Tuesday, October 17, 2006

Noxious Elitism at TNR

In an otherwise negligible post over at The Plank, Jason Zengerle betrays the sort of blithe and vacuous elitism that drives those of us who don't have our heads up our gilded asses absolutely batty:
Hence, in most social and economic measures North Carolina--which boasts an excellent state university--is way ahead of Alabama--which doesn't. (Before any U of A grads or profs get all bent out of shape, they could read this piece, which goes a long way toward explaining my somewhat dim view of the school in Tuscaloosa, or simply check out this year's U.S. News rankings of public universities.)

Where to begin . . .?


Zengerle takes a "dim view" of Alabama for a host of reasons both legitimate and illegitimate. But some of the legitimate ones -- the sorority culture, for example -- could be applied to hundreds of universities in the United States, including some that fulfill Zengerle's criteria for excellence. If Zengerle does not think that daft behavior happens in Chapel Hill, he is sadly mistaken. Yes, there is racism that pervades the culture at 'Bama, just as there is -- again -- at an abundance of universities in the United States. But here si the thing -- if race is your barometer (and Zengerle has decided that it is) then UNC only looks acceptable by comparison to schools such as Alabama; it does not, alas, come across as being especially "excellent."


But fine. Zengerle wrote a negative article about Alabama, wanted to cite it again, and so decides to slur the university in toto based largely on anecdote simply because it sort of kind of serves his argument, if you bother to figure out what that argument might be.


But more significant, to me, is that Zengerle has decided that Alabama's status as one of the top 40 public universities in the United States does not confer upon it the status of "excellence." Keep in mind, now, that the lines that separate schools in this ranking are both insignificant and fungible. Among the schools within five in the rankings of "Bama include the University of Kansas and the University of Missouri at Columbia. These are schools that might not quite reach the rarefied air of North Carolina, but they also are hardly slouches. This list is of the top fifty public universities according to the U. S. News methodology. it is not a list that goes from great to bad, or from excellent to mediocre. It is, instead, a list that goes from a very high level of excellence to a fairly high level of excellence.


If you were a history major at Alabama in the 2006-2007 academic year you could take classes with superstar historians Kari Frederickson, George Rable, Howard Jones, David Beito or countless others. Alabama produces world class scholarship across a host of disciplines while producing students that, as at North Carolina, run the gamut from the stellar (According to this story, more Alabama undergraduates have been named to this year’s USA Today All-USA College Academic Team than students of any other school in the nation - that would be more even than the excellent UNC) to the marginal -- witness Zengerle's episodic and selective article. Most Carnegie Research I universities will experience this dynamic.


Zengerle has a parochial and silly view of what constitutes excellence, but more importantly, his parochial silliness is utterly gratuitous. There is no need to weigh the various merits of the state universities in Alabama and North Carolina. But to make matters worse, his arbitrary pronouncement actrually flies directly in the face of his larger point, the very point for which he invokes Alabama. To wit, from the very next paragraph after that I have already excerpted:

And I have another (again possibly dubious) theory that one of the reasons North Carolina has been able to maintain such an excellent state university is because the success of (Dean) Smith's basketball teams made it palatable for North Carolina legislators to continue appropriating so much money to higher education--since so many of their constituents, even if they themselves didn't attend UNC, had such loyalty to the school because of its basketball team.

I hope that when Zengerle gets home his mom immediately makes him don oven mits so as to prevent him from hurting himself by playing with sharp objects. Like, say, a Google search. Because the very school that Zengerle chooses to serve as a counterpoint to UNC's basketball excellence under Dean Smith is the University of Alabama. UNC has a nice little history in college basketball. It has been to 16 Final Fours, which is tied for the most all time. UNC has won four national championships, which puts them among the all-time great programs to be sure. So far, Zengerle's article seems to hold some weight.


But here is the problem -- and remember, I am only using the very same school that he evokes as the ideal example to serve as a foil for the vaunted UNC basketball program -- Alabama football, especially under someone who was far more of an icon in Alabama than Dean Smith is in North Carolina, has won a dozen college football national championships. That's twelve, as in thrice the amount of UNC's basketball championships, and only four fewer than UNC's total number of Final Four appearances. And in 1966 Alabama was the only undefeated and untied team in college football, yet somehow did not win the championship in the polls.


Are you kidding me with this? And this guy gets to ply his theories at The New Republic?


Update: Zengerle has responded in the comments, and I have fired back.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

At the risk of polluting your comments section with my noxious elitism, let me try to respond.

First, you completely miss the point of my article about the sororities at Alabama. Yes, plenty of schools have ugly, racist Greek cultures; but none of those schools have anything like Alabama's "Machine"--which, by functioning as the incubator for the state's business and political elite, extends that corrupt Greek culture well beyond Tuscaloosa. That's one of my major beefs with the University of Alabama: that it's done the state a severe disservice by churning out--through the Machine--generations of self-seeking, corrupt "leaders." Contrast Alabama with North Carolina on that score: at UNC you had pillars like Frank Porter Graham and Bill Friday setting an ethos of the public good for the entire university--particularly for those at the university who wanted to be future leaders of the state; at Alabama you had the Machine.

Second, yes, Alabama had some excellent football teams and Bear Bryant was indeed an icon in the state. But what kind of an icon? The man was a great football coach--and as Allen Barra showed in his recent biography of Bryant, he wasn't the ogre on race that many long assumed him to be--but Bryant nevertheless gave the impression that his teams were incidental to--and in some ways even separate from--any larger mission of the university. Contrast that with Dean Smith, who was constantly talking about how his basketball teams were merely the "front porch" to UNC--"the most visible part yet certainly not the most important part." The two men--in their relationships to their schools; in their opinions about the balance between athletics and academics--couldn't be more different. And it was that difference that allowed Smith to transfer some of the loyalty fans felt to him and his teams to the larger university. In fact, it seems that was something Smith consciously and deliberately set out to do. I don't think you can make that claim for Bryant.

Anyway, I should probably wrap this up. I had to take off my oven mitts in order to type, and I don't want to hurt myself.

dcat said...

Jason --
Thanks for responding.

But here's the problem with "What I meant to say" arguments, which is what your comments here amount to: You did not write what you meant to write, you wrote what you wrote, which I excerpted fully and which is the only possible thing to which one could be expected to respond. And what you wrote was not as clear as what you just put in the comments here. So your work at The New Republic's blog was sloppy and ill thought out. Your arguments here were clear and made your point. my readers will benefit. The vast majority of yours, alas, will not.

You also are not bothering to address the point that got me riled up about your elitism to begin with: Alabama is one of the top 50 state universities in the United States. Across disciplines it has many fabulous faculty members who can provide an excellent education and who produce excellent scholarship, both of which are sort of the point of universities. Is Alabama UNC? Perhaps not. But where are we drawing our line for excellence? Because UNC is a lot closer to Alabama than it is to Yale or Princeton, say, and in terms of quality of undergraduates and many faculty, a goodly number of elite liberal arts colleges could stake a claim to excellence over UNC, and so what is your standard for excellence?

I would not deny that Smith is far more admirable than Bryant. And my (to be seen soon, we hope) book on the Journey of Reconciliation and Freedom Rides takes this issue of state politics on directly, including several pages on Graham and UNC. But all of this being true does not make your larger argument as you presented it at TNR any more valid, and I still am unclear where the gratuitous, and I still think fundamentally fallacious, attack on Alabama fits in to all of this.

You made an argument that sporting excellence and iconography can improve a university, and the example you use is Smith, as opposed to Alabama. On your terms as expressed at The Plank, your argument is silly. As presented here, it is a much better argument. It's as simple as that.

dcat

Tom said...

I'm not buying the Dean Smith as all that far removed from Bryant as the face of their respective schools' academics. Smith did do some of that stuff, but as an interested outsider, I never got the impression that UNC basketball was all about the scholarship of the larger university, at least no more than any fairly well-run and classy basketball program like Kansas, UCLA (at times), or Syracuse, and certainly not as much as Duke.

Again, as an interested outsider, I know that the basketball arena is named after Dean Smith (kind of like the football stadium at Alabama is named after Bryant), but that's it. As a very interested outsider, I also know that the athletic center at Ohio State is named after Woody Hayes, but due to Hayes' wishes and money, there is also a Woody Hayes Chair in security studies at OSU. In the meantime, the library at Penn State is named after some guy named Paterno.

Dean Smith supported academics fairly well, but was he an icon of the academic university? Not any more than your average classy and successful coach, and not all that much more (in any clearly quantifiable way) than Bear Bryant.

Thunderstick said...

If not for a Freddie Brown pass to James Worthy and a Chris Webber timeout, Dean is just one step above John Cheney in the history of college coaches. Any unbiased college hoops fan knows that Dean is closer to that level of coach then he is to Wooden, Krzyzewski, Rupp or Knight.

dcat said...

Jason --
Thanks again for responding.
I guess I'm not certain how I misread your article so much as I am unsure of just how much it applies, or I should say, how unique what you point to at Bama is. I think that lots of southern universities -- most all, in fact -- have a comparable insularity. For the brief period when I was thinking of going to law school rather than pursuing a PhD I noticed that several of the state university law schools said basically the same thing: "For students interested in pursuing politics or business in state X, going to law school at U of X is as valuable as going to Harvard." (Always Harvard . . .!) But yes, I did not give your article enough credit for being more nuanced than I imply.

As for excellence, I agree -- it is a slippery concept. I guess that as someone who teaches at a university far down the totem pole, I give a wider berth to what counts as excellent. And while I realize that your reference for comparison was state universities, one would think that we don't engage in an intellectual ghettoization whereby we lower our expectations for state schools. In that sense, excellence is excellence but still requires some sort of standard.

I aalso gree -- some schools may or may not be *more* excellent than others. And UNC may be more excellent than Alabama in some areas, and enough of those areas will add up to what most might assume is comprehensively a better university. I just thought that in making your point -- which I really do feel that you made better over here -- Alabama might have been largely irrelevant. Of course UNC is a fantastic school, alongside a handful of elites -- Michigan, Virginia, Texas, Berkeley, Wisconsin most quickly roll off the tongue. I just tend to maintain a great deal of respect for most all Research I flagship universities.

I'm a huge sports fan. My first book was fundamentally about what it means to be a nutter about a sports team. And I am an academic whose main area of work is race and politics. So I value what you are doing -- and generally really acknowledge your writing across the board at TNR. But I did find an element of the sort of east coast liberal elitism that sometimes east coast liberal elites don't even realize the proffer. And I'm an east coast liberal. I even went to a school that by any criteria fits that category of "excellence." But I also now live in the provinces and spent a good deal of my grad time at a couple of state universities that do not meet your criteria for excellence and so I have seen all side on this issue. I suspect we agree on the idea that there is something that we know as excellence. I just think it is damaging to liberals, and thus to liberalism, to come across as much of the world perceives us -- which is to say effete snobs who never travel west of the I-95 axis.

I wonder if the idea of an icon coupled with athletic success might not have actually been bolstered by including Alabama, (and as Tom points out, Penn State and Ohio State) in your argument. They are still all very good schools where sporting success has augmented the academic mission.

I'm not sure what you'd use for a counterpoint -- perhaps "directional schools," or perhaps places such as Ole Miss, which have not had either the national level success or the nationally recognized icon. then you get to what might be a real key in drumming up that support that you aver, and I agree, is so vital: subway alums, who support programs sometimes more loyally even than actual alums, and who are oftentimes (though not always) willing to be pulled into a university's larger mission.

Sorry for the early snarkiness, in any case, though I do wonder if you'd have paid me any mind had I not been so over the top.

Cheers, and I'd be happy to go on with this a bit further, as I do think that we are hitting on important topics independent of the question of "excellence,' which, for my own career interests, I sure hope can extend out here to the hinterlands, at least on a case-by-case basis!

Cheers --
dcat

dcat said...

Jason --
I think Paterno belongs in that comversation, and Knight too, of immersion in other parts of the school. But yes, Smith in that sense is a special man, as he was on issues of civil rights at a time when he was not DEAN SMITH but rather Dean Smith.
Funny that you mention Warren St. John's book. I reviewed it and then out of sheer serendipity a few months later he and I made up a panel where we discussed our books and our perspective on sports fans at the Virginia Festival of the Book. And certainly in that fan subculture there are always those who don't care -- or are actively hostile to -- the academic mission of the university. But there are always going to be those who are not. There are always going to be genuine fans who also genuinely care about the university. Obviously neither of us appears to have any actual data to begin to get to the extent of that support, and maybe it is higher at some places (Notre Dame say -- though I am fully on board with your colleague Jonbathan Chait and have written similar things here about Notre Dame's mystique) but I just cannot help but think that the rabid Bama fan base consists of enough people whose support to the university is fungible.

I think I definitely like your term "insular" in this context, as opposed to a fruitless -- and maybe even counterproductive -- discussion of excellence. In so much of the South and midwest, the state university is seen as the place to which to aspire. You grow up knowing you'll go to Bama or Ohio State or UNC if everything breaks right. I grew up in New Hampshire, and smart kids there, and in New England generally, see our state universities --fine though many of them are -- as our safety schools while we considered the Ivies and Little Ivies and the like. And so i certainly think that you hit on a regional component that is spot on and that surely pervades the political culture.

In fact it seems to me that perhaps the outsized devotion to the state university is in a sense both a reaction to and an attempt to supplant the northeastern elite establishment. What better way to overcome what LBJ called "The Harvards" than to establish a world where a degree from Alabama or Ole Miss or LSU (especially when coupled with Greek life, which allows for the creation of en elite world within the public institution) carries with it as much of the old boy network and social cache as Harvard?

I'd say you are only half engaged in rationalization. (Just know that at least one of my most regular and loyal readers, the Thunderstick, is a Dukie.)

Cheers --
dcat

Tom said...

This really does seem to be an example of being too close to the issue. Dean Smith is certainly no more devoted to the academic mission of his university than Woody Hayes or Bob Knight, and anyone at those schools would tell you the same things you hear about Smith. And I imagine that there are a handful of longtime coaches out there who have the same reputation in their own academic communities. (It might also be worth considering that some of the UNC faculty is inclined to like Smith because of his political stands.)

But where I am going to make a clear stand, and this in part reflects my own bias, Dean Smith is not in Joe Paterno's league when it comes to support of academics (nor John Wooden's, but I'll let a UCLA fan handle that one). Just do a Google search of 'Paterno and academics' and 'Dean Smith and academics' to get a feel for the scale of the difference. It really isn't even close.

dcat said...

I think what we are seeing here is that a lot of coaches do take the academic mission seriously. Which really should make us expect more from most coaches. Sure, a first-year coach at a small school cannot be expected to donate to the library, but when you have a Joe Paterno or a Deam Smith or a Bobby Knight doing what they do, how can any program justify having a 17% graduation rate? The first place to start, then, should be with coaches taking a more serious responsibility for their own athletes' academic success.

I'll let the Thunderstick and JZ fight it out about their cute little rivalry.

dcat

dcat said...

Good Lib --
Thanks. A guy can dream anyway.

dcat