sometimes there's a buggy....

Grading Day, so Link

Blast! I begin each term with such an effective schedule--no course assignments overlap, due dates are spread out, and so on. Blast! Each term's schedule ends up collapsing about week four. Granted, "collapse" is a bit hyperbolic, but it's inevitable that something will occur to shake up the term's choreography. Yes. I am behind schedule.

Anyway, I've been responding to student work all week, and the end approaches: I sit with 50 papers before me. I will meet with half of the authors in conference tomorrow and Friday. The remainder I will respond to via email today and tomorrow.  As much as I'd love to spend today writing about SCOTUS and WKRP in Cincinnati, I've my priorities. Instead, I'll leave a link to Lawyers, Guns, and Money, where you'll always find insightful challenging posts on a number of issues (academia, politics, ideology, pop culture, etc). Love that blog.

Howard Zinn, Ideology, and Faulty Scholarship

It's a day (and night) for grading papers, so I'll put this here: part review of a biography of Howard Zinn, and part critique of Zinn's career, David Greenberg's "Howard Zinn's Influential Mutilations of American History" in The New Republic (hardly a bastion of traditionalism or of conservatism). I appreciate Greenberg's approach to revisionism such as Zinn's: he calls out Zinn's willingness to castigate the USA's actions and ideologies while ignoring or minimizing other nations' cruelties--his silences on the brutalities of Soviet Russia, and so on.

Of Zinn's scholarship in A People's History of the United States, Greenberg says:

Zinn rests satisfied with what strikes him as the scandalous revelation that claims of objectivity often mask ideological predilections. Imagine! And on the basis of this sophomoric insight, he renounces the ideals of objectivity and empirical responsibility, and makes the dubious leap to the notion that a historian need only lay his ideological cards on the table and tell whatever history he chooses.

Lord, but I have heard this methodology set forth by undergraduates in courses past: "as long as I identify my point of view and find sufficient quotes that seem to lend authority, my work is done." Rather than reasoning and sound evidence that reflects a thorough consideration of the issue, support becomes a quote-hunt, the results of which are often cherry-picked, redefined, and decontextualized.

Don't such arguments (aligned with specific ideologies, supported with cherry-picked evidence)  become non-arguable? Rather than dealing with reason, we deal with emotion and belief--and one can't really (fairly) argue with feeling or faith.

It's tempting to go on and to develop, somewhat, these initial thoughts, but I have yards of paper to read before I sleep.

Aside: Apparently Ralph Ellison didn't think much of Zinn's scholarship. Who knew?