Becoming a conservative icon

In sociological social psychology, role theory examines the effects of the various social roles that individuals take on. A recent article by Jacob Weisberg at Slate (excerpted from his recent biography) examines how Ronald Reagan transitioned from being a “liberal anticommunist” (and sociology major!) to the man who would become a conservative icon during his time working for General Electric from the mid-1950s until 1962. Reagan’s tasks for General Electric included hosting a weekly show called “General Electric Theater” and traveling the company’s plants as a “goodwill ambassador,” which included giving speeches to employees.

As Weisberg states,

For Reagan, it was a dry run for politics. He learned how to interact with a live audience, and not just perform for the camera and microphone. He learned how to test which jokes went over and refine the way he told them. He learned how to preserve his voice and manage his energy during weeks of uninterrupted travel. He learned how to come across not as a distant matinee idol, but as a man of the people.

His interactions with company officials, though, may have had an even bigger impact. He traveled from plant to plant with a GE public relations officer named Earl Dunckel, a strong conservative who challenged Reagan’s liberal views. Weisberg also reports that he was influenced by GE’s chief labor negotiator, Lemuel Boulware, through his interactions with countless midlevel executives and plant managers. He states,

Over time, Reagan’s speeches came to match the message from headquarters about the inefficient, irrational, and meddlesome federal government. After a couple of years, Reagan was professing concern about the “business climate,” a term Boulware coined, and recounting tales of “government interference and snafus.” Now that he could no longer shelter his income through the “temporary corporation” loophole, high marginal tax rates were a constant preoccupation of his.

Thus, as his roles changed, so did his attitudes, and he became the man that conservatives revere today. It is interesting that changes as a result of our roles often seem “natural” in hindsight. Reagan probably looked back on his younger self as foolish and inexperienced, ignoring the fact that different roles would have led to different attitudes.

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive posts and links about Reagan and other conservative icons via your news feed. If you do, you’re sure to be disappointed!

Read Full Post »

Only men can whine

A week or so ago, Alanis Morissette showed up at a Taylor Swift concert to sing her breakout hit, “You Oughta Know.” This prompted Taylor Swift fans to ask, “who the hell was that?”, which prompted Amanda Marcotte at Slate to answer, “Alanis sucked, you’re better off for not knowing.” Marcotte explains:

Alanis Morissette was a singer who, in the mid-1990s, capitalized on a small but growing trend of “angry woman” rock acts, such as L7 and Hole, and made an absolute killing, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill worldwide. But while her predecessors wrote songs protesting sexual harassment and rape, Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you.

Although Marcotte compares Morissette to other “angry women” in the mid-1990s, I think that a better comparison is mid-’90s rock music in general. (I’ll also set aside the direct line from “You Oughta Know” to Taylor Swift’s catalog of songs aimed at people who have wronged her, which suggests that Swift’s fans are familiar with this form of protest with or without knowledge of Morissette.) The ’90s were, for better or worse, a particularly whiny time. From Pearl Jam’s “Black” to less-remembered songs like Stabbing Westward’s “What Do I Have to Do?” lots of men were singing about unrequited love. Hell, Weezer’s Pinkerton, with songs like “Pink Triangle” and “Across the Sea” helped launch an entire genre of music made by whiny men.

In this context, it seems unfair to deny Morissette the ability to whine about a failed relationship just because some of her less popular female peers sang about more serious topics. “Jagged Little Pill” is no “Little Earthquakes” or “Not a Pretty Girl,” but it wasn’t intended to be. That it sold many more copies than all of these other other albums by “angry women” put together speaks to its broader relatability, regardless of its misuse of the word “Ironic.” Marcotte seems to think that the world would have been better off if Morissette had simply said, “boys will be boys” and moved on with her life, though I bet that Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood disagree.

Whatever you think of “Jagged Little Pill” or Alanis Morissette’s music in general, Marcotte’s criticism seems to be rooted in the relative dearth of female-fronted rock bands, whether in the ’90s or today. As Shonda Rhimes has noted, when there is a lack of diversity in a particular medium, the depictions of those in underrepresented groups are expected to meet a higher standard. A lot of white men in the ’90s could whine because white men made nearly all rock music and, between them, covered the entire range of emotions and topics. If anything, the presence of L7, Hole, Tori Amos, and Ani DiFranco in the ’90s, with their music about serious issues, made more room for Alanis Morissette to talk about things that were less serious, or serious in different ways. To expect every female musician to be all things to all people indicates that there aren’t nearly enough female musicians.

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook for more discussions of the music of my youth via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

Chris Rock and Kiese Laymon on racial progress

In an interview with New York Magazine (via Slate), Chris Rock offers some thoughts on racial progress after Ferguson, changing the typical framing of this issue and focusing indirectly on the issue of power. He says:

When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before. … So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Also making the rounds on Facebook is an article about the experiences of Kiese Laymon, a black faculty member at Vassar College. Like Rock, Laymon highlights the differential power afforded to whites vs. blacks, even when the whites are campus security guards and the blacks are professors, concluding:

We are so much better than the sick part of our nation that murders an unarmed black boy like a rabid dog, before prosecuting him for being a nigger. We are so much better than powerful academic institutions, special prosecutors, and the innocent practitioners of white racial supremacy in this nation who really believe that a handful of niggers with some special IDs, and a scar(r)ed black President on the wrong side of history, are proof of their—and really, our own—terrifying deliverance from American evil.

This, combined with other recent events, demonstrates that we still have a long way to go to change the structural elements that will allow whites to be “nicer.”

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links about the depressing state of race relations in the U.S. via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

N of one (journalist edition)

I’ve previously discussed the fact that the general public doesn’t typically use the same standards as researchers to arrive at their conclusions. In that post, I explained, “I’ve heard sociologists use the disclaimer that their personal experiences are based on an “N of one,” meaning that they are drawing conclusions from a sample of one.” Now, journalists are disregarding the age-old “Three is a trend” rule of thumb (that I couldn’t find the origin of during a 30-second Google search) and getting in on the action. Let’s take a look at the results:

On one side we have a report originally posted at Business Insider (which may not be the best source) and reposted at Slate highlighting the experiences of John Greenough, a Business Insider research analyst who purchased a “Never Ending Pasta Pass” from Olive Garden (not to be confused with Applebee’s Endless Appetizers) that ends on November 9 (I guess that Olive Garden and I disagree on the meaning of “never”). Hayley Peterson, the article’s author, writes:

We asked him about what it was like having access to free Olive Garden every day for the past seven weeks. At the beginning of the promotion, Greenough said he had planned to take full advantage of the pass and go to Olive Garden every day. But the salty pasta has gotten the best of him.

“I ate there, I think, 20 of the first 25 days, but stopped for a week because I started to get horrible canker sores from all the salt in the pasta,” he said. (According to the Mayo Clinic, the exact cause of canker sores is unclear, although triggers can include highly acidic certain foods like tomato sauce.) “Since then, I’ve gone sparingly because I felt really unhealthy from the pasta*,” Greenough said.

Greenough continues to complain about the slow take-out service and concludes that he will not return to the restaurant after his “Never Ending” pass ends, despite the money that he saved. Greenough’s feelings pervade the article, which is titled “This is What Happens When You Eat Olive Garden for 7 Weeks Straight,” and reports that “Olive Garden sold only 1,000 passes.”

Reading that Olive Garden only sold 1,000 passes in the context of Greenough’s experiences led me to believe that Olive Garden’s food is so bad that they couldn’t find more than 1,000 suckers to pay $100 for two months of eating it. Then, however, I read this article at the Huffington Post about an “American Hero” who has eaten at Olive Garden 95 times in six weeks. In it, Leigh Weingus shares the story of Alan Martin, who “was one of the lucky 1,000 people to score” a Never Ending Pasta Pass, which sold out in two hours. So the rarity of the passes was apparently one of supply, not of demand.

The differences don’t end at the framing of the articles, however. Martin is quoted as saying, “I can’t believe I get to eat like this every day… This is great.” Not only does he appear to love the food, but he also doesn’t complain about the service. Weingus fails to inform readers about any canker sores that have appeared in Martin’s mouth, so he must not have any since no serious journalist writing about somebody eating at Olive Garden would omit a key piece of information like that. The differences between the two stories are so apparent that it is almost as if each journalist talked to a separate individual and used that individual’s experience with the promotion to write their article, leading to dramatically different conclusions!

*That one would feel unhealthy after eating this amount of pasta is not particularly surprising in light of the recent revelation on South Park that the Food Guide Pyramid was upside-down.

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive never-ending updates and links via your news feed.

 

Read Full Post »

A new tool for discussing race in the classroom

Over the years I’ve had a number of “good” classes of students, but I can’t recall a good class conversation about race. This is a problem, because without the ability to think about the ways that people understand race it is harder to tear those understandings down and introduce a sociological perspective (even if the sociological perspective is sometimes debated). The Whiteness Project, A new series from PBS, and related videos online, provide a possible solution to these problems. As the “About” section on the webpage notes:

The Whiteness Project is a multiplatform investigation into how Americans who identify as “white” experience their ethnicity.

The project is conducting 1,000 interviews with white people from all walks of life and localities in which they are asked about their relationship to, and their understanding of, their own whiteness. It also includes data drawn from a variety of sources that highlights some quantitative aspects of what it means to be a white American.

This is great for the classroom because it allows instructors to show a brief video clip and then discuss the ideas it contains, the likely origins of those ideas, and sociological responses. Essentially, it shifts the burden of revealing the types of ideas that many white Americans hold from students to video clips. Take Jason, for instance, who says that he has not received any benefits from being white an discusses blacks blaming problems that have long-since been solved (you know, like slavery and discrimination) for their current situations. Or Harold, who believes that whites are the ones who suffer from discrimination today.

Using these videos as a starting point will allow students to do the work of critiquing the ideas present from a sociological perspective. I’m looking forward to trying it out.

Via Slate

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

Life at a Lego R1

Dear IT, Thanks for the swift reply, but Dr Black has a PhD in Computing: she's tried a restart already. Regards. pic.twitter.com/Bya9v6KA8b

— Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 27, 2014

Lego recently launched a line of female scientists, and according to Slate, archaeologist Donna Yates bought a set and started the “Lego Academics” Twitter account to chronicle their adventures. It is nice to see depictions of female scientists experiencing the highs and lows of academic lives (unfortunately, the set is now sold out), but they must be at an R1 because as far as I can tell they never teach.

PUBLISH OR PERISH!!!! pic.twitter.com/a5333nDd4F

— Lego Academics (@LegoAcademics) August 8, 2014

Read Full Post »

Didn’t Curious George know about stranger danger?

At Slate, Hanna Rosin discusses a children’s book for parents who are uncomfortable allowing their children to have the same freedoms they did while growing up. While they have been raised with Curious George, then, George does not provide the type of example they want their children to follow. As Rosin says:

Remember poor Curious George? How every time that “good little monkey” tried to have a little fun, he would get severely punished? Like, he’d walk up to a friendly stranger in the jungle and wind up smuggled across the ocean in a bag, or play around with the phone and end up in jail? This year brings the successor to Curious George, an energetic little monkey named Bitsy who is possibly the most pitiful children’s book character I’ve come across in a long time.

As a result, the book Bitsy Bear solves the problem of parents who want to read their children a story about monkeys (although the book is called “Bitsy Bear,” Bitsy is a monkey and the bear is the antagonist) without the danger inherent in exploring their world or jumping on the bed. Rosin concludes:

Jenks’ appendix is full of helpful safety tips for parents, such as: Keep DNA samples at home and teach kids about safety latches in trunks. She says to discuss “good strangers,” such as a police officer and other family members, and “bad strangers”— “people who try to lure children from public places.”  In fact children are vastly more likely to be abducted or molested by family members and people they know than they are by strangers, but this kind of information is far too complex for Jenks to process. “This book is dedicated to the sweet innocence of every child,” she writes. If you are so unfortunate as to have a complicated child with other, less savory qualities—curiosity, willfulness, mischievousness, even, God forbid, a wicked temper—I’d say it’s not the book for you.

Maybe the man with the yellow hat will buy it for George.

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

Define “paywall”

To most people, a website that lets you click on a link and then tells you that you need to subscribe to a pay service in order to access the link on which you just clicked would be using a paywall. Most people are apparently wrong. Thanks for clearing that up, Slate!

—

Facebook might try to manipulate your emotions, but because you are their product they will definitely not put you behind a paywall! “Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

Failing students or failing schools?

Ugh.

That was my primary response after reading Reihan Salam’s recent argument at Slate that colleges should be fined when former students default on their student loans. Citing the work of sociologists Elizabeth Armstrong and Laura Hamilton in their book Paying for the Party, Salam notes:

One of their most striking findings is that standard college advising consistently failed to meet the needs of students from modest backgrounds. Students from affluent backgrounds had extensive social networks at their disposal, which helped them turn degrees in “party majors” like sports communication and broadcasting or interior decorating into jobs in glamorous, or glamorous-sounding, fields. Students who didn’t have parents familiar with the ins and outs of higher education to help them navigate the system found themselves at the mercy of incompetent, indifferent, and overworked advisers who routinely led them astray.

His solution? Punish schools for failing their students. He writes:

A good first step would be to punish colleges that have failed their students, as Andrew P. Kelly and Alex Pollock of the American Enterprise Institute have suggested. The basic idea is that if a student defaults on her student loans, the higher education institution she attended should pay a penalty. The genius of this idea, as Kelly has explained, is that it would make colleges think twice about their lackluster advising, even if the penalty were quite small. Colleges would suddenly have an excellent reason to guide students to majors that would help them gain marketable skills.

I see so many problems with this proposal that it is hard to list them all (for a start: financial punishments for schools that serve students with the highest risk has had terrible results for K-12 education, you can lead a student to a major but you can’t make her sign up for classes, if students graduate they might be less likely to default so pressure to pass everybody would increase) but for now I will focus on Salam’s apparent assumption that all schools are the same.

Salam may be surprised to find out that most colleges and universities are not like Midwest University in Paying for the Party. In fact, the middle- and working-class women who were most successful in Armstrong and Hamilton’s study were those who transferred to smaller schools closer to home where they did not face pressure to adhere to a lifestyle that they could not afford (in the short- or long-term). In addition to public flagships there are regional universities and a whole range of liberal arts colleges. Salam doesn’t seem to understand this, writing as if a college is a college and concluding with support for Obama’s proposed college ratings, even arguing that “he hasn’t gone far enough. It is egregious that students, parents, and taxpayers are the ones who suffer when colleges don’t do their jobs while the colleges in question are left untouched. We simply can’t let them get away with it anymore.”

If only colleges would do their jobs! Those jobs are apparently to prepare students for work by ensuring that they graduate from college with the right degrees. The difference between a college graduate and somebody with “some college,” then, lies solely in whether or not a given student received good advice, took that advice, received (not “earned”!) passing grades, and received (not “earned”!) a diploma, marking him or her as suitable for high-wage employment. Except…

I have spent the past ten years teaching college students. I have a job that privileges teaching and advising. I do everything I can to help my students succeed. The majority of them do. Some of them, however, do not. I can think of a handful of students in the course of my teaching career who simply were not prepared to be successful college students. In some cases, students had insufficient preparation in high school. In others, they were not emotionally ready for college or had family obligations that prevented them from focusing on their courses. Sometimes, these students took the same course with me multiple times and failed each time. Often, these students have failed to complete their degrees because their GPAs were insufficient to remain enrolled.

In my experience, the students who have failed at college for these reasons had a strong desire to succeed but could not make it happen. They were not alone, though. In addition to me and their other professors they had advisors working closely with them. They also received help through academic probation programs and took advantage of free tutors, writing centers, and counseling. It is true that they failed as college students, but it is absolutely not true that their institutions failed them.

I do not mean to downplay the factors that led some students in Armstrong and Hamilton’s study not to do well. There are clearly structural changes that Midwestern University could implement that would benefit students. Implementing the same changes on every campus, though, would be ridiculous. Sort of like trying to use a single rating to measure the success of graduates across all departments at a college or university…

—

“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive updates and links via your news feed.

Read Full Post »

Today’s “welfare queen” has a big-screen TV and an iPhone

One of the challenges when discussing poverty in class is the looming specter of the “welfare queen.” Ronald Reagan’s version may have driven a Cadillac with the money she made from scamming the system, but Ronald Reagan’s version was also imaginary. Today’s “welfare queen” is more likely to have a big-screen TV and an iPhone, at least according to my students. A few recent articles at Slate bear this out, but they also do a good job of detailing why a student’s* perceptions of what poverty should look like don’t match up with the experience of what poverty is.

The first summarizes a recent New York Times article highlighting changing costs (as seen in the graph above) showing that although prices of consumer goods have fallen dramatically, the prices of things that are necessary for escaping poverty have risen just as dramatically. The second highlights some of the things that the bottom fifth of American households spend their money on, noting that they “devote a combined 78 percent of their spending, on average, to housing, food, utilities, transportation, and health care. In fact, they spend more on those basics than they make in total pre-tax income, which they can do thanks to government supports such as food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit.” Because they spend more than they make, they are also not able to save for a rainy day, which many Americans would define as “job loss” but those in poverty might be more likely to define as “missed a shift at work” or “visited the doctor about that nagging pain.”

The lack of savings causes problems for some students (and conservative pundits), who argue that the poor should not be buying big-screen TVs or smartphones if they aren’t saving for unexpected events. I wonder if these practices might be connected to Allison Pugh’s concept of symbolic indulgence, in which poor parents sacrifice in order to provide their children with things that will allow them to participate in peer culture. Applying this to adults, a smartphone or big-screen TV (which today is basically just known as a TV) may help adults ease some of the mental burdens of poverty because they are not denying themselves of everything that other Americans have. Pugh also mentions that purchases are sporadic, coming after a tax refund or some unexpected overtime, so this may also be when people make big purchases.

Of course, somebody’s TV may also be rented, in which case they are not only paying a high price in order to have it, but they risk losing it if their economic situation gets worse. Maybe predatory lending and rent-to-own stores will help students gain some compassion for those in poverty, especially when they can relate**.

*These perceptions may also be held by your grandparents or racist uncle.

**Obviously, student loan interest rates are nowhere near the effective interest rates charged by cash advance businesses or Rent-A-Center, but students probably perceive them to be.

Read Full Post »