For some reason, Tom Wolfe gets a lot of credit for writing these sorts of scenarios, but Shvarts is getting no credit for staging a life-action Tom Wolfe story.

I'm suspecting the entire project was a hoax meant to spur exactly the reactions it is currently spurring.

The fact that a professor of Victorian literature has blogged more about Shvarts's performance art than about Victorian literature suggests that Shvarts's strategies have worked.

It's a stupid project, but it's a project nonetheless. Fendrick's attack on it as belated and institutional assumes that performance art wasn't always belated and institutional. I suspect we can find outrageous art before performance art (Dada, anyone); and I suspect the originators of performance art had some relationship with the art establishments of their time.

Luther wrote:

The fact that a professor of Victorian literature has blogged more about Shvarts's performance art than about Victorian literature suggests that Shvarts's strategies have worked.

Boy did I miss the boat!

All this time, I thought the professor of Victorian literature was posting on academic oversight, or the lack of it, as exemplified by Shvart and her "project."

OK, so maybe I'm convinced the humanities have degraded to a hopeless mess. (hah-hah).

Now, can we get back to something serious?

Mike wrote:

OK, so maybe I'm convinced the humanities have degraded to a hopeless mess. (hah-hah).

Now, can we get back to something serious?

Darn. I blew it again.

Academic oversight is too trivial to be discussed. We need to get back to serious stuff.

Yes indeed, Mike. A single bad senior art project is no doubt the straw that broke the back of my confidence in the academic humanities. I mean, there's never been a bad young artist before now. And we all remember the names of all the members of the Royal Academy, right?

And the sciences have never had a problem with oversight of research. Tuskegee folks will tell you so.

Luther, if you know of something like the Tuskegee incident going on at an American university these days, please let us know.

minerva: glad to hear that this is not symptomatic of the entire humanities area. I have gotten a different impression from reading websites such as this one. My friends in the humanities tell me things are blown way out of proportion, maybe they are right. But still I wonder, why devote all this attention to one bad student artist?

Mike sez: "But still I wonder, why devote all this attention to one bad student artist?"

Erin, feel free to not approve this comment if it is not sufficiently on-target.

Mike, years ago I had a co-worker who had returned from a weekend visit to her out-of-state family. She told me on that Monday that she had done something that kind of surprised her - she'd run into a man she had gone to high school with and hadn't seen since, and ended up spending the night at his place. What she expressed to me was that she didn't know why she was so bothered about her behavior; and that couldn't stop thinking about it, and she didn't know why she couldn't stop.

My response was that if she was bothered then she must have violated her own moral standards, even if she didn't think so; that she had crossed a line she didn't know she had. I advised her to go home that night (she lived alone) and turn off the TV, take the phone off the hook, and have a little talk with herself to determine exactly what her moral standards were and exactly where she drew that line. Because she had reached the age of 30 and had never done that.

I suspect that attention is being given to this case because it presents an opportunity to do what clearly needs to be done and perhaps has been neglected too long; and that is to devote a little time and focussed thought toward figuring out exactly what "society" (hate that word) can or can't accept.

Mike, check out the human testing on TGN1412. The pharmaceutical industry, which has deep connections to the academic sciences, is a bit of a horror show.

Mike specified American universities. The TGN1412 thing happened in England.

Luther: What does a clinical trial in London gone awry -- it's very far from clear from the published reports that there were ethical lapses -- have to do with American universities? And the pharmaceutical industry is a horror show? I'll keep the advances in pharmaceuticals, medicine, and biology during my lifetime, thank you very much.

Hi Mike –
About your friends in the humanities and their opinion that things are blown out of proportion because of the Shvarts affair, etc., you might want to check out a recent post by Roger Kimball, a conservative critic of academe. Certainly, in the humanities there are plenty of smart people who are good teachers and writers, not to mention students, and they shouldn’t all be tarred with the same brush. But unfortunately, it is common for many humanities colleges to have large numbers of opinionated, untalented (but energetic) nincompoops who are deemed to be geniuses by people who should know better. I think there is a big problem, and that it’s not limited to college campuses. It has to do with a lack of belief in our culture, and a lack of courage on the part of those who are in a position to defend it.

From Roger Kimball:
-- Many of my readers, being sensible souls, will be innocent of the name Homi K. Bhabha. The former Chester D. Tripp Professor of the Humanities at the University of Chicago is now the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and Director of the Humanities Center at Harvard as well as Distinguished Visiting Professor in the Humanities at University College, London. . . .Bhabha made his name as an exponent of “post-colonial studies,” i.e., a reader-proof species of anti-Western multicultural claptrap that even now makes many graduate students salivate. In case you believe that “reader-proof” is unkind, allow me to introduce you to this snippet from his much-admired essay “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse”:

‘Within that conflictual economy of colonial discourse which Edward Said describes as the tension between the synchronic panoptical vision of domination—the demand for identity, stasis—and the counter-pressure of the diachrony of history—change, difference—mimicry represents an ironic compromise. If I may adapt Samuel Weber’s formulation of the marginalizing vision of castration, …’

Well, let’s draw a veil over Mr. Weber’s “marginalizing vision.” You get the drift. And the amazing thing is that Professor Bhahba can keep it up over the long haul. --

Oh, I get it now, Mike, "the humanities" only take place inside the academy. And academic scientists have no connection to pharmaceuticals.

Luther, what a tremendous non-sequitur.

If you insist on talking about pharmaceuticals: To compare Tuskegee to TGN1412 is to trivialize the evil that Tuskegee was. TGN1412 did not involve the deliberate withholding, over decades, of treatment for a debilitating disease in order to study the course of it in the human body, and lying to the subjects so they would think they were being treated. Neither have any other pharmaceutical blunders. You can probably list a lot of them, but every one was an inadvertent mistake. Even if oversight was lax, it was lax because no one thought anything bad would happen. This is in stark contrast to the Tuskegee incident, which was deliberate. The reason we keep invoking Tuskegee, which as far as anyone knows is unique in American history, is that it crossed a line we don't want to cross ever again.

Getting back to the story at hand, Shvarts apparently made it very clear to her advisers what she was doing, or pretending to do, and they apparently knew all about it and gave her the go-ahead. No inadvertent error here. To quote from a quote from Erin's previous post:

The Dean of Yale College Peter Salovey stated, "I am appalled. This piece of performance art as reported in the press bears no relation to what I consider appropriate for an undergraduate senior project. The Dean of the School of Art and I are reassessing what constitutes an appropriate senior art project and the manner in which those projects are mentored."

So it is clear, even to the luminaries at Yale, that this was too much and shouldn't have been allowed, and a correction is being made. Good for them. Luther says, "I'm suspecting the entire project was a hoax meant to spur exactly the reactions it is currently spurring." Do you think reassessment, and probably tightening down on, "what constitutes an appropriate senior art project" is what Shvarts meant to spur? I kind of doubt it.

Laura, thanks, you put the matter to Luther very well. I'll just say one thing more.

Luther: yes, academics have connections to pharmaceuticals. I even trained a few Ph.D.'s who ended up in the pharaceutical industry in one way or another. And I'm proud to have done so. And no, there is nothing like Tuskegee going on at any American university that I know of. If you know something the rest of us don't, please inform us.

TG – What I was getting at in my first post is that this business at Yale is not worth all the commotion. If the arts or humanities are really that far gone. Or on the other hand if this is an extreme and fairly isolated case, something like I believe the Ward Churchill business was.

I am very suspicious of what is going on in the humanities where I teach, at a large state university, from what I can tell as an outsider. Most of the public programs – seminars, outside speakers – at least about half, probably much more – seem uninteresting and a waste of time, the usual race class and gender stuff in addition to a good deal of trivia. A good many of them are overtly politicized. There are virtually no politically colored presentations that offer a conservative or even middle of the road view. Still, there is a certain residuum that is interesting and very much worth attention, I’m one of the very few science people here who shows up at a wide spectrum of this stuff.

As I say, my faculty friends in the humanities tell me the attacks of people like Roger Kimball are overblown, the attacks of people like David Horowitz. I am strongly inclined to agree, but I think my friends (who are kind of defensive about the whole business, as I can well understand) don’t realize how far things have gone, partly because they are on the left themselves.

A few years ago I was a lot more sympathetic to notions like core curricula than I am now. Why the falloff of enthusiasm? For one thing, I wouldn’t trust my university to come up with a core that would be valuable for the students I teach (science majors). I would fear that they would come up with something that was worse than the mishmash we have now. Another thing is, the students I teach generally don’t care much about the humanities and social sciences. If I were convinced that we would come up with something that was good for them, whether they liked it or not, I wouldn’t care what they want. But I’ve come to the tentative conclusion that the system we have now isn’t all that bad, given the realistic alternatives. (Except I would like to get rid of a couple of multicultural courses). As it is, the vast majority who couldn’t care less can get through their general education requirements by taking fluff. The minority who care have the freedom, more or less, to pick and choose among stuff that I would consider garbage, and other stuff that I think is probably pretty good. Even some of the indifferent ones may discover an interest they didn’t know they had, by taking a course in something that appeals, like philosophy of science, or music, or something else.

That may sound kind of cynical, and it is. At this point, I simply don’t want the natural sciences to be pulled down with the rest of the university, by internal and external forces. The natural sciences in this country are in enough trouble already, though most people don’t realize it.

Mike..."The natural sciences in this country are in enough trouble already, though most people don’t realize it"...could you expand on that a bit?

Luther, I've spoken up for you before and I guess I just have to do it again, You're absolutely right about American universities. Just look at what was happening at the University of Delaware residence halls not too long ago. If that didn't call out for scientific oversight, I can't imagine what would.

David Foster -- sure, I can expand. The natural sciences -- the physical sciences at least -- are in big trouble in the U.S. Funding has not kept up with inflation. Programs like the National Science Foundation increasingly have gone off into social enginnering and big group programs, rather than the individual investigator grants that were once the mainstay of American science. There is a big push on to apply the Title IX hammer to universities over supposed gender inequities (as a recent piece on National Review Online put it). The scientists are absolutely terrified to resist this on account of fear of losing their funding, and other reasons; see the Larry Summers case at Harvard as a lesson in what can happen.

The U.S. has also clearly fallen behind in big-science things like high-energy physics (the Europeans will be leaving us in the dust when the Large Hadron Collider starts up, and we have stiffed the rest of the world on our commitments to fund and participate in fusion energy facilities). Huge numbers of academic scientists, in mid-career, are in despair over losing their grants. Some of them tell me they would never advise their own children to go into academic science. As for myself, I'm further along in my career, and I've been fortunate (so far) with funding, for a variety of reasons that probably don't necessarily reflect on any superiority, I don't kid myself on that score.

One last thing: American companies used to do a lot of basic research in the physical sciences. No more; because of competitive pressures, it's all quicly commercializable stuff. Any long-range work is going to be done in non-profit entities.

I've ruefully concluded that the U.S. in rapid long-term decline, at least in physical science. I don't think many people are aware of this, and I don't know how many people would care. It's not like it was several decades ago.

Thanks, Mike. I'd note that--at least for some American companies--"quickly commercializable stuff" can mean 10 years away as well as 3 years away...also, a lot of very fundamental innovations have come from projects which had practical and urgent objectives in mind...the modern computer emerged largely from the need to calculate artillery trajectories. But I agree that there is less fundamental research going on at places like GE and 3M than there used to be, and this poses some issues. I also think that the "big group programs" that you say are becoming increasingly common in NSF-supported academia are very likely to be driven by the fashions of the time and hence to not be very innovatives.

You might enjoy the post "Leaving a Trillion on the Table" at my blog.

Interesting couple of posts, Mike. We seem to agree that the problems on our campuses are not simply the creation of hostile conservative critics. (Some of whom are themselves hysterical boneheads.) You mention the Title IX-like program, written about recently on the NRO site, that is probably coming soon to a science department in your town. I think you and your younger colleagues are right to be concerned -- and we should all be worried about these programs and the motives of those creating and supporting them. The idea behind such efforts is that there is “unconscious bias”. That sounds to me like the mortal sin of misogynist males in lab coats, and has a ring similar to that of “institutional racism”. Them’s witchuntin’ words, and you can bet that gender quotas, and the creation of kooky kommittees, whose purpose will be to make science research kinder and gentler will be soon to follow. It’s sad that we’ve come to this point, and that there seems to be little that anyone can do to reverse the PC trend. Nothing wrong with fairness, helping people achieve their goals, and being guided by the Golden Rule, but something else animates these efforts, which have less to do with fairness and more to do with pressure-group politics and social engineering. We’ve got trouble . . .

David Foster -- I think you are right about the lack of innovation that is likely to come from the big-group NSF programs. They have gone off on a very unfortunate track, is my opinion.

Also, I think you have hit on something on fundamental and/or big results coming out of the government programs. They do best either with very fundamental research, or applied research connected with some real government mission, the example of the computer coming out of military needs is a very good example of the latter; MRI imaging a very good example of the former. Where they usually flop is in "industrial policy" or "social engineering", which is what they increasingly seem to be doing.

TG -- No, I certainly don't think that the problems on campus are only the result of conservative critics, not by a long shot. What I am concerned about is the "solutions" on offer, and also the effect on the sciences, either of embracing the "solutions" or trying to defend the targets of criticism. Either way I'm afraid the sciences are going to lose. And as I've indicated, I think American science is in enough trouble, even if this is generally not known.