two months ago. But this time, the great innovation is that someone tuned into a country station and found that country music has recently discovered sadness and other bad feelings. Big news! The rednecks are becoming more like us with every passing day. Would that Johnny Cash, singer of exclusively upbeat songs, had lived to see this revolution. To celebrate this new discovery, I offer you John Prine and Dolores Keane on the unstinting joy of small town living, a song written just yesterday.

Via Withywindle, who has used it to other purposes.

"An institution...that is so synonymous with excellence in everything it does"

Harvard worries that maybe Harvard's athletics program has begun to aggrandize itself at the expense of Harvard's non-athletics program, whatever program that might be. The problem with this concern is of course that Harvard is just so excellent at everything, and so excellent at being excellent, that it's hard to discern any reasonable limit to the "domains" it ought to colonize with its excellence. Surely it must play sports. But how many sports, and how intensively? Other schools play dozens of sports, and very intensively. Then Harvard must do the same, but better! Like a light unto nations, Harvard redeems all that it touches, so that clearly, it ought to grope everything in sight. 

One professor explains that expanding athletics is necessary for Harvard to successfully condescend to the cretins outside Harvard:

Lewis adds that eliminating Division I sports would change the way Harvard is viewed in some communities. “It would be even harder for people who are from rural America to think of Harvard as being a real university and not some elite place where people don’t do the things that college students really do,” says Lewis, who throughout his tenure as dean of the College was an active supporter of athletics. “We would sort of drop out a piece of American culture.....And we’d lose a lot of people who come from subcultures of America where sports is one of the ways that you show your ambition.”

Now, we sophisticated urbanites may see the problems with turning colleges into sports stadiums, but the vast American cornfields are inhabited by cavemen who believe that a college ought to be a football stadium, and they ain't gonna wanna send their kids to no fancy-pants school that purports to be all about book-learnin' instead of drinking and brawling, the primary activities of this "subculture." Forget whether there aren't some people living in these forsaken places who might get it in their heads that the purpose of college is academic. Surely their numbers would be infinitesimal, if any exist at all. But, if these "communities" are really so primitive, then why would Harvard want to recruit from them in the first place? This is less clear. Perhaps it hopes to rescue the few hopeful progeny of these benighted masses, but must first convince their parents to hand them over with promises of bread and circuses. But to do that, it wouldn't really need to expand its athletics program in fact, only in appearance - enough to convince these distant savages that it shares their, uh, values. A Division I women's rugby team would seem to be unnecessary to that goal.

But Lewis isn't advocating a bait-and-switch after all. He seems altogether pleased with the prospect of Harvard's actually conforming to the noble vision of education that he attributes to these cretins. "We want to be able to show ourselves persuasively as representing the best of America in the terms that America recognizes," and if "America" recognizes football as best, it's Harvard's job to represent it to itself accordingly. Whatever the people like, Harvard provides. But why should we stop at sports? I can think of a few other things that "America" also recognizes as "best," at least as determined by popular enthusiasm for them - for example: reality TV, pornography, recreational drug use. Every vulgar activity by definition has many patrons, so why shouldn't one of these patrons be Harvard, an institution whose purpose is apparently to reflect America's vulgar interests, whatever they may be? Lewis agrees:

“I think Harvard still values athletics because people who have displayed success in athletics have shown a capacity to achieve a level of excellence in a particular domain, and the domains in which we try to achieve and represent excellence are not only academic ones, because very few, in the long run, of our undergraduates are going to go on to academic careers,” says Lewis.

Well, never mind that even fewer of them will go on to athletic careers. Lewis is right - most students aren't going to be professors. So why, we might wonder, is Harvard imposing academics on all its undergraduates in the first place? The domains of excellence are many and varied, and none is clearly better or more valuable than any other, so why should everyone be forced to jump through all these irrelevant academic hoops to have their excellence certified when they could instead focus on "displaying success" in other domains? Is Harvard even achieving and representing excellence in enough domains? I'm not sure. Beauty is a domain. Why hasn't Harvard yet organized an effort to excel in beauty pageants? Agriculture is a domain, but I don't see a lot of Harvard investment in training farmers.

Now, to be fair, no one seems to know quite what Harvard's non-athletics program is, or is for, so confusion about whether the athletics program has encroached on it is inevitable. Even the athletics detractors quoted don't offer any clear boundaries for athletics, except to say that students should be recruited for academics. Non-athletics is presumably academics, but academics must then be defined quite broadly. Entrepreneurship is academic, extracurriculars are academic, social life is academic. Nap space is academic! Almost everything in this article is a reflection of how unwilling Harvard is to give any reason for its existence, since to define itself would imply a limitation on what it might someday become, and God forbid that Harvard impose limits on Harvard! Today, it's a university. But tomorrow, the situation may be ripe for it to become a country, or a spaceship, or a subterranean egg hatchery. Who can know what the future holds? Well, technically, Harvard can know, because it's on the cutting edge of everything, but for the purposes of future institutional adaptation, no one knows. 

A further pleasant and unexpected event

Four years ago, to my great joy, Geocities descended into internet oblivion. Today, I accidentally discovered that Xanga has as well. Naturally, this led me to investigate the status of Livejournal, which is still limping along rather pathetically, though it has mercifully "purged" most traces of a teenaged Miss Self-Important unadvisedly and unreservedly running her mouth.

I suppose there is not much to lament in the loss of Xanga, which was an awkward transitional platform wedged between Webs 1.0 and 2.0. Let's call it Web 1.5: the adolescence of the internet, and the domination of the internet by adolescents. The result was an inverse proportion of ostentatious gridded wallpaper images to grammatical prose. But as I was telling someone IRL (yes, IRL!) recently, the single redeeming fact about all the early commercial blogging platforms like Xanga and Livejournal (and Diaryland, peeps - do you remember Diaryland?) is that they required their mainly teenage users to learn some basic code and to write long-form thoughts on a regular basis. True, these thoughts were almost uniformly sub-rational and poorly articulated. Also true, the authorial autonomy over the aesthetic appearance of their pages generally resulted in a net loss of beauty in the world. But - grumble, grumble - at least you had to try. Blogging was an investment, it had a learning curve, and it was not an activity that overlapped much with your actually existing social life, since most of your friends did not blog, or at least not seriously. This was most of all the case with Blogger but for a while also Livejournal that it required you to learn how to write for an indeterminate audience of strangers, which was both exhilarating and vastly skill-enhancing, and also on the whole a Very Bad Idea for most 16 year-olds. However, I'm unpersuaded that the present wholesale reification (surely there is a better word than this for what happens when the real is reinforced by the virtual?) of the school-based social lives of adolescents on internet fora does them any favors. The only skill this expands is obsessive self-consciousness because now you're "on" all the time.

But, such grumblings aside, I can't really be too sorry that the remnants of my foolishly overexposed adolescence that I feared would be embarrassingly visible forever are being buried sooner than I expected. Sink faster, Web 1.5, and take our crazed adolescent ramblings down with you. As for me, I have it all backed up on a hard drive anyway.

The decline and fall of the village of Mudhole

The NYT has a photo essay about the sad state of the villages along the highway that runs from St. Petersburg to Moscow, in which the villagers encountered along the way lament their neglect at the hands of the Russian government since the fall of the Soviet Union. But I am perplexed. These are places named things like "Cockroachville" and "Black Dirt." If this is how optimistic their first residents were about these locales, how much could they really have declined since their glory days?

"Seminar baboons"

The Maroon has an excellent interview with David Brooks, who I think may have decided to love the U of C precisely the year after I left the place. Among the highlights, advice on selecting a senior thesis topic for history majors:

My senior paper—what I did was I went to the library, I looked at all the archives, and I started with the letter “A,” and I figured I would write about the first person who looked interesting, so I got up to “Ar,” to Robert Ardrey, whose papers had never been looked at. He was a left-wing playwright in the ’30s, and then became sort of an early Darwinian theorist in the ’60s and ’70s. So I wrote about him. I’m probably the only person to ever look at the Robert Ardrey papers at the Reg.

Faculty news from the memory department

Although he died two years ago, I still sometimes think about my college humanities professor in connection with things Greek in my academic life, and since Greek things are unusually prevalent right now thanks to TAing, I've had occasion to think of him often this fall. And when I do think of him, my natural postmodern impulse is to Google him to make sure that the internet also remembers him, and to see if it has perhaps generated something new in the memory department. It's remarkable how one can keep up with the goings on of the dead this way, as though even death were no longer an impediment to continued intellectual output. Most recently, I came across this series of interviews with him from 2009 done by some guy who might be some sort of fringe lefty nut. But that's immaterial to the interviews, in which Sinaiko talks about ancient China (asserting at some point that the present government is a haven for open debate), citizenship, Rome, the Tea Party, and his questionable political opinions. I don't think I ever agreed with his politics, and I'm not going to start now, but it is nice to see these videos.

This post is boring and long and kinda hard to relate to

I've mentioned before that I think that crowdsourced reviews of great books may signal the end of civilization. This was in response to reviews of Emile, which tend to say, in summarized paraphrase, "This book is very stupid. I would not raise children this way, and also Rousseau is a misogynist." In light of the reviews of other such books, we might be relieved that at least the modern, non-academic reader had a response it. Because most early modern texts produce one of two kinds of reviews - those written by technicians who outline the entire argument for you, and those written by lazers who wish to inform you that this book was very long, difficult, and boring. Mostly boring. Some reviewers of the latter party do admit that the book is "important," but this consideration does not apparently move them to work harder at it.

For example, Locke's Essay
"Okay, I like philosophy, but everything has limits! I had to read this book for an assignment I have, and well, it was...weird? John Locke kept on saying something and after some pages going all against to what he previously said. His opinions? I don't know if I agree, I was too absorbed trying to make sense of what he was actually saying. And I had to keep notes, so yeah..."

Grotius's On the Rights of War and Peace:
"This is a painful read, but there's worthwhile information in there. I don't know. I'm very ambivalent toward it. "

There are, in addition, a plural number of reviews of More's Utopia accusing More of being a Marxist propagandist. (The Utopia reviews are so bad. Have these people no teachers?) A reviewer of Mill's Autobiography seems to be under the impression that Mill was "admittedly not very smart, but diligent" and also that he was an American. And it goes on. Allan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind that he was charmed by the habit of American students to take great books at face value, naively assuming they are just regular books and their authors just the folks next door, like "Mr. Aristotle." Well, here is the flipside of this democratic leveling. Mr. More is a Marxist, and his book "more an insight into the minds of Renaissance-era Englishmen than anything useful today as a philosophical statement."

But, I have decided that I will not stand idly by as civilization is destroyed by careless democratic readers. No, I will fight them with my own brand of careless democratic reviews, beginning with Grotius. What follows is a review of On the Rights of War and Peace, by Miss Self-Important, democrat:

De Jure Belli ac Pacis means On the Justice of War and Peace in Greek. This is a kinda weird book, as far as books go, but pretty worthwhile in the end. The plot starts out real slow at first, and the characters are distant and hard to relate to. You really have to get used to Grotius' style, which is a little outdated because he was a Roman, and he references tons of Roman and other examples to bolster his arguments, sometimes even like 20 pages of examples, and by the end, you're like, OK I get it dude, Jesus said it was ok to have wars, or whatever. This book is really long, but I feel like in olden times, people maybe just wrote longer books, and you have to be patient about that because they say a lot of good stuff when you give them a chance.

Grotius' main point is that there is a natural law in the world which governs even how countries have wars with each other, even though while they're having the war, it seems like they might not be governed by any laws at all, so many people have argued that there is no such law. But this natural law is not based on God or anything subjective or controversial like that (although God is cool with it). It's based on two things: the universally observable human impulse to defend himselves when he is under attack, and the equally universal fact that humans are sociable and want to live together. The first part justifies why war is justified in the first place, because we have a right to defend ourselves when we're attacked. But the second is really cool, because it limits the extent to which we can do the first part, so that we can't just do whatever we want in self-defense, like Mr. Tom Hobbes says thousands of years later, but we can only defend ourself to the degree that our defense promotes sociability, or maintains our society as a whole. That still means we can do a lot of badass stuff in war though.

I'm not sure if I buy Grotius ultimately, because it's really hard to make countries follow laws when they are in wars and there is no way to hold them to the laws, or they feel existential about a particular war and conclude that they have to do whatever it takes to win it or be totally crushed, like what happened to the land of Carthage in Grotius' time. But for the most part, I feel like Grotius is really good to read when you get tired of some of the edgier authors in this genre like Bodin and Hobbes, because he has a more moderate idea about what a country's self-interest is, and thinks that laws about contract and property can be extrapolated from within a country to govern relations among countries. Especially for people who care about international law and human rights nowadays, it's really important for them to justify that without relying on different subjective religions, and if you think that Grotius' justifications are not that good, you need to think about whether you have any better ones.

True, it's not very comprehensive. But, by posting such reviews, can I persuade democrats that, since other democrats, even outright idiots, managed to read and digest the books they were so bored by and pre-emptively jaded about, they can do it too? That the baseline expectation for even writing a review is reading the book and having at least three thoughts about it, one of which can be descriptive? It's kind of deceitful, sure, but could it be effective? Or is making these books seem easy and accessible only going to exacerbate the turpitude?

Sex and Consequences

It is well-known that Yale was founded as an orthodox Puritan alternative to dissipated, heretical Harvard, and I am pleased to see that this founding impulse remains strong there. First, there was the blanket ban on faculty-student relations, and now, this wonderfully detailed guide to ways one might go about having sex there, to which are appended the variety of punishments one will face afterwards. Gawker has already pointed out many of the things that make this guide so useful, and also how it might be improved with the addition of more potential scenarios for the serious student of college sex, the one who desires a synoptic understanding of the subject. However, I'm a little disappointed to discover that all these scenarios frame "sexual misconduct" exclusively as a matter of discerning the nature of consent. Are there not other forms of "sexual misconduct" following from consent that we could also punish, if only we first elaborated them clearly?

For example [Ed. note - advance reading of Yale's scenarios will greatly assist in the understanding of these essential additions]:

Jib and Twizzle meet at an organic chemistry study group and experience immediate and undeniable...chemistry. Jib invites Twizzle upstairs afterwards, and they mutually and consensually throw themselves into one another's arms. So great is their passion for one another however, that as they press up against one of the centuries-old windows in Jib's dormitory room, the hinges give way, and both Jib and Twizzle are defenestrated.

This is malicious destruction of university property: although Jib and Twizzle reached positive, voluntary, unambiguous agreement to engage in sexual conduct together, they failed to gain the window's consent to these proceedings. Since the steam generated by their conduct makes it difficult for the UWC to determine which of the two was the presser and which the pressee at the time of the defenestration, the spirit of gender equity that animates the UWC's policies requires that both be charged with felony vandalism after they have recovered from injuries sustained in their mutually consensual fall. 

Oatmeal and Cholera are classmates who meet at a party, flirt, dance closely, kiss, spin around in concentric circles, exchange a series of primal mating calls, lick each other's faces, and agree to go home together. On the walk to Oatmeal's room, they send a few texts, letting Cholera's friends know not to be jealous, and asking Oatmeal's roommate to please sleep somewhere else. Once in the room, they discover that Oatmeal's roommate, Pest, does not want to sleep somewhere else. "It's my damn room," Pest remonstrates, and Oatmeal and Cholera "can go to a motel or screw on the lawn for all I care, but I have a physics exam tomorrow and I'm going to sleep in my own dorm." Oatmeal and Cholera look at one another, then at Pest, then at one another again. Using only their eyes, they mutually consent to and execute a plan to place Pest in a large trash receptacle, affix the receptacle's lid tightly with duct tape, and leave it in one of the closets overnight. Oatmeal and Cholera then proceed to have undisturbed sex all night long, and release Pest the following morning in time for his exam.
This is consensual sex: Oatmeal and Cholera reached positive, voluntary, unambiguous, even telepathic agreement to engage in sexual conduct together. They go out of their way to honor Pest's request to "sleep in my own dorm," ensuring that he has a quiet space to rest in preparation for his exam. However, Pest's disrespectful language and effort to disrupt the mutually consensual sexual congress of Oatmeal and Cholera is in violation of the UWC's policies on "cockblocking." The UWC penalty would likely be mandatory sensitivity training for Pest.

Clap and Harpie are strangers who have arranged to meet for sex, an activity neither of them has had time to attempt earlier due to heavy academic commitments, but which both are anxious to initiate because each has heard many positive things about it from the university. Having carefully reviewed the theoretical gender and sexuality literature available in Sterling Library in advance, they have already exchanged signed statements of mutual consent to sexual conduct which include detailed lists of activities to which they are amenable. They meet in Clap's room, and after a preliminary discussion of their preferred gender pronouns and mutual commitment to subverting the paradigmatic norm of patriarchal repression which is reified in the present hegemonic form of the genital-dependent sex act, they proceed to disrobe. But when they move to engage each other, they discover that neither of them knows how to proceed. Having renounced the gender binary and its social construction of genital difference, they find that basic forms of instruction available in books and on the internet are inapplicable to their situation. They agree to turn to Yale's sexual scenarios memo for guidance, recalling that it shares their commitment to gender non-specificity. After applying themselves to a close reading of the document, Clap and Harpie derive a series of steps to follow, including rubbing each other's shoulders, crying and embracing, looking up at one another questioningly, and pulling each other close and then hesitating. They follow this progression, but remain unable to initiate the sex act. They become increasingly frustrated as the night wears on and sex continues to elude them, and after exchanging a series of recriminating remarks about one another's intelligence, appearance, and sexual function, Harpie throws a shoe at Clap's head, and marches out of the room, slamming the door and waking other students residing on that floor.
Although Clap and Harpie demonstrated a strong commitment to positive, voluntary, unambiguous agreement to engage in sexual conduct together, they failed to engage in the conduct. Initial consent was followed by ambiguity as Clap's and Harpie's expectations from each other diverged. In the process of attempting to engage in the conduct, Harpie transgressed Clap's stated limits of acceptable sexual activity. In this case, there was no consent to receive a blow to the cranium from projectile footwear. The UWC penalty for Harpie would likely be expulsion, and it would likely counsel Clap to get counseling.

***

In the benighted past, it was difficult to pursue simultaneous careers in writing pornography and academic administration, but thanks in large part to the pioneering efforts of places like Yale, it is now possible to combine these interests into a single post, charged with the composition of administrative porn. Perhaps you can think of other incidents to be included in a second edition of this important memo?