I’m back over at stevendouglasmaloney.com. I think I’m up for hosting myself this time… wish me luck!

My university’s center for E-Learning (I wonder how much more the school puts into that center compared to academic subjects) sent me a link to this article on “Legacy Demands and Technology Expectations.”  Here are some of the winning bits of commentary.

On campus, we educators behave as if computers have not yet been invented. Well, a bit of hyperbole, but isn’t it odd that knowledge technology would so easily change our home and social patterns but have only a limited impact where knowledge is produced?

And this one:

Teaching and learning interactions seem like rituals that both teachers and students adhere to with religious persistence. The other institution we expect to remain unaltered–despite the televangelists–is church or mosque or synagogue. Many colleges started as religious institutions centuries ago and, not coincidentally, teaching is still thought of as aquasi-religious service. As a teacher, I’ve often been told that I must find my work “rewarding,” a backhanded compliment meaning that I probably don’t earn much money.

As much as the author laments the state of technology in the university, we are not presented with an explanation of what effective teaching actually is, or what, precisely technology has to offer it.

I suspect that many of my colleagues believe, as do I, that technology has little marginal effectiveness for enhancing the teaching/learning process compared to the costs of implementing it.

Harvard has this great page with all sorts of fascinating videos and lectures and stuff.  I had started watching the lectures on Beethoven’s 9th in the summer of 2007, but never finished.  We’ll put this one back on my to-do list.

Link.  (anyone know how to use flowplayer on a wordpress.com blog??)

One of the nice discoveries of being in a Derek Parfit reading group – aside from encountering Parfit – is that I am going to stumble upon some other interesting and thoughtful blogs as others host the chapters.  As such, I have very belatedly run into an Arendt question that apparently has people talking, both here and here.  

Is Hannah Arendt a philosopher?

I believe that the answer is yes, but with a qualification.  She is one “with a hammer,” as Nietzsche would say.  I think Arendt would agree with Hubert Dreyfus’ reading of Nietzsche’s aphorism about God having been killed by man in The Gay Science, as indiciating that God is not the Christian God, but God is the idea (going back to Plato) that there is a perspective on the universe that will completely explain all things, and that the judgment of our lives and their meaning is in accordance to this standard.  

In following Nietzsche, Heidegger, etc. down this road, Arendt is in some sense an “anti-philosopher.”  She takes multiple cuts at perceiving the same thing over and over again, the way an artist makes multiple sketches, and sometimes multiple versions (like Monet, for example) in order to work out her relationship with the world.  

Many commenters on the two above cited blogs have stressed that Arendt says she is not a philosopher as a way that sets her up as an anti-philosopher like Nietzsche or Kierkegaard.  Where I think we can take Arendt at her own word about what she is doing is when she said in an interview with Gunther Gaus, “I want only to understand.” and that if her work helped others understand, that would feel like, “being home.”  For me, that is the Arendt comment on Arendt that is worth thinking through in order to understand what she has done.

Here again, is the Sotomayor quote that has some rankled:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life

Here’s the context of where and why she said it, via the WSJ.  

The idea of legal realism came back in the now-famous 2001 lecture Judge Sotomayor delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” There she disputed the argument by former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor that a “wise man” and a “wise woman” should necessarily reach the same verdict.

Let’s play a game:  Objective:  PROVE JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR’S STATEMENT INCORRECT

HYPOTHESIS:  It would be good if all justices should rule the same regardless of race in all cases

CASE:  Korematsu v. United States

WISE WHITE JUDGES: “Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and, finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for.”

CONCLUSION:  A Wise Japanese-American judge would agree with the “Wise White Judge Opinion.”

Ummm… Q.E.D. ?????

It’s funny.  I watched the HBO movie Recount last night, where both sides of the Bush-Gore election are portrayed in a fairly positive manner, but the Supreme Court is not.  It was an interesting thing to watch in the context of the nomination of Justice Sonia Sotamayor to the United States Supreme Court.  

I’m not sure how anyone can look at Bush v. Gore and not say, at the very least, that the court always makes decisions as an exercise of political power that awards some as winners and others as losers.  This is what President’s do when they set particular administrative policy, and it is what Congress does when they pass legislation.  In the olden days (see: Montesquieu, Madison), these three facts were called judicial power, executive power, and legislative power.   Somewhere along the way, America has become bedazzled by this idea that judges somehow do not use power, and that their decisions on law are simply like “calling balls and strikes,” to quote our now Chief Justice of the Court.  

What is funny, actually, is that Justice Roberts’ famed comparison not only misstates the duty of the court, it misstates the purpose of umpires.  Yes, umpires are supposed to call balls and strikes as accurately as possible.  But they are supposed to do so in order that no one feels as though the game’s integrity is compromised.  We use umpires because they are disinterested, not objective.  Even with television exposing the shocking performances of officials in sports night after night, we need them in order to contain the impact that certain types of cheating and intimidation have on deciding winners and losers.  

This, too, is in effect what the use of judicial power is for.  It is designed so that it may allow politics to determine who wins and loses under the conditions that it finds most prudent for all.  Judges are as disinterested as possible, but are not wholly disinterested.  If one looks at the decisions of Justice Scalia, who is supposed to be one of the great examples of “judge as umpire,” one can find passages about the core of our culture in gay rights decisions, implied harm to political candidates and the nation in Presidential recounts, and proclamations that Supreme Court rulings on releasing detainees have made our country “less safe.”  Even Justice Scalia has an understanding that the judiciary rules on the structure of power in society and deems some ways valid and others invalid.  He has a particular view, that is colored by his particular notion of what’s at stake in who it would be wise to privilege in these power relations.    While I do not always agree with his sense of what is prudent in assigning these privileges, I do think he is, in fact, trying to make legal decisions with these concerns in mind, and is right to do so. 

In this context, the “umpire” view of justice actually hinges on preserving the existing privileges in the structure of power in American society as much as possible.  It is not, on the whole, a terrible impulse.  It is also, clearly, not always the best impulse either.  In fact, Sotomayor’s comment, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.” Is directed specifically at egregious decisions by famed early twentieth century legal realists who made egregious legal decisions because they had no understanding of how underprivileged non-whites fit into the current and future constellation of the American regime.  

As Brian Leiter points out in the link above, there is empirical evidence to show that race effects legal decisions.  However, to firmly believe that this implies something about the law, argues some in the opposition, makes a judge not sufficiently disinterested to be competent.  On this view, the only way to prove you are disinterested enough is apparently to lie about how disinterested you are.  

I do not know if Justice Sotomayor would make a competent Supreme Court justice or not.  What I think that I do know is that the idea that privileging the allocation of power to its default sources is what conservative justices do, and that this is not always either the best or the worst course of action.  Neither is having the position of Sotomayor as I understand her position.  In short, their is no implied holy covenant of jurisprudence that either a Scalia or a Sotomayor offends, so let’s stop pretending that there is and move on.

In talking to students about papers this semester, I’m wondering about their writing priorities.  They are so obsessed with PLANNING their papers before ever committing a word to the page.  They are in fact, unanimously convinced that the best way to write a paper is to write it once and then to edit it to make sure that their grammar and spelling is correct.  

I’m going to provoke a fight in saying this, but the best writing method is not massive planning, outline, paper, spell and grammar check.  I’m a big fan of the following:  just write.  And then realize that what you have written is actually terrible.  So write it again better.  Repeat terrible paper recognition.  Repeat improvement.  Repeat cycle until paper is due.  

Why is this better?  Because students, as of now, are not interested in revising their IDEAS because they have a phobia of ripping out parts of their papers and redoing them.  ”Rewrite” is taken as a sign of failure, rather than a matter of course.  

I wonder if part of the aversion to revision–and the writing method we teach students–is actually a throwback to typewriters.  Stay with me here.  Back when people typed papers on typewrites, mistakes in writing early drafts cost paper and ribbon.  A priority was placed on doing papers in a way where you maximize getting as much right the first time as possible.  

Now that we have computers, we may overvalue pressuring a quality first/only draft.  The computer makes typeface the only non-perishable resource a student has in their writing process.  My conjecture here is not that students shouldn’t make good outlines or do competent pre-planning.  Ideally, they’d do all phases with the greatest attention and care.  But given that students have papers on deadline, I wonder if we do not teach them to economize poorly because we convince them that revising is the most time-consuming part of the writing process when it is not.  Writing the first draft is the most time consuming process, and we actually appear to teach students to extend that portion of the process out as agonizingly long as possible.  

Another consideration.  If we have students do papers the way I am suggesting, the ideas they are writing down have more time to be called into question, struggled with, etc.  Rather than locking the students into a plan (outline) early that the y feel like they are committed to defend to avoid having to do more work, students would have time to see their ideas as they can now see their papers.  As works in progress, subject to revision.  The will also be asked to exercise skills in editorial judgment, consider how to alter plans in the middle of projects to better accomplish goals, and maybe even, develop a better appreciation for the relationship between their research and their ideas (as opposed to thinking of citations as things to stick in papers as appeals to authority or to show that one has read something carefully when they have not, or simply because it is required).  I doubt my change in emphasis will revolutionize results, but I bet we would see tangible improvement, and that’s enough for my argument to be taken seriously.  Better is better.  

I anticipate an objection.  Students write badly because they don’t care.  But students who write badly because they don’t care are going to do step one of my process anyway, and nothing more.  Students who don’t care don’t write careful outlines either.  They just write bad first drafts.  What I like to do is have multi-level paper assignments where the bad first draft is due and graded and then there is a second draft due that I expect to be substantially better (after a meeting).  I believe that for many students it improves their understanding of both writing and thinking processes for those who try, and it shows more modest improvements for those who do not (which would be expected).

Brian Leiter posted a poll for the best political and legal theory journals… I find this interesting both for future reference if I ever publish again with Sybil, and also because the poll ranks Condorcet Winners.

Have people made good use of the similarity in ridiculous formulation between Cap ‘n Trade and Cap’n Crunch?  Yes?  Oh good.