Real Americans at Yale

Last week’s Washington Post had a great op-ed in which conservative sociologist Charles Murray accuses the meritocratic elite in this country of being un-American. Every Yale student should read it, as far as I’m concerned. We need to keep arguments like Murray’s in mind, especially as we all think about what the results of Tuesday’s election mean (and what they don’t mean):

Get into a conversation about television with members of the New Elite, and they can probably talk about a few trendy shows — “Mad Men” now, “The Sopranos” a few years ago. But they haven’t any idea who replaced Bob Barker on “The Price Is Right.” They know who Oprah is, but they’ve never watched one of her shows from beginning to end.

Talk to them about sports, and you may get an animated discussion of yoga, pilates, skiing or mountain biking, but they are unlikely to know who Jimmie Johnson is (the really famous Jimmie Johnson, not the former Dallas Cowboys coach), and the acronym MMA means nothing to them.

They can talk about books endlessly, but they’ve never read a “Left Behind” novel (65 million copies sold) or a Harlequin romance (part of a genre with a core readership of 29 million Americans). … They’ve never heard of Branson, MO.

There are so many quintessentially American things that few members of the New Elite have experienced.

Making Course Feedback Surveys Work

TAYLOR DUNN: We are officially one week past the point in the term when one can drop a course without any consequences. That was also the point where we should have had an official route for giving feedback to professors.

Yale encourages students to give feedback to their professors after the course is over via an anonymous online form. The form asks questions such as “How would you summarize this course for a fellow student?” and “Overall, how would you rate the workload of this course in comparison to other Yale courses you have taken?” and “Would you recommend Economics 116 01 to another student? Why or why not?” These questions are aimed at helping other students decide whether they want to take the course in the future. But this doesn’t always help professors improve their teaching.

The problem with giving feedback after the end of the course is since students are unlikely to have more contact with the professor unless they liked the course, they have no incentive to be productive, constructive, and specific in their critiques. In turn, there’s no pressure for professors to respond to students’ suggestions.

Under the current system, students feel comfortable being incredibly harsh.

One professor I spoke with said some of her students made sweeping generalizations that she had difficulty reconciling with the course she thought she taught. She mentioned that some of her criticism had felt so harsh and so ungrounded one year, that she has rarely read any of her feedback since. This makes the process entirely counterproductive.

The Art of Reading a Picture Book

REBECCA SCHULTZ: Apparently, picture book sales are down as parents are pushing chapter books on preschool-age children:

Publishers cite pressures from parents who are mindful of increasingly rigorous standardized testing in schools. “Parents are saying, ‘My kid doesn’t need books with pictures anymore,’” said Justin Chanda, the publisher of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers.

This is sad for several reasons.

First, means-to-an-end education is always sad. If picture books are a mere stepping-stone – a road to chapter books and a way to learn how to read – then the delight that children take in them becomes secondary and skippable. After chapter books, presumably, comes something else, and the possibility of reading as an end in itself is continually postponed. Education becomes an uphill battle, whose final reward is abstract, untenable, and probably doesn’t exist. Meanwhile, “Goodnight moon, Goodnight cow jumping over the moon, Goodnight light, and the red balloon” loses its poetry.

Second, picture books are just better than children’s chapter books anyhow.

The News’ View

JESSE WILLIAMS: At this point, the “News’ View” editorial regarding the Women’s Center has all but been taken out back and shot.  Such is, to my mind, deserved.  In light of the DKE issue, the News’ choice to use its editorial space to lambaste the Women’s Center not only betrays a misunderstanding of the role of that organization (they exist to speak up when this stuff happens), but also constitutes a discouraging failure to understand how to advance public discourse – that is, a failure to understand how to do a newspaper’s job.  The editors added nothing to the dialogue. More than that, they discredited what is meant to be a moderating voice in the Yale media.  The fact of the matter is that an editorial of that sarcastic tenor, of that misdirected purpose, should never have borne the name of the YDN.  The editors conceded as much in a statement yesterday.

It seems to me that the basic tenet of feminism, at least in this context, is this: women and men should have an equal voice in negotiating how their social and sexual relationships function.  After all, women and men are different creatures, and sometimes they desire their relationships to function in different ways.  Feminism says: let’s talk about it.  The DKE pledges’ chants suggested that they didn’t want to, and wouldn’t listen.  Whether or not they meant it, it’s the job of the Women’s Center to tell them they’re in the wrong.  That’s how things work in a society that protects free speech. I say something you don’t like and you tell me I’m wrong, and if I say it particularly nastily (as the DKE pledges did), you call me out with particular force.  To say that the Women’s Center is failing feminism is to misunderstand one or both.  I don’t think that the Women’s Center’s response was perfect.  But we should remember that in advocating a conversation between the sexes, the Women’s Center is advocating for all of us.  And if we believe in gender equality, we’re all feminists of a sort.

Much Ado about Meatless Mondays

MAX EHRENFREUND: Last week featured another exchange in the “Meatless Mondays” debate on the YDN’s opinion page. We just can’t seem to let it go. As for me, I think this whole argument is a bit silly, because I can’t understand why opponents of Meatless Mondays are so upset about the idea when there are lots of other ways in which the dining halls tell us how to eat and no one seems to mind.

It started when Dining Services tried offering only vegetarian entrées one Monday last April. Anyone who wanted meat had to ask for it from the grill or eat in Commons. Meatless Monday elicited righteous anger and cries of protest from students, which we saw some more of in Alex Fisher’s column on Tuesday. He was responding to another column arguing that if Americans ate much less meat, the world would be a better place in all kinds of ways. That’s a very reasonable argument to make, and people who complain about Meatless Monday (including Fisher) don’t object to it. Rather, their outrage is ostensibly due to the fact that Yale is telling students how they ought to live their lives.

Fine. I agree that Meatless Mondays aren’t a very good idea. It makes more sense for campus vegetarians to try to persuade the rest of us to eat les meat than for Yale to push us into it. That way they would change people’s minds instead of creating resentment. Meatless Mondays wouldn’t work in the long term, anyway—a lot of students would probably just make a habit of eating off-campus.

There’s a Worm in This Apple

SAM BRUDNER: The Apple Store on Fifth Avenue in New York City is, in its way, about as cool as the flagship store of a corporate giant can be.  I went there shortly before the start of this school year and the environment affected me substantially.  On some unconscious plane, many of the anxieties that naturally attend the start of an academic year dissipated; the store’s sleek wares and ultra-modern building implicitly promised me that, with the right state-of-the-art accoutrements, life would be easy.  Papers, the daily flood of emails, schedules and due dates and midterms: all this might tidy itself up under my Mac’s silver cover and cease to frustrate and challenge me.

What could make a computer store so compelling?  To answer this question, we must realize that Apple isn’t making these promises all on its own, or even in its own terms.  The store draws from modern architecture and design for its symbols; it appropriates a futuristic aesthetic ala Le Corbusier, with impeccably clean white walls furnished with glass-and-steel, functional fixtures.  Within this tradition, the Apple Store, like much architecture of its kind, stands as a symbol of the future, of high hopes and expectations for mankind. More broadly, the store manifests a consistent theme in Western thought: the hope for happiness in an unrealized utopia.  Though disagreement over the nature of this utopia animates Western philosophical history, many thinkers have fundamentally agreed that happiness belongs to some idealized realm – not to the imperfect, apparent world in which we live.  This basic thesis has motivated distinct projects from twentieth-century experiments in political theory, to Christian eschatology, to Plato’s ideal world of forms.

Going Places

REBECCA SCHULTZ: I didn’t travel this summer, but I did spend a lot of time in transit.  I was at home in New York, doing a public art job that sometimes involved spending hours on the subway and only a minute or two at my destination. I memorized a lot of advertisements, studied my reflection in a lot of train windows, and read religious pamphlets over a lot of people’s shoulders.  All of which I enjoyed very much.

Moving vehicles open up a bizarre and, I think, unique aesthetic space. Transportation is inherently utilitarian, which is the precise opposite of the aesthetic: beauty is supposed to be an end in itself; vehicles, on the other hand, are definitely a means to an end.  We get on the train because we need to get somewhere else. Nonetheless, we do like to aestheticize our vehicles.  We build monuments to them: Grand Central Station, for instance.  We are also delighted by the notion of vehicles appropriated from their original use: drive-thrus (you can EAT in your car!), or the old Redbird trains in New York, which have been sunk into the Atlantic and now form artificial reefs off the coast of Delaware and other states.

There is something illogical, dream-like and perhaps magical about vehicles.  They involve a lot of opposites and a lot of strange in-betweens.  They can allow you to move very fast while sitting perfectly still.  They can be public spaces, which nonetheless afford the passenger a totally isolated experience. 

Why Apple is Bad

JESSE WILLIAMS:  When Apple was down in the dumps fifteen years ago, they started advertising themselves as the counter-culture, underdog alternative to big ol’ evil Microsoft: “think different,” they said.  Their resurgence in the past decade has made for some irony: it’s hard to claim that buying an iPod amounts to “thinking different” when Apple controls seventy percent of the mp3 player market.  College students like us buy Macs to fit in, not to stand out.  But this is old news.

What’s the problem?  It’s not that people still like to tickle themselves about how their Macbooks trendy and different.  Tickle away.  Rather, the problem is that people who are otherwise -legitimately- counter-culture have not realized that using a Macintosh runs contrary to their own ideology.  Apple seems to have tricked us into thinking they’re the good guys.  They’re not.

Most of the companies that sell computers use the same sorts of internal parts that everyone else does.  These parts are all manufactured to certain standard specifications so that they work together — just like how a bunch of different phone manufacturers all accept the same, standard SIM card.  That means that with few exceptions, the parts inside your computer’s case can be purchased from ten or more separate hardware-manufacturing companies.  

Freshman Housing

TAYLOR DUNN: The plans for the two new residential colleges were submitted to the Board of Aldermen for review last week.  The colleges will house 850 new students,including freshmen.

Until the 1960s, students applied to residential colleges after their freshman year, allowing each college to have its own individual cliques and culture. When the current system of random assignment to residential college was put in place in 1963, freshmen continued living on Old Campus.  Much had changed: students no longer applied into colleges, so they could no longer develop cliques – but this caveat remained. And it has proven absolutely crucial.

At no other time in college is it so crucial to have people of the same age living together. Freshmen are searching for community and for people going through the same experience. Allowing freshmen to bond with one another rather than leaving them to float around in a college dominated by upperclassmen who are already established groups of friends is to their advantage. The central location of Old Campus facilitates this horizontal bonding before moving freshmen into a residential college and engaging them in a more vertical way.

Removing freshmen from Old Campus (beyond those who already living in Silliman and TD) would mark a significant shift in the way in which Yale’s residential college system works. Being isolated from Old Campus further means that those freshmen would be removed from some of the more exciting social events of freshman year, including A Capella Tap and Spring Fling.

Modern Epithets

PHIL KAPLAN: Epithets didn’t die with Homer. Today’s epithets take the form of little internet memes, single words or phrases that penetrate the electronic news media and then our brains.  Reverend Jeremiah Wright is a “controversial pastor” in the same way that Hector was a “breaker of horses.” At one point Obama was “professorial.” Great word. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed: “Mastermind behind the attacks.” People are always becoming “embattled.” There’s a really weird epithet out there in the ethereal inter-webs for the heir-apparent to North Korea, Kim Jong Il’s youngest son, Kim Jong Un. With the release of Kim Jong Un’s first official photograph, independently written articles from the AP, the AFP, the WSJ, the Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian, AOL News, and likely a host of others, are all calling the budding dictator “chubby cheeked.”

His epithet isn’t inaccurate, because Kim Jong Un is kind of fat. What is interesting, though, is that Kim Jong Un is going to wind up ruling over a country where there is a massive, chronic famine. Of all the crimes against humanity currently unfolding on the globe, North Korean famine is one of the most cruel and least publicized or well-understood. I would bet you could count the number of “chubby cheeked” North Koreans on one hand.