Writing Boots

I offer very little advice in my forthcoming book, Soccer Dad (out in April from Disruption Books and available for pre-order wherever books are sold).

Why?

Mostly because it’s fighting words, telling parents what to do. Tell someone they maintain their lawn badly, drive badly or even do their job badly, and they can sluff you off: “Well, at least I’m a good parent.” But tell somebody they’re fucking parenting up, they can’t exactly retort that at least they’re good at pickle ball.

That said, if you’re following your kid(s) on Life 360 or whatever the hell it’s called, you’re fucking parenting up. And the older the kid, the worse you’re fucking it up.

[Insert 1,000 caveats here, about the logistics of your life and the psychology of your kid.]

That said: One cannot live a properly adventurous life if one grows up knowing one’s parents know exactly where one is at all times. A part of growing up is doing things your parents don’t want you to do in places they have told you specifically not to go. (Or in places they don’t even know about, like that bonfire way down in the woods.)

I raised my kid in the city of Chicago. She didn’t tell me until the summer before her senior year of college that, in the spring of her senior year of high school, she frequently skipped class and went to the beach, returning to the school just in time for soccer practice. At the time, I would have been infuriated. (And a part of me still grinds my teeth at the thought.) But in hindsight, really: How cool is that?

Once when she was in high school, I got up at 3:00 a.m. to ride my motorcycle to Milwaukee in time to catch at 7:00 a.m. ferry across Lake Michigan. My bike lashed down on the ferry’s deck, I felt sufficiently exhilarated to text her a picture of the sun coming up over the lake. I figured she’d see it about 11:00, when she got up. Was surprised when a text came right back, with a picture of her own. Same lake, same sunrise. Same spirit, who had talked her friends into riding their bicycles, pre-dawn, to the little bridge at Diversey Harbor, where they jumped off, into the lake. (She didn’t tell me that part until a couple years later.)

If I have her coordinates on my phone, none of that happens. If she wants to do something daring, she has to paint herself into an electronic alibi—a friend’s basement, maybe. Feel like the kinds of things she’d have done down there would have been both less adventurous and more dangerous.

Part of growing up is doing what you’re not supposed to do, and facing the consequences. (Or getting away with it.)

Part of being a parent is knowing that, and (tremblingly) daring to let it happen.

Or so I believe. Not you?

Last week hedge fund manager Marc Rowan crowed a bit about his involvement in developing the Trump administration’s recent proposed “compact” with nine universities, in a New York Times guest column headlined, “Academia Is Broken. Trump’s University ‘Compact’ Can Help Fix It.”

Really? All of academia—every field of study in 6,000 American colleges and universities—is “broken”?

Rowan explains:

I am the product of and have long believed deeply in the promise of America’s institutions of higher education. At their best, colleges and universities instill curiosity, critical thinking and commitment to bettering ourselves and our communities. American higher education has, moreover, been an engine of opportunity to countless Americans who have acquired the skills to pursue meaningful work, support their families and drive American prosperity.

But the system is broken. Over the past year, I have spoken with countless university presidents, directors and advisers; scholars and academics; and lawmakers, policy experts and activists. The one thing they all agree on is that our university system, which was once one of the nation’s greatest strategic assets, has lost its way.

First off, no mention there of college students, which is a little odd. Then there’s the claim that “countless” higher education muckety-mucks all agree that our university system has “lost its way.” I guess Rowan could get everyone in higher-ed to agree with the characterization … because the characterization doesn’t really mean anything. Any cocktail party boor could tell you “sports has lost its way,” “religion has lost its way” or “business has lost its way,” and you’d nod vaguely and see about getting yourself another Old Fashioned. Same with higher education.

Worst of all: I have long suspected the motives of people who describe whole huge things as “broken.” I wrote this, many years ago:

When did “broken” become the adjective by which we describe public education, the financial regulatory system, the tax code, The Culture in Washington or American politics in general?

When, and why?

I just read 700 pages of Hunter S. Thompson’s letters about how fucked up American politcs were in the late 1960s and 1970s, and not once did I see the system described as “broken.”

The trouble with this “broken” term—aside from its overuse by the same sorts of hacks who also write horrible things like “speaking truth to power”—is that it’s purposely simplistic.

What if you went to the doctor and after some tests, she said, “You’re broken”? You’d say, “What is broken? A bone? A blood vessel? My heart?” Or if your car mechanic called and said he’d found the trouble: “The car is broken.”

Yet we accept it when a columnist describes the free enterprise system—everything happening in an economy of hundreds of millions of people and dozens of nations—as “broken.”

It’s also a misapplication of a mechanical diagnosis to an organic problem.

And using the word “broken” to describe a social system can have a practical political consequence:

The only way to deal with something that is “broken” is to “fix” it. So if you and I think the American government is “broken,” the only remedy we’ll accept is from someone who promises to “fix” it. Now who are you and I both going to trust to do that? Sure, I might listen to your candidate’s bright idea to improve one or another area of the system. But I’m nervous even about my candidate’s plan to fix the whole “broken” thing. Maybe it’s just the carburetor and a the piston rings!

Obviously, we need terms to make broad statements about complex social systems.

But “broken” is just about the worst word I can think of.

Then why is it the best word anyone else can think of?

The rest of Rowan’s piece is larded with a litany of subjective and unsupported judgments:

The evidence is overwhelming: outrageous costs [sez who?] and prolonged indebtedness for students; poor outcomes [sez who?], with too many students [sez who?] left unable to find meaningful work [sez who?] after graduating; some talented [sez who?] domestic students and scholars have been crowded out of enrollment and employment opportunities by international students; and a high degree of uniformity of thought [sez who?] among faculty members and administrators, which can result in a hostile environment [sez who?] for students with different ideas.

Near the end, Rowan writes:

It is also important that colleges and universities remain neutral on hot-button political issues, as the compact requires. As many leading colleges have learned, the alternative is chaos and an environment that stifles rather than promotes individual expression. After all, who speaks for a university in the first place? The president? The provost? The board? Department chairs? When those or other individuals purport to speak on behalf of an entire school or department, those pronouncements chill the speech of students or professors who may think otherwise but who fear reprisal.

But wait, Mr. Hedge Fund Man and Higher-Ed Hobbyist! You just borrowed all your credibility by saying everybody in higher ed agrees that the whole system has “lost its way” and is “broken”! Is that indeed their only unanimous opinion? Or is it only sensibility you’d like “them”academia” to hold in common, and express publicly?

I’ll defend to your right to say it. But I disapprove of how you do.