Too much to say about this to fit into a comment, but I love the points about performative ambiguity and the metaphor of the dank cave, rather than the ivory tower. As I'll write for Tuesday's newsletter, a lot of this ironically mimics American Puritanism. Maybe a sliver of John Winthrop's audience could have understood his logical method and argument in "A Model of Christian Charity," but flourishes from the pulpit were common strategies for lording authority over the common people and keeping them in their place. The American university was born of the Enlightenment and the Early Republic and could use a dose of the clarity and rationality that one finds in, say, Benjamin Franklin.
As a fellow social scientist, rural sociology MS from Iowa State, I couldn't agree more with Dr. Bob. I got a degree in rural sociology because I wanted to change the world. It's served me well. But often I feel like the outlier rather than the norm. It seems the two big groups in sociology are academics and marketers. Learning how to think, write, and act through a scientific approach has supercharged my ability to engage and help advance social change. I encourage any younger person who wants to be a change maker, which is almost all of them that I've met, to study whatever field they are most interested in and then figure out how to use what they've learned to build a life of learning and action. Bob calls out the bullshit that actually undermines the entire movement of liberal education. And the consequences of that bullshit go far beyond making stupid generalizations about my people, mid-westerners.
Thank you for this necessary push-back. I totally agree that this kind of insulated and shoddy scholarship undermines the role of higher education. The authors are helping out the anti-intellectual right and they don't even know it. Even worse, it sounds as if they're erasing Black history.
This book is but one more example of people treating the Midwest as a sort of curiosity to be looked at the way we look at animals in a zoo. I mean the “Everyman in a diner” is an entire cottage industry. It’s annoying, condescending, but most important inaccurate.
To your point, it’s almost always conclusion-first “reporting” and (willfully?) ignores the reality that the Midwest is a very real region with very real people living very real lives.
Much easier to marvel at gas station breakfast pizza and treat us all as caricatures.
Suggested first sentence: "This book about the "flyover region" was worth a flyover itself, but it crashed and burned when I read it. Here's why." Was any of the "evidence" a picture of Rush Limbaugh (born in Cape Girardeau, MO) with his famous phrase of "I have one hand behind my back, on loan from God" and I will tell you what to think? (many years before Ron DeSantis' recent claim). Your review described the torture in reading and reflecting, but without mention of bread and water, just implied beer. In an earlier era of this process, you could have referenced how many trees died to yield the mountains of crumpled pieces of paper and how many gross of #2 pencils were snapped in wrestling to produce this review. Clearly you wanted to end the match very early with a technical fall but somehow you struggled to a complete review with far too much riding time. (had to use the wrestling metaphor for you). If social sciences are a mess, they have a lot of company with the arts, any theoretical disciplines (including math and engineering), and science in general. How many and which people seem to be uncomfortable with facts or scientific process? Lots of thoughts triggered by your review, and hard to focus it all just now as is obvious in my commentary.
Sounds like a boring book in itself but think about Kim Reynold's tv ads. Didn't they play to this very notion? She went riding around in a big bus with her picture on it in her white sweatshirt, saying other places are frightening and we know right from wrong --not like those cities or even worse, California. I never imagined the pig neutering- gun shooting ad or give 'em the bird would be effective campaign slogans, but they were. It was like Harold Hill from the Music Man coming to town in my opinion. Iowa was once an unpredictable place but politicians have told us not to be. What happened to our independent streak? Someone needs to write a book about it, even if it isn't these authors.
Great comments. Thank you. Let me also toss in the juvenilization that comes with the "assistant" and "associate" professor titles as also part of the problem. An assistant professor is an assistant to no other faculty member.
Thanks Charles. This was the book I was telling you about when we met at Peace Tree. This took way too much time to do because it was so hard to penetrate. I'm glad it's over!
My concern is that few people in Iowa stood up to it even though in the past, as you point out, we have been very different. Dominie Scholte must be rolling in his grave after the racist ad was shot in Pella and no one said a damn thing.
Excellent! Regarding tenure and academia: For the most part, University professors are given no credit for being good teachers. Most professors have no education in how to effectively educate. Their primary measurements seem to be, at least to me, grant money brought in, # of doctoral students, and publications. Be a great teacher without the 3 metrics listed above will not get you tenure or even paid particularly well. Yes, all that money being paid for your education to institutions that don't really value teaching. Universities often crow about outreach, but unless that brings in a pocket or two full of money, it will get the outreacher in an academic unit nowhere. Yes, there are non-academic units dedicated to outreach, but their reputations are based on their connection to experts in the needed knowledge to help solve their clients' problems.
A friend of mine who was a professor in an engineering program at Iowa State received only 2 criticisms in his departmental appraisals: You spend too much time with undergraduate students and small Iowa companies.
One more example: My dad was the co-op program advisor for the industrial engineering department for a long time. The position required much more planning and interaction with the students he advised to help them secure co-op positions and to plan their academic coursework around their job rotations. He began his professional career as a high school math teacher before returning to school to get his IE degree. He also worked for 7 years for an Iowa manufacturer which gave him real world experience many professors do not have. He was voted the top professor by the students and student organizations many times. When he came up for a promotion to a full professorship, he was always docked for not publishing. He finally told them to give the co-op program to someone else and he would be glad to publish. They finally gave him the promotion to Professor.
Yes, these are but two examples of anecdotal data, but they are not unusual. I worked in one of those units designated to outreach for 20 years and experienced many similar examples.
Too much to say about this to fit into a comment, but I love the points about performative ambiguity and the metaphor of the dank cave, rather than the ivory tower. As I'll write for Tuesday's newsletter, a lot of this ironically mimics American Puritanism. Maybe a sliver of John Winthrop's audience could have understood his logical method and argument in "A Model of Christian Charity," but flourishes from the pulpit were common strategies for lording authority over the common people and keeping them in their place. The American university was born of the Enlightenment and the Early Republic and could use a dose of the clarity and rationality that one finds in, say, Benjamin Franklin.
As a fellow social scientist, rural sociology MS from Iowa State, I couldn't agree more with Dr. Bob. I got a degree in rural sociology because I wanted to change the world. It's served me well. But often I feel like the outlier rather than the norm. It seems the two big groups in sociology are academics and marketers. Learning how to think, write, and act through a scientific approach has supercharged my ability to engage and help advance social change. I encourage any younger person who wants to be a change maker, which is almost all of them that I've met, to study whatever field they are most interested in and then figure out how to use what they've learned to build a life of learning and action. Bob calls out the bullshit that actually undermines the entire movement of liberal education. And the consequences of that bullshit go far beyond making stupid generalizations about my people, mid-westerners.
Thank you for this necessary push-back. I totally agree that this kind of insulated and shoddy scholarship undermines the role of higher education. The authors are helping out the anti-intellectual right and they don't even know it. Even worse, it sounds as if they're erasing Black history.
Now that’s what I call a book review! Leonard rocks!
This book is but one more example of people treating the Midwest as a sort of curiosity to be looked at the way we look at animals in a zoo. I mean the “Everyman in a diner” is an entire cottage industry. It’s annoying, condescending, but most important inaccurate.
To your point, it’s almost always conclusion-first “reporting” and (willfully?) ignores the reality that the Midwest is a very real region with very real people living very real lives.
Much easier to marvel at gas station breakfast pizza and treat us all as caricatures.
Wow, Bob. That is quite a review. I cannot comment on the book, since I don't know it, but I agree with you completely about academia. Well said.
And really interesting points about Iowa's progressive history, which I didn't know.
Suggested first sentence: "This book about the "flyover region" was worth a flyover itself, but it crashed and burned when I read it. Here's why." Was any of the "evidence" a picture of Rush Limbaugh (born in Cape Girardeau, MO) with his famous phrase of "I have one hand behind my back, on loan from God" and I will tell you what to think? (many years before Ron DeSantis' recent claim). Your review described the torture in reading and reflecting, but without mention of bread and water, just implied beer. In an earlier era of this process, you could have referenced how many trees died to yield the mountains of crumpled pieces of paper and how many gross of #2 pencils were snapped in wrestling to produce this review. Clearly you wanted to end the match very early with a technical fall but somehow you struggled to a complete review with far too much riding time. (had to use the wrestling metaphor for you). If social sciences are a mess, they have a lot of company with the arts, any theoretical disciplines (including math and engineering), and science in general. How many and which people seem to be uncomfortable with facts or scientific process? Lots of thoughts triggered by your review, and hard to focus it all just now as is obvious in my commentary.
Sounds like a boring book in itself but think about Kim Reynold's tv ads. Didn't they play to this very notion? She went riding around in a big bus with her picture on it in her white sweatshirt, saying other places are frightening and we know right from wrong --not like those cities or even worse, California. I never imagined the pig neutering- gun shooting ad or give 'em the bird would be effective campaign slogans, but they were. It was like Harold Hill from the Music Man coming to town in my opinion. Iowa was once an unpredictable place but politicians have told us not to be. What happened to our independent streak? Someone needs to write a book about it, even if it isn't these authors.
Great comments. Thank you. Let me also toss in the juvenilization that comes with the "assistant" and "associate" professor titles as also part of the problem. An assistant professor is an assistant to no other faculty member.
Thanks Charles. This was the book I was telling you about when we met at Peace Tree. This took way too much time to do because it was so hard to penetrate. I'm glad it's over!
My concern is that few people in Iowa stood up to it even though in the past, as you point out, we have been very different. Dominie Scholte must be rolling in his grave after the racist ad was shot in Pella and no one said a damn thing.
Excellent! Regarding tenure and academia: For the most part, University professors are given no credit for being good teachers. Most professors have no education in how to effectively educate. Their primary measurements seem to be, at least to me, grant money brought in, # of doctoral students, and publications. Be a great teacher without the 3 metrics listed above will not get you tenure or even paid particularly well. Yes, all that money being paid for your education to institutions that don't really value teaching. Universities often crow about outreach, but unless that brings in a pocket or two full of money, it will get the outreacher in an academic unit nowhere. Yes, there are non-academic units dedicated to outreach, but their reputations are based on their connection to experts in the needed knowledge to help solve their clients' problems.
A friend of mine who was a professor in an engineering program at Iowa State received only 2 criticisms in his departmental appraisals: You spend too much time with undergraduate students and small Iowa companies.
One more example: My dad was the co-op program advisor for the industrial engineering department for a long time. The position required much more planning and interaction with the students he advised to help them secure co-op positions and to plan their academic coursework around their job rotations. He began his professional career as a high school math teacher before returning to school to get his IE degree. He also worked for 7 years for an Iowa manufacturer which gave him real world experience many professors do not have. He was voted the top professor by the students and student organizations many times. When he came up for a promotion to a full professorship, he was always docked for not publishing. He finally told them to give the co-op program to someone else and he would be glad to publish. They finally gave him the promotion to Professor.
Yes, these are but two examples of anecdotal data, but they are not unusual. I worked in one of those units designated to outreach for 20 years and experienced many similar examples.
Just my 2-cents worth.