Shots in the Dark

This is from Edward Snowden’s online chat yesterday:

So far are things going the way you thought they would regarding a public debate? – tikkamasala

Answer:

Initially I was very encouraged. Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.

It’s pathetically true. As interesting as Snowden’s story may be, in and of itself, it’s not important. His character, his motives, his life before now—not important. What matters is what he’s disclosed….

One serious, two less so.

“Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American.”

- Edward Snowden

“They’re tweeting themselves senseless!”

And…

“She’s grabbing for the shaft—she’s a shaft-grabber!”

Russell Brand, referring, respectively, to the staff of MSNBC’s Morning Joe and host Mika Brzezinski. Russell Brand is kind of a genius, I think.

One of the paper’s reporters conducts a lengthy interview with David Ortiz to discuss his fitness regimen.

The “s…” word goes unmentioned.

…where apparently the state of manhood is in disarray.

The National Post reports on a Toronto fundraiser to raise money for a “Canadian Centre for Men and Families.” The lead speaker is Rutgers anthropologist and gender studies professor Lionel Tiger (yes, that’s his name). Tiger apparently invented the term “male bonding.”

In an interview, the Canadian who has taught at McGill University and the University of British Columbia, said his talk at a downtown Toronto bar will aim to set aside moral or religious arguments and simply describe the current state of maleness, in which schoolboys are drugged with Ritalin to make them behave like girls; university-aged men have lost long-standing mating systems in the name of sexual liberation; universities themselves wholeheartedly embrace feminist victimology; and the worst is assumed about any adult man who ends up in family court, or is accused of domestic violence.

What does that mean, “university-aged men have lost long-standing mating systems”? How curious.

In other news, the Daily Mail reports that the University of Kansas has launched a legal fight to shut down a Twitter page called KU Boobs. The content is pretty self-explanatory. (Here’s the Facebook page.)

And back to the National Post again: It runs a very curious story from the Telegraph about Lindsay Mills, the girlfriend of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who appears to be something of a free spirit; the Post describes her as a “vivacious pole-dancing girlfriend.”

Mills, who went to art college, actually appears to be a dancer with libertarian tendencies—nothing particularly bizarre. But the article makes her look loony—and, by extension, speaks to the character of Edward Snowden. Given that Mills’ blog is not online anymore, you have to wonder who provided the Telegraph with all this information.

Incidentally, one of the photos used to illustrate the article is pulled straight off Facebook, and simply credited: “Facebook.” As I’ve been telling friends for years, never post anything on Facebook with any expectation of even limited privacy.

I have to run to various meetings, but I want to write more about the character assassination of Edward Snowden, which is surely being fueled by government leaks and assisted by compliant fools such as David Brooks, who actually accuses Snowden of “[betraying] the cause of open government]”….

As regular SITD readers know, I’ve long argued that one of the great changes of the 21st century will come in human interaction with animals. As we learn to communicate with animals and better understand and appreciate their intelligence, our relationships with nature, God and ourselves will be forced to change.

Now the Atlantic reports on an animal behaviorist who argues that, soon, our computers will allow us to communicate with our pets.

Con Schlobodnikoff, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University, focuses his studies on the communication of prairie dogs.

The creatures, he says, talk to each other using “the most sophisticated animal language that has been decoded.” The animals have word-like phonemes, combining those into sentence-like calls. They have social chatter. They can distinguish between types of predators that are nearby — dogs, coyotes, humans — and seem to have developed warnings that specify the predators’ species and size and color.

And if we can understand the communication between prairie dogs, we can devise ways to become part of it.

Like me, Schlobodnikoff is fascinated by the implications of what could be perhaps the most fundamental shift in the way human beings live on and interact with our planet—and he shares the thought that resistance to the idea that animals have language is essentially a form of species bias. Insecurity, really.

…for the most part, there is the thought that we humans have to be really special — and language is part of what makes us special. Back when I was a graduate student, people used to talk about (at that time, quaintly) “man” as a tool-user — the only one who was capable of using tools. Well, then we found that lots of animals could make tools, as well. So then the story shifted: humans were the only ones with culture. And then we found that lots of other animals have culture. So then we had language as the only other thing that distinguishes us from other animals. And now we’re finding out that lots of other animals have language.

It’s a fascinating interview.

Dollar Shave Club releases a new product—and accompanying video.

I thought Evelyn Hammonds said something interesting in her statement of resignation.

“I am looking forward to redesigning my classes in light of new technologies and modes of teaching, and I’m eager to return to my teaching and research on race, genomics and gender in science and medicine.”

Perhaps I’m over-interpreting it, but the first half of that sentence—”redesigning my classes in light of new technologies”—felt like a shot across the bow to me, a way of saying, I’ll continue to teach at Harvard, but I’m also going to be reaching out to an audience outside the university.

Which prompted me to think of a situation that online education could easily create for Harvard: a professor who becomes more popular, and thus more powerful, because of her online presence than for her teaching to actual Harvard students or other engagement with Harvard.

Especially if that professor has reason to feel alienated from or disenchanted with the university, as Hammonds probably does—what might the combination of online stature and in-house disillusion do to her sense of obligation and loyalty to the university? What happens if a tenured professor becomes an online star but is otherwise not a particularly good campus citizen…especially if her online course makes money for Harvard?

More and more questions about MOOCs, which may destroy Harvard in the process of saving it….

The Globe and the Journal report that Harvard is desperately trying to boost interest in the humanities.

From the Globe:

The report takes aim at the declining number of Harvard students who major in the humanities, which also include English, religion, and romance languages. Since 2003, the number majoring in the humanities dropped from 21 percent to 17 percent, and the number who considered such majors has fallen off sharply.

Over the past eight years, more than half of students who said before arriving at Harvard that they planned to concentrate in the humanities wound up choosing another major, the report found.

From the Journal:

This “is an anti-intellectual moment, and what matters to me is that we, the people in arts and humanities, find creative and affirmative ways of engaging the moment,” said Diana Sorensen, Harvard’s dean of Arts and Humanities.”

An interesting quote; I started to wonder what Sorensen was referring to when she used the term “anti-intellectual moment,” until I read a bit further in the article.

The weaker job prospects in certain fields have led four Republican governors to call for funding cuts at departments in public universities that they don’t believe prepare students for the workforce.

“If you want to take gender studies, that’s fine, go to private school,” North Carolina GOP Gov. Patrick McCrory said in a radio interview in January. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if it’s not going to get someone a job.”

Okay—an anti-intellectual moment.

Part of me hates the idea that the point of college is “to prepare someone for a job.” I prefer Harvard’s argument that the point of college is to create educated men and women. What McCrory is really promoting is essentially education as industrial policy, which is something we used to associate with the neoliberals of the 1980s, only in a somewhat perverted way. The problem with industrial policy, as the Republicans used to point out, is that it’s extremely hard for government to know exactly what to invest in to prepare people for jobs and strengthen the country’s economic future. And, of course, we don’t only want people to have good jobs, we want them to be thoughtful citizens who have grappled with moral and philosophical issues. Otherwise, you get Mark Zuckerberg, a success without a soul.

It’s sad that Harvard has to generate interest in the humanities, but you can’t say it’s surprising. Even Harvard grads have to be concerned about the job market, and when you’re paying so much money for college, it’s very hard to think of it as just a time to think and learn. Plus, today’s Harvard students have spent most of their lives thinking of everything they’re doing in the present as fodder for their Harvard applications, and that forward-looking utilitarianism is a hard mindset to abandon; you can’t just ask them to stop thinking thusly the moment they set foot in Harvard Yard. To do so would be to rebuke the very methodology that landed the students at Harvard in the first place.

This is, I think, a stressful moment in higher education, with so many profound questions about its purpose and its future simmering. It’s a fantastic opportunity for Drew Faust to articulate an educational agenda and philosophy for Harvard and higher education in general. I’m just not hearing it from her.

The green roofs of Chicago, where I am today….

That’s Barneys, by the way….