Author: daelnorwood

Ivory Towers, Power At Play

Roll for Initiative, Doctorate

daelnorwood

Or, Do PhDs roll Twenties?

Dice

Wow. This L.A. Times story — a version of this much better reported year-old piece by Scott Jaschik at InsideHigherEd — describes a colossally bad idea on which ETS (Educational Testing Service) is trying to sell graduate admissions deans.

Put very briefly: ETS has come up with an additional form for graduate school applicants (and paying customers of the GRE) to give to their recommendation-letter writers. The form asks recommenders to rate the applicants on “a scale of 1-5” on their abilities in “knowledge and creativity, communication skills, team work, resilience, planning and organization, and ethics and integrity.” (1) These ratings are then put through some kind of algorithm to produce a “PPI” score (Personal Potential Index), which purports to measure the applicant’s “non-cognitive” qualities. These, in turn, will supposedly enable admissions folks to determine whether or not the applicant is likely to complete graduate school, like, ever. (Only 57% of admitted students actually do, you see).

I won’t get into all the ways that this is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. But to quickly run down a few objections: don’t most schools already require similar rating forms in their grad applications? how can “knowledge,” “creativity,” or “planning” be non-cognitive? how would a prof. know about a student’s “resilience,” anyway? does ETS have data that backs up the correlation between PPI and grad school success?

(Other arguments against this are left as an exercise for the reader).
Continue reading “Roll for Initiative, Doctorate” →

History and Historians, Our Glorious National Heritage

The whole epoch is disorienting

daelnorwood

Or, Atlantic Linkages

Disorient

Listen everybody: if you aren’t reading Ta-Nehisi Coates over at the Atlantic, you are missing out.

He’s a very good writer, and a very deep thinker. I mention him here — rather than just by grabbing you by the collar and preaching the cant of the converted to you individually — because recently he’s been reading through the historical literature on slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, and blogging his reactions. The result is some of the most thoughtful and powerful writing on the topic, and its present relevance, that I’ve had the pleasure of encountering.

What I like best of about Coates’s writing (and thought) is his how open he is to new ideas. Not uncritical; but willing to engage. That is as true of his reading of history as it is in his conversations with ideological opponents. There is, in his postings, a constant autobiographical refrain where he tracks the development of this willingness in himself, which gives it an anchor and a sincerity which even the most plaintively open-minded writers lack.
Continue reading “The whole epoch is disorienting” →

Corrupting the Youth

Quite Readable, I’ve Heard

daelnorwood

Opium

Just about the most honest book review I’ve ever seen:

Confessions of an English Opium Eater. Being an extract from the Life of a Scholar. From the last London Edition. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1841. 16mo. pp. 190. — This work is very neatly got up, and is withal an interesting book. We suppose we ought to know something about it, but we only know that we have often heard it spoken of, and alluded to, as a remarkable book, and we have found it quite readable. We have certain vague impressions abuot its author, but, Reviewers as we are, and therefore expected to know all things, we must confess ignorance, and acknowledge, who Mr. De Quincy was or is, we know not, at this present.
~”Literary Notices and Criticisms,” Boston Quarterly Review, October 1841, p. 523

The BQR was Orestes Brownson’s literary review and all-around philosophical mouthpiece; Brownson, you’ll recall, was the social reformer and philosopher of Democracy who embraced the state as the organic representation of the people, favored John C. Calhoun’s vision of a “concurrent minority,” and rejected the abolitionist critique of slavery as so much “agitation” on the part of the bourgeoisie. Oh, and a convert to Catholicism who became one of the most important American nineteenth-century intellectuals in that tradition.

He was also, apparently, a hell of a review writer.

Ecstaticist, “Opium Bokeh,” Flickr, CC License

History and Historians, Our Glorious National Heritage, Uncategorized

Searching for Sustainable Sovereignty

daelnorwood

Or, The Axes of Ideology Don’t Just Split Hairs

Chopping

Sean Safford, one of the OrgHeads, has just put up a very astute post about movements in contemporary U.S. political ideology. Essentially, he thinks that the ideological axis in the U.S. has shifted away from an emphasis on “fairness” vs. “conservation” — CEO pay is far too high! 40 million are uninsured! v. the market works great! If it [institutions] ain’t broke don’t fix it!– to an emphasis on “sustainability.”

Here’s his description of the “sustainability” argument:

The argument goes something like this: We live in a highly interconnected society which operates within a series of interconnected systems. Resources (physical, material, social, and political) are not only scarce, they are extinguishable. The system is in place, not so much to keep social order, but to ensure the reproduction of the resources needed to reproduce society over time. Undermining any of the systems on which society depends threatens to have ripple effects on others. But importantly, the biggest threat to the system comes not from external threats, but from individuals acting in their own self interest in ways that could undermine the delicate balance on which interdependencies of the system depends. Government action is needed, not to ensure fairness, but in order to save us from ourselves.

Continue reading “Searching for Sustainable Sovereignty” →

Uncategorized

Only with Twelve Men, On the Outside of the Wall

daelnorwood

Or, Now That’s some doux commerce

Those that know me IRL know that there’s no…way…I… could… resist. Sorry, sober scholarship will return tomorrow.

Our young readers may not feel much interest in ordinary wars, at best they are infringements of the laws of God and humanity; but a war with the empire of China, with whose inhabitants no intercourse has been allowed for centuries, except on the outside of the walls of the single city of Canton with only twelve men called Hong merchants, is a war of considerable novelty.

~”About the British Taking Chusan,” Parley’s Magazine (New York) January 1841, v9, p.64

Uh, that’s what she said?

This makes a bit more sense (or less?) if you know that Parley’s was a family magazine? And double entendres were still in beta, in France.