Noted Here and There ...

by Cliopatria

An Oxymoron: The Shorter John Holbo. Still, he goes on at good length. Hat tip to Kevin Drum.

Buffy Buffs: Speaking of Holbo, he and Ogged at Unfogged have been asking"What's So Great About Buffy the Vampire Slayer?" As it happens, one of my favorite colleagues at Cliopatria is the reigning expert on that subject. So, why doesn't she tell us, you ask? Because she's buried under blue books and term papers like everybody else. That's why.

Improvement: Hey, I went from"unfair" and" cruel" to merely"stuffy". That's better, isn't it?

Halas: Cliopatria has been getting a significant number of hits because Bernard Kerik is married to a Syrian-born woman whose first name is Hala. To my knowledge, Hala Fattah is not that woman. Silly google.

Academic Privilege: It's a good thing Joseph Ellis wasn't actually serving in the military when he misled his students about his serving in Viet Nam. This guy is about to be stripped of his rank and court-martialed. Last I heard, Joe was back in good standing at Mt. Holyoke and flying into Atlanta to push three best sellers in a lecture series for a big honorarium. Hat tip to Clayton Cramer.

EduBlogging: Congratulations to Pharyngula and Crooked Timber which won the 2004 EduBlog Awards for Best Individual and Best Group Blog. No mean achievement when Technorati now tracks more than 5,000,000 blogs. More importantly, I think, there are good posts and comments at Early Modern Notes and by some guy named Sepoy at Chapati Mystery on the uses of student blogs in history classes. [And, btw, Sharon, I saw you eat that mince meat pie and didn't even offer me a bite. Don't come kneeling at my altar and expect any sacrament!]

Administration: Robert Campbell at Liberty & Power continues to follow the shockwaves of horror at the University of Southern Mississippi and it's a long story. The abuse of power, fraud, and incompetence at the top of some our tertiary institutions of higher education is breath-taking. We've got a former college president here in Atlanta under indictment for mis-appropriating $5,000,000 in student-aid money. When Morris Brown College lost its accreditation, student enrollment fell from over 2,000 to about 150. Still, good will keeps its doors open.

Plagiarizing the Confederacy: It's difficult to measure the damage done to Southern children by Christian academies. A place to begin is the Cary Christian School in Cary, North Carolina, hard by those citadels of Southern enlightenment: Duke, UNC, and NC State. At Cary Christian, elementary school children were required to read Southern Slavery, As It Was by Douglas Wilson and Steve Wilkins. Wilkins is a board member of Alabama's secessionist League of the South; Wilson is a Moscow, Idaho, pastor. Ya gotta love that combination of Idaho white supremacism and Old South nostalgia, which sees the Confederacy as"the last true Christian civilization." Happy children; happy slaves. Alas, Brothers Wilson and Wilkins extensively plagiarized passages in Southern Slavery, As It Was from Bob Fogel's and Stanley Engerman's Time on the Cross. School cancels its use of the booklet; booklet withdrawn from publication; no more happy slaves; no more happy children. Hat tip to Platinum Page at Daily Kos and to Jonathan Rees.

Chris Bray: He Naughty: Brother Chris Bray likes to point out that Michelle Malkin's columns appear regularly at VDARE, a site tellingly named for the first white child born in America. They appear there beside columns by Sam Francis, who holds that"breaking down the sexual barriers between the races is a major weapon of cultural destruction because it means the dissolution of the cultural boundaries that define breeding and the family and, ultimately, the transmission and survival of the culture itself." Chris Bray, he ask Brother Francis if he know that Michelle Malkin's cross-racial marriage is polluting VDARE culture. That Chris Bray. He so naughty.

On the Other Hand: I'm perplexed by Evan Roberts' attitude at Coffee Grounds about our public names for things. He is surprised that there are still Jeff Davis counties in Mississippi and Louisiana. There's a line to be drawn somewhere about renaming things, but I'm not sure where it is. It would take a massive re-adjustment to wipe the names of all slave-owners from public recognition, not only in the South, but across the country. If Jeff Davis must disappear, why not Calhoun? If Calhoun, why not Washington and Jefferson? Why, pretty soon, you could have an innocent republic. We'd like to think we were.

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Oscar Chamberlain - 12/13/2004

When I moved to South Carolina in the late 1980s, I had no idea--but a number of stereotypes--about what would await me.

The first attack on my preconceptions came early in the Fall. I was on a regional campus there, and I saw two young black women. Like many students early in the semester, they had their old high school jerseys on.

Strom Thurmond High School.

This helped me, as I began to try to look at what was around me rather than assume that I already knew.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/12/2004

Consider Jacksonville, in my own sunny state. It has Nathan Bedford Forrest High, with 48% black and 41% white. Or Robert E. Lee High, with 62% blacks. Unbelievable. I told you that restoring Lee's citizenship would bring no end of grief.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/12/2004

I don't subscribe to the dubious social science behind Brown purporting to demonstrate that all-black schools are inherently inferior. It seems to me obvious that school districts drawn up with the likely purpose of discriminating are illegal WHATEVER the effects of single race schools -- that, and that alone, justifies bussing. It seems to me a moral imperative that where the government compels attendance, they owe equal facilities. But did Brown end inequities in school financing? Did it end segregation? No. In fact, at least the latter is even worse now.

Brown did not compel the actions of Shaker Heights, so I'm not sure how Plessy would have condemned Shaker's effort to failure. What level of government? Whatever level in whatever state chose to, or whatever state, or the federal government. I'm not sure how I'm compelled to demonstrate the plausibility and effectiveness of roads not taken, when compared to roads indeed taken but which led nowhere. The chosen legal route failed. Pure and simple. And with it, they have now introduced new obstacles to justice. They bent the law. It failed to achieve their purposes. They created a desert and called it peace. They screwed the pitch. Will they ever take responsibility? Hell, no. They've wrapped themselves in the warm cloak of their own good intentions.

Ralph E. Luker - 12/12/2004

Richard,
So long as Plessy was the law of the land, what level of government would have provided incentives to do something the law did not require? You still haven't said whether you are attacking Brown or bussing.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/12/2004

You're right, goodwill is not omnipresent. On the other hand, government could have tried incentives (perish the thought!!) to achieve voluntary and enthusiastic compliance with goals -- nobody tried to scale up the Shaker move, or make a system not relying on full community self-financing. Imagine matching state or federal funds for communities setting up mortgage funds and attendant policies. But no, dubious legal bases were adduced to justify coercion. Imagine you've paid a premium for a home in a school district with good schools (and the taxes that go with them), only to have your kids bussed halfway to hell to a substandard school. Thankyou federal courts. You've just converted another citizen to desegregation. What has coercion wrought?

Ralph E. Luker - 12/12/2004

Richard, If good will were omnipresent, you would be correct. Alas, coercion must supplement good will. In fact, Shaker Heights is hardly representative of red flyover country, as your citation of North Little Rock confirms.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/12/2004

In fact desegregation can be accomplished without court order, as it has been achieved in Shaker Heights, Ohio -- you know, retrograde red flyover country -- the same place that produced Oberlin. In Shaker Heights the inhabitants voted to help fund mortgages for blacks who wanted to move into the town. The effects seem to have lasted longer than court orders.
http://fordfound.org/elibrary/documents/0286/013.cfm

Of course, Ralph does have a point -- I don't see the basis for court-ordered bussing where you can't make out a case for discrimination as a motivator for drawing up school districts. On the other hand, I don't see how court-ordered desegregation has successfully addressed the inequities Ralph suggests. The great irony resides in the legends of places like Little Rock, where they integrated Central High only after building a separate school for the rich section of town, North Little Rock. The rich have their ways, don't they?

Oscar Chamberlain - 12/12/2004

Ralph, you are right to ask Richard what the alternatives were. Still, there were possibilities between your duality of forced bussing for integration and forced bussing under Plessy. However, a combination of circumstances created problems for finding a functional middle ground.

Brown v. Board clearly eliminated the creation of separate school systems for different races and the designation of separate facilities within school systems.

Unfortunately, even where southern whites accepted this, there remained the rigid residential segregation that made simply opening the doors a long-term alternative to integration at best. Simultaneously, the prolonged effects of underfunding black institutions meant that serious spending had to be done to get those institutions up to white levels.

Here we come to a possible point of compromise. This would have been a long term process in three parts: (1) the focusing of spending on building new schools in black areas; (2) where geography allowed, finding new school locations that led to integration, and (3) serious action at the state level toward ending housing discrimination.

One and two happened on occasion--though I'm having trouble coming up with an example--but number 3 did not. We got federal laws, but without local cooperation, the prospects of that working seemed awfully poor at the time.

So the nation tried bussing. Unfortunately, Richard has a good point concerning the impact of that solution in many places. Still, I'd be interested in knowing

Ralph E. Luker - 12/12/2004

Richard,
What conclusion do you reach from this? That Southern schools better served public interest prior to Brown? Or prior to bussing? If the latter, then your point assumes that bussing produced the movement to Christian academies. I doubt that you can show that. If the former, then your point runs against court ordered desegregation itself. I don't see how school desegregation might have been accomplished otherwise; and I don't see how the inequity that accompanied public school segregation might otherwise have been addressed. Are you recommending a return to Plessy?

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/12/2004

I don't imagine this was among the intended consequences of court-ordered bussing in the South, yet it has come to pass -- a good many students fleeing from relatively progressive public schools to intellectually and morally retrograde all-white "Christian" academies, with attendant lessening support for the public system. We are probably as far away from equal financing as we were forty years ago. What is certainly true is that we're more segregated. Better living through court orders.

Jonathan Dresner - 12/12/2004

It's kind of challenging to our sense of moral order, I think, that a theologically challenged apologia for slavery was withdrawn ... for plagiarism.

Clearly, we're letting plagiarists off easy... they should be enslaved!