More Anti-Immigrant Stuff

In the past few months, I’ve been personally present for several nasty anti-immigrant comments, which I guess I never blogged about. I won’t right now, except to say that there’s a real nativist streak that runs across the whole political spectrum in Canada. Despite the talk about multiculturalism and being a nation of immigrants, there is a dark underside that basically says “if you were not born here you can never really belong here.” Francophone Quebecois are often accused of this by Anglophones, but the reality is that it’s just as present in the Anglophone media. Obviously not everybody thinks that way, but I guess I believed the advertising about multiculturalism and tolerance enough that I am surprised to find how prevalent it is.

The current talk around dual citizenship for people born in Lebanon is particularly disturbing. For those of you who don’t know, there are estimates of 40,000-50,000 Canadian citizens living in Lebanon. And since the government has been busy helping people get out, there’s been much talk in the news about dual citizenship and whether those citizens in Lebanon were “real” citizens. What’s shocking to me is the degree to which commentators assume that dual citizenship is second class citizenship, which essentially means citizenship for all immigrants is in their minds second-class citizenship (except for those who renounce citizenship in the countries from which they’ve departed). Just today, Jeffrey Simpson was prattling on in the Globe and Mail about how maybe citizenship should be harder to get and maybe there ought to be conditions attached to it, especially for people who live abroad. Sure, and you’re telling me that we should also limit the citizenship rights of people who were born here? Right. I thought not.

The whole point of citizenship is that the same rights apply to everybody. Otherwise it’s not citizenship.

More on Academic Blogging

The Barnacle of Higher Ed has been covering the controversy over academic blogging (or doing their best to manufacture one) for over a year now. The latest is a symposium on whether blogging “damaged” Juan Cole’s career. Cole is a middle east expert and a full professor at the University of Michigan. The “damage”? Apparently he was up for a job at Yale and there’s some suspicion that he didn’t get it because he blogged about controversial topics — topics in his area of expertise (which is more than I do most of the time).

So it is quite refreshing to read Cole’s response to the Chronicle’s forum, where he basically shames them. Even if he does go too far (it’s okay in my book for people without jobs or on the tenure treadmill to “worry about their careers”), it’s nice to see someone pointing out that not getting a job at Yale isn’t exactly a “damaged” career. A little perspective, please!

Disembodied Fish

Stanley Fish’s op-ed in today’s New York Times(1) argues that professors must separate themselves from their subject matter in the classroom. I believe we have some professional duties which require us to put our “selves” aside (for instance, not grading down students for disagreeing with us) but I also think that there are times when some unavoidable overlap occurs between the person teaching and the content. For instance, when a professor presents something he or she has spent her life on. More to the point ae matters of political import. Fish writes

Academic freedom means that if I think that there may be an intellectual payoff to be had by turning an academic lens on material others consider trivial – golf tees, gourmet coffee, lingerie ads, convenience stores, street names, whatever – I should get a chance to try. If I manage to demonstrate to my peers and students that studying this material yields insights into matters of general intellectual interest, there is a new topic under the academic sun and a new subject for classroom discussion.

Fish’s examples are all things that aren’t politically controversial. Essentially, he’s writing like he doesn’t have a body. Now substitute “sexuality” “race” “colonialism” “gender” and it changes a bit, especially for professors who are themselves not members of the dominant group in those categories. Academic freedom must indeed include the right not only to inquire, but to advance positions — in research and in the classroom — that are unpopular, controversial, and otherwise politically uncomfortable. Of course, students ought to have the same freedom to disagree with the professor by the standards of the field being taught. . . .

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1. I won’t bother linking since by tomorrow you’ll have to pay for it. I always have to track down the Times’ online stuff through a library database anyway, so the link’s useless.

My Paris Counterpart

I give you Le Blagueur à Paris, who is — wait for it — an American in Paris. So far, she’s on quite a roll. No cushy professor job or anything but she’s struggling with her French too so we’ve got that going. She’s also quite ahead of me in introducing readers to various things that are specific to the city. I’ve lived here for 2 years and 9 days now, maybe it’s time for me to do the same. The truth is I’m having a wonderful summer and loving the city, but my head is really in my writing and I seem to want to blog about things apropos of text, so that’s my special series for the moment. I’ll get back to things Montreal in due time.

. . .I’m also way overdue on updating my blogroll, now that I have a real one, but that will come. In the meantime, let me tell you that you can score that kind of French bistro menu here for, well, less at au petit extra, but if you want vegetarian bistro action, you’ll have to pay for it at le Chevre. I must learn that “Canadian” characterset on my keyboard so I can start doing accents.

Google Book Search

So today was my first serious encounter with google book search. I hadn’t played around with it much, but came across an unattributed phrase in a so-so book on animal rights called An Unnatural Order. The book argues that the domination of nature through agriculture, men’s domination of women, people’s domination of animals and colonial domination are all interrelated. I think they’re cast as too homologous and the author doesn’t really carry through the argument. I have been trying to wrap up a section on animal experimentation in psychoacoustic research and so have been rooting around in the Animal Rights literature. Which is interesting, but ultimately not helpful since most of the arguments are normative, ethical, political as opposed to more historical-critical. Good for thinking about my relationships to animals,(1) but they haven’t led me to more profound statements about animal experimentation beyond the “gee whiz that’s barbaric,” which isn’t enough.

Anyway, at one point the book had an uncited quote from Claude Bernard. Here’s the quote:

With the help of these active experimental sciences, man becomes an inventor of phenomena, a real foreman of creation; and under this head we cannot set limits to the power that he may gain over nature through future progress in the experimental sciences.

Not elegant, but I wanted to see the context. My expectation was that I’d pick up the book in the library but first I needed to know what book it was in.

So I did what probably thousands of scholars do every day — I googled the phrase to see if anyone else had cited it. And up comes google book search, and there is the quote as clear as day at the bottom of the penultimate paragraph on page 18 of Bernard’s An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.

Now, I had my answer and I had a little context. Not too much since the publisher is clearly not interested in anyone actually reading the book through google. But it was enough to get me through the session and now I can peruse the book at my leisure.

It also immediately made clear to me the utility of a massive, searchable online database of everything that has ever been published, even if that is a pipe dream decades away.

It’s not news that people are concerned that google wishes to own this database. I’m concerned too. And certainly owners of the rights to books like Bernard’s are worried about making this work available online. But the problem I have is that all these concerns about ownership and intellectual property trump the point of the books’ existence in the first place. All authors who publish can be said to wish to be read. All readers who seek such authors wish to read them. Libraries have been a traditional end-run around the property-relations issue. Can’t or don’t want to buy the book? You can read it in the library or check it out, and if they don’t have it, there’s always interlibrary loan.

The problem with the online model, as it stands, is that there is no moral equivalent of the library when it comes to this imaginary database. But there should be, because as of yet no digital technology has surpassed the codex for conviviality, portability, scalability or durability. I will still buy and read books, and I will still check them out from the library so long as there is one, but I might like to search them online first, for legitimate, scholarly reasons. For that matter, if I had no institutional certification, I should still have free access to that sort of thing. That’s the spirit of the public library. I suspect that something much less will drive the creation of such a database, and we will all be the poorer for it.

“The House” 26, False Consciousness 13

A smaller-than-usual False Consciousness squad took the field against a shockingly large team from the “House” Friday evening. Despite a little rain, nobody slipped and fell, but we were thoroughly routed. Not in the trash-talking, mind you, but in the runs column. For the second game in a row we had an outstanding rookie performance by Carla (Karla? sorry), who has no fear of the ball and caught some fiery line drives at shortstop. Though Anu, last game’s rookie of the game, was somewhat distraught by our loss. I can only image that to someone who’d showed up to our last game and hadn’t seen the previous year and a half of chaos, it would appear that we were a good team, that we were always in it, and that losing would be unusual for us. Hopefully, she has been disabused of that notion.

We have now been beaten by serious teams in uniform, not serious teams who almost never win (like us), teams that were distracted, shy teams, drunk teams, friendly teams, and teams with several members who were high.

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Yesterday was a good day, despite being awakened at 7:30am by construction workers. That kind of sucked. But I wrote three good pages and read some stuff. I fought with Endnote, I filled out an application for pre-approval on a mortgage (I know I’m getting older because I have assets, some of which I do not wish to liquidate), and I took a nap. After the game, I came home, took a shower, enjoyed the fact that we can now get Asian food delivered, watched a spectacularly bad Canadian 90210 imitation, and went to a party that wound up with one of those foreign-film sit-around-a-table-and-converse things that seems to happen here so much more than anyplace else I’ve lived. Wonderful summer day.