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
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  1. dnewlander Inactive
    dnewlander
    @dnewlander

    katievs: 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.

    If you were employing her to teach you tennis, you surely would, or you’d be wasting your money. And that is the point of calling teachers “masters,” which, as has been pointed out, literally means “teacher.”

    • #61
  2. James Of England Inactive
    James Of England
    @JamesOfEngland

    dnewlander:

    katievs: 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.

    If you were employing her to teach you tennis, you surely would, or you’d be wasting your money. And that is the point of calling teachers “masters,” which, as has been pointed out, literally means “teacher.”

    When I was young, I went to a school for a while where we called the teachers masters. While I was at that school, I fully recognized my inferiority. In my final two years of high school, having spent the interim in schools where teachers hewed closer to the buddy model, I decided that I ought to teach myself A level history as one of the four subjects I studied (in the UK, “ordinary” high school graduation was at 16 and then you specialized for your last two years; nowadays more people stay on, although what Americans would consider a high school graduation is still rarer in the UK than the US).

    It turned out that that was a really dumb idea. I was reasonably bright, and keenly interested in history, but I was nowhere near capable of working out what was important and structuring my learning toward an exam, even though the syllabus was more than clear. I read Herodotus for the historiography portion, for instance, when I should have read some paragraphs about Herodotus, and failed to read about Marx at all. It would have been helpful to have been a little more humble.

    I’m sure it’s coincidence, but it seems to me that every little helps, and each mental trick I can use to properly prepare myself to benefit from my teachers, even today when the teachers will not generally be in an academic setting, is a useful one. It’s a lot easier to learn when you push yourself into a humble, listening, position.

    It may be that Katie’s disagreement with me comes down, in part, to her being far better at that than I am, and needing less help to be open to the other, taking a personalist approach to life.

    • #62
  3. Liz Member
    Liz
    @Liz

    katievs:I know Thomas Aquinas College has a custom of students and teachers alike being addressed as Mr. or Mrs. or Miss, rather than professors being called “doctor so and so” while students are called by their first names. It’s a way of deliberately emphasizing their relative peerage under the great masters of the perennial tradition.

    This is standard practice among Straussian professors everywhere.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find Straussians on the faculty of Aquinas.

    • #63
  4. Miffed White Male Member
    Miffed White Male
    @MiffedWhiteMale

    James Of England: 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.

    Q:  How can you tell if someone went to Yale?

    A:  Wait ten seconds, they’ll tell you.

    • #64
  5. Amy Schley Coolidge
    Amy Schley
    @AmySchley

    katievs: I feel similarly uncomfortable with terms like “lady” and “courtship” and “sir”. They come from and hearken back to another culture—a hierarchical one, with a definite pecking order, where good manners entailed “knowing your place.”

    Wait, what?!

    So if I’m walking along on the street, and a man in front of me drops a glove or something, and I yell, “Sir!” to get his attention, I’m hen-pecking him into his proper position in the hierarchy?

    I’ve written a post on this somewhere, but I’m always flabbergasted by the way people refuse respect.  (e.g. “Mr. So-and-so is my father!”) Doing so doesn’t make him and me peers; it just means that I have to flatter his delusions that he and I are somehow something other than strangers or acquaintances.

    • #65
  6. Man With the Axe Inactive
    Man With the Axe
    @ManWiththeAxe

    I don’t have any objection to students calling their professors “Mr. or Mrs.,” etc., as the case may be, instead of “Doctor.” That is a way of reducing the stigma that would be placed on non-Ph.D. faculty, such as those who possess an MFA degree. By calling all Mr. instead of some Dr. and some Mr. there is less of a caste system amongst the faculty, which students pick up on.

    But I don’t like the rampant use of first names for faculty in the classroom. Outside of class that should be up to the professor, but inside of class there is a need to differentiate through language who is in charge, who has the power to assign grades, who is the presumed authority.

    Of course it’s true but irrelevant that in the sense of equality before the law and in the eyes of God the professor is no better than his students. But why is the professor being paid to be there and the students paying, and not vice-versa?

    continued

    • #66
  7. Man With the Axe Inactive
    Man With the Axe
    @ManWiththeAxe

    My daughter went to a small women’s college in which undergraduates, some only juniors, were hired to be teaching assistants for the freshmen. There were no graduate students. My daughter reported to me that she thought that these teaching assistants were as good as the regular faculty, since they had read the book just a year or two ago.

    Anyone who has taught at the university level knows that after, say, 20 years of experience, the depth of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom that comes from immersing oneself in the subject, the wide range of reading and writing about it, the innumerable discussions at academic conferences, the adopting, testing, and jettisoning of ideas, all makes for a level of mastery of the subject that these undergraduate assistants could not possibly approach.

    These assistants should be called by their first names, by all means. But remembering the difference that the professor and the student have traveled respectively, in their discipline, and by retaining a title of respect for the former, helps the students to have some humility in the presence of those who know so much more. Respect for elders, especially learned elders, should not be tossed aside so thoughtlessly.

    • #67
  8. Kozak Member
    Kozak
    @Kozak

    Adam Freedman: . 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.

    And of course must immediately stop awarding “Masters” degrees.  The Precious Little Snowflakes may be traumatized by that verbiage ….

    • #68
  9. Adam Freedman Member
    Adam Freedman
    @AdamFreedman

    Son of Spengler: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.

    S of S:

    As an alumnus myself, I would be delighted if I thought Yale was embarking on a fair and balanced examination of Calhoun.  Look at the events currently slated for the so-called “open conversation” on the topic — there is an “interdisciplinary conference” on “the interplay between race, artistic expression, mass incarceration, and varying perspectives on justice.”  There is a panel on the Charleston shootings, there is a tea with Linda Greenhouse — the NYT far-left legal analyst — about affirmative action.

    Not only do these events promise to be one-sided they are also completely unrelated to John Calhoun.  How on earth can any of these events have any bearing on whether to name a college for John Calhoun?

    Also, I disagree that Calhoun was the spokesman for slavery.  Of course he supported slavery like many antebellum southerners.  But slavery needed no “spokesman” in his day, there was no threat to slavery in the South, it was strongly enforced at the federal level (the major controversy at the time was whether to extend slavery into the territories).  Calhoun supported states’ rights but in that regard he was no different from many Northern politicians, including Daniel Webster.  He never called for secession; in fact, he felt that states’ rights was the best way to avoid splitting up the union.  He died 10 years before the beginning of the Civil War.

    And if Yale does decide to rename Calhoun College as a way of making itself feel as though it has righted some historical wrong, does anyone trust the College to come up with an alternative?   I suppose they would name the college for some less offensive alumnus.   Brace yourself for Clinton College.

    • #69
  10. Amy Schley Coolidge
    Amy Schley
    @AmySchley

    Adam Freedman: And if Yale does decide to rename Calhoun College as a way of making itself feel as though it has righted some historical wrong, does anyone trust the College to come up with an alternative?   I suppose they would name the college for some less offensive alumnus.   Brace yourself for Clinton College.

    Yeah, Kris Kobach or Clarence Thomas College probably wouldn’t go over too well.

    • #70
  11. Man With the Axe Inactive
    Man With the Axe
    @ManWiththeAxe

    Adam Freedman: And if Yale does decide to rename Calhoun College as a way of making itself feel as though it has righted some historical wrong, does anyone trust the College to come up with an alternative?   I suppose they would name the college for some less offensive alumnus.   Brace yourself for Clinton College.

    I recommend that they name it after David “Corky” Calhoun, black basketball player at Penn, class of 1972, and for the Phoenix Suns and Portland Trailblazers, a member of the latter’s championship team in 1977, and who is currently wholesale area manager at Potomac Energy Holdings, LLC

    • #71
  12. Addiction Is A Choice Member
    Addiction Is A Choice
    @AddictionIsAChoice

    At the risk of triggering further: Rowan Atkinson

    • #72
  13. Kate Braestrup Member
    Kate Braestrup
    @GrannyDude

    Man With the Axe: Respect for elders, especially learned elders, should not be tossed aside so thoughtlessly.

    Agree, and this speaks to a larger issue in both parenting and pedagogy; the notion that the moral equality of children and adults, students and teachers, leaders and followers demands that we pretend to functional equality in all settings is a formula for anxious, unhappy children and unmotivated students.

    In Anchor & Flares I wrote about my son’s experience in the ultimate in hierarchical learning environments; Marine Corps Boot Camp.

    Though I distinctly remembered being assured that drill instructors don’t hit recruits, Zach wrote about the day one threw a full breakfast tray at him accurately, and hard, when Zach was caught talking in line at the chow hall.

    “Didn’t that hurt?” Ellie asked, when I retailed the story to her.

    Not much, evidently. “Mostly it was just hard to keep from laughing,” was Zach’s reassuring conclusion.

    To this day, Zach has to put his pants on left leg first, and his belts have to point to the left, and the buckle must align with the zipper of his pants.

    “I spend a lot of time fiddling compulsively with my belt area,” Zach confesses. “Even if I’m not wearing a belt. It’s a Marine thing: we all walk around adjusting imaginary uniforms. Oh, and when I wear a hat, the brim must sit two fingers above the bridge of my nose.”

    The impeccable uniforms, like the preternatural fitness of the drill instructors, spoke eloquently of power, and not just physical or even institutional power, but the personal power acquired through self-discipline and self-control. Even as they assumed near-total control of a recruit’s every moment and motion, the drill instructors were modeling the end result: This is what you are going to be.

    • #73
  14. Son of Spengler Member
    Son of Spengler
    @SonofSpengler

    Adam Freedman: As an alumnus myself, I would be delighted if I thought Yale was embarking on a fair and balanced examination of Calhoun.  Look at the events currently slated for the so-called “open conversation” on the topic — there is an “interdisciplinary conference” on “the interplay between race, artistic expression, mass incarceration, and varying perspectives on justice.”  There is a panel on the Charleston shootings, there is a tea with Linda Greenhouse — the NYT far-left legal analyst — about affirmative action. Not only do these events promise to be one-sided they are also completely unrelated to John Calhoun.  How on earth can any of these events have any bearing on whether to name a college for John Calhoun?

    I hadn’t looked closely enough at the scheduled events. I agree that they are disturbingly one-sided.

    • #74
  15. RushBabe49 Thatcher
    RushBabe49
    @RushBabe49

    Just a couple of points. We often say around here that Libs problem is their ignorance of Human Nature. Well, both hiererchy and racism are hard-wired in humans, and most animals. ALL members of Nature are subject to hierarchies in most areas of their lives. Even solitary (mostly) animals have hierarchies in their groups. And you naturally like people who are like you, and dislike people who are not like you. Primitive Man needed to be able to distinguish friend from foe in order to survive, and your own tribe or clan or family was more likely to be friend, so you favor them and disfavor those not of your tribe or clan. “Racism” can be combated by culture, with parents raising their children to treat all people well. But hierarchy will exist in spite of any efforts we make to get rid of it. Kids on the playground (are there any left?) simply form themselves into hiererchies, no matter what the adults do. It’s hard-wired.

    • #75
  16. Doug Watt Member
    Doug Watt
    @DougWatt

    Methinks some professors have too much time on their hands. The good professors at Yale that have enslaved a graduate student to do all their research for their next book, that no one is going to read, might want to stand in front of a mirror and ponder the concept of academic masters and servants.

    • #76
  17. Eeyore Member
    Eeyore
    @Eeyore

    Doug Watt:Methinks some professors have too much time on their hands. The good professors at Yale that have enslaved a graduate student to do all their research for their next book, that no one is going to read, might want to stand in front of a mirror and ponder the concept of academic masters and servants.

    Boy are you wrong, Doug! Every tenured professor in the same discipline will read it. Strong proponents and opponents of the positions will write about it for lectures, symposia, conferences and maybe even other books to be read by the same in-group. Graduate students wishing to be seen outstanding will write and speak of the book. There will be much Sturm und Drang.

    Then again, outside academia, yer pretty much right…no one.

    • #77
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