How Naming the James Webb Telescope Turned Into a Fight Over Homophobia. For half a decade now, influential young scientists have denounced NASA’s decision to name its deep-space telescope after James E. Webb, who led the space agency to the cusp of the 1969 moon landing. This man, they insisted, was a homophobe who oversaw a purge of gay employees.
Hakeem Oluseyi, who is now the president of the National Society of Black Physicists, was sympathetic to these critics. Then he delved into archives and talked to historians and wrote a carefully sourced essay in Medium in 2021 that laid out his surprising findings. … (New York Times)
Plato Was Not White. Another teaching semester is about to ramp up, and as is often the case, I have some Platonic dialogues lined up to teach. I’ve taught at least one dialogue in almost every semester since about 2005, and on the campus of Emmanuel College, where I’ve taught since 2009, people who know about me at all know about me as “that Plato guy.” My sense is that the relatively few people who know about me on the Internet regard me likewise.
Perhaps that professional investment in Plato (personally, I’m more of a postmodern Augustinian with leanings towards MacIntyre’s brand of neo-Thomism) has made me more irritable than I should be when the old Athenian ends up in the crosshairs of well-meaning folks who wish to set right the balance of power and take away the overlordship (I prefer that Anglo-Saxon compound word to the Hellenism “hegemony,” and I grant the irony) from “dead white males.” I think the political questions there are fascinating, but a matter of some historical import gets in the way of the politics, if one isn’t careful: Plato wasn’t White. … (The Christian Humanist)
Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds. In 1975, researchers at Stanford invited a group of undergraduates to take part in a study about suicide. They were presented with pairs of suicide notes. In each pair, one note had been composed by a random individual, the other by a person who had subsequently taken his own life. The students were then asked to distinguish between the genuine notes and the fake ones.
Some students discovered that they had a genius for the task. Out of twenty-five pairs of notes, they correctly identified the real one twenty-four times. Others discovered that they were hopeless. They identified the real note in only ten instances. … (The New Yorker)
The Gendered Ape: Those Embarrassing Bonobos! It’s not always easy to talk about bonobos at academic gatherings. There is no issue with fellow primatologists, who are used to straightforward descriptions of sexual behavior and know the recent evidence. But it’s different with people outside my field, such as anthropologists, philosophers, or psychologists. They become fidgety, scratch their heads, snicker, or adopt a puzzled look. Why do bonobos stump them?
One reason for the discomfort is excessive shyness about erotic behavior, which bonobos exhibit in all positions that we can imagine, and even some that we can’t. Moreover, these apes do it in all partner combinations. People assume that animals use sex only for reproduction, but I estimate that three quarters of bonobo sex has nothing to do with it. … (3QuarksDaily)
If It Was Good Enough for Socrates, It’s Good Enough for Sophomores. This is the season for final exams, but maybe we should drop the pencils, paper and keyboards and start talking instead.
The thought is scary at first. If Chidera Onyeoziri had known that her introductory sociology course required oral exams, “I’m not sure I would have taken the class,” she told me. She was a sophomore at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.; she had never taken an oral exam before.
“I remember putting in a lot of work, spending a lot more time on the course than I otherwise would have,” she said. During the first exam of the semester, she coped with her nerves by getting out of her chair and pacing. Her professor, normally so friendly, stared impassively and interrupted her with questions.” … (New York Times)
The historian and artist Nell Painter has a wonderful book called "The History of White People," which is a sweeping historical analysis of the concept of whiteness that begins in the ancient mediterranean before the concept ever existed as such. Despite the fact that these people weren't really "white" for any variety of reasons, she begins there because as Ted points out, later thinkers and race scientists leaned heavily on defining them as "white" in order to establish their own meaning of "whiteness."
As a college instructor I would 100% support more oral examination. Indeed, I think the whole premise of grades as we use them now is wrongheaded and misconceived. Socrates and Confucius never received a letter grade on anything they ever did and they're revered as history's greatest sages, so why are we so hung up on the concept now? Most of the figures we tend to think of as emblematic of brilliance never received letter grades, which only emerged--really--in the early 20th century, and yet any talk of getting rid of grades or even de-emphasizing them is met by alarmist talk of a the end of "rigor."
My only answer is that switching to things like oral examination and qualitative/narrative assessment requires more teachers, and giving more resources to those teachers, and doesn't lend itself as well to the factory model of education that our institutions have become so invested in over the last 100 years or so as education has become more democratic/accessible. Many educational administrators--it seems--would rather spend billions on tech solutions not rooted in educational scholarship or experience before they spend a dime on hiring more teachers.
A provocative list . . . it is not that I have any lack of things to read (more like a lack of time to get to the things I want), but some of those will be worth a look . . .
A couple of thoughts . . .
On oral examinations: One of the best experiences of my undergraduate career was an oral examination at the end of my sophomore year. The course was on the American Revolution. The professor was a (justly) famous scholar of the period (and a warm and unfailingly polite individual). The panel was the professor and two of his teaching assistants (neither of whom had been my section leader). It quickly evolved into a freewheeling discussion of the period, which was all too short. Wonderful.
On Plato (or Socrates, or Aristotle) not being "white." It has struck me that attaching the concept of "whiteness" (which, at a minimum, has to look at Germanic and other northern peoples, and their movements across northwestern Europe centuries after Plato; and which is very likely a construct of the early modern period) to some guys who lived in a Mediterranean culture with interactions with Egypt, Persia and a host of other influences was anachronistic. No doubt that Plato (and the other two--as well as many many others) had a profound effect on what we have come to call Western civilization. But they precede it, and their thought is open to all (think of their influence on Islamic culture, for one). Will follow that link to see if perhaps I was, in my musing, on to something . . .