It takes all kinds! I *don’t* find Mamdani interesting (I look forward to autocorrect finding him interesting though) nor Sydney Sweeney, but I do Helen Andrews. She is so perfect a representative of a type that would’ve once been scorned as a “bluestocking” and yet, her politics do not owe much to the exemplars of that label. I’m pretty sure she’ll never be other than a working woman, unless she has to be suppressed. I was introduced to her via a piece she wrote when younger, on the misbehavior of JS Mill. Very entertaining.
I did read a little tidbit about Mamdani in a rather fun and acid WSJ review (my parents still get the paper!) of his father’s new book, which is a hagiography of Idi Amin, with the curious zest obviously of being written by a member of a group that was especially persecuted by him.
Here was the mention:
“There’s only one paragraph about the younger Mamdani in the entire book. The author writes of a sabbatical from Columbia in 2004, spent in Kampala. His wife and Zohran, then only 12, joined him. The boy was yanked out of school in New York and taken to Africa. What fun, you might think, how thrilling for a young lad! And then Mr. Mamdani tells us that, in Kampala, “Zohran settled down with the study of issues such as ‘zero grazing,’” a type of farming in which cattle are fed with cut grass.
As your heart sinks for the 12-year-old, you may also feel you understand Zohran better. It can’t be that easy, can it, to be the son of someone like that?”
Oh, very interesting! I agree--studying "zero grazing" doesn't sound like a typical kid activity. Then again, our son began listening to the Revolutions podcast when he was twelve and really loved it. Sometimes these special interests emerge early.
But I am aghast that anyone could praise Idi Amin for anything, and I can't imagine having an ideologue like that for a father.
One thing that book review makes plain (I’d never heard of his father despite the latter’s well-known thoughts about 9/11), though the media misses it in finding in Mamdani the turning of a page, the new generational voice of the young immigrant for whom America is a disappointment: he is not a rebel. He is very convention-bound to a familial worldview.
As far as mamdani goes, your POV is interesting. But I would be careful — after 2 years of seething Jew hate — of dismissing New Yorker’s fears: “The poor dears are just having a fit of the vapors. Calmer heads will prevail.” I’m not saying YOU are saying that, but some people certainly are. And people have been accusing the Jews of blowing things out of proportion for the last couple decades. It’s an indirect mode of trivializing us and our concerns, of talking over.
Anyway I’ll be interested in your take on a contrary perspective:
I agree that American Jews are right to be worried about rising antisemitism and about violence against Jews. I just don’t think they are right to make Mamdani the one they’re most worried about, when antisemitism on the Right is so virulent. But thank you for the link—I will check the article out.
But it’s not about American Jews worrying about Z — it’s about NYC Jews. In two heavily Jewish neighborhoods < 3 miles from me, there were angry demonstrations. These were LEFT, not RIGHT, mobs.
And even though idiots like Candace O and Jake Shields have been spewing Jew-hate for a long time, show me a post October 7 RW demo. Whereas DSA/BDS — Z-man’s gang — have been flooding campuses and cities.
I agree Carlson’s recent sickening antics are increasing RW danger. But the red/green alliance (usually cloaked as anti-Zionism) has been and still is the greatest threat, as I see it.
I was paywalled from being able to read the whole Free Press post, so I looked up the story elsewhere. If the event at the synagogue was exclusively about immigrating to illegal settlements, then Mamdani was correct to mention violations of international law. However, if the event was simply about immigrating to Israel, then he was in the wrong. It is not a violation of international law to immigrate to, say, Tel Aviv!
I also read an op-ed piece (I'm sorry--I couldn't find it again so I could share the link) that proposes that the same rules we use for protestors at abortion clinics be applied to pro-Palestine protestors. Our First Amendment gives us a right to express our opinions but not to engage in violence or vandalism. I am strongly pro-choice, but I acknowledge that people have a right to engage in peaceful protest outside abortion clinics. Similarly, our Constitution gives people the right to express their opinions about Israel, so long as they do so peacefully.
Zohran, Helen Andrews, AND Sydney Sweeney? In one article? *Someone's* trying to go viral ;')
Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to find the latter two people interesting; someone or other goes viral once a month here for an article that invents a new euphemism for the groundbreaking idea that society is being ruined by women-and-maybe-gays (hence Substack's obsession with "theater kids," "millennial snot," "HR ladies," etc -- it's ladies all the way down!!), so I guess it's this woman's turn. Sweeney is a talented actress who leans on her boobs in insipid advertisements so that she has leeway to take interesting indie film roles that don't lean on her beauty. Good for her! Can't care about any of this.
Mamdani... well, I guess as a Native New Yorker I have opinions on him. He will probably be the latest in a line of do-nothing mayors whose personal politics are completely irrelevant in the face of a massive city bureaucracy. But I am much more annoyed that we are pretending NYC can be affordable WITHOUT a yuppie exodus.
Ha! I have never yet gone viral, alas. The closest I ever came is that a photo I shared on Notes--of a cow lying across a path in the Alps--was featured in the weekly Substack roundup post. Ah well, I can dream.
You make a good point about why the predicted Mamdani catastrophe is unlikely to come to pass. The city bureaucracy (and Albany) will throw up a lot of obstacles. But I can hope. Bill deBlasio did get universal pre-k passed, after all, and maybe some of Mamdani's more appealing proposals--like universal childcare--will be passed in some form.
And I agree about Sweeney: She knows how to use her assets. Good for her!
I think you're being much too dismissive of the feminization piece, as if Andrews had nothing legitimate to say. While not endorsing everything she wrote, I think she made some very interesting observations. The most intriguing is that "wokeness" derives from feminization. That makes sense to me.
I don't look at any of this as someone with antipathy towards women. I love and respect the women in my life. I have 4 beloved sisters, and most of my faculty colleagues are women. Most of my closest friends, and even most of my bandmates are women.
However I do think we can generalize that certain big changes in society over my lifetime derive from "feminization" of institutions that were once predominantly male. Those changes have their upsides and downsides, and I think it's wrong and flippant to pretend that there are no costs. To me, this would not discredit feminization; it would be an opportunity to consider what's happening in feminized institutions and constructively critique them.
For example: when I began my academic career 30 years ago, my department was an "old boy network" (OBN). Ten of the 13 faculty members were men, and their average age was probably about 55. The faculty tended to hire men who "fit in". To be sure, there weren't many women in the academic pipeline in those days, but the faculty was demographically homogenous. Fast forward 30 years, and it has flipped. Now the faculty is mostly women, and there is definitely an "old girl network" (OGN) that pretty much runs the show. There are many upsides for having some of these women as colleagues. Two are close friends of mine. But there are downsides too:
>>>When we hire a new person, the OGN pushes to hire someone like them and in particular they seem suspicious or even hostile to candidates who are male, younger women, or Asian (so much for "diversity", haha!) because they like people who "fit in" to their social network. I have been on the search committees; I have seen all this up close.
>>>They are not adventurous by nature or inclination. They prize safety and comfort. I lead a traveling program that includes two 3-week driving trips with 30+ 19-yr-olds and two colleagues that travels about 5000 miles total, something the department designed and began doing 25 years ago, when the OBN held sway. If you want to keep that going--and this program is at the heart and foundation of our unique undergrad degree program--you have to hire people who are willing (or eager!) to do it. The OGN, none of whom are willing to do it, are also not interested in hiring for it. They prefer to hire more OGN members.
>>>The OGN is a very supportive sub-group. They really look after each other. Most are single, all are middle-aged to late-middle aged. They spend a lot of time together outside of work. This is great, right? Older women banding together for support. But this social dynamic has its own downsides. They tend to cover for each other's shortcomings. Two of the OGN are deficient as teachers--one is simply a fish out of water in a classroom, and the other is simply neglectful of students (I hear this from a great many credible students, year after year). It is noteworthy to me that the OGN doesn't seem to ever help their weaker members improve; it simply protects them from accountability.
>>>Just like the Randi-Weingarten-led public school teachers union (vast majority of members are women), our OGN, along with the women in other departments, really took to remote teaching during COVID. Our university closed down in-person classes only for the end of spring semester 2020. It then allowed remote teaching for the next two semesters, and then it decreed NO remote teaching beginning fall 2021. The OGN was very unhappy about this, and fought it at the college level unsuccessfully, and some of them still "go remote" routinely when it suits them, even though this is officially verboten.
I only went remote for the 6 weeks that it was mandatory, because I think remote teaching is a dereliction of duty and a wasted opportunity (not to mention, short-changing tuition-paying students). For the year that going remote was allowed, there weren't many classes or studios happening in my building (parking availability was awesome, haha!). But when I would encounter other instructors, it was almost always men. And then later, the people raising hell about having to go back were mostly women.
Yes this is anecdotal, but it's an observation of a fairly large institution, and I see people writing about this from other universities. Looks to me that women were far more likely to prefer to "teach" from the comfort of home, and to rationalize that this had no costs. Let me tell you something that I KNOW: it has immense costs for undergrad students, especially for the lower-to-mid level achieving students who need personal attention, strong mentorship, and meaningful, cooperative social interaction with peers.
End of screed. I think it is arguable that the effects I describe here are byproducts of feminization. Women change things when they become the dominant group, and not necessarily for the better. I am very happy to work in a world full of women, but I think it's very important to be as constructively critical of the feminized academy as we were of the masculinized academy that it displaced. Maybe we can eventually build institutions in which we balance the upsides of both.
PS I appreciate your poo-pooing of the silliness about Sweeney's genes/jeans. I agree--she is much more than a sex symbol, actually a talented and accomplished actress. But there's something else that appeals to us men. Sydney Sweeney seems like a girl you'd want to have a beer with--and I don't mean a beer and then taking things further. Just a beer, and 30 minutes of conversation. She's "relatable" as a human being, a deeper level connection than mere sexual attraction. She also seems like a very interesting person with a lot to talk about, and a great sense of humor, which us guys really like. She shares this quality with two of my celebrity crushes from my youth: Julie Andrews and Diana Rigg.
Thank you for this very thoughtful (and not at all screed-like!) comment! I actually think we agree more than it might seem. I do agree with you that stereotypical femininity, like stereotypical masculinity, can cause problems in the workplace if not moderated. You are right that Weingarten's risk-averse insistence on keeping the schools closed so long during Covid was terribly destructive for millions of kids. (We always fear the wrong things, don't we?)
I actually worked in an all-female environment when I was a high school teacher, and there were some disadvantages. As just one example, a close friend, who had been a teacher in French schools before coming to us, continued to grade by the extremely harsh French standards. She would give kids a C for two comma errors, for example. This caused the school a lot of problems; the college counselor had to personally call the admissions offices of all the schools my friend's students had applied to and explain her insane grading system.
However, the way the school dealt with her was the opposite of what was needed. Instead of telling her, "You can't grade this way. We do things differently here" or instead of putting her with a mentor to help her adapt her grading, our department just froze her out. She wasn't invited to curriculum-planning meetings, and she was given the worst courses and three preps instead of the usual two. It seemed as though they were trying to force her to quit. Obviously, this is a bad way to go about managing people, and part of the blame does rest on feminine indirection, in my opinion.
Where I depart from Andrews, though, is that I don't think we need to push women out of the workplace. It seems to me that people can speak up about excesses of "feminine" leadership, just as we have about "masculine" excesses in the past. And it is ridiculous to say that if women ever become the majority of the legal profession, there will be no more rule of law. It is revealing to me that when asked, Andrews was unable to come up with a single positive thing to say about women. I don't think she is someone anyone should take seriously, and it is depressing to me that so many people are repeating her ideas, possibly because they are eager for other reasons (religious fundamentalism, for example) to get women back in the home.
PS: I like your point about Sweeney's relatability! I think it's similar to how we women just love actors like Tom Hiddleston. He seems like such a nice guy, and is a fantastic dancer too! It's not just physical appearance we're responding to.
One thing I didn't mention while describing the culture shift in my department is that we have a male Chair. Everyone likes him because he's a nice guy and a "consensus" sort of leader. But I have come to realize that he's something of a puppet--he gets kind of yanked and pushed around by the OGN. One of the OGN members is a very, very strong sort of personality. She is brilliant and I admire her hugely. We have co-taught that traveling program six times! But something changed in the past couple of years, and I think what it is, is that she has come to see her primary role as the protector of the weaker OGN members.
Duly note: even so, she is extraordinarily effective in several other roles--teaching, committee leadership, mentoring grad students, scholarly production, etc. I have considered her indispensable since the first time we co-taught a studio (that is when you REALLY get to know a person!), 18 years ago. However, her role as protector and sustainer of the OGN means that we have shifted from a student-centered program to a faculty-centered program--and our chair has allowed that to happen, bit by bit, over the past 3 or 4 years. We need a stronger leader.
This reminds me of something I read long ago about one of the "laws" of institutions. Maybe Robert Conquest? Something like, all large institutions that are initially founded to serve clients outside of the institution (in my case, students) eventually gets taken over by people whose primary interest is the perpetuation of the institution as a way to preserve their own power, wealth, job security, etc. I think this dynamic is easy to discern in large corporations, government agencies, and universities.
Thanks for your reply Mari. I always enjoy your posts. We should meet up for a beer sometime :·)
I think you are right about this: “all large institutions that are initially founded to serve clients outside of the institution (in my case, students) eventually gets taken over by people whose primary interest is the perpetuation of the institution as a way to preserve their own power, wealth, job security, etc.” I think we can see this phenomenon in some nonprofits, corporate boards, and also the teachers’ unions during Covid.
I would love to meet up for a beer sometime! Prost!
It takes all kinds! I *don’t* find Mamdani interesting (I look forward to autocorrect finding him interesting though) nor Sydney Sweeney, but I do Helen Andrews. She is so perfect a representative of a type that would’ve once been scorned as a “bluestocking” and yet, her politics do not owe much to the exemplars of that label. I’m pretty sure she’ll never be other than a working woman, unless she has to be suppressed. I was introduced to her via a piece she wrote when younger, on the misbehavior of JS Mill. Very entertaining.
I did read a little tidbit about Mamdani in a rather fun and acid WSJ review (my parents still get the paper!) of his father’s new book, which is a hagiography of Idi Amin, with the curious zest obviously of being written by a member of a group that was especially persecuted by him.
Here was the mention:
“There’s only one paragraph about the younger Mamdani in the entire book. The author writes of a sabbatical from Columbia in 2004, spent in Kampala. His wife and Zohran, then only 12, joined him. The boy was yanked out of school in New York and taken to Africa. What fun, you might think, how thrilling for a young lad! And then Mr. Mamdani tells us that, in Kampala, “Zohran settled down with the study of issues such as ‘zero grazing,’” a type of farming in which cattle are fed with cut grass.
As your heart sinks for the 12-year-old, you may also feel you understand Zohran better. It can’t be that easy, can it, to be the son of someone like that?”
Oh, very interesting! I agree--studying "zero grazing" doesn't sound like a typical kid activity. Then again, our son began listening to the Revolutions podcast when he was twelve and really loved it. Sometimes these special interests emerge early.
But I am aghast that anyone could praise Idi Amin for anything, and I can't imagine having an ideologue like that for a father.
One thing that book review makes plain (I’d never heard of his father despite the latter’s well-known thoughts about 9/11), though the media misses it in finding in Mamdani the turning of a page, the new generational voice of the young immigrant for whom America is a disappointment: he is not a rebel. He is very convention-bound to a familial worldview.
As far as mamdani goes, your POV is interesting. But I would be careful — after 2 years of seething Jew hate — of dismissing New Yorker’s fears: “The poor dears are just having a fit of the vapors. Calmer heads will prevail.” I’m not saying YOU are saying that, but some people certainly are. And people have been accusing the Jews of blowing things out of proportion for the last couple decades. It’s an indirect mode of trivializing us and our concerns, of talking over.
Anyway I’ll be interested in your take on a contrary perspective:
https://open.substack.com/pub/bariweiss/p/zohran-mamdani-sides-with-the-anti?r=dszqz&utm_medium=ios
I agree that American Jews are right to be worried about rising antisemitism and about violence against Jews. I just don’t think they are right to make Mamdani the one they’re most worried about, when antisemitism on the Right is so virulent. But thank you for the link—I will check the article out.
But it’s not about American Jews worrying about Z — it’s about NYC Jews. In two heavily Jewish neighborhoods < 3 miles from me, there were angry demonstrations. These were LEFT, not RIGHT, mobs.
And even though idiots like Candace O and Jake Shields have been spewing Jew-hate for a long time, show me a post October 7 RW demo. Whereas DSA/BDS — Z-man’s gang — have been flooding campuses and cities.
I agree Carlson’s recent sickening antics are increasing RW danger. But the red/green alliance (usually cloaked as anti-Zionism) has been and still is the greatest threat, as I see it.
I was paywalled from being able to read the whole Free Press post, so I looked up the story elsewhere. If the event at the synagogue was exclusively about immigrating to illegal settlements, then Mamdani was correct to mention violations of international law. However, if the event was simply about immigrating to Israel, then he was in the wrong. It is not a violation of international law to immigrate to, say, Tel Aviv!
I also read an op-ed piece (I'm sorry--I couldn't find it again so I could share the link) that proposes that the same rules we use for protestors at abortion clinics be applied to pro-Palestine protestors. Our First Amendment gives us a right to express our opinions but not to engage in violence or vandalism. I am strongly pro-choice, but I acknowledge that people have a right to engage in peaceful protest outside abortion clinics. Similarly, our Constitution gives people the right to express their opinions about Israel, so long as they do so peacefully.
Zohran, Helen Andrews, AND Sydney Sweeney? In one article? *Someone's* trying to go viral ;')
Unfortunately I cannot bring myself to find the latter two people interesting; someone or other goes viral once a month here for an article that invents a new euphemism for the groundbreaking idea that society is being ruined by women-and-maybe-gays (hence Substack's obsession with "theater kids," "millennial snot," "HR ladies," etc -- it's ladies all the way down!!), so I guess it's this woman's turn. Sweeney is a talented actress who leans on her boobs in insipid advertisements so that she has leeway to take interesting indie film roles that don't lean on her beauty. Good for her! Can't care about any of this.
Mamdani... well, I guess as a Native New Yorker I have opinions on him. He will probably be the latest in a line of do-nothing mayors whose personal politics are completely irrelevant in the face of a massive city bureaucracy. But I am much more annoyed that we are pretending NYC can be affordable WITHOUT a yuppie exodus.
Ha! I have never yet gone viral, alas. The closest I ever came is that a photo I shared on Notes--of a cow lying across a path in the Alps--was featured in the weekly Substack roundup post. Ah well, I can dream.
You make a good point about why the predicted Mamdani catastrophe is unlikely to come to pass. The city bureaucracy (and Albany) will throw up a lot of obstacles. But I can hope. Bill deBlasio did get universal pre-k passed, after all, and maybe some of Mamdani's more appealing proposals--like universal childcare--will be passed in some form.
And I agree about Sweeney: She knows how to use her assets. Good for her!
Warning, Mari: lengthy screed!
I think you're being much too dismissive of the feminization piece, as if Andrews had nothing legitimate to say. While not endorsing everything she wrote, I think she made some very interesting observations. The most intriguing is that "wokeness" derives from feminization. That makes sense to me.
I don't look at any of this as someone with antipathy towards women. I love and respect the women in my life. I have 4 beloved sisters, and most of my faculty colleagues are women. Most of my closest friends, and even most of my bandmates are women.
However I do think we can generalize that certain big changes in society over my lifetime derive from "feminization" of institutions that were once predominantly male. Those changes have their upsides and downsides, and I think it's wrong and flippant to pretend that there are no costs. To me, this would not discredit feminization; it would be an opportunity to consider what's happening in feminized institutions and constructively critique them.
For example: when I began my academic career 30 years ago, my department was an "old boy network" (OBN). Ten of the 13 faculty members were men, and their average age was probably about 55. The faculty tended to hire men who "fit in". To be sure, there weren't many women in the academic pipeline in those days, but the faculty was demographically homogenous. Fast forward 30 years, and it has flipped. Now the faculty is mostly women, and there is definitely an "old girl network" (OGN) that pretty much runs the show. There are many upsides for having some of these women as colleagues. Two are close friends of mine. But there are downsides too:
>>>When we hire a new person, the OGN pushes to hire someone like them and in particular they seem suspicious or even hostile to candidates who are male, younger women, or Asian (so much for "diversity", haha!) because they like people who "fit in" to their social network. I have been on the search committees; I have seen all this up close.
>>>They are not adventurous by nature or inclination. They prize safety and comfort. I lead a traveling program that includes two 3-week driving trips with 30+ 19-yr-olds and two colleagues that travels about 5000 miles total, something the department designed and began doing 25 years ago, when the OBN held sway. If you want to keep that going--and this program is at the heart and foundation of our unique undergrad degree program--you have to hire people who are willing (or eager!) to do it. The OGN, none of whom are willing to do it, are also not interested in hiring for it. They prefer to hire more OGN members.
>>>The OGN is a very supportive sub-group. They really look after each other. Most are single, all are middle-aged to late-middle aged. They spend a lot of time together outside of work. This is great, right? Older women banding together for support. But this social dynamic has its own downsides. They tend to cover for each other's shortcomings. Two of the OGN are deficient as teachers--one is simply a fish out of water in a classroom, and the other is simply neglectful of students (I hear this from a great many credible students, year after year). It is noteworthy to me that the OGN doesn't seem to ever help their weaker members improve; it simply protects them from accountability.
>>>Just like the Randi-Weingarten-led public school teachers union (vast majority of members are women), our OGN, along with the women in other departments, really took to remote teaching during COVID. Our university closed down in-person classes only for the end of spring semester 2020. It then allowed remote teaching for the next two semesters, and then it decreed NO remote teaching beginning fall 2021. The OGN was very unhappy about this, and fought it at the college level unsuccessfully, and some of them still "go remote" routinely when it suits them, even though this is officially verboten.
I only went remote for the 6 weeks that it was mandatory, because I think remote teaching is a dereliction of duty and a wasted opportunity (not to mention, short-changing tuition-paying students). For the year that going remote was allowed, there weren't many classes or studios happening in my building (parking availability was awesome, haha!). But when I would encounter other instructors, it was almost always men. And then later, the people raising hell about having to go back were mostly women.
Yes this is anecdotal, but it's an observation of a fairly large institution, and I see people writing about this from other universities. Looks to me that women were far more likely to prefer to "teach" from the comfort of home, and to rationalize that this had no costs. Let me tell you something that I KNOW: it has immense costs for undergrad students, especially for the lower-to-mid level achieving students who need personal attention, strong mentorship, and meaningful, cooperative social interaction with peers.
End of screed. I think it is arguable that the effects I describe here are byproducts of feminization. Women change things when they become the dominant group, and not necessarily for the better. I am very happy to work in a world full of women, but I think it's very important to be as constructively critical of the feminized academy as we were of the masculinized academy that it displaced. Maybe we can eventually build institutions in which we balance the upsides of both.
PS I appreciate your poo-pooing of the silliness about Sweeney's genes/jeans. I agree--she is much more than a sex symbol, actually a talented and accomplished actress. But there's something else that appeals to us men. Sydney Sweeney seems like a girl you'd want to have a beer with--and I don't mean a beer and then taking things further. Just a beer, and 30 minutes of conversation. She's "relatable" as a human being, a deeper level connection than mere sexual attraction. She also seems like a very interesting person with a lot to talk about, and a great sense of humor, which us guys really like. She shares this quality with two of my celebrity crushes from my youth: Julie Andrews and Diana Rigg.
Thank you for this very thoughtful (and not at all screed-like!) comment! I actually think we agree more than it might seem. I do agree with you that stereotypical femininity, like stereotypical masculinity, can cause problems in the workplace if not moderated. You are right that Weingarten's risk-averse insistence on keeping the schools closed so long during Covid was terribly destructive for millions of kids. (We always fear the wrong things, don't we?)
I actually worked in an all-female environment when I was a high school teacher, and there were some disadvantages. As just one example, a close friend, who had been a teacher in French schools before coming to us, continued to grade by the extremely harsh French standards. She would give kids a C for two comma errors, for example. This caused the school a lot of problems; the college counselor had to personally call the admissions offices of all the schools my friend's students had applied to and explain her insane grading system.
However, the way the school dealt with her was the opposite of what was needed. Instead of telling her, "You can't grade this way. We do things differently here" or instead of putting her with a mentor to help her adapt her grading, our department just froze her out. She wasn't invited to curriculum-planning meetings, and she was given the worst courses and three preps instead of the usual two. It seemed as though they were trying to force her to quit. Obviously, this is a bad way to go about managing people, and part of the blame does rest on feminine indirection, in my opinion.
Where I depart from Andrews, though, is that I don't think we need to push women out of the workplace. It seems to me that people can speak up about excesses of "feminine" leadership, just as we have about "masculine" excesses in the past. And it is ridiculous to say that if women ever become the majority of the legal profession, there will be no more rule of law. It is revealing to me that when asked, Andrews was unable to come up with a single positive thing to say about women. I don't think she is someone anyone should take seriously, and it is depressing to me that so many people are repeating her ideas, possibly because they are eager for other reasons (religious fundamentalism, for example) to get women back in the home.
PS: I like your point about Sweeney's relatability! I think it's similar to how we women just love actors like Tom Hiddleston. He seems like such a nice guy, and is a fantastic dancer too! It's not just physical appearance we're responding to.
One thing I didn't mention while describing the culture shift in my department is that we have a male Chair. Everyone likes him because he's a nice guy and a "consensus" sort of leader. But I have come to realize that he's something of a puppet--he gets kind of yanked and pushed around by the OGN. One of the OGN members is a very, very strong sort of personality. She is brilliant and I admire her hugely. We have co-taught that traveling program six times! But something changed in the past couple of years, and I think what it is, is that she has come to see her primary role as the protector of the weaker OGN members.
Duly note: even so, she is extraordinarily effective in several other roles--teaching, committee leadership, mentoring grad students, scholarly production, etc. I have considered her indispensable since the first time we co-taught a studio (that is when you REALLY get to know a person!), 18 years ago. However, her role as protector and sustainer of the OGN means that we have shifted from a student-centered program to a faculty-centered program--and our chair has allowed that to happen, bit by bit, over the past 3 or 4 years. We need a stronger leader.
This reminds me of something I read long ago about one of the "laws" of institutions. Maybe Robert Conquest? Something like, all large institutions that are initially founded to serve clients outside of the institution (in my case, students) eventually gets taken over by people whose primary interest is the perpetuation of the institution as a way to preserve their own power, wealth, job security, etc. I think this dynamic is easy to discern in large corporations, government agencies, and universities.
Thanks for your reply Mari. I always enjoy your posts. We should meet up for a beer sometime :·)
I think you are right about this: “all large institutions that are initially founded to serve clients outside of the institution (in my case, students) eventually gets taken over by people whose primary interest is the perpetuation of the institution as a way to preserve their own power, wealth, job security, etc.” I think we can see this phenomenon in some nonprofits, corporate boards, and also the teachers’ unions during Covid.
I would love to meet up for a beer sometime! Prost!