Episode 21: "The Campus" in the American Imagination with Samuel Catlin

The founders and the great leaders who had come through this institution in the past believed in religious liberty, they believed in democracy, they believed in morality and virtue and the dignity of every human person.

They believed in the free exchange of ideas and they detested mob rule.

Hello, I'm Adrian Dobb.

And I'm Weira Donegan.

And whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

Adrian, what are we talking about today?

Well, we're talking about the place where we all find ourselves, the place that paves our way and corrodes our souls, the campus.

And we're joined today by an amazing guest.

Sam Catlin is joining us from the University of Buffalo, where he is the Irving M.

and Marilyn C.

Schuman Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Jewish Thought.

He just wrote an amazing article or essay really for Parapraxis Magazine, one of my faves, about the campus and how the campus doesn't exist.

And a little thing about me, I've been writing about the cancel culture panic for

going on four years.

And so I have a great deal of sympathy for

the...

What the fuck are you talking about, school, of analyzing campus discourses?

And so I loved that essay.

It came out much to my chagrin, like a minute after I sent off the page proofs to my own book.

So I cannot cite it.

But I thought I could do the next best thing and ask Samuel to talk with us today.

Welcome to Embed with the Right.

Hi, thanks for having me.

And can I ask, I mean, so we always now sort of tell our listeners when we're recording this, which I think is not actually what you're supposed to do in a podcast.

But it is May 3rd, Friday.

This might matter just in case we make reference to current events.

And then by the time...

we publish this, you know, events are totally different.

And like, you know, people are flying helicopters over uh college campuses and you're like why are they not mentioning this it's like well that's because it hasn't happened yet maybe so this is may 3rd um 9 a.m pacific uh and what's the situation like uh in in your nick of the woods here

things are not that heated but that's only relative to how heated they are elsewhere um so like we did have uh an attempt at forming one of these encampments that have been popping up at institutions around the country that was very quickly dismantled.

And we had, I think,

if I have it right, and we're still figuring this out, but I think there were six different police forces present.

And it was very much a display, a preemptive display of force.

What was at the end of the day about 20 to 25 committed protesters.

And I was there filming,

observing and filming.

the arrests, which were quite violent,

certainly unnecessarily so.

I mean, i think all all arrests are necessary and certainly all police violence is unnecessary but even if you were to grant the premise that sometimes it's necessary what was happening here was really people sitting in a circle who were being thrown to the ground pinned down um beaten so that happened uh just uh two days ago here and the university it's it's a suburban university so it's

very much a commuter school.

There are dorms, but a lot of the students don't live on campus.

And so it's pretty difficult for there to be sustained political organizing.

It's infrastructurally hard to do.

And so it's been a little more scattershot than what you see at some of these other institutions.

Yeah, I mean, that's already, I think, for some listeners that maybe,

you know,

whose experience of college is maybe not as in-depth as those of us who somehow never seem to be able to leave it.

But, you know, yeah,

one thing we do notice these days is that there is, you know, a great deal of variety and diversity in America and college experiences and college life.

And yet the image we have, and that's kind of the topic of your essay, that we have of the college and the campus is weirdly monolithic.

And the kinds of, you know, the impulse you just showed of just like explaining what type of campus you're dealing with, it's the same thing I do all the time.

For us inmates, it's obvious that that's the first thing you have to do.

But it's

shockingly obvious to other people that

no such contextualization is ever necessary.

Like, we know what college students are, whether they're at DeVry University or at Princeton in some way, right?

Like, we know what they're like, we know they're privileged, we know they have blue hair, we know they live in dorms, right?

And I think that that was such a brilliant way in which you opened that up in your essay to sort of say, like, that's a phantasm.

This thing,

an object that can contain all these these things that you know so well, even though you've like seen one exemplar of it, like that's a phantasm.

Only psychoanalysis can explain to you why you have this image.

Yeah, and one of the questions I was trying to ask, there are a couple that I was trying to address in the essay, but one of them that still I didn't really answer.

I got at, but it still stays with me is not just why is that image the image that people have of the campus.

That's what I did get at in the essay, but also why is it that students at certain kinds of institutions are able to organize politically in the way that makes them available as the image of the student?

Because

I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, which is one of these elite residential research universities.

And

that's a place where students kind of have the time.

It's almost a luxury to be able to figure out what you think and then organize to try to achieve your goals.

And other kinds of institutions don't facilitate that degree of mass political organizing among the students.

But then at the level of media discourse, all of that gets flattened into those few representative examples.

It's so fascinating to think about the fact that organizing is going on on very different campuses right now.

I mean, the example I always give is Cal Poly Humboldt, which is really, that's a very

very different kind of school from let's say UCLA.

But I do also imagine it means that organizing must must mean totally different things there.

It's just that the students are contending with very different headwinds than they are on the quad or on the south lawn at various

highly credentialed institutions.

I mean, the reason why we care, I guess, on this podcast, I mean, beyond the fact that

we care about the university, is also, of course, that the campus, as you describe it, that phantasm has kind of co-evolved alongside a conservative media environment

obsessed with it, right?

Like I feel like the campus was never available to just sort of say, hey, what a bunch of weirdos.

It was always available to be like, hey, what a bunch of weirdos.

Why'd you vote for Ronald Reagan?

It's been part of an electoral pitch.

And that's one reason we're here, because we're in bed with the right.

And the other is that

in a weird way, gender and sexuality comes up again and again

when we think about the coddling of the college student, the really gross fantasies about, do these students know what would happen to them if you dropped them in Gaza?

And they're like,

what kind of argument is that?

You just imagine violence being done to these young people.

Like, have your head examined, please, you know?

But there is this kind of, there's a gendered valence to a lot of this and has been, really, I think, since the 1960s.

Adrian, just to jump in in some more recent iterations of this campus panic that has arisen in response to student Gaza solidarity encampments.

One of the critiques you see coming from the right wing is that this is because students are not having enough sex that they need to be engaged in, I guess, in this imagination, some kind of like wholesome heterosexual levity rather than engaging with some kind of unwholesome, malignant political force.

Yeah, which is in some ways kind of a turducken of campus discourse because like every part of that is like this weird hypostatization of the campus, right?

Like on the one hand, like, yes, that's what the students are like.

And then it is also this like very weird construction where kind of opposite things are always true of the college student, right?

They're too censorious and too soft.

They're too soft, too hard, too, too easily triggered,

too insensitive, too, you know, closed-minded and too relativistic.

And I guess sort of too,

yeah, how to put this, hypersexual and not sexual enough.

Yeah, I mean, one thing that came to mind as you both were speaking was something, another thing that's been on my mind, and I haven't been able to figure out why this is exactly it, but I think you're getting at it, is

the blue hair thing, hair dye in general, is like this weird metonym in this discourse for

people who are not,

I think basically it is at bottom, it's not natural.

Your hair is not a natural color and that isn't right.

And that means that you're also not natural in these, you know, quote unquote natural in these other ways.

You're not sufficiently

laminated into the social order as I envision it.

The other thing I wanted to say is if we could just give a sort of concrete recent example from this past two weeks that I wrote about in the essay was the

Colombia President Minus Shafiq's sort of disenrolling of the campus protesters.

So they were suspended and by being suspended, they became trespassers, but they couldn't have been called trespassers previously.

Right.

Which I think is a kind of very concrete, precise instance of this weird doubleness that you're talking about in the figure of the student, where I think the reality is that college students are a kind of weird, ambiguous social position.

They're not, they're constantly infantilized, but they're also technically adults,

able to do all the things that adults do except sometimes purchase alcohol.

And

they therefore have a kind of symbolic instability that I think enables them to be selectively coded one way or the other way, depending on the whims of the discourse.

That seems exactly right.

I mean, it's it's fascinating to think about, I mean, several people have pointed out that like, in some way, we're living through the unsettled aftermath still of the end of in loco parentis, right?

So that like in the 19 until the 1960s, it was assumed that basically the school took over for the parents.

And that was done away with.

The Supreme Court says you can't do that.

But then what are they?

What is the university to them, right?

Like it's not non-parental.

It clearly has

some responsibility to them and seems to be somewhat selective and when it exercises that.

It has some measure of control over them.

But as you say, like they occupy this sort of middle space and

it's something that the rest of society seems to have real trouble kind of figuring out what to do with.

To bring this ambiguity of the student status back to these Gaza encampments for a second, I think, you know, to Sam's point about disenrollment of suspended students, we're also seeing sort of rhetorical disenrollment of

these protesters more broadly as they, some of them become labeled as outside agitators.

You know, the

New York City Mayor Eric Adams just this morning put out a press release about the recent like really military raids raids by the NYPD the other night on the Columbia and city college campuses uptown in which there were pie charts of how many of the arrestees were enrolled students and how many were not right and the permeability of this student non-student status on the campus the idea of this like enclosed space that is at once rarefied and entitling its occupants to protection and also a crucible of potential corruption is I think like a really rich psychological text.

Sam, I wanted to know what you thought about this outside agitator narrative.

First of all, about that pie chart that he showed, even that chart itself is rhetorically unstable.

So the top part of the chart breaks down both arrests, CCNY and Columbia, into students and non-students.

And then the label at the bottom, the fine print, describes affiliates and non-affiliates of the institutions.

So even the document that Adams put out can't decide whether the problem is that these people don't belong to the universities or whether the problem is that they're not students.

And obviously there's ultimately, I don't think it matters either way politically.

I think people who aren't involved in any way in the university should be going to these protests.

But nevertheless, there's some real stakes to that distinction.

You know, one of those codes faculty as just as much an outsider as some random person off the street.

So if we do care about institutional affiliation and belonging as a criterion of participation, that actually matters kind of a lot, whether you're distinguishing between students and non-students or affiliates and non-affiliates.

And then, yeah, where do suspended students fit into that?

It's not explained.

And we might add,

like, one thing that has been one of the big changes in higher ed, and certainly at Columbia, I don't know about city college.

I'm hoping they were a little bit more circumspect in this way, is what we call administrative bloat.

That is to say, universities have large administrative bodies,

some of which are famously engaged in DEI and

racial justice work, meaning

who are they?

Like, these are people invested in the community.

They're drawing salaries from Columbia University, presumably.

But by that pie charts logic, they would in fact be outside agitators, right?

It's like,

it's a weird outside agitator if he's on your payroll, gotta say, right?

But you're right, there's this like need to police a boundary and an assumption that there is a boundary to police, that like for all of us who live on these campuses, like,

what are you doing?

Like, this doesn't work.

Yeah, I mean, this is a larger question about the ongoing deterioration of American higher education and the emergence of an administrative class that doesn't seem necessarily to have education as its aim, that in some ways is pitted against faculty and against students.

That's a larger battle.

But

also, I would note that, like, to your point, Maura, like, the police raids of these institutions.

What is a police officer storming a campus if not an outside agitator?

It seems very clear to me that there are outside agitators in these situations and they are people who are armed and coming onto campus to drag students off the campus.

I mean, what is a PAC-funded airplane flying a banner about anti-Semitism over Harvard?

That seems like outside agitation to me.

If we're gonna label anything outside agitators, there's all these outside actors who are getting involved in these protests, and none of them are the people protesting.

Well, so this is something that

I really sort of tried to hone in on in my book, that the fact that the campus discourse does two things, right?

The one hand, it says, yeah, there is, it is essentially a long license for outside agitation.

It's saying your opinions belong there.

It matters what you personally think about Columbia University.

Like you may have never been there.

You may not be an alumna, alumnus or alumna.

You might not, you know, be able to find it on a map, uh, right, but like it, it, it is okay for it to matter to you, right?

That was Reagan's big pitch to Californians in 1965, right?

You may never have been to Berkeley, and it might be kind of weird to imagine people half your age, like, have not having a shirt on, right?

Like, but that's okay, like you,

it is your business, and you should involve yourself in it.

The entire campus discourse isn't one large invitation for outside agitation, right?

Like, half the global press corps seems to have descended on these campuses in the last

seven days.

And like, none of them ask the questions, like, what are we doing here?

Is this something, right?

Like, what is it that I am doing here?

Like, framing these people, these people that are 19, that probably for the first time are talking into a mic in their lives.

We have met the outside agitators, and it is us, right?

And in some way,

we've been allowed to be blind to that.

The fact that we are voyeurs, the fact that we are interlopers, and we don't have to feel bad about it, like, because

we're the good ones.

We have to sort of come in and control these,

you know, these wayward students.

This might be a useful moment for us to drill down on what the campus serves in the public imagination, like, what fears it animates, and what are the stakes of that investment in there.

Because, you know, I think it's one thing to just say, to quote me and girls, like, she doesn't even go here.

And it's another, I think, to try and elucidate why the campus as an abstraction and then the campus protesters as these you know symbolic individuals arouses so much anxiety.

There's so much to say about this and there's so many scales at which that abstraction is working too.

So I do think that at the largest possible scale, when people hear about, and I'm using people also as an abstraction, when there's interest in what's going on on campus, that interest is also interest in like what's going on in America.

And there's this,

I think think

on a psychic level, there's a collapse happening of the campus as a figure for the nation state.

That's how I've been able to make sense of it.

And that's also how I've been able to make sense of the elevation of these particular elite schools to

the figure of the campus.

It has to do in part, in the essay I talked a bit about the sort of architectural favoring, like why the space lends itself to this kind of imagining, the quadrangle, the ivy, the bricks.

But I also think that decades and decades of college application discourse feed into this.

This idea that these schools pick from among the very best Americans, the most special ones, and assemble them into these curated classes of not just the most intelligent, but also the most diverse in every sense of the word cohorts of people, that that's an exercise in curating a community, curating a citizenry.

And that also, I think, really lends itself then to national level level investment, where it's like, well, these are the young, these are the best young people in America, and they're all being held up for us as that,

as precisely what we ought to aspire to be.

And they're going to these institutions that are these organs for class reproduction and class mobility.

And it seems like it's a perfect recipe then for

an isolated site, the campus, to be

a place to work out your anxieties about what's going on nationally.

Where's the future?

What's the future of the nation?

Where's the nation going?

This strikes me as something that could be cast in a few different balances.

Like one is

class anxiety among

what we might think of as adult elites, that the institutions that produced them and that conferred their superior status

might be conferring that, weakening that status by conferring it on people who are less worthy, right?

There's that.

And then there's this also kind of like class resentment potential among those who, you know, didn't get into Columbia, Yale, Harvard,

who might see themselves as sort of excluded from this rarefied status that is now also being exposed as, you know, somehow pernicious, you know, for the wrong reasons that people like me consider pernicious, right?

So like one of the things I noticed about Columbia is that there was a New York Post story.

about some of the initial arrestees talking about how rich their parents were.

And you can read that in a couple ways.

One is that these are kids who come from privilege and thus are unworthy or insincere in their claims to radical politics.

Or you can see it as kids who come from privilege and are not doing their duty to be loyal to that class status, right?

And it kind of like functions both ways about like resentment at the upper class and anxiety of the upper class to preserve its own status.

And it's weird that these seemingly opposed resentments can be wielded towards the same end,

which is antagonism towards the student protest.

Yeah, I mean, that's fundamentally the neoconservative view of the campus, isn't it?

Like, Barbara Ehrenreich talks about this in Fear of Falling, that like the neocons who largely operated outside of the university but had gone, right, including city college, that they kind of felt that they had to become traitors sort of to their class in order to save that class because they thought, like, well, what they're now teaching in college, right?

This is the whole cavil about the like the dying canon, et cetera, et cetera.

They're like, well, they are not really doing the thing they need to do to reproduce the class right they're they're debasing in some way sort of the the bases of our of our power um the best way to preserve it is to critique it from the outside and so i i think that one of the things that has happened since the 1980s is that that neoconservative uptake has really become available to a staggering number of americans right like we're all

invited to be Irving Crystal right now looking at universities, which is really kind of remarkable.

But I think that's what it is, right?

This gesture, I mean, Samuel already kind of alluded to this, the heightening of the campus as this like utopian space or this space of like, you know, the best that we can offer as a nation is of course always going to be disappointed.

And it is a giant stage just to stage disappointment, right?

Like, I was an alum and when I went here, it was like this.

And now, right?

Like, it's the whole thing is an invitation to, frankly, also grapple with your own aging process, you know, whatever you want to call it, right?

Like the fact that like, you know, you keep getting older and they keep staying the same age.

But it also is a, it's just like, it's, it's an invitation to kind of do these grand gestures of disappointment.

There's a whole class of, I think, liberal pundits that probably peaked, frankly, in senior year of college and who just like seem to be like performing like, oh, well, you have no idea what it's like now at Princeton.

It's like, I mean, it's probably, it's twice as hard to get in there when you went there, Bozo, but like, you know, but still they're able to like kind of perform this level of like, oh, God, like, you know, what has happened to these places that were so important to us?

And it's like, it's being kind of offered for that, I feel like.

It's like, hardly anyone ever is like, oh, how inspiring.

It's always like, I'm so disappointed.

Yeah, I mean, it does seem like the campus is an available object for this kind of working out of one's own anxieties, whether those are political anxieties or personal anxieties, you know, at every level.

And from multiple directions, I think that's partially why I found psychoanalysis a useful lens for thinking about this, is not just because

we already talked a little bit about the sort of fantasizing about the sex lives of college students that sort of runs throughout all of this, but also insofar as the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy is something that can sustain overdetermination and can sustain contradiction.

So the New York, what was it, the Post that ran that article, you know, it's offering that article up and

it does everything it needs to do for everybody.

Despite the fact that it appears to be towing one particular line about these protesters, that line can be read from multiple directions.

And that's what makes it a fantasy.

It's not just that it's one person's fantasy, but that it's a space where everybody's fantasies can simultaneously be brought to bear without the discourse collapsing under the weight of all that energy.

Everybody's obsessed with the campus and that for a variety of different reasons.

And the campus can take all of it.

Yeah, I mean, that's in some way the real question here, right?

Like, we've lost the ability, and you can still see it in other countries and I think in other eras, like we've lost the ability to just not give a shit what 19-year-olds are doing, right?

Like there is a, which I'm not saying like 19-year-olds also do significant things, but like the bar ought to be kind of high.

These were people who were, let's not forget, like 15, four years ago, we've divested ourselves really of the collective ability to just be like, all right, I guess that's the thing they now do.

Not sure what it means for my weekend.

I'm just going to, you know, go, you know, grout some tile or whatever I do, right?

Like it's, you you know, the idea that like, no, what these kids do matters.

And, you know, it's, I mean, I earlier made fun of it as voyeurism, and there isn't a voyeuristic element, but you're right.

It's sustaining a bunch of, a bunch of narratives, a bunch of questions, a bunch of, a bunch of self-positionings and self-conceptualizations for sure.

So one thing I wanted to ask about, like, do you have a theory as to when this started or how this happened?

I wrote this essay kind of as a one-off thing, although the process of writing it has made me want to keep writing writing about it, so I may continue working in this direction.

I can say as a little bit of like biographical data about me that I got interested in this well before October 7th, which is when I sort of date it in the essay,

because I wrote my dissertation on literary theory,

like the intellectual history of this thing that we call literary theory.

And what you learn very quickly if you look into that intellectual history is that the history of the discourse on literary theory is very much a history of campus panic.

Oh my God, the children are not reading literature anymore.

They're reading Foucault.

Oh my goodness, this is such a scandal.

And that was the first iteration of this that I started to conceptualize.

And I started conceptualizing it.

in my graduate work in that pretty different context.

But in order to figure out what was going on there, I had to start thinking about like why people, yeah, why do people spend so much time fantasizing about what's happening in English classrooms at Yale University, a place that educates, again, far less than 1% of the American population.

English majors make up even less of that, 1%.

2% or 3%, yeah.

And so the fact that, well, yes, maybe they're not reading the whole Fairy Queen anymore, and maybe they're also reading, you know, a little bit of Edward Saeed, you know,

the idea that that might be happening is

something that was being litigated in the pages of Newsweek in the 1980s, in the pages of the New York Times.

These big journals and

newspapers are concerned about a few people being assigned a few essays.

That seemed so disproportionate, and I really became hung up on it then.

So all I can say in answer to your question is that already in the 1970s, this was very much happening quite apart from political activity.

And I think the go-to origin point would would be the 60s and anti-war protests in the 60s.

And I think that's maybe right.

I don't know for sure.

But I think it's more salient, actually, to look at when there's not an incipient political crisis around which students are mobilizing, like what's happening right now.

People still talk all the time in all of these magazines and newspapers about what are college students doing?

And that's real campus panic.

Yeah,

I think that's so well put, that in some way, right, the idea that this is reactive is the first lie, right?

Like it's actually about the people

doing the projecting, then about like the kids can do whatever the hell they want.

Like, that's not to say that's not to excuse everything college students ever do, but it's to say it's fairly independent.

And just to give

a sense of what Samuel is talking about here, just so that you don't think he's making this up, this is the cover from New York magazine, January 21st, 1991.

It's a picture of a worried-looking white woman.

And the headline is, are you politically correct?

And here comes the the the subhead am i guilty of racism sexism classism am i guilty of ageism ableism lookism am i logocentric right like it's right in there right like the third thing is like a for for those of you who are not who did not like like us uh study literary theory logos logocentrism is a is a important concept in one seminar you took that one time in graduate school i would say and

the idea that it's like on the cover of the fucking magazine is like, this is the thing you should care about.

Like the next, I think the next issue is about like the drug war, right?

And you're like, sure.

Yes, logocentrism is definitely on the same level of national crisis.

Like the idea that like young people say that, again, 3% of 1% of students, you know, who are whatever, like 10% of Americans, like might know what logocentric means is a crisis.

Like, that's remarkable.

But also, like, this goes back way further than the 90s, this campus panic.

We can historicize it at least back i think to you know william f buckley got a man at yale right this is and and that means it has been crucially central in forming the 20th century conservative imagination as positioning themselves as restoring a endangered or lost uh pure

like antediluvian uh like campus culture and then also uh insulating the american mind against the threats that are emerging from this, you know, nefarious,

changed, fallen campus of today.

Yeah, I mean, Buckley is such an interesting case because in some way, Samuel was mentioning the 80s and 90s, and so that would be sort of the Dinesh de Souza era, Alan Bloom era, so closing of the American mind, and then the 50s, right, with William F.

Buckley's Got a Man at Yale.

Those are actually, right, two opposed critiques of the American campus.

Buckley is saying,

The campus is malignant because it cleaves itself apart from the rest of America, right?

He says, you take a bunch of capitalist, individualist boys, and you turn them into Sisified socialist atheists, right?

And Bloom is really saying the American campus is getting submerged in American society.

It's no longer distinct enough, right?

And I think it's really, really key that, like,

even in the conservative imagination, like, it's not one project.

It's always both and, right?

Like, you're too distinct.

You're not distinct enough.

You know, you're, you know, you think you're not elitist enough.

You're too elitist.

It's really noticeable that

from its very inception, this discourse kind of appeals to people who kind of have enough remoteness from the campus to not notice that

those are two diametrically opposed imperatives in some way.

Well, I mean, I could add about Yale specifically that one of the things that I found in my research on literary theory was the curious and persistent prominence of Yale as the site where all of this discourse was being worked out.

And I do think that Buckley

is key in sort of offering Yale up as the campus par excellence.

That's not totally determined.

Obviously, we've seen, and I argued in the essay, that the campus is mobile.

It can go where it needs to go to serve the interests of the discourse.

But that when people started getting worried about literary theory in the 70s, they were worried specifically about a group of people at Yale

in the Complet department and the English department who were doing something called theory.

None of the four people really was doing the same thing.

It was very much a kind of media creation that these four people,

so this is Jeffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, Paul DeMond, and J.

Hillis Miller.

These four people are somehow doing some sort of organized project when in fact it's a heterogeneous group of people.

But that group of four professors became this sort of flashpoint for anxiety about what was happening to the campus and to our students and they're being corrupted and they're learning the word logocentrism from J.

Hillis Miller, who's getting it from Derry Duh.

And I think that that's interesting to bear in mind just

because

it means that this thing called theory

that became the object of this of fear and panic, something's happening and it's theoretical.

That is like the injection of that word into conservative panic discourse.

And that word then never goes away as the object of conservative panic discourse.

So

whatever is happening around the imagination of Yale between Buckley and,

let's say, 1989 produces this sort of meme called theory that doesn't have a content, but can get attached to any variety of intellectual projects in order to make them seem pernicious, dangerous, corruptive,

foreign, certainly foreign, Jewish often.

I think now we're seeing it particularly.

I mean, the critical race theory panic had all these other elements in it, but one of them is that, well, these are not white people and they're doing something, and I don't like it, so now it's theory, and I don't like that.

Or gender theory, gender theory.

The attack on Judith Butler, very much.

I mean, there's a wonderful article that I might plug here by Maura Weigel called Hating Theory.

It's about sort of these modes of conservative half-reading of like, and she says it starts really at the Frankfurt School.

And it is very much the three parentheses are very much implied, right?

Like, it is basically theory as Jewish conspiracy against sort of a healthy thinking, which is basically just like osmotic exposure to the canon, right?

You spend your time with great minds and not criticizing them or whatever, right?

Like submission to Socrates and Plato or whatever, but not in a gay way, just to be clear, not in a gay way.

To just give an example that I really like.

Give people a sense of like just the level of investment and the sustained level of investment in what students are reading and talking about that that Samuel was alluding to.

This is from,

I picked these out from my book and I just thought I'd share them with the two of you because it's just so remarkable.

So this is a quote from Thomas Short from the journal Academic Questions, which was a kind of conservative campus newspaper at the time from 1988.

Quote, no one of any intelligence who reads both is going to agree that Alice Walker is as profound or artful as Shakespeare.

Yet it is possible that Walker's black lesbian saga, The Color Purple, is now assigned more often in college courses than all of Shakespeare's plays combined.

This is what we in the biz in literary theory call absolute bullshit

or a thing that didn't happen, but still.

Okay, so that's 1988.

Here's Toby Young, human barnacle, writing in The Spectator in England in 2012.

Inclusive.

It's one of those ghastly politically correct words that have survived the demise of new labor.

Schools have to be inclusive these days.

That means wheelchair ramps, the complete works of Alice Walker in the school library, though no Mark Twain, and a special education needs department that can cope with everything from dyslexia to Minchausen syndrome by proxy.

So that's

2012.

And then here is a German magazine from 2021.

In the United States, some teachers refused to teach the relatively well-known poet William Shakespeare in class.

He represents the toxic worldview of straight white men.

He is racist and must therefore be promptly replaced by diverse, inclusive poets.

This case of cancer culture is particularly remarkable because to this day, no one knows exactly who this Shakespeare actually was, right?

Like, this is 30 years of just like imagining that the works of Alice Walker have replaced Shakespeare.

It's like, visit a fucking seminar, dude.

Like,

this could have, you know, this 30-year freakout could have been a quick email be like, hey.

You guys seen Shakespeare?

So, yep.

Oh, cool.

I should take that out.

That could have, that could have, that is how that could have gone.

That is not how it went.

Like the investment, you're right.

Like the investment in these disciplines that, as this is happening, are becoming increasingly more marginal.

I don't have the exact data, but I would say

if I'm remembering the trend lines correctly from the MLA report, like the number of English majors, I think it went from like 5% in the mid-80s.

So when the first of these three essays came out, to something like one and a half, I want to say.

Does that sound right?

Like it's a appreciable difference, right?

And

to and to treat that as then indicative indicative of like anything is just really, really remarkable, isn't it?

What's sort of allegorized in that disc in the in that sequence that you just read for us is also the big question of like who and what college education is for

is looming over it.

And like the fear that Alice Walker might be taught, just as someone who teaches literature out of college, I have to say, you know, one does want to teach things that students find interesting and engaging and that they will, that will get them thinking about the world.

And for some people, because of like the

totemic word identity here

is necessary.

Like, for some people, Alice Walker is going to tell them more about their life than Shakespeare, especially at first blush.

And that's often all college students do when they read this.

You know, not everyone takes all the time, you know, we would love, and that's

also part of this question.

But the point being,

the anxiety there is that like there's now people for whom Shakespeare doesn't seem important, but Alice Walker does, and that really means that there's different kinds of people now in these universities, different races of people, different sexualities and genders of people.

And at the same time, the idea that everyone should read Shakespeare suggests that there's something important for becoming an American.

that involves exposure to the great works of Shakespeare and that you are falling short of some sort of imagined idea of what an American should be if you are not reading that.

And behind all of that, then there's also the question of who's going to college and why.

And maybe there's a reason people aren't majoring in English.

It's because they are increasingly saddled with debt loads.

And

there's larger conversation here.

But at bottom, this is all being compressed into a question of what people are reading as if it's not also about why they might choose to go to college in the first place, how much money they're paying to be there, and so on and so forth.

I wonder if this might be a good time to shift towards one of the thoughts I hope we could close with, which is, I'm doing a fellowship at Stanford.

I'm a journalist for my day job, so I very much feel like I'm an outsider, an outside agitator, if you will, on the campus.

But I would have wondered what it's like for you guys who teach as your main gig to try and navigate all these fantasies that are imposed on the campus.

When you're on the campus themselves, does this impact your time in the classroom?

Does it impact how you have to shape your syllabi?

Does it impact what students come to campus hoping and fearing for?

I would say

it affects me.

I feel the effect in two ways.

The first is the mixed and contradictory messages that I get about what my relationship to a student should be.

Are students, again, to sort of summon all these specters that have been haunting the conversation, are these students children who need to be taken care of?

Or are my students all adults who are capable of leading their own lives and making choices about how they spend their time?

So do I need to have an attendance policy in my lecture class so that students are forced to show up?

Or can I say, you choose if you're going to come to class or not, and that will affect how you do in the class, and that's a set of choices that you make.

Those are competing messages that I get.

Sometimes it's like you're not being supportive enough of your students, and supportive there really means you're not treating them like they're not agents, doing the agential work of adulthood for them.

And other times, I'm being too soft and too supportive, and I need to be harder, and I need to discipline them, and I need to have an attendance requirement so that people come to my 200-person lecture

as if they're going to, you know, as if they're going to speak in the lecture anyway.

I don't know.

I just feel constantly being buffeted back and forth between I should be a caretaker to children and

I need to get these people to grow up faster.

And my own attitude is much more that like they're adults and I'm educating adults and I treat them that way.

So that would be the one sort of big way in which I feel the fantasy of the campus bearing down on me is the instability of the student as either too much or too little, too adult, too childlike.

All of those contradictions we were talking about are displaced onto teachers as pedagogical demands.

And it's very confusing sometimes to know what is it that I'm supposed to be doing here.

And what really do the students want is not a question that anyone has ever bothered, it seems to me,

in this conversation.

Well, I mean, so, I mean, this is something I probably should know, but does it also mean, so you mentioned it's more of a commuter school, does that also mean the students are themselves a bit older?

Because that's the other thing, like, you know, people tend to picture one thing and one age bracket when they picture college students, but of course, you know, it can take a little longer to graduate from college if you're, you know, if you also are working, for instance, and I feel like at a lot of schools, that's the case.

So are these, you know, biologically,

are they the same age as the ones you taught at Chicago?

Or are they, are they slightly different?

Definitely there's there's more what we call non-traditional students.

I hate that phrase.

Non-traditional.

The tradition there, by the way, is just the fantasy of the campus, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But

certainly, there's more, but I mean, it is still a college, and so the majority of the students are between the ages of 17 and 23.

But yes, there's more than certainly at Chicago.

I never taught

an undergraduate who was outside that age range.

And but that also i still don't really feel like

it should be affecting how i conceptualize the students no that's true um

and

i certainly don't think there's no difference in like ability i've noticed between an 18 year old and a 45 year old student they're all but it is certainly the case that many of my students have jobs Some of them have, they really can't have full-time jobs if they want to take daytime classes, but many of them have multiple part-time jobs.

And that, again,

affects like the kind of time they can devote to studies.

So if it's a choice between taking a class on Shakespeare and a class on Alice Walker, and Alice Walker is more enjoyable or engaging to read, why wouldn't you take that?

Yeah, I think that gets to a really, really important point, which is to say the college student is an ambivalent site.

And in some way, the conservative projection exploits that.

It's not that the like, oh, college students are perfectly simple and we know where they fit in society and these people are just getting deranged over it.

Like it really is a kind of an ambivalent site.

It's a place where capitalism and something pre-capitalistic kind of subsist side by side in this kind of awkward way.

And I like the way you're also pointing out that like the college

is just a massive repository of like

of capital and privilege.

The thing that people are picturing is the residue of just money, right?

The moment you withdraw any of that, the picture of the college student splinters.

They get a little older, they have to work several jobs, they commute,

they have to travel further to campus.

And of course, that has been the history of the last 40 years.

It's been just massive disinvestment from campuses.

But of course, it's also been this kind of symbolic overinvestment in the campus as a thing.

And that's to me this fascinating duality that we are really getting fixated on campus, on a form of the campus that, as you point out,

we're also making less and less possible, right?

So, like, there was a time probably when, you know, there really was a way to make your way through one of these campuses and have that kind of

that kind of

college experience, even if, you know, let's say it was a fairly small, it was a smaller campus, it was a secondary campus, et cetera, et cetera.

That's been made impossible by state legislatures the country over.

And so, it's really kind of interesting to think about the fact that

our image gets hardened as the reality underneath it fractures.

Yeah.

I mean, just look at the University of California, which was a place you could go to college for free for a long time.

And now you have to go into debt to attend it.

And like City College of New York as well, you know, like these neoconservatives that you're talking about all got free education.

Right.

Like the New York intellectuals

all went to city college.

Like there's this generation that's like the fixed image of the campus from the 50s are all people who didn't pay very much money to go to school and got excellent educations.

Maybe this is where we end it with a call for reinvestment in the university and in public education in particular, so that the campus can, in fact, become decadent enough in reality to sustain all these fantasies that we assign to it.

That's right.

It deserves to be what the conservatives fear it is.

Yeah, give us enough money so we can turn into your worst nightmare.

Finally.

Let's realize this fantasy.

I mean, in some sense, that does seem to be what's going on when people panic about what's going on at Columbia, say, and they're like, classes were canceled.

The same people who a week before had been like, what are they learning in these classes?

Right.

Learning critical race theory.

Now they're like, get back into those classrooms, learn that critical race theory.

We can't have you out on the clause.

Get that Alice Walker.

We don't care anymore.

Yeah.

I mean, you write in your essay that

now the fantasy and the material reality of the campus have coincided.

And I think you mean that about the police presence on campus, but it's true on several levels, isn't it?

They're kind of turning the campus into the thing that they've been wanting to hate all along, the violent space of suppression that they've imagined.

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