The New York Sophist

I got a new GoPro so what better way to break it in than to walk and talk through something on my mind about teaching.

I think what explains the lack of student motivation best is that they have only one measure to evaluate things in this world: entertainment. Is it entertaining? If not, they won’t do it.

How do we engage a generation of people whose only reason to engage anything is that they think it is entertaining?

On Friday I’ll post the second vlog on this topic. Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get the first look!

Is asking someone to consider the broader impact of supporting a policy out of place? Disrespectful? Is it hostile? Is it inconsiderate?

The Governor of Louisiana thinks so. An LSU Law professor asked students that if they felt comfortable voting for Donald Trump because of his policy agenda, they should consider how that makes people of different identities feel.

This is a great argument, one that is great because of the element of surprise. Most people who are voting purely on policy issues – something like the southern border for example – wouldn’t be connected to the rights of the groups that Trump and a lot of his supporters don’t appear to have respect for or care about.

This probably won’t go anywhere as in a classroom teaching a class a professor has a lot of protection. They have academic freedom and first amendment freedom. Professors often rely on saying controversial or surprising things to stimulate class discussion and thought. Where else in the world would highly-educated people be permitted to stimulate thought at this level without university protections?

It’s a great thing to think about for a lawyer: How would supporting the letter of the law, or a policy, have adverse communication effects that could be interpreted as a policy choice, or worse, a principled stand? Sometimes in choosing what we think is the best policy we are happy to let the lives and bodies of others serve as the lubricant to let the gears of our lives operate unimpeded. Occasionally this is done willingly, more often this is done out of a cursory awareness but an unwillingness or perception that there can be no other way. What this professor is suggesting is that perhaps the decision of how to vote or support policy should be done via a different kind of rubric, one that doesn’t force a choice.

The university today is often thought of as a job-training site. Students are there to learn how to do a job, and that’s it – it should be apolitical. This model strips the university of a number of its more important and vital functions which can be thought of through different narratives and discourses. The job training model is the least relevant namely because it would be so much cheaper to enter the job after high school and be taught by your employers. This wouldn’t take public money, it would be corporations footing the bill, and they would get employees who did things exactly the way they wanted. But most corporations would be against this; they want the university system. But why? Someone with a degree commands more salary and also probably has the tools to push back on poor decisions made by bosses, asking annoying questions and wanting reasons why the policies are the way they are.

Let’s think of the university as a seed bank, as the place that ideas we have rejected are allowed to live in a terrarium of sorts, where we can repopulate the world with the extinct ideas if we ever needed to. This is why universities teach things that are “useless” to many people outside the university. Teaching these things allow people to understand that these perspectives are around and available, and can be used if needed to address something, solve an issue, or provide some new light to old perceptions. The seed vault keeps ideas and methods alive and available in case society realizes that their quest for progress and innovation didn’t check the blind spot. This is insurance at the minimum.

But also the seed vault model encourages different ways of thinking by exposing students to types of thinking and approaches that seem incorrect and out of place. Academic freedom is essential to allow professors to introduce ways and approaches to thought that aren’t popular or automatic. We are the products of many things when it comes to our thought: The media, our relatives and friends, what we choose to read, watch, and listen to in our spare time. We need direct intervention in this, and that intervention is unlikely to come on the path of least resistance. That is, it has to come from an agitator who is protected and encouraged to agitate – a teacher.

A teacher cannot just say whatever they want. Academic freedom is the responsibility to be free to interrogate and speak however they wish about anything that will encourage or spark different ways of thinking. In this case, this incident is justified. The professor is not dismissing the people who voted for Donald Trump, he is pushing on the question of whether or not it is ethical to vote for someone purely on policy. What a question! Isn’t that what we are supposed to do, make logical decisions about what’s best for the country? This professor pushes back – best for whose country?

Unfortunately our elected officials are starting to think of dissent – even the intellectual exercise of dissent – is a threat to the country. Which is one of the biggest threats to the country that we could possibly face. If we are no longer permitted to question authority and criticize how we make decisions, what sort of democracy do we have at that point? Who is really free to express ideas? What kind of culture will that attitude produce?

I must remind myself that education and learning is practicing something. We don’t have the convenient reminders like doctors and dentists do, that they work in or at a practice; that they own a “medical practice” and “practice medicine.” I think we “practice education” but we don’t have the reminder all the time that we are doing well at the thing by trying to do it at our best level.

Practice goes deeper than preparation. In Buddhism, practice is the thing. There’s a famous story about the Zen center in New York that people would arrive and the master would sit them down and say “we’ll get started soon.” Then everyone was just sitting. They were doing the thing they were waiting to do, unaware of it. This was somehow the perfect kind of practice – not concentrating, not thinking about it too much, and letting your mind go and think and imagine what is coming. Seems like good Zen practice to me.

Practicing something is being in it and doing it, practicing it not to prepare for the real thing, but practicing it because we care for it and we want it to be good all the time, every time. Practice is something that is done to improve or get better right now. Certainly not for when it “really matters.” This is a big mistake that a lot of well-meaning teachers make. We have the following well-meaning but horrible trope:

“In the real world, this work/behavior will not be accepted by your boss or employer”

I hear this one a lot. I think this is lazy. This is a fear appeal, that whatever practices are going on in the classroom are permissible to a degree, but not the degree that you are preparing for in the world. In other words, your behavior would be rejected in a situation that really mattered, where the stakes were high (translation: the classroom doesn’t matter; low-stakes). The teacher pins their authority on the questionable one of the forced labor market of capital and the idea that they are saving the student from a material punishment in the future.

Another related one is that the student “disrespects” the instructor through their lateness or poor work. I don’t understand this one either. Why are instructors in the immediate position of deserving respect straight away? A more equitable relationship is one where respect is the finishing place not the starting place of the teaching relationship.

These two examples misunderstand the role of practice. What are you practicing? How to be yourself. This requires intense attention daily. When you are reading you are practicing being yourself reading; when in class, you are practicing that. You are practicing speaking when you share your thoughts; you are sharing yourself, you are practicing how to be in the world with others.

This doesn’t mean that what happens in class is less than or somehow not high-stakes, it’s the highest stakes as it is the real world. No distinction. Whatever happens in a classroom is as real as it gets. The students and instructor have to face it together and account for it. There’s no game or fakeness. It’s the real deal, it’s the same practice you will do for the rest of your life out there without a classroom to “protect” you or a school to make sure you don’t mess up.

Practicing practice is the focus of education and what higher education should really be thinking about right now. How do we encourage serious practice of our practice? Are there multiple practices? How do we engage them and make sure the practices are good? How do we sustain the focus and attention on our practice of thought, writing, speaking, and reading? This isn’t just up to each individual; this is a community effort and at the same time is and becomes the practice of community.

The ICC indictment against Netanyahu is getting a lot of attention in the media as being out of line. U.S. Senator Lindsay Graham has said that if an ally arrests him, the United States will tank their economy. Joe Biden has said the charge is “outrageous.” But what other method or manner should be used to investigate whether a head of state with a powerful military has violated the rights that all humans should enjoy by default?

It’s clear that powerful world leaders are not a good source for evaluating this on face. They have a narrow goal of self-preservation, often couched in the rhetoric of the nation-state. The state must defend itself not only territorially, which is obvious, but also symbolically – the permanence and obviousness of borders is best conveyed through material violence. The state has no other tools other than slaughter to convince others that their borders are real.

There are times when border defense via weapons is necessary but these times should be rare. The further you live from a border the more real it seems. The closer you get, the more it seems to be somewhere else. You are never quite there. Sometimes we have to put big signs and facilities on borders to make sure people don’t mistake where they are.

The symbolic necessity of a hard border in the logic of the nation-state means that leaders of nation-states will defer to going hard on defending them – including violating other borders and territorial integrity, invasion, and other such actions that one would see at a pre-school such as breaking your stuff because you broke mine; knocking over your brick tower because you didn’t like mine, etc.

The suffering people on and around the border and the state or organization that has been determined to be at fault pay the price. The ICC makes sure that the state’s actions do not violate the rights of those who happen to be close to these borders, or in a geographically inconvenient spot. The ICC is the agreement that the governments of the world should step back and check one another to determine if state reaction to the flimsiness of borders goes too hard or too devastating on the physical lives and practiced rights of the people who happen to be in the area chosen for this demonstration of force.

The ICC seems like the perfect place to this rhetorician to stand and defend one’s actions. It seems like the best forum we have of this writing to make the argument that the nation-state has no alternative but material destruction and casualty when there is an existential threat to the state. The ICC prosecutor has the burden to argue when and where that line exists: That the defense of the nation-state has limits that should be respected and enforced in order to secure the fundamental rights of the people of the world. This discourse would be incredible to have access to in order to help people have conversations with one another about military reaction to violation of state sovereignty, and why violating peoples’ right to life or right to safe passage, might not be a valid way of re-establishing the symbolic certainty that “borders make the state” (to the tune of the clothes make the man).

Maybe I’m naïve, but I think stepping back and having the arguments articulated as to why such destruction is not only appropriate, but necessary, or perhaps the only option available versus the arguments that this kind of state action is illegitimate because of the cost on human rights, life, etc as well as the interesting argument that perhaps it further de-legitimizes the state in ways that it can’t recover (a very cynical reason to sign on to the Rome Statute, but I would think some governments had this conversation in their parliament or perhaps behind closed doors) is essential for us to figure out not just who to vote for or what policy to protest against, but the very nature and role of things like voting and protest in our world that we increasingly feel as more real and simultaneously deeply, deeply symbolic.

Finding some pretty striking and pretty sad draft posts in my Google Drive, which honestly I haven’t looked at in many years. I started using OneDrive and Word exclusively a while ago and cleaned out my Google Drive to save money. I put everything on my NAS and deleted it from Drive except for the Google Docs. Those don’t take up any space, and there were about 1200 of them. So I figured I would just let them sit there until – well, probably forever. I saw no need to really mess around with them.

Now My NAS is getting older and I need to make a backup and put it somewhere else. Backups are tough. Without backups though you get no archive. And when I start to make a backup, I become an archivist. I have to decide what is worth keeping and what gets tossed. It’s costly to archive every single document and file you have on every computer. My NAS has a functional 16TB of space with 7.5 of it used. We’ll have to get bigger one day but at that point, I’ll just buy a new NAS unit with more drive bays. Restoring 16TB of data should be made as easy as possible. So I’ve been curating.

I’ve thinned out the backup as much as possible but in so doing found some drafts of things that I can’t believe I wrote – they seem too good for me from 11 years ago. I found some very sad, very angry things too – all of which I think I’ll post on here. They are worth sharing even though they strike me as not my own.

Years ago I did some archival research at the University of Maryland and met a great archivist there who was too busy to really spend time with me although he helped me a lot in preparing my visit. On my last day there we met and he apologized for being so busy – he had just been dropped into (or had dropped on him) boxes of Spiro Agnew’s archival material. Most of which was socks and gifts of geographically-themed ashtrays. This seems like garbage to me, but the rubric of the archivist says: Who are we to decide what future scholars should have access to? What becomes important in the future? What should we keep for them if not everything? It’s a tough thing to try to guess about future significance.

For me I’m glad I have a lot of backups. You can see on this “new” blogsite I have thousands of posts restored from frequent backups from all my old blogs, including the one from 2007 where I’m speculating about what it will be like to work at St. John’s. That positivity aged like milk, but it’s still nice to see it there. Is this an archive of ideas, and have I saved too much?

It’s late here and everyone is in bed, but I can hear my NAS uploading the backup to the cloud server.