Heartache With Hard Work

We hear a lot of stories about students these days. Complaints about a culture of protest and shelter. About students who demand safe spaces, who shy away from engaging anything difficult, who treat the academic space as a therapy session, and who reject the time-tested principle of free speech and the marketplace of ideas. Who just want to complain and don’t want to learn.

I think these stories are exceptionally silly for the most part, and I want to talk about why. It’s not that there is no truth in them. But the truth is often deeply distorted, to the point where it’s almost unrecognizable.

Now, I don’t pretend that my experience is universal, of course, but all I can say is this:

Over the past seven years, I have taught thousands of students, at a fairly liberal institution. And in all that time, I honestly cannot recall a single one who I would characterize as wanting to be ‘coddled,’ or who demanded the right to hide away from difficult or troubling material. What I have seen are many students who see the academic space as important for developing and growing, for coming to understand different ideas and different ways of life. And for becoming more comfortable in their own skins.

Often their idealism is unsophisticated at best or blunt at worst. They often latch onto simple explanations for complex problems, and gnash their teeth at the stupidity of others who fail to see things in such clear terms. They often exaggerate the effect of relatively small events, and dismiss too quickly those who might still be open to persuasion.

And, of course, I occasionally lament the naivete this exposes.

But then I remember myself at the same age. And I remember so many other generations that have gone through the same process. And in thinking of those things, I don’t simply chuckle and say to myself ‘well, they’ll grow out of it.’ Instead, I take heart that complacency is not so easily instilled. The world is made better by people who care, by people who don’t accept what is. By people who don’t yet know better.

There are many reasons to be dismayed about the current state of academia. But the fact that it’s filled with students who are constantly looking to change the terms of their education, who are asking more of those that teach them, who are taking advantage of this space and making it something that speaks to them…well, that’s pretty low on my list.

I’m much more concerned with those seeking to maintain all the unspoken elements of privilege that have corroded these spaces over the many centuries, who use tools of mockery to belittle those who see violence in the habits that sustain such privilege, and who dismiss out of hand the premise that anyone challenging the status quo could ever be right.  Who assume that because something doesn’t bother them, it can’t possibly bother anyone else, either. Who see the educational experience they obtained as neutral and natural, and who therefore cannot even understand why that experience might not serve students who come to college via different routes, with different skin, different sexuality, different cultural backgrounds, different emotions, and different values.

There is a lot to complain about in contemporary academia. But if the primary focus of your complaints is the students, well…that says a lot more about you than it does about them.

Always – Moving Panoramas

Gentle guitar lines that wash over you in waves. Warm melodies wrapped lightly around beautiful voices. Deceptively simple chord progressions that feel immediately intimate and familiar, but still fresh and exciting. It’s timeless, speaking truths that last beyond this moment.

It’s the sound of a dream that stays with you all day.

Moving Panoramas have produced a truly beautiful record, one that evokes Galaxie 500, the Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, and about a hundred other bands you probably love just as much. Basically, this is the best Labrador Records album I’ve heard in years, except they’re from Austin.

One came out this week, and I’ve already listened about a dozen times. Go get yourself a copy and do the same.

Today’s episode of ‘you can’t be serious’ is provided by Sean Wilentz in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times. Willentz is arguing that Bernie Sanders is wrong to say that the United States was founded on racist principles. His evidence:

THE Civil War began over a simple question: Did the Constitution of the United States recognize slavery — property in humans — in national law? Southern slaveholders, inspired by Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, charged that it did and that the Constitution was proslavery; Northern Republicans, led by Abraham Lincoln, and joined by abolitionists including Frederick Douglass, resolutely denied it. After Lincoln’s election to the presidency, 11 Southern states seceded to protect what the South Carolina secessionists called their constitutional “right of property in slaves.”

The war settled this central question on the side of Lincoln and Douglass. Yet the myth that the United States was founded on racial slavery persists, notably among scholars and activists on the left who are rightly angry at America’s racist past. The myth, ironically, has led advocates for social justice to reject Lincoln’s and Douglass’s view of the Constitution in favor of Calhoun’s. And now the myth threatens to poison the current presidential campaign. The United States, Bernie Sanders has charged, “in many ways was created, and I’m sorry to have to say this, from way back, on racist principles, that’s a fact.”

But as far as the nation’s founding is concerned, it is not a fact, as Lincoln and Douglass explained. It is one of the most destructive falsehoods in all of American history.

Yes, that’s really his argument.

Okay, so let’s set aside the fact that there is a whole of lot of room for ‘racist principles’ to wreck havoc on lives over the centuries that doesn’t even include the bare fact of slavery, and just focus on the simple question of slavery.

Willentz is arguing that the Constitution rejected the principle of racial human bondage, and rejected it so firmly that…a war had to be fought to enforce the question, and three new Amendments had to be written and jammed through in order to protect those rights.

Sometimes I just can’t even…

(By the way, if you want some good history on the relationship between slavery and the founding, I found Mark Graber’s Dred Scott and the Problem of Constitutional Evil to be pretty good.  Dred Scott was an evil decision, but it’s hard to show that it was ‘wrong’ according to the standards available at the time.

It’s a terrible and ironic truth about our nation’s founding that Calhoun–an evil man espousing an evil position–in many ways had the most clear-eyed perspective on what the Constitution demanded.)

I want to talk a little bit about Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who has just been jailed for refusing to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples. In particular, I want to talk about the way that a lot of liberals have attacked her position. Here’s a good example, from Daily Kos:

I have very little patience for Argument By Hypocrisy in most circumstances, and this is no different. My question is: what happens if we reverse the terms?

That is: just how many of those mocking Kim Davis’s refusal to issue marriage licenses based on her religious objections would similarly mock Martin Luther King Jr. calling for public officials to refuse to enforce Jim Crow laws based on his religious objections? And how many would mock Henry David Thoreau’s refusal to pay taxes to a state that permits the continuation of slavery? And how many would mock a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War?

My point is emphatically not to say that Davis is right in her position, but instead to resist the form through which her principles have been attacked. Because these are principles–terrible principles, yes, but principles nonetheless–and we do a disservice to ourselves if we reduce this to simply an assault on the very notion of principled resistance.

In short, I am troubled by the way that the very idea of morally-grounded civil disobedience has come under attack in these comments. Because that isn’t the real issue at all. The problem is much simpler: it’s the content of her moral beliefs, rather than the principle that moral beliefs can, under some circumstances, provide a counterweight to the pure rule of law.

Let’s go back to our Thoreau, to see what he says about the relationship between liberal democracy and religious objectors:

I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves abolitionists should at once effectively withdraw their support, both in person and “property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough that they have God on their side, without waiting for the other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

How about Martin Luther King, Jr.:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all.”

Again, I do not think that Davis should be allowed to deny licenses. I don’t think she should be permitted to continue in her job if she won’t perform the duties that it requires.

But I do think she has the capacity, as a moral being, to raise these objections without categorical dismissal. Just as we have the capacity, also as moral beings, to disagree with her interpretation of the ‘higher’ law. Which, again, is precisely the terms on which King made his own arguments against segregation:

How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. … Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn’t segregation an existential expression of man’s tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

Whiskey – Tamara Laurel

A little bit pop in the progression and harmonies, a little bit country in the twang, a little bit folk in the setup, all held together by the sort of affable rock production that just fills me with nostalgia for the mid 90s.

Now that I’ve written that, I realize it basically sounds like I’m describing Sheryl Crow or Lisa Loeb. But, you know what? I kind of dig Sheryl Crow and I freaking love Lisa Loeb. So yeah, I like this song.

This is the first song out from Tamara Laurel‘s debut album Runway, coming soon.