Internet round-up: the Psmiths on class; Harper’s on Oklahoma universities; Leiter on ChatGPT

My favorite Substackers have reviewed Paul Fussell’s Class and applied its principles to today’s political landscape (and other things).

I get the vibe they’d read Class before.

If you haven’t read Class, you really ought to.

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From Harper’s’s “Weekly Review”:

Lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced a bill mandating that every state college erect a statue of [Charlie] Kirk in a “highly visible and easily accessible” plaza that bears the activist’s name.

The bill is here.

Just one more example of politicians trying to control what colleges say.

Kirk may have debated on campuses, but he wasn’t a faculty member or even a degree earner. And his work wasn’t scholarly. It didn’t try to adhere to the standards of any guild of experts.

I’d hope that no professional academic would wish to flaunt him as a symbol of what colleges and universities do.

Then again, a lot of schools are happy to put up statues of their football players. The state doesn’t even have to enforce that.

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Brian Leiter posts about how a colleague of his got a chatbot to write an “alarmingly competent” philosophical essay.

“How much trouble are we [academic philosophers] in?” Leiter asks.

I’ve never seen any undergraduate writing with the chatbot’s precise style, but (*shudder*) I’ve seen lots of PhD- and journal-level prose just like it.

So, yes, we philosophers – or, at least, those who aspire to a livelihood based on the production and evaluation of scholarship – are in big, big trouble. Because, with just a little input, robots can do those tasks now (or, if not now, soon). Not superlatively well, but well enough to impress the profession’s gatekeepers.

Worse: readers of philosophy are in trouble, and have been for some time, because so much scholarship makes the grade even though it sounds like it rolled off a conveyor belt. The prose is undistinguished, and stock “-isms” (contractualism! particularism!) are opposed or combined almost mechanically.

More on Bethel’s name change

In the United States, inflating a school’s status is an old trick: “As one citizen exulted in the 1870s: ‘There are two universities in England, four in France, ten in Prussia, and thirty-seven in Ohio.’”

This quotation is from p. 135 of Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1983) by Paul Fussell.

(The full historical discussion covers pp. 134–138. Most of it can be accessed through the Google Books link just given.)

Like Bethel, many, many other schools have “upgraded” their names. This is precisely what makes “upgrading” so tacky.

Even so, “upgrading” succeeds in luring in students.

Fussell calls it “the great swindle.” He thinks it’s worse than tacky: it’s morally reprehensible.

Well, in Bethel’s case, is it a swindle?

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I’ll grant that putting “University” into Bethel’s name isn’t a swindle if it reflects ordinary dictionary definitions. This is one way Bethel could be exonerated, morally.

Merriam-Webster says:

A college is “an independent institution of higher learning offering a course of general studies [i.e., instruction] leading to a bachelor’s degree – a liberal arts college” (def. 3c).

A university is “an institution of higher learning providing facilities for teaching AND RESEARCH and authorized to grant academic degrees; specifically : one made up of an undergraduate division which confers bachelor’s degrees and a graduate division which comprises a graduate school and professional schools each of which may confer master’s degrees and doctorates” (def. 1; capitalization added for emphasis).

According to these definitions, Bethel gets halfway between the two types of school. Like the definitional university, Bethel confers undergraduate and graduate degrees. Unlike it, and like the definitional college, Bethel is overwhelmingly teaching-focused.

Yes, some people do perform some research at Bethel. But Bethel doesn’t have facilities, employees, etc. “for teaching and research.” It has them for “a course of general studies,” full stop. We who are acquainted with Bethel all know this.

(Research by Bethel’s faculty, or which occurs in Bethel’s graduate programs, isn’t greatly facilitated by other resources than those provided for general instruction.)

So putting “University” into Bethel’s name doesn’t quite reflect the dictionary definitions. (Quite is hardly a good thing here. It makes deception easier to pull off.)

So the dictionary doesn’t let Bethel off the hook.

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There’s one other linguistic phenomenon that might let Bethel off the hook. Some names have descriptive content. And, sometimes, the content of such a name isn’t meant to be informative (though the name’s falling under a certain type is meant to be informative). Therefore, even if the name is designed to have false descriptive content, it might not be deceptive.

For example, in The Outsiders, there’s a character named “Sodapop.” Nobody is meant to think that he is a soda pop, or that he has soda pop-like qualities, or even that he’s in any way associated with soda pop. Sodapop’s name does tell us something about him – it suggests what his parents are like (in Ecuador, it would suggest that they’re from the Manabí province) – but the descriptive content of that name tells us nothing about him.

But this isn’t what’s happening at Bethel. Putting “University” into Bethel’s name is meant to do more than to suggest what sort of people Bethel’s leaders are (though it would do that, too). It’s meant to deliberately engender certain beliefs about what kind of school Bethel is through the new name’s descriptive content. Since these beliefs would be false, this would amount to deceiving, and hence to swindling.

If a company calls itself “Premium Cable” but offers premium cable just one day a month, isn’t that swindling? Isn’t it deceptive?

(If the company admits in its fine print, “Except for one day a month, we only offer basic cable,” it may avoid committing an illegal swindle. But it still commits an immoral one.)