The “bodies” stuff grates on me too, but it basically comes from DuBois and his idea of “double consciousness” — the idea that a Black person (at his own time and stretching back into slavery) had to dramatically separate their inner life from their external actions.
So you’re getting the causality backwards. DuBois was in fact describing how dehumanizing it was to be forced to have that double consciousness, not trying to dehumanize anyone himself.
However, I think he’d probably be minorly annoyed by how that language of “bodies” has become separated from his theories and taken on its own wierd dynamics that he probably didn’t intend. He might not disagree with most of the actual substance of the theories based off of it, he’d probably just think that the language of “bodies” had really outgrown and outlived its usefulness.
At least half of the weird terms are like this—terms that have outgrown their original usages and now have their own meanings in an academic canon that Ari is just not privy to (which is why he would consider taking one of those courses in the first place). I'm probably going to write a response post, because I think usually Ari's writing is much more fair and measured than this, and I am hopeful that he will approach college with more of an open mind than he is currently displaying.
Probably you're mostly right. One of my old teachers read this post and said that the Black Feminist Theory course sounded interesting, "if you know what the words mean."
I look forward to reading your response... I think I likely am being too grumpy about it all. But, Christ, how open would my mind have to be before I could stomach learning about how "the disabled body has become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics"?
Maybe it's a matter of skewed expectations? I thought I'd run into Freddie deBoer–level Marxists, not all the most ridiculous caricatures from the Rufo crowd. I just really have trouble seeing how it helps anyone to learn these things, when they could be learning how to change a lightbulb or evaluate an integral.
When I was a math TA for our intro-level calculus courses, I ended up teaching a bunch of humanities people the rigorous delta-epsilon definition of limits, along with the Riemann sum trapezoidal integration necessary to define an integral. I'm a physics major, and even I never really used either of those things beyond my intro calc classes—most people don't need to know how to do an integral beyond their college years (and also you should really just google how to change a lightbulb).
Even though I was a physics major, I was "forced" to study Descartes and Hume in my philosophy classes, and Locke and Hobbes and Smith and Marx in my social and political theory classes. I'm really glad I did, because I no longer study physics—I work for my local county government in Illinois, where political philosophy is suddenly a really important thing for me to understand—and if I hadn't had such a comprehensive education on things I found "useless" at the time, I would be worse off for it.
But "useless" is still missing the point. I think that Universities are places for knowledge learning and production. They aren't always seen this way, because college degrees have become signaling mechanisms and are seen as standard for all employment (but that's a separate topic). The point I'm making is just that "efficiency" or "utility" is not what most of the top-tier colleges are designed for. The point of a liberal arts education is to provide a foundational understanding of the humanities and social sciences and natural sciences. And Yale is a liberal arts college—so this is exactly what you signed up for (and it's awesome!)
I guess I'm just saying, try to appreciate it for what it is instead of wishing it were something else. Many of your criticisms of college are super valid, but many of them stem from a misunderstanding of college's intended purpose. College isn't solely meant to maximize one's future profits (though it can certainly be used that way by business majors or MBAs but I digress)—it's supposed to be a place of learning, literally for higher education. That's the goal. If that higher education is weird or esoteric, so be it!
Also on the disabled body stuff, I can’t comment because I don’t know much about it. There’s probably some “woke”ness going on there, and probably some interesting points about disability rights being used by elites as a political cudgel or banner moral superiority and ignoring the perspectives of disabled people in their own right. I would hope that the course would focus on the latter, but I can’t say for certain—maybe it just sucks.
The disabled body as political site is a claim that might seem odd at first glance but is uncontroversial once you unpack it. Consider who gets to participate physically in society, who is allowed to occupy the sick role, which people are systematically disabled (nationally, globally) by pollution, overwork etc. You wouldn't have framed these issues in this language because you haven't been accultured to this way of writing but there is something of real substance underlying the framing here.
Nah, if anything you are being appropriately close-minded; it's a fun rhetorical trick people who are steeped in this sort of thing unintentionally use. If someone accuses them of being insane, you hit back by calling them out for being close-minded or not using the words in the correct way -- but in the meantime they'll use extremely loaded and weird verbiage in internally inconsistent ways. Any accusation of inconsistency will be met with increasingly subtle clarifications as to the definition of the words; you'll get the sense that every word means so damn much you're an idiot for ever thinking otherwise. It's incredibly effective. The secret is that if you don't say anything/say stuff vaguely in line with their ideology/say stuff vaguely using their verbiage, they will almost never apply the same standard of rigor.
I think at this point I've seen dozens of fairly smart people (often phd students at great institutions) go through this cycle of 'this is BS' to 'wait actually i didn't understand and was an asshole' back to 'this is BS'. Typically takes around 5-6 years. It's a pretty effective mind-virus, and a very tricky one to avoid, IMO.
It’s pretty easy to go through college and also grad school without encountering this stuff, assuming you don’t intentionally seek it out.
That said, I’d recommend against writing it off or forming strong opinions before you learn more about it. It’s not surprising the field-specific jargon doesn’t make much sense as an outsider; the same would be true of pretty much any field. I think it’s good advice to go into these topics with an open mind. And of course if you don’t like it, you can safely ignore it (see above).
For context, my major and PhD are in cognitive science and that’s also what I teach now, so my introduction to some of the topics you mention is only cursory. But I’ve gotten a lot of value from what I have learned.
That’s the point. “If you know what the words mean”. It’s a little psychological reward system for understanding all the double and triple meaning of the specialty words. That’s why they’re in quotations.
It also gives a person versed in the system a whole lot of wriggle room when challenged on any of the theory because they can fall back on increasingly less objectionable and more commonly used definitions. Which is infuriating in person, by the way.
I hated that in college because you got to the end and realized that the professor just presented a fringe academic theory as hard science, or gospel if you wanted to irritate them. I had a Spanish grad student have us all take the implicit bias test to make us aware of our unconscious racism, as if that wasn’t debunked by its own inventor. I realized real time I could just game it any way I wanted.
They all seemed entirely sincere in the same way your most corny school teacher tried to get everyone engaged in DARE or brought in an MLM lady to talk about starting your own business. More about patting yourself on the back for a good deed than a true evangelical mission.
I’m assuming I didn’t usually meet that cohort because I about faced in the art department as soon as the annual art show was won by a baby doll on a chair, surrounded by dismembered doll parts and splattered with red paint - an inspiring, bold statement on women’s bodily autonomy, if I recall correctly.
This is a pretty ridiculous take on what things you could be learning at Yale, although I generally agree that most of these courses seem self-evidently worthless. You didn't think to ask, where are the actually good humanities courses? Other than pointing at one decent history example, how about English? Learning to read Milton (or Homer, in classics) used to be the central example of a thing you might do in university. Probably the biggest harm of these "studies" courses is crowding that kind of work out.
I agree that some progressive language is cringey but a lot of these, like the affect theory course and the slavery and capitalism course, seem fine to me. This is something I see a lot in complaints like yours: there are legitimate grievances, though they’re fairly small, but when legitimate objects of grievance are targeted a bunch of other stuff gets grouped in.
Like, in answer to your (rhetorical, I think) question, the Comparative Colonialisms course seems like it should help people think clearly about the history of the U.S. and disentangle or connect the legacies of various events in that history that might be called colonial. That seems good!
FWIW, as someone who just graduated from a similar school, and with a degree in English no less, I only ever took one class that was indoctrination-y. Which is one too many, sure, but overwhelmingly my experience was that it was the students who came in doctrinaire and professors—including leftist profs—who consistently pushed or tried to push them toward more critical thinking and nuance. Take heart! (And Yuck Fale.)
Reminds me of “ marxism-Leninism” classes i had to take at Polytechnic University in Leningrad in 1970’s, the big difference though we never took it seriously…they were mandatory in Soviet Union. The odd thing is that i rejected all my friends claims that this is going on in schools, but looks like they have legit concerns, and some of Trump’s effort make more sense now…by the way, are there “conservative” Universities that have opposite perspective, or are there none?
I absolutely adore the cute little flags that show up to describe how fast the results were retrieved.
'Faster than you can sell out into consulting...'
Those people should be teaching some of the professors how to write.
On a slightly more serious note. I think all of these are basically foreign languages of a parallel culture. My math education stopped at high school geometry (although I will be taking college algebra this fall) so the math course description is about as foreign as the kooky course descriptions are.
I think the most interesting point you raise is that many of the descriptions read like theses. That's possibly meaningful, although I don't know what it might mean.
If that's any consolation, my (way less fancy) university also had DEI-descriptions on almost every course, but the actual profs were pretty chill (well, they still were SocDem to communists, and loved Marxists lens, but they weren't blinded by that love).
I have no idea who writes these labels, but they have very little connection to reality. Professor matters way more.
I sometimes have to write descriptions for my English courses (although I’m a grad student so I teach pretty basic undergrad courses and I avoid expressing my politics), and it’s mostly professors who write them at all levels except very basic required courses that have standard descriptions (like the normal-seeming, brief philosophy ones above). Grad class descriptions are supposed to appeal to students, but in the case of specialised undergrad courses, the goal is as often to appeal to advisors who are advising their undergrads on what to take. That’s probably why there can be such a massive disconnect between the tone of the description and the actual course: the description is marketing from one academic to other academics, the course is much less public-facing actual education.
I do think it's worse in women/non-white studies so. There is a kind of sneering attitude towards Europeans, whether they engage in transatlantic slave trade, or it's a man supporting women suffrage, but who is still has 19-century views on reproduction.
The content of the courses was still fine, but this refusal to try and understand motifs of people doing, objectively, atrocious shit, and instead mocking them on sight is pretty annoying. I don't think it's good for historians to think this way.
Really enjoyed this! Your writing was funny and succinct, and I definitely did not expect that one class to be in architecture. Woof.
Food for thought: is the purpose of college to get a job or just to learn? I think that there’s no real answer - different students are going to be there for different reasons.
At a liberal arts school like Yale, there’s going to be plenty of people who aren’t actually worried about future job prospects and just want to explore. Are some of these exploratory classes absurd? Sometimes, yeah. I think it’s also just what a substantial portion of the community wants.
You’re going to meet all kinds of people at school, and they’re going to be ridiculous in all kinds of ways! I wish you lots of luck in getting to know people you’re going to disagree with lots and making some good friends too.
Also, the worst descriptions are written for the professor, not the potential student taking a class. The audience is the students! Also, these obtuse and long descriptions are for classes that are hemoraging students. I know, I teach English at a liberal arts college. I personally feel that colleges should do away with any "Studies" department or programs.
“inter-American Cold War” sounds like a slightly asinine way of describing, you know, the Cold War in the Americas, which was an actual thing that happened and was probably at least moderately relevant to Spanish-language literature.
I probably would have gone with “intra-American,” but if you take North and South America as separate Americas, “inter-“ is OK.
What do you mean by "net-negative"? I've seen this phrasing describes in several blogs on here, and it seems like there's a deeper meaning being referenced here that I can't discern.
They're gesturing at a utilitarian calculus: negative or positive utility. It's talking about morality as a bank balance. I'm not sure if Peter Singer uses this exact language but plenty of blogosphere Effective Altruist act-consequentialists are influenced by his arguments.
The anthropology class listed in your initial list looks like a completely normal and anodyne class that addresses neo liberalism in a perfectly normie way. Its inclusion undercuts some of the force of your argument here.
The “bodies” stuff grates on me too, but it basically comes from DuBois and his idea of “double consciousness” — the idea that a Black person (at his own time and stretching back into slavery) had to dramatically separate their inner life from their external actions.
So you’re getting the causality backwards. DuBois was in fact describing how dehumanizing it was to be forced to have that double consciousness, not trying to dehumanize anyone himself.
However, I think he’d probably be minorly annoyed by how that language of “bodies” has become separated from his theories and taken on its own wierd dynamics that he probably didn’t intend. He might not disagree with most of the actual substance of the theories based off of it, he’d probably just think that the language of “bodies” had really outgrown and outlived its usefulness.
This is good context, thanks.
At least half of the weird terms are like this—terms that have outgrown their original usages and now have their own meanings in an academic canon that Ari is just not privy to (which is why he would consider taking one of those courses in the first place). I'm probably going to write a response post, because I think usually Ari's writing is much more fair and measured than this, and I am hopeful that he will approach college with more of an open mind than he is currently displaying.
Probably you're mostly right. One of my old teachers read this post and said that the Black Feminist Theory course sounded interesting, "if you know what the words mean."
I look forward to reading your response... I think I likely am being too grumpy about it all. But, Christ, how open would my mind have to be before I could stomach learning about how "the disabled body has become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics"?
Maybe it's a matter of skewed expectations? I thought I'd run into Freddie deBoer–level Marxists, not all the most ridiculous caricatures from the Rufo crowd. I just really have trouble seeing how it helps anyone to learn these things, when they could be learning how to change a lightbulb or evaluate an integral.
When I was a math TA for our intro-level calculus courses, I ended up teaching a bunch of humanities people the rigorous delta-epsilon definition of limits, along with the Riemann sum trapezoidal integration necessary to define an integral. I'm a physics major, and even I never really used either of those things beyond my intro calc classes—most people don't need to know how to do an integral beyond their college years (and also you should really just google how to change a lightbulb).
Even though I was a physics major, I was "forced" to study Descartes and Hume in my philosophy classes, and Locke and Hobbes and Smith and Marx in my social and political theory classes. I'm really glad I did, because I no longer study physics—I work for my local county government in Illinois, where political philosophy is suddenly a really important thing for me to understand—and if I hadn't had such a comprehensive education on things I found "useless" at the time, I would be worse off for it.
But "useless" is still missing the point. I think that Universities are places for knowledge learning and production. They aren't always seen this way, because college degrees have become signaling mechanisms and are seen as standard for all employment (but that's a separate topic). The point I'm making is just that "efficiency" or "utility" is not what most of the top-tier colleges are designed for. The point of a liberal arts education is to provide a foundational understanding of the humanities and social sciences and natural sciences. And Yale is a liberal arts college—so this is exactly what you signed up for (and it's awesome!)
I guess I'm just saying, try to appreciate it for what it is instead of wishing it were something else. Many of your criticisms of college are super valid, but many of them stem from a misunderstanding of college's intended purpose. College isn't solely meant to maximize one's future profits (though it can certainly be used that way by business majors or MBAs but I digress)—it's supposed to be a place of learning, literally for higher education. That's the goal. If that higher education is weird or esoteric, so be it!
Also on the disabled body stuff, I can’t comment because I don’t know much about it. There’s probably some “woke”ness going on there, and probably some interesting points about disability rights being used by elites as a political cudgel or banner moral superiority and ignoring the perspectives of disabled people in their own right. I would hope that the course would focus on the latter, but I can’t say for certain—maybe it just sucks.
The disabled body as political site is a claim that might seem odd at first glance but is uncontroversial once you unpack it. Consider who gets to participate physically in society, who is allowed to occupy the sick role, which people are systematically disabled (nationally, globally) by pollution, overwork etc. You wouldn't have framed these issues in this language because you haven't been accultured to this way of writing but there is something of real substance underlying the framing here.
Nah, if anything you are being appropriately close-minded; it's a fun rhetorical trick people who are steeped in this sort of thing unintentionally use. If someone accuses them of being insane, you hit back by calling them out for being close-minded or not using the words in the correct way -- but in the meantime they'll use extremely loaded and weird verbiage in internally inconsistent ways. Any accusation of inconsistency will be met with increasingly subtle clarifications as to the definition of the words; you'll get the sense that every word means so damn much you're an idiot for ever thinking otherwise. It's incredibly effective. The secret is that if you don't say anything/say stuff vaguely in line with their ideology/say stuff vaguely using their verbiage, they will almost never apply the same standard of rigor.
I think at this point I've seen dozens of fairly smart people (often phd students at great institutions) go through this cycle of 'this is BS' to 'wait actually i didn't understand and was an asshole' back to 'this is BS'. Typically takes around 5-6 years. It's a pretty effective mind-virus, and a very tricky one to avoid, IMO.
It’s pretty easy to go through college and also grad school without encountering this stuff, assuming you don’t intentionally seek it out.
That said, I’d recommend against writing it off or forming strong opinions before you learn more about it. It’s not surprising the field-specific jargon doesn’t make much sense as an outsider; the same would be true of pretty much any field. I think it’s good advice to go into these topics with an open mind. And of course if you don’t like it, you can safely ignore it (see above).
For context, my major and PhD are in cognitive science and that’s also what I teach now, so my introduction to some of the topics you mention is only cursory. But I’ve gotten a lot of value from what I have learned.
That’s the point. “If you know what the words mean”. It’s a little psychological reward system for understanding all the double and triple meaning of the specialty words. That’s why they’re in quotations.
It also gives a person versed in the system a whole lot of wriggle room when challenged on any of the theory because they can fall back on increasingly less objectionable and more commonly used definitions. Which is infuriating in person, by the way.
I hated that in college because you got to the end and realized that the professor just presented a fringe academic theory as hard science, or gospel if you wanted to irritate them. I had a Spanish grad student have us all take the implicit bias test to make us aware of our unconscious racism, as if that wasn’t debunked by its own inventor. I realized real time I could just game it any way I wanted.
They all seemed entirely sincere in the same way your most corny school teacher tried to get everyone engaged in DARE or brought in an MLM lady to talk about starting your own business. More about patting yourself on the back for a good deed than a true evangelical mission.
I’m assuming I didn’t usually meet that cohort because I about faced in the art department as soon as the annual art show was won by a baby doll on a chair, surrounded by dismembered doll parts and splattered with red paint - an inspiring, bold statement on women’s bodily autonomy, if I recall correctly.
This is a pretty ridiculous take on what things you could be learning at Yale, although I generally agree that most of these courses seem self-evidently worthless. You didn't think to ask, where are the actually good humanities courses? Other than pointing at one decent history example, how about English? Learning to read Milton (or Homer, in classics) used to be the central example of a thing you might do in university. Probably the biggest harm of these "studies" courses is crowding that kind of work out.
What are you studying, if I could ask?
I thought the whole 'body' thing came from Foucault and biopolitics?
I believe that you are correct. W.E.B DuBois is talking about ways of seeing yourself, kind of a mental process.
I could be cynical and say he was also dealing with real problems.
Oh, definitely.
I could be mistaken, this is just what I understood.
I agree that some progressive language is cringey but a lot of these, like the affect theory course and the slavery and capitalism course, seem fine to me. This is something I see a lot in complaints like yours: there are legitimate grievances, though they’re fairly small, but when legitimate objects of grievance are targeted a bunch of other stuff gets grouped in.
Like, in answer to your (rhetorical, I think) question, the Comparative Colonialisms course seems like it should help people think clearly about the history of the U.S. and disentangle or connect the legacies of various events in that history that might be called colonial. That seems good!
FWIW, as someone who just graduated from a similar school, and with a degree in English no less, I only ever took one class that was indoctrination-y. Which is one too many, sure, but overwhelmingly my experience was that it was the students who came in doctrinaire and professors—including leftist profs—who consistently pushed or tried to push them toward more critical thinking and nuance. Take heart! (And Yuck Fale.)
Reminds me of “ marxism-Leninism” classes i had to take at Polytechnic University in Leningrad in 1970’s, the big difference though we never took it seriously…they were mandatory in Soviet Union. The odd thing is that i rejected all my friends claims that this is going on in schools, but looks like they have legit concerns, and some of Trump’s effort make more sense now…by the way, are there “conservative” Universities that have opposite perspective, or are there none?
I know of Hillsdale College (https://www.hillsdale.edu/) and the University of Austin (https://www.uaustin.org/)... George Mason University economics are also known for their libertarian-ish slant.
University of Chicago.
I'd assume Notre Dame would tend at least a bit conservative, given the religious affiliation.
Liberty University comes to mind as a conservative Christian university that's more conservative than Christian.
I absolutely adore the cute little flags that show up to describe how fast the results were retrieved.
'Faster than you can sell out into consulting...'
Those people should be teaching some of the professors how to write.
On a slightly more serious note. I think all of these are basically foreign languages of a parallel culture. My math education stopped at high school geometry (although I will be taking college algebra this fall) so the math course description is about as foreign as the kooky course descriptions are.
I think the most interesting point you raise is that many of the descriptions read like theses. That's possibly meaningful, although I don't know what it might mean.
If that's any consolation, my (way less fancy) university also had DEI-descriptions on almost every course, but the actual profs were pretty chill (well, they still were SocDem to communists, and loved Marxists lens, but they weren't blinded by that love).
I have no idea who writes these labels, but they have very little connection to reality. Professor matters way more.
I sometimes have to write descriptions for my English courses (although I’m a grad student so I teach pretty basic undergrad courses and I avoid expressing my politics), and it’s mostly professors who write them at all levels except very basic required courses that have standard descriptions (like the normal-seeming, brief philosophy ones above). Grad class descriptions are supposed to appeal to students, but in the case of specialised undergrad courses, the goal is as often to appeal to advisors who are advising their undergrads on what to take. That’s probably why there can be such a massive disconnect between the tone of the description and the actual course: the description is marketing from one academic to other academics, the course is much less public-facing actual education.
I do think it's worse in women/non-white studies so. There is a kind of sneering attitude towards Europeans, whether they engage in transatlantic slave trade, or it's a man supporting women suffrage, but who is still has 19-century views on reproduction.
The content of the courses was still fine, but this refusal to try and understand motifs of people doing, objectively, atrocious shit, and instead mocking them on sight is pretty annoying. I don't think it's good for historians to think this way.
Really enjoyed this! Your writing was funny and succinct, and I definitely did not expect that one class to be in architecture. Woof.
Food for thought: is the purpose of college to get a job or just to learn? I think that there’s no real answer - different students are going to be there for different reasons.
At a liberal arts school like Yale, there’s going to be plenty of people who aren’t actually worried about future job prospects and just want to explore. Are some of these exploratory classes absurd? Sometimes, yeah. I think it’s also just what a substantial portion of the community wants.
You’re going to meet all kinds of people at school, and they’re going to be ridiculous in all kinds of ways! I wish you lots of luck in getting to know people you’re going to disagree with lots and making some good friends too.
A tangential piece of advice: take Sanskrit! I really enjoyed it at Yale, and it’s guaranteed to have a very small class size.
MATH 120 is also great, though somewhat dependent on who teaches it that year.
Counter point: Take all the crazy ones and become a full time anti-woke substack spy.
Not a problem at uatx…
Also, the worst descriptions are written for the professor, not the potential student taking a class. The audience is the students! Also, these obtuse and long descriptions are for classes that are hemoraging students. I know, I teach English at a liberal arts college. I personally feel that colleges should do away with any "Studies" department or programs.
Yes like social theory of the city. I hope it bleeds to death 😆
“inter-American Cold War” sounds like a slightly asinine way of describing, you know, the Cold War in the Americas, which was an actual thing that happened and was probably at least moderately relevant to Spanish-language literature.
I probably would have gone with “intra-American,” but if you take North and South America as separate Americas, “inter-“ is OK.
I think "discursive contexts" is the height of euphemism. Do they mean discussion?
What do you mean by "net-negative"? I've seen this phrasing describes in several blogs on here, and it seems like there's a deeper meaning being referenced here that I can't discern.
Net-negative means (roughly), if you take all the upsides and downsides of a thing, the downsides overall outweigh the upsides
eg, “smoking might be enjoyable in the short term, but it’s a net negative in the long run”
They're gesturing at a utilitarian calculus: negative or positive utility. It's talking about morality as a bank balance. I'm not sure if Peter Singer uses this exact language but plenty of blogosphere Effective Altruist act-consequentialists are influenced by his arguments.
Described*
The anthropology class listed in your initial list looks like a completely normal and anodyne class that addresses neo liberalism in a perfectly normie way. Its inclusion undercuts some of the force of your argument here.
Curious what college this is…did I miss that?
Yale! I think I mentioned it in passing once, but I have some gross weird embarrassment over it, so I don't like being too explicit...
Thank you for clarifying! And for sharing. That is some crazy ass ideology for college courses. Yikes. Glad I graduated when I did.
Social theory of the city is off the rails already 🤪