James Joyce Meets Ayn Rand ...

... for what I hope is the last time!

Ah, the trials and tribulations of finding one's voice! Well, this blog is part diary and part political commentary: This entry will serve to chronicle some lessons I learned the hard way yesterday. When I started blogging, it was with the intent of getting into the practice of writing by forcing myself to write something regularly. I thought in terms of an analogy to muscular strength: that if you don't exercise, you won't get strong. I find myself now thinking in terms of a different analogy: motor skills. Think of ice skating or gymnastics. Certainly, regular practice is important to each, but each also requires more than just brute strength. There are also fine motor skills involved for one thing. Beyond that, the analogy with writing gets even better: longer compositions require decisions as to which elements should be included and a theory of integration to make the components into a coherent whole. My future blogging will follow that model as I will explain below.

I posted my last entry with some misgivings. I started off well, having seen on a visit to Jewish World Review an interesting John Fund column on diversity of ideas in academia. Some quick internet searches found that this is becoming a rich vein of thought in conservative circles, so that's what I wrote about. I made some good mental connections in the process and hit the ground running with them. Unfortunately, I quickly tumbled over the limitations of time and multitasking! The result: a long, rambling post that buries a few good points I was able to support and should have emphasized under a pile of other good points that needed a lot more research on my part before I'd be able to present them coherently or convincingly to a reader.

I'm very unhappy with that post and will allow it to remain only because I have a policy against making substantial changes to past entries. I may further develop the post into a column or a series of better posts, but for now, I can't. The post will remain to remind me not to let that happen again. For now, I will put it on the backburner after making a brief critical examination of the column.

Stepping in It

My main point should have been that religious conservatives will ultimately threaten academic freedom because they are stealing the concept of "academic freedom" and using it to pretend that religious cosmology (creationism) and scientific theory (evolution) are just as valid, epistemologically. That is, they will end up compromising the rational methods of science by introducing blind faith as a valid means of scientific knowledge.

One way the religionists could do this is certainly by glomming on to "hate speech" codes, which I think they will do. Fair enough. But I didn't make the connection between these hate speech codes and government control of the university system explicit.

Worse was my handling of the government funding side of the educational crisis. This is, I am sure, a valid point, but it will require much more evidence to develop it correctly. For starters, most people do not pay (directly, at least) even $12,000 per annum in education-related taxation. Then there is the whole issue of the inefficiency and waste associated with the bureaucratic layer of the government-run educational system. In addition to making a stronger case for how "free" education is actually expensive, I could have raised the issue of its well-known low quality. But what I'm really annoyed with is the fact that I missed how the (apparent) zero cost of tuition is, in and of itself, an impediment to people trying private education. I could go on and on, but suffice it to say that I hardly began to make an adequate case for how government-run education stifles private education. And didn't really make the case at all that this funding necessarily involves government control of the educational establishment. All of this would be necessary to make a good case for why the state and the academy should be kept separate.

On the overall point (i.e., that state and academy must be separate), I think it's good and it's an idea I haven't heard articulated. But to develop this point would probably require the equivalent of a news magazine article. So, while I'm happy to have thought about it, I'm flagellating myself for doing such a lousy job presenting it.

In my thinking so far, it seems that I should make shorter posts that concentrate on one point or put off publication of posts that make a complicated point or both, but I'm still mulling that over.

Fascinating medium, the blog! And a lot harder to master than the big fish make it look! One point of difficulty that became apparent to me yesterday is this: there is a tension between the committment to regular posting and maintenance of quality. The former requires a certain amount of discipline and perhaps a willingness to post even when one doesn't necessarily feel like it. (And yesterday, I didn't really feel like posting.) The latter requires a willingness to not necessarily post for the sake of posting. It will probably take a little more trial and error to figure out the right balance between these two requirements of blogging.

-- CAV