Achtung, MOS! It appears, from "Today's Paper" on line, that the Sunday Review section has returned to the New York Times this week. Douthat is being Douthat, Maureen Dowd is wondering for a whole column why we make so much of another country's royal family. There is a piece about how to talk to boys about sex (too late!). And Frank Bruni tells us Tucker Carlson is not our friend. I knew that.
Oh, yes, and the once powerful editorial board explains how to fix the Food and Drug Administration, which needs a lot of fixing. Not that fixing it will draw cheers in Traverse City, and, ergo the current overlord of the FDA and all agencies federal won't fix it.
I never did see an explanation for what wasn't there last week.
Heil! Yes, but back to the increasing thinness of the print edition...Maybe should cancel Sunday and spend it in church.
ReplyDeleteI thought Douthat got a bit tangled in his argument about English Departments, canons and values vis a vis secularization....
Anyway, as we all know, it is history departments that are at the heart of the humanities curriculum...reminding us of what we didn't get right last time.
So now I'm curious about what Frank Bruni said about Tucker Carlson. But not curious enough to subscribe to NYT; I'll find a back door somewhere. I'm never curious about what Douthat says. Maureen Dowd is sometimes entertaining in a snarky way. But I don't know why Harry and Megan's announcement is news. We've never heard of a kid deciding he doesn't want to make a career in the family business? And what exactly is the family business, besides furnishing the tabloids with something to write about?
ReplyDeleteYeah, the FDA needs fixing. But I think the only way to do that is to elect someone who isn't Trump.
On the subject of Meghan and Harry, Rod Dreher is tut-tutting and tsk-tsk-ing his little heart out: "...as an American who is fairly traditionalist about these things, I find her behavior to be appalling, and am sorry he got mixed up with a Hollywood celebrity...Harry and his greedy wife are exploiting his name, his heritage, and his family, while at the same time holding them in contempt. She has Americanized him."
DeleteWhat a dork. Dreher, not Harry.
Great Caesar's ghost! What business of Dreher's is it if Harry and Megan want to get out of the snow globe? I am guessing he approves of Brexit, and this is just Brexit writ small.
DeleteThey're calling it The Megxit.
DeleteI suspect that young Douthat will discover, sooner or later, that as messed up as the English departments are, it's history where the real chaos is. The NYT, which I think Douthat reads when he isn't downloading from the Journal of Higher Education, has a story this very day about how the same-liking history texts in Texas and California do not have identical contact. Texas doesn't like to talk about this and that, while California notes this and insists on that. But Texas textbook rules are an old, slow-news-day story.
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Delete"same lOOking texts" and "identical CONTENT."
DeleteKatherine, Reader's Digest version of Bruni's column. Carlson spent four days denouncing Trump's decision to drone to death the Iranian wassisname. As a result, some people who should know better have welcomed Carlson to the side of the angels. But, Bruni points out, Carlson isn't blaming Trump so much as his administration. And, of course, the usual suspects:
Delete(sample)"During his Tuesday show, Carlson performed political jujitsu and held two of the president’s principal Democratic adversaries responsible for exacerbated tensions with Iran. Referring to the Washington establishment and singling out Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, he said, “These are people who have been basically advocating for a kind of war against Iran for an awfully long time.”
" “It’s infuriating,” he added. “It’s because of Schumer and Pelosi and people like them that we got into Iraq in the first place.”
"Come again? A Republican president, George W. Bush, urged and oversaw the invasion of Iraq, and while Schumer authorized it, Pelosi voted against it, as did many more Democrats than Republicans."
Same old Tucker; just making noises that happen to sound similar to a different worldview.
Thanks, Tom.
DeleteHere's a link to the Times story, Tom mentions above. It compares Texas and California history text books for eighth and eleventh graders.
Deletehttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/12/us/texas-vs-california-history-textbooks.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share
Had brunch with the grandson today. Interrogated by his grandfather on purpose in life--taking off from this morning's sermon. Grandson reported that such was the final topic of the semester's philosophy course, which featured a guy who's name didn't come to mind--until it did. Thomas Nagel!! I had almost decided to reread his "Mind &Cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is almost Certainly False." I love the almost... The book is a defense of teleology. Second only to a defense of Metaphysics. (Which Douthat never mentioned). People who think Shakespeare has the answers are ALMOST certainly mistaken.
ReplyDeleteFurther discussion of required courses and organized curriculum underlined once again that (compared to LU, 1963) it is hit or miss. The issue being, have any of your friends, grandson, read any of the same books as you? He smiled. Books? he asked.
Though I have seen him reading books he suggested that a conversation around a common reading was not a common college experience, except by happenstance.
Douthat reminds me of this article in the WashPost yesterday:
ReplyDelete"Is college still worth it? Read this study." https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/personal-finance/is-college-still-worth-it-read-this-study/2020/01/10/b9894514-3330-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html
Unfortunately the link to the study doesn't work, but the gist of the story is that increasingly the costs of college don't pay off at least economically. So if they don't get Shakespeare and don't get metaphysics, world war 1 or the renaissance, and end up with a load of debt, why are they going to college?
A little comparison exercise. The value of a dollar in 1970 equals $6.66 in 2019. The cost for me to attend a Catholic college my freshman year in 1970 was $2200. Which in 2019 bucks would be $14652. I transferred to an in-state public college the following year. Tuition was $400 for two semesters. In 2019 that translates to $2664. However, the statistics I found for tuition cost at a private school in 2019 was $36801. At an in-state public school it is $10116.
DeleteSo average tuition at a public school has risen about 3.8 times the rate of inflation. And average tuition at a private school has risen about 2.51 times the rate of inflation. And these statistics are not including room and board, or books. No wonder the cost of college is not paying off economically. If wages have somewhat kept pace with inflation (and they haven't across the board) how do we explain that college costs have gone up to this extent?
College costs: The gyms?
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Delete"... how do we explain that college costs have gone up to this extent?"
DeleteHealth care and benefits costs for tenured faculty and.permanent staff. That's why 75 percent of college instructors are adjuncts. You can give them bigger class loads than tenured profs, pay them less, provide no (or pro-rated) benefits, and get rid of them easily by not renewing their contracts.
Jean, I don't think it's right that they treat adjunct instructors like that. But if 75% of the instructors are adjunct, you'd think we'd see tuition going down, because they're not paying them benefits. But costs to the students just keep on rising.
DeleteThe Nebraska University system just hired a new CEO. His salary is just under $1 million a year. Don't even get me started on what the athletic director or the head football coach is making. Margaret mentioned gyms. Which falls under the category of "ammenities". Ammenities include such thing as rock-climbing walls and lazy rivers. And dining halls that are more like a food court. My point is that college costs are including a lot of things that have a pretty tenuous connection to education.
Sorry, "amenities" is only supposed to have one m.
DeleteThey have stopped building amenities in Michigan since the legislature tied tuition rises to reduced funding. Many schools have sold off the beauty shops, cafes, food service and rock climbing walls to contractors.
DeleteNonetheless, they are paying STEM profs big bucks and no one with tenure retires until he's 80 or dead. So as health care costs and benefits rise, so do costs to students.
And look at what they pay admin and coaching staff.
I went through 4 years of Marquette (1958-1962)for the princely fully-loaded sum of $10,000. That's about $85,000 in today's highly inflated dollar.
ReplyDeleteYes, different times now. Even in the early 1970s, I was able to graduate with zero debt while working part time. Took me eight years to get my BA, but it was a good experience. Now counselors scare.kids with stories about how they're going to be college drop outs of they don't get it done in 4 years, and parents get into debt and frenzy trying to pay for it. I have so many.friends whose kids got kicked out of college after freshman year for drinking, smoking dope, and not bothering to go to class. Earn your first year kid, and then we'll see if you're scholar material, is my view.
DeleteWith our kids, it seemed like the colleges wanted to keep them longer than four years (paying full tuition the whole time, of course.) The way they did that was "gateway courses" that you had to have as a prerequisite in your major. But they only offered them every other semester, and only offered one section at a time. When that was filled up, too bad, you had to wait until next time.
DeleteI'm not sure what the deal is with getting them out quicker, except maybe it means a bigger volume of business. Some schools have a rebate deal if you're out in less than four years.
DeleteOffering gen ed required courses every other term is a way to reduce the number of adjuncts they have to hire.