Ryan Adams w/ Emmylou Harris – Oh My Sweet Carolina
This Week in Decadence
I’ve been thinking about the meaning of decadence (after reading about Harold Bloom) a lot this week, and I know my own internal filters are probably to blame, but another piece, “Questions Abound as the College-Rankings Race Goes Global,” has gotten me thinking about a kind of institutionalized cynicism that seems to be typical of contemporary academia…. On the one hand, you have the atomized, self-serving careerism of so many “star” professors like Bloom, and on the other you have the institutional hucksterism represented as much by the profound corruptions of college athletics as by, in this case, so-called college rankings.
Hazelkorn juxtaposes the intellectual poverty of these rankings (“Rankings are essentially one-dimensional…) with their pervasive influence: “… college presidents believe rankings play a significant role in establishing and securing institutional position and reputation… colleges use rankings to help identify potential partners, assess membership of international networks and organizations, and for measuring themselves.” If we put this into historical context– increasing tuition, labor exploitation, and narcissistic professorial stars– we can begin to see why so many suspect some sort of precipitous decline in U.S. higher education.
The Hollow Men
I hate to go all ad hominem, but if I am, especially when it comes to someone like Harold Bloom (see, “Harold Bloom by the Numbers“) , I have to go for T.S. Elliot: “We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!” It’s not so much Bloom’s freakish careerism, if not greed, that’s so bothersome, although that’s disturbing enough.
What gets my goat is that Bloom– and the journalist, Carlin Romano– seem so blissfully unconcerned about the ways that Bloom’s ideas reflect the self-serving decadence of academic intellectual work at this particular time in U.S. history. “This is cactus land / Here the stone images / Are raised, here they receive / The supplication of a dead man’s hand / Under the twinkle of a fading star.”
Romano calls Bloom an “unsteady Midwest autocrat… oblivious as his ritual pronouncements fall on deaf ears.” Fair enough. What’s disturbing is that way that Bloom’s status seems to excuse him from complicity in the long list of problems– from labor exploitation to administrative salaries to rising tuition– facing academia. Isn’t there a connection between these problems and the old autocrats like Bloom?
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My Morning Jacket – Circuital