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Master and Panderer
On Friday, The New York Times reported that Yale University was “grappling” with its “ties to slavery.” Lest anyone think that there is any genuine intellectual grappling going on here, let’s put this in context. One of the issues the article cites is that “some at Yale have suggested an end to calling the heads of the colleges ‘masters’” – because the word “master,” of course, is just too evocative of antebellum slavery.
I must confess I was blissfully unaware that I was living under the yoke of a latter-day slave master when I was an undergraduate at Yale. I felt myself quite fortunate to live in one of Yale’s residential colleges, each of which is led by a professor who lives in the college and has the title of “master.”
Well, I can just about forgive undergraduates for this sort of nonsense, but the revolt against the masters came, not from students, but from a member of the faculty. Professor Stephen Davis, who has served as Master of Pierson College for two years, announced a few weeks ago that he would stop using the title because of the “deeply problematic” racial and gender hierarchies associated with the title. He had “heard stories and witnessed situations involving members of our community … who have felt it necessary to move off campus their junior or senior year to avoid a system where the title ‘master’ is valorized.”
One hates to “de-valorize” Professor Davis’s remarks, but he is spouting nonsense. Yale’s residential college system was not created until the 1930s, and the title “master” was a very conscious borrowing from the Oxbridge college system, and wholly unrelated to slavery. Thankfully, not all undergraduates jumped on the Davis bandwagon. One senior wrote an eloquent rebuttal to Professor Davis in the Yale Daily News, pointing out, among other things:
Ousting the word “master” will impoverish our language and our thoughts. “Master” connotes much more than the master-slave relationship. It is a fine word, rich with meaning. “Master” originates with the Latin “magister,” meaning “teacher.” The word connotes erudition, skill and wisdom, which is often hard won. A master is a person who has developed expertise in some area, who has honed his or her talents to a high degree or who has learned something useful about leadership or life that elicits the admiration of others.
It used to be a joke to suggest that “the kids should run the school.” Now it is clear that Yale would be far better off in the hands of undergraduates like Cohen rather than the current faculty.
As of now, none of Yale’s other 11 masters have decided to follow Professor and head-of-college Davis. A more contentious question among Yalies is whether one of its residential colleges – Calhoun College – should be renamed so as not to valorize, as it were, alumnus John C. Calhoun. Calhoun did, of course, support slavery, but then, he was also a US Senator and Vice President, a skilled lawyer, and an important thinker on states’ rights regarding issues other than slavery; particularly tariffs. And if Yale wants to go down that road, it will need to do a lot of renaming, because more than half its colleges are named after slaveowners. In fact, since Eli Yale himself was involved in the slave trade, Yale must drop its own name.
A modest suggestion for those in academia: if you want students to learn about all the terrible things John Calhoun did, why not try teaching them about him, rather than pretending that he never existed?
Published in Culture, Education, General
I think these guys are all, intellectually, masters of their own domain.
Have there been any estimates of how many words will remain walking about after the pc-police have incarcerated all of the guilty words? Will it be possible to construct a compound sentence without jailbreaking a guilty word?
Fine; all well and good that customs change and institutions adapt. This has nothing to do with the point of this post and what’s going on at Yale, however. Yale is considering dropping the title not because it’s overly formal in a more casual age, but out of a false association of the term with slavery.
This is about moral preening, in my view. It’s an attempt by late baby boomers to feel good about themselves when, in fact, they’ve no meaningful “social justice” dragons to slay inside their sealed-off, Ivy League world. The place is so homogenized in its political correctness they literally have to make up stuff, strike blows against the faux oppression, and then puff out their chests to accept the sycophantic accolades they desperately crave.
You beat me to the Master’s degree. I could almost the complaint if “Master” were a rarely used term in academia, but it’s part of just about everyone’s title bar the undergrads and some of the janitorial and support staff.
Mrs. of England is a mistress three times over (of Theology once and the arts twice), but a wife only to me. Cuckservative that I am, I’m somewhat proud of her multiple mistress status. I’m only a master twice, because the law degrees are mostly unaffiliated with slavery, although one of them actually interacted with slavery in a somewhat meaningful way (it was in an International Labor And Employment class that the author of constitution of Bhutan, a classmate, realized that the constitution made many non-Monks meet the international legal definition for slavery).
I believe that the Venn diagram for my slaver ancestors and my magisterial ancestors includes two circles without overlap. I don’t believe that this is terribly uncommon; Southern and Caribbean universities just weren’t that big.
The fallibility of the superior does not make him a peer. Serena Williams sometimes misses shots in tennis, but she is not the peer of you or I. Krauthammer is wrong on some issues, but that does not mean that Trump is on a parr with him. JPII was not just fallible, but was actively wrong on occasion, y’all are both equal in important respects, but it was and is appropriate to treat him with a kind of respect.
There should be decency displayed by teachers, but it is a matter of noblesse oblige, not of equality. It is, indeed, perhaps more important for them to be decent than for the students, for precisely that reason. This can make some teachers uncomfortable.
He should feel uncomfortable with power; it’s a lot of responsibility. The best response to it, though, is not to pretend that it does not exist. Indeed, that is often a route to calamitous outcomes. We don’t have students dating their teachers for the same reason that we avoid romantic entanglement in other master/ servant relationships (and, for what it’s worth, that’s still the language used in a lot of sexual harassment law, since that field is often a subset of agency law in a tort context). Again, there are many people who will try to pretend that the problems of abuse do not arise, because they are keen for the criteria for those problems to arise. Other than from an ethical standpoint and medium- long term consequences, who wouldn’t want inappropriate relationships with students?
As Hegel pointed out, a master/ servant context does not require universal power imbalances and hardly even implies superiority. When an indigent employs Ryan M as a defense attorney, he gains a degree of power over him, and Ryan gains a duty of loyalty and such, along with the other attributes of servanthood. When I employ a dance teacher, we simultaneously have a master/ servant and master/ student relationship, with power imbalances flowing both ways. We should avoid abuse, but we often do so best by recognizing, rather than wishing away, the differences between us.
I think that this is true. This is one of many ways that society has become more culturally conservative since the 1960s and 1970s. Today we still have libertarians trying to end the institution of marriage, but the feminist call to end it has dramatically weakened. We don’t have the invasions, sit ins, and other disturbances of the hierarchy that we used to. We spend a lot of time talking about the ways in which millennial students are infantilized, but there are also ways in which they’re more grown up. Communist movements and such are dramatically weaker. Rape culture advocates push us ever closer to a pre-sexual revolution set of sexual mores.
As online and modular learning increases at K-12 and further education levels, power is gradually taken from the faculty lounges. The gradual revolution in the universities means that one of the great bastions of liberal boomer power is set to dramatically decline. Not too long ago, they had the unions, the universities, and the media. Now the unions are mostly gone (still powerful, but a pale shadow of their former selves), the universities are set to decline at massive rates, and the media is disaggregated, democratized, and diversified. We have Fox, Rush, and blogs.
It used to be predicted that the church would decline with the Age of Aquarius. Instead, it’s the harbingers of the Age that have declined.
It’s interesting that you perceive that as a boomer phenomenon. I would say the preeminence of brick-and-mortar universities belongs to our parents’ generation. And to their credit, actually. Looking at the growth and astonishing contributions made in medicine and the sciences, what they built will have a lasting value.
I also think the boomers, to their credit, have been actively exploring and producing worthy alternatives to traditional avenues for higher education.
Some really interesting points . . . I should be pleased if your optimism proves more justified than my (perhaps innate) pessimism. Unions are smaller, as you say, but their center of gravity is now the public sector, creating a nexus that’s more intractable. I’m not sure the rape culture bugaboo means retrograde mores so much as a bellowing for consequence-free choices (and abandonment of due process norms). In general, it seems fanciful to think the Commanding Heights of the Culture are in for a turn-around, no matter how many curricula adopt an online format. Fox is still an Army of One on the MSM battleground.
So, in other words, Oxford and Cambridge were engaging in a preemptive act of racial insensitivity, not to mention the “deeply problematical” valorization of dead white males. What a bunch of jerks.
I think the universities as an institution expanded dramatically under the Greatest generation, and that their corruption was already well under way at that point, but that the apex of the long march through the institutions was the 1970s and 1960s, which…. well, okay, I guess that’s more people born in the 1930s-40s than 1940s-50s. Still, boomer adjacent.
It’s also true that the school choice movement and such were created and fueled in part by boomers (Jeb Bush and Bill Gates, for instance), although, again, there’s a lot of folks (George Bush, most notably), from the previous generation in that, too, and a lot of folks (Salman Khan etc.) from the subsequent generation.
All these things are complex processes, and one cannot generalize too greatly by generation without error, but I do think that guilt about that sort of stuff was a bigger burden to previous generations, and the sense that the world could be usefully made anew stronger, even if the language used to describe the problems is more complicated now.
You are ascribing to the boomer generation the PC world in which you live, and that’s neither fair nor accurate.
The lawsuit brought against Houghton Mifflin by the Wisconsin Teachers’ Union charging the company with sexism in their textbooks happened in the early 1970s.
The PC movement was instigated by my parents’ and grandparents’ generation, who were, in all fairness, still reeling from the war. It wasn’t actually a bad thing. If you were to pick up an elementary school textbook published before 1973, you’d be appalled at how women and girls were represented.
The cultural change that has occurred since World War II has been a result more of the mass media than anything else.
Public sector union membership was 35.9% when Reagan took office. It’s 35.7% now. The nexus has shifted not because public sector membership has increased, but because it hasn’t plummeted. And now, we have governors like Walker, Daniels, Christie, and others targeting even public sector unions. In Wisconsin, the nexus doesn’t seem too intractable. I really am close to finishing my post on this, though, so should probably stop there.
In the absence of traditional shame culture, tyrannical abuse of male scarlet letter wearers is the only plausible way of returning us to the age of the puritans. For some reason, many on our side find this to be an undesirable; the means certainly are undesirable, but the outcome would appear to be a perpetuation of the Charles Murray syndrome, whereby college class kids become upstanding bourgeois Americans, and it becomes ever more clear that successful people outside Hollywood have traditional moral lives. We have lefties like Robert Putnam extolling the academic benefits from school prayer, in part because the left really is fighting against the harms of the boomer revolution; it becomes ever more clear that fighting against the man produces misery rather than bliss.
Fallibility isn’t the issue I’m trying to zero in on. Nor do I deny that the respect in which a teacher is above his student abides, even in cases when the student is right and he is wrong. Teacher is an objectively superior position, and he’s owed real respect and deference from his students. With that I think we all agree.
The analogy with Serena Williams isn’t quite apt either. She’s a master tennis player, and she’s super rich and famous. In those respects, true, we’re not peers. But, in front of the law, say, or in front of God, we are. She is no better than me, and I don’t owe her special deference. So there’s a case in which people can be peers in one respect and not in another.
And if ever for some unimaginable reason we ended up as opponents on a tennis court, we would be, in a sense, peers, subject to the same rules of the game.
My ancient greek philosophy prof. knew a lot more than I did and grasped it all much more intelligently. But the “distance” between me and him was minor in comparison with the distance between each of us and Plato. Compared to Plato and Aristotle, we were both students and novices.
And, while I was learning about the Republic from him, I also had an independent relation to the text. I was free (and encouraged) to dispute with him about what the analogy of the cave might mean, for instance. I could form my own judgements about the merits of a philosopher king, and so on.
In that sense, we were peers.
At my academy, all the professors (except Barry) were called “Doctor” or “Professor.” But they made a point of presenting themselves as fellow seekers-of-truth. They made a point of eschewing excessive deference from their students. I remember one prof. teasing another for secretly relishing the title “Herr Rektor Magnificus.” We were taught not to think much of arguments from authority.
I think, too, of Newman saying that “throw keen men together” and they’ll learn more from the vigorous exchange with each other than they do from sitting in lectures with their professors.
There’s a perfectly good and valid aspect to the trend toward egalitarianism in academia. We shouldn’t lose sight of that while we’re scoffing at the excesses of the left.
http://observer.com/2015/09/the-real-reason-we-need-to-stop-trying-to-protect-everyones-feelings/
I’ll just leave this here.
Good article.
This is why you should not believe what you read in the New York Times.
As both a Yale alumnus and a Yale parent, I’ve been following these news items closely. There is no movement to get rid of the “Master” title. It’s one professor, and his concern is not being taken seriously, even by the most identity-conscious students and professors. Yale is not Hillsdale, but it has a serious culture of academic and intellectual rigor.
The question of Calhoun College is more pertinent. President Salovey (for whom I have great respect) has begun a yearlong formal process examining Calhoun’s legacy, both positive and negative. It began with a lecture by David Blight, a professor specializing in the history of the era, who highlighted Calhoun’s great experience as a statesman. This is not an effort to whitewash history.
Personally, I would be glad to see Calhoun College renamed. Calhoun was not just any slaveholder; he was, effectively, the spokesman on behalf of American slavery. The college was named for him in 1933 at the height of the influence of Progressive historians, whose revisionism downplayed the role of slavery in the Civil War. We can remember the man without honoring him in this way.
That’s a relief, S of S. Thank you. I can stop shrieking in parentheses now.
Boolah boolah.
The stats and Walker in WI are encouraging. But we’ve known the people opposed the unions a long time, and still it’s taken more than 30-40 years for a Walker to emerge. Obama’s response is to simply grow government and—this past week—to effectively deputize contractors at the insistence of his union overlords. By giving contractors near-equivalent benefits to government workers, he’s aiming for the eventual argument that “we might as well make them govies.” The feckless and ineffectual GOP will go along, as they always do.
There’s no danger of a puritan revival on campus (or elsewhere)! It’s now more than 50% what we used to quaintly call “coeds.” Heterosexual men are competed for not the other way around. “Hook-up culture” is the result. This rape culture charade came about when young women lost the “our bodies, ourselves” battle at the precise moment they were being evangelized into a cult where ‘womanhood means never getting your feelings hurt.’ The campus bureaucracy is now weaponized against men under the ethos of now-that-I’m-sober-someone-must-be-punished-for-what-I-did-of-my-own-accord.
Despite what Son of Spengler says about Yale, this sort of stuff is being written into the academy everywhere. Here is an article by a Precious Snowflake at UNC-CH who feels terrible because of the oppression of being considered attractive and a good “female” athlete. She is “struggl[ing] to be taken seriously in the age of subtle sexism.”
Every time she she refers to another person, she says, for instance, “who identifies as male.”
I’m fairly confident she didn’t come into college with this trigger-warning laden existence. She is being taught it at university. And I’d be very surprised if the majority of her fellow students don’t think that soon a phrase like “who identifies as” will become a part of all speech, inside and outside the university. Even required by law. And she may not be wrong.
From the Yale Press:
This Professor Davis is trying to bait the Yale community into an absurd conversation. And he clearly is a master baiter.
Am I the only one around here old enough to remember when little boy Smith would be addressed as “Master Smith” to distinguish him from his father, “Mister Smith.” Or that a craftsman who was really good at his craft would be referred to as a master craftsman? Or that the guy who runs the harbor is the harbormaster?
My God, man, use the word in all these non-slave contexts, including the master of a college at Yale, and give people the chance to overcome their senseless belief that everything must be understood to mean only its archaic racial reference.
To my ears, this complaint is not so different than the insanity of Vester Flanagan, who complained that words like “field” and “swing” were meant to imply slavery and monkeys, respectively. I guess that murdering psychopath would fit right in at Yale.
When I was a kid, when encountering my next-door neighbor, the very elderly Miss Jones, she would insist on a bow from the waist, one hand in front, one behind, and a “Good morning, Miss Jones,” to which she would then reply “Good morning, Master John.”
And how stupid is that statement? Is “master” a male-gendered title? Not if the women who hold the position are also called “master,” which it appears they are. It’s like calling a woman a “doctor” or a “teacher.” Or my favorite, the tendency these days in Hollywood to call women “actors” instead of “actresses.” Isn’t that a male-gendered title, you nitwits? (I’m referring to the Hollywood stars.)
Should women who graduate from college who previously received a “bachelor’s degree” receive instead a “spinster’s degree?”
Recall the recent flap at Harvard Law when some lame-brained student objected to using the word “violate” in Contracts class, as in “He violated the terms of the contract.” This was because hearing “violate” might make some student think of rape. Why not prohibit “Contracts” because it makes me think of murder, as in, “He took out a contract on his school dean.”
This has really gone too far. I am appalled that any educated person could think that it is a good idea to purge our language of perfectly good words that refer to perfectly acceptable concepts because in some other context they refer to something that some people might not like.
While I’m complaining about this, I want to mention the prohibition of referring to the men on a sports team as “boys” out of racial sensitivity.
Now, it was an old racist commonplace in the old South to denigrate (can I use that word?) black men by calling them “boy.” That is one context where there is agreement that use of the word is unacceptable. But should that one context make use of that perfectly acceptable word equally out of bounds in all other contexts?
I always called the fellows on the basketball teams I played with and coached “boys” regardless of age. “Come on boys, we can still win.” “I’m proud of you boys.” I noticed that the TV announcers for the Tour de France, who happen to be British, refer to the riders as “boys,” as in “The boys are going to have a hard day in the Alps today.” Should we tell them to stop doing that because several generations ago some racists called some black men “boys,” and a black man hearing that word today, even though the person using it isn’t a racist and the person being called a boy isn’t black, might be put in mind of that earlier time when racists roamed the Earth?
Riddle me this: How is it that blacks who can’t abide hearing “master” of a college or basketball playing “boys” are perfectly okay nearing “nigger” so long as it comes in a rap song?
This sin is too great to be bore. They need to shut Yale down to stop this madness.
No more master-slave flip flops in the digital circuitry lab, I guess.
What’s really upsetting is that there are so many people with so much time on their hands. Good grief.
This stuff gets worse with each passing day.
The students would be better off learning something concrete like foreign languages.
Uh…Marci…they are. “Micro-aggression” “cis-normative” “trigger warning”
I remember years ago, it was stated that a person can get by in society with only about 300 words. I suspect these newlanguagers have at least 300 in-words and in-phrases to separate you from the Brave New World.
It’s kinda like Common Core math, with 17(?) steps in subtracting one 2-digit number from another. It’s to separate old world parent from new world child. The newlanguage is to separate and excommunicate you from the larger society, which they are overtaking and plan to control.
I think we’re agreed that a degree of hierarchy is important, that “Doctor” and “Professor” are appropriate and that a triple barreled title would be going too far.
Of the people I know who I know have been to Yale, none of them have seemed excessively lacking in confidence or likely to have needed linguistic support to feel as if they were, in some respects, the peers of their professors. It’s true that it may be the case that the humblest wouldn’t let me know where they studied.
Do we agree that institutional traditions and diversity are valuable? Do we agree, in other words, that it is appropriate for Oxford, at the very least to retain the titles?
I imagine we also agree that it was healthy for Yale to aspire to improve itself and thus to imitate Oxford; back in the day, it was not Oxford’s equal. Thus, it seems that Yale by now has a meaningful institutional tradition of its own.
“Master’s” is a commonly used term to denote a milestone in academia.
If we’re agreed that far, and we just disagree about whether the arguments in favor are outweighed by the subjective sense of it going too far, then I think we come as possible to agreement.
That is a good point. Should we rename the Master Degree programs as well? It is just appalling, all those schools teaching and giving degrees to people to become masters. Obviously referring to the mastering of certain minorities. I am sure that somebody will want reparations for this.
I’ve spent the last six weeks working on a book on the status of education in China. I might write a post about it when I am done, but what’s really overwhelming to me is how alike U.S. education is to Communist-socialist China. There are good–not nefarious–reasons for the similarities. But if the global economy is tanking, I hope someone asks me why. I think I know the answer. :)