Wear Clean Draws  (because there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

Chuck Grimes pointed me at a post about Walter Benn Michaels by Lou Proyect. I dropped by to ask him his opinion. I left the link to WBM’s talk at Harvard and listened to it again as I was packing. At Lou’s blog, people challenged him on his interpretation of WBM and Lou concedes that it’s hard to tell with WBM because he’s deceptive, he waffles, he elides.

True.

But he does make flat out statements such as the one both of us have quoted: “My point is not that anti-racism and anti-sexism are not good things. It is rather that they currently have nothing to do with left-wing politics.”

Additionally, in his talk he does the same thing. He makes it clear that he sees it as an either/or. Either we pursue race, gender, etc. or we do not, and pursue class politics. It isn’t an accident he speaks like this. If you see these issues as inseparable, if you really do see them as requiring the other then you emphatically do not say things like this:

What I’m interested is the now let’s say 80% of the kids in this country who never even dream of going to Harvard. They aren’t being kept out of Harvard because of racism. The fundamental inequality today being presented by universities has nothing whatsoever to do with race and sex despite what …. is he still the President of Harvard? I can’t remember where Larry Summers is in all this… But those aren’t the problems that confront our universities today. It would be a very different world if our faculty, instead of getting up in arms about foolish and inappropriate things about race and sex, if they would instead get up in arms when it occurred to them that they are turning themselves into finishing schools for rich kids of the u.s. That’s a social issue of some magnitude. The Trouble With Diversity is that diversity plays a fundamental role in enabling us to ignore that social issue. And that’s the fundamental argument of the book.

it really is a grand either/or for Walter Benn Michaels. If he wanted to see both, he could have simply said that he’d like a world where faculty got up in arms about racist and sexist comments AND got up in arms about the fact that they are a finishing school for the rich.

but what also bugs me about this comment is something that occurred to me yesterday. I don’t think Walter Benn Michaels thinks any college or university matters in terms of quality unless it’s a Harvard or a UIC or a Yale or a Berkeley. For him, the outrage is that people aren’t going to Harvard or Yale.

Sure. But since when have these elite institutions been anything but finishing schools for the rich? And not to deny the status hierarchy of the university system, but I don’t think Michaels cares about prestige. He really *does* think that the problem is that 80% of students aren’t getting the quality education they should be getting. This is clearer when you revisit his discussion of equality of opportunity. The problem with K-12 schools that aren’t in rich neighborhoods is that they suck and the reason why people aren’t getting into the good colleges is because they are not good enough to get into them. This is why he isn’t impressed with Harvard doling out free tuition for people who make less than 60k. Michaels seems to think that people making less than 60k have children that could get into Harvard anyway. They are from schools that, since they’re not in rich districts, couldn’t possibly produce children who could do well enough to merit Harvard’s attention.

I’m not sure if I’m explaining the correctly but this statement about the 80% makes it seem like no one’s going to college at all. But a significant number of them are going to college. 50% of the population attends university in the u.s. Since they all don’t go to Harvard, they’re going somewhere.

So, what’s the problem? They’re getting college degrees right? It’s a rhetorical question. I know what the problem is. What I’m not clear on is if Michaels understands that his obsession with whether or not people are getting into Harvard makes it appear as if he doesn’t think people get decent college educations anywhere else. Obviously, he thinks they do since he doesn’t work at a Harvard but you can explain that kind of thing by noting the “not my Nigel” syndrome. People like to make all kinds of claims about the system — schools are bad, the medical system is awful, corporations suck — but often when it comes to their school, their doctor, their employer things are different. They manage to have the exceptionally good school, doctor, or employer.

Michaels’ Nigel is his own university which, in spite of his crumbling infrastructure, may just have quality professors after all!

But it ultimately has zippo to do with the content of the learning at a university, which is what Michaels seems to assume. It’s that the universities operate as a sorting mechanism. People go to Harvard to get good educations, sure, but its function is to funnel people into the most prestigious jobs in the world. And whether or not they learn anything is irrelevant to whether or not they land this fabulous jobs.

One tangential think that fascinates me about Michaels is related to this book I read recently, Managing Humans. It’s a hilarious book about IT managers and management. Joel Spolsky recommended it so I just had to read it.

One of the things the author talks about is different kinds of managers. Some are looking “downward” and focused on their reports. They’re concerned about their employees, etc. They’re the kind of people who have weekly one on ones and actually talk to the people sitting in their office — talk to them with an eye toward getting to know them.

Another kind of manager is always got his eyes gazing upward, toward his or her bosses. That manager is most concerned about moving on up and it will be hopeless to expect that kind of manage to have one on ones and actually care about what you might say to her. That manager is looking to move up the ladder and has no interest in working with other managerial colleagues and certainly isn’t going to focus energies on her reports.

Well, that’s the kind of manager Michaels would be: constantly looking up the ladder in order to impress the people he really thinks matter.

I don’t know how to parse a book that, in its discussion of higher education, is constantly about Harvard, Yale, Princeton. it’s as if no other universities exist. I find it really really strange and wondering if anyone else has any thoughts.

In some way I’m thinking that this is somehow connected to Michaels work and even his talk at a Harvard forum where, as Robert Wood noted on LBO, Michaels doesn’t seem to acknowledge race as it exists globally, since capitalism is a world system. It’s a kind of narrowness. Capitalism is discussed almost entirely in terms of economic equality *in* the United States. Why? The u.s. educational system appears to be reduced to Harvard. Why?

It might also be that this is who Michaels envisions as his audience: professors who will assign the book at the Ivies and the big three.