I Can't Wait For J.[ohn] M. Coetzee's Nobel Prize Speech!

When I discuss Upton's Sinclair's The Jungle with my students, I bring up—inevitably—the murderous atmosphere of the kill floor at the local meetpacking plant: Tyson Fresh Meats, Inc. (formerly IBP—Iowa Beef Producers). As I write this, I remember helping a rancher get a calf into a livestock trailer. The rancher drove the calf toward me. Armed with a cattle-prod, I was to get the calf into the trailer. Suffice it to say, I failed. The exasperated rancher rode up, got off his horse, and seized the cattle-prod. The next thing I knew, the cattle-prod was rammed up the calf's anus into its rectum. Runny, green dung flew everywhere as the calf lost control of its bowels. With a well-aimed boot, the calf ended up in the trailer and the gate slammed shut. I was shaken by the violence and the brutality of the moment. As I read about Coetzee's view of animal slaughter; in the words of one his fictional characters: "...we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of." I don't wish I were an Oscar Meyer weiner. If this be (fair & balanced) condemnation, so be it!

The novelist and the animals
J.M. Coetzee's unsettling literature of animal rights
By Jennifer Schuessler

WHEN THE NOVELIST J.M. Coetzee travels to Stockholm in December to accept this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, it should perhaps come as no surprise if the publicity-shy South African sends a drab, middle-aged Australian woman in a faded blue dress onstage to deliver the Nobel address for him. Coetzee's new novel, "Elizabeth Costello," published this week, follows a celebrated but self-doubting novelist as she travels from Amsterdam to South Africa to Massachusetts to the very gates of Heaven for a series of addresses on topics ranging from literary realism to the problem of evil to the fate of the humanities.

Coetzee has long been hailed as a powerful and controversial, if often oblique, commentator on the ravages of apartheid. But "Elizabeth Costello," which was long-listed for this year's Booker Prize, reveals little of Coetzee's views on South Africa's continued reckoning with its past. It does, however, raise another unsettled and unsettling question that is likely to make some readers deeply uncomfortable, even angry: By raising billions of animals a year in often squalid conditions before brutally slaughtering them for their meat and skin, are we all complicit in a "crime of stupefying proportions"?

Those words are Elizabeth Costello's, whose two lectures on animal rights -- "The Philosophers and the Animals" and "The Poets and the Animals" -- make up the longest section of the book. But the preoccupation is very much Coetzee's own, and one that has moved increasingly close to the moral center of his work. In 1997-98, Coetzee delivered these chapters as the prestigious Tanner Lectures in Human Values at Princeton. (They were published separately in 1999 as "The Lives of Animals.") The curious lecture within a short story within a lecture format insulated Coetzee from the kind of angry response Costello receives from her audience. But it does not blunt his puzzling lesson's power.

The killing floors may be hidden from view, Costello tells her audience. But even in this pleasant college town (identified as "suburban Waltham"), "we are surrounded by an enterprise of degradation, cruelty and killing which rivals anything that the Third Reich was capable of." The comment raises the expected hackles: The comparison "insults the memories of the dead" and "trades on the horrors of the camp in a cheap way," protests an elderly Jewish poet.

But Costello doesn't stop there. Reason, which allegedly elevates us above the beasts and reflects our creation in God's image, is just a smokescreen to justify our will to domination, she says. When one listener argues that animals do not understand the concept of death and therefore do not value life, she shoots back that this kind of thinking is little different than efforts to define "humanity" based on the color of a person's skin.

. . .

These are fighting words, especially coming, however indirectly, from a South African. Indeed, some have taken Elizabeth Costello's views to be a direct reflection of Coetzee's own. Michael Pollan, writing last year in The New York Times Magazine, stated that Coetzee thinks history will "someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka."

Certainly, Coetzee means the comparison to be taken seriously. But pinning such decisive views on such a subtle, ironizing writer is a risky business. While Coetzee (who gives virtually no interviews) is a vegetarian, an earlier essay suggests an ambiguous view of the animal rights question that is more in keeping with the taut balancing of arguments and utter lack of consolation that characterizes his novels.

"Meat Country," which appeared in the Winter 1995 issue of the British literary quarterly Granta, begins as an account of his own attempts, during an academic stint in Texas, to stick to an eccentric-seeming regimen that includes "a dislike for cars, a deep affection for the bicycle, and a diet without flesh." But unlike Elizabeth Costello's confrontational explanation for why she will be forgoing the red snapper at dinner, Coetzee does not explain why he declines (apparently politely) to partake of the all-chicken-and-rib feasts of his hosts. In fact, the essay almost reads like an apology for meat-eating.

"The question of whether we should eat meat is not a serious question," he writes. "Should" has nothing to do with it; the taste for flesh is bred into our bones through evolution. "We are born like that: it is a given, it is the human condition. We would not be here, we would not be asking the question, if our forebears had eaten grass: we would be antelopes or horses." History, including the settlement of the New World, he writes (following the anthropologist Marvin Harris), is in large part the story of the drive for steady supplies of high-quality protein.

There is little philosophy here. Indeed, there is even a sense that Coetzee thinks reason, in the end, cannot guide us through this territory. He brushes aside the arguments of "rationalist vegetarians" who point to the wastefulness of using valuable grain to fatten livestock, as well as the squeamishness of those who denounce the decadence of gourmands who eat only the flamingo's tongue (as they did in ancient Rome) or the bear's paw (as they still do in China). Appeals to efficiency, in the end, just give us a false comfort. "What a relief," he writes with a flash of sarcasm, "we have a pet-food industry to grind up all the leftover flesh and put it in cans, so that no death occurs in vain!"

But still, there is a problem that will not go away. We suspect that in tasting the flesh of a living thing, we may also be tasting sin. Hence all the religious taboos on eating various kinds of meat, founded on "a fear that forbidden flesh -- flesh that has not been properly killed and ritually pronounced dead -- will continue to live some kind of malign life in one's belly."

. . .

In his 1999 novel, "Disgrace," Coetzee's ambiguous morality of the table begins to overlap with his larger themes. David Lurie, a white, middle-aged professor of literature who has lost his job in a campus sex scandal, goes to live with his daughter Lucy on her small farm on the Eastern Cape, where she scratches out a living selling produce at the local market and running a small dog kennel. All is well, if a bit awkward, until a trio of local thugs -- black Africans -- ransack the farm and rape Lucy.

When she discovers she is pregnant, Lucy decides to bear the child and align herself with the family of her rapist. ". . . Perhaps that is a good point to start from," she tells her father. "Perhaps that is what I must learn to accept. . .. To start again at ground level. . .. With nothing. No cards, no weapons, no property, no rights, no dignity. . .. Like a dog."

Professor Lurie is a man of ideas, but to him -- and to Coetzee -- a dog is not just an idea, a metaphor. At Lucy's suggestion, he reluctantly begins volunteering at a local animal shelter, "playing right-hand man to a woman who specializes in sterilization and euthanasia." (Lsung, he calls it -- German for "solution.") After the attack, the work at the shelter becomes his own penance, his own ritual, if not his salvation. His job is to bag the corpses and take them to the dump. But when he observes workmen beating the rigid dogs so they can fit in the incinerator, he decides to operate the machine himself. Not, at first, for the sake of the dogs, but for himself: "For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing." Later he calls it by another name: love.

. . .

At the end of her own life, Elizabeth Costello finds herself in a strange unnamed city. She spends her days in barracks reminiscent of a concentration camp, waiting to be called before a tribunal which makes a shadowy demand that she make a statement of "belief." Belief in what? she asks. God? The court functionary just shrugs. "We all believe. We are not cattle." She resists: "It is not my profession to believe, just to write. . .. I change belief as I change my habitation or my clothes, according to my needs."

She recalls a scene from the "Odyssey" in which Odysseus sacrifices a ram so the seer Tiresias can read its entrails. "The ram is not just an idea, the ram is alive though right now it is dying." Should she just empty herself like a bag of blood as well? "For that, finally, is all it means to be alive: to be able to die."

There are no limits to the human imagination, Costello says in one of her earlier academic lectures, no reason we can't understand animals' pain, no reason we can't produce literature that tries to inhabit the bodies that form the whole of their being: "poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal . . . but is instead the record of an engagement with him." In his own imaginative engagement with animals, Coetzee has perhaps settled on our ultimate disgrace: that we reason, talk, chase after glimmerings of immortality through sex, or art -- and yet still have to die.

Jennifer Schuessler is deputy editor of Ideas.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.

No WONDER I Get Poor Student Evaluations!

I need help! No hair. Old. Wrinkled. Cranky. I am doomed to mediocrity in the opinion of Amarillo College students. What can I do? Botox? Hair Club for Men? Jerry Jones facelift? Woe is me. If this is (fair & balanced) whining, so be it!

[x Chronicle of Higher Education]
Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?
By GABRIELA MONTELL

Professors aren't known for fussing about their looks, but the results of a new study suggest they may have to if they want better teaching evaluations.

Daniel Hamermesh, a professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin, and Amy Parker, one of his students, found that attractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. The findings, they say, raise serious questions about the use of student evaluations as a valid measure of teaching quality.

In their study, Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker asked students to look at photographs of 94 professors and rate their beauty. Then they compared those ratings to the average student evaluation scores for the courses taught by those professors. The two found that the professors who had been rated among the most beautiful scored a point higher than those rated least beautiful (that's a substantial difference, since student evaluations don't generally vary by much).

While it's not news that beauty trumps brains in many quarters, you would think that the ivory tower would be relatively exempt from such shallowness.

Not so, says Rocky Kolb, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago, who notes that teaching, like acting, is a kind of performance art in which looks play a part. Besides, even nerds must answer to beauty standards (albeit lower ones), says Mr. Kolb, who posed in 1996 for a calendar featuring hot scientists, called the "Studmuffins of Science."

He added: "It's a little known fact that the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has a swimsuit competition for the Nobel Prize."

Anyone who thinks looks don't count in academe is foolish, says Judith Waters, a psychology professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University who studies the relationship of physical beauty to aging, income, and work. "It's sad that they make such a difference, and I'm sure there are many people who are going to read this and say, 'Well, they don't matter to me.' But they matter to large numbers of other people, including students," she says.

James M. Lang made that discovery. Mr. Lang has always earned high marks from his students at Assumption College, but he doesn't consider himself a "Baldwin" (for the clueless, that's a term for a hot guy, popularized by the movie Clueless). Apparently, though, some of his students do. More than one of them has made comments about his "buns" on student evaluations.

Now the assistant professor of English says he's self-conscious about his looks and his teaching. "I work very hard at my teaching," he says, "and I am a little disturbed at the possibility that students are evaluating my courses based on such a superficial criterion." He wonders if he's as good a teacher as he thought he was, and he's afraid to turn his back to his classes to write on the chalkboard.

Kate Antonovics says she can relate. The 33-year-old assistant professor of economics is a "Betty" (that's slang for a gorgeous woman, also from Clueless) in her students' eyes. She has gotten e-mail messages from her students at the University of California at San Diego that include remarks such as, "Where do you shop? My friends and I can't get over how cute your outfits always are (I suppose because of the usual professor clothing-style stereotype ... which I apologize for)," and "I think you are very very hot." (One student even asked her on a date in the middle of the semester. She declined.)

Despite some awkward moments, Ms. Antonovics (who also gets high ratings from students on her teaching evaluations) says she's not bothered by all the remarks. "I mostly think they're hysterical," she says. "I've never felt like I'm getting good evaluations just because they think I'm attractive." And if students like her, and her teaching, then maybe they're paying better attention in class, she says.

Mr. Hamermesh says his student ratings are above average, but his looks are average -- though he adds, "Hopefully, I'm being too harsh on myself." Twenty years ago a young woman wrote on one of the professor's evalutions, "Snacks in bed with you would be exciting and economically beneficial," but besides that, the only comments he's gotten related to his appearance have been about his neckties (generally favorable) and his cowboy hats (also generally favorable, though one student once wrote, "All hat, no cattle").

The big question, he says, is: Do students discriminate against homely professors, or are attractive professors better teachers?

Unfortunately, the study is inconclusive on that count. But if the answer is that students discriminate, "and if you think this beauty variable really shouldn't matter, and yet it does, then maybe we should discount teaching evaluations somewhat," Mr. Hamermesh says, "because clearly they are affected by something which most of us would argue should not be something that we should be accounting for."

Some male professors also may be dismayed about another finding of the study: "Good looks generated more of a premium, and bad looks more of a penalty, for male instructors," say Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker in a paper about their findings, "Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity." According to their data, the effect of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men was three times as great as it was for women.

The two also found that both female and minority professors earned lower overall ratings for their teaching than their white, male peers. That finding is worrisome, but hardly astonishing, says Susan Basow, a professor of psychology at Lafayette College. "It just shows that white, native-speaking males are still the norm for professors in students' eyes. When they think of a professor, they think of a Mr. Chips type." More surprising, she says, was the finding that the teaching ratings for men were more affected by their looks.

Dina Ibrahim, who is herself no stranger to objectification by students, says she can't help being amused by the notion that men are being judged on their looks more than women are. "It's nice to have the males objectified for a change," says the assistant professor of broadcast journalism at San Francisco State University. Every semester, Ms. Ibrahim, who is from Egypt, must put up with student comments like, "She can be my Egyptian queen any day."

Of course, not all student comments are flattering. A glance at Web sites such as ProfessorPerformance.com and RateMyProfessors.com -- where students rate their instructors on criteria such as coolness, clarity, easiness, helpfulness, and hotness (on RateMyProfessors.com, hot professors get chili peppers beside their names) -- leaves little doubt about the viciousness of some students. Petty comments abound: "Someone fire this fat bastard" and "Looks like a hobbit, is not a nice person!"

Harold Glasser has been a victim of such comments. One of his students posted the following remarks on ProfessorPerformance.com: "Glasser where's (sic) the same blue fleece sweatercoat thing, and this awful matching blue fleece hat that looks like the one Elmer Fudd wore. If this wasn't enough, he has some of the same mannerisms as Dr. Evil," from the Austin Powers movies.

Mr. Glasser, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Western Michigan University, says he doesn't take such remarks seriously. "I care more about my teaching than what I wear. I think my appearance is irrelevant." Besides, he adds, "I don't even have a blue fleece sweatercoat."

Students are not the only ones in the academy biased by looks, says Ms. Waters, the psychology professor at Fairleigh Dickinson. When she first started teaching, she says, she was a little on the chubby side. "But after I went on a crash diet, my faculty evaluations went up," she recalls. "I wanted to laugh. I'm the same person, yet suddenly I'm a genius?"

Unfortunately, professors who look more like Gollum and less like Aragorn (aka Viggo Mortensen) may have their work cut out for them. "Looks shouldn't count, but clearly they do," Ms. Ibrahim says. "That means ugly professors have to really, really know what they're talking about if they want to get good evaluations, as horrible as that sounds. They have to work harder."

Short of botox injections and plastic surgery, there's not a lot professors can do about the looks they were born with, so most of them should focus on improving the things they can control -- like dress, grooming and, above all, their teaching, says Ms. Basow of Lafayette College.

The good news is that looks are just one of many factors that affect student evaluations. In addition, the bar for beauty is probably low for academics (beautiful professors are about as rare as genius members of the World Wrestling Federation, says the University of Chicago's Mr. Kolb), so clearing it may be easier.

Upon hearing about the study's findings, one anthropology professor (who asked for anonymity), said, "Given this information, I'm wondering if I'm better looking than I thought I was because my evaluations have been so good."

Copyright © 2003 The Chronicle of Higher Education

Bush Hatred Revisited

Remember Clinton Hatred? Poor, poor W. He has suffered so much in life that a little criticism is just too, too much. The Trickster (anti-Semitism and all) was a genius compared to W. Dutch was a genius (?) compared to W. Warren Harding was a genius compared to W. It just gets worse and worse. Iraq, the economy, the cynicism of Leave No Child Behind, Rummy, Dickster, the cynicism of supporting the military, Condi, Wolfie, and the Protestant Right. W will reap the whirlwind. Unfortunately, he will take all of us down at the same time. If this be (fair & balanced) hatred, so be it.

[x New Republic Online]
October 10, 2003

Dear Reader,

In the September 29 issue of The New Republic, we published a piece by Senior Editor Jonathan Chait in which he argues that there is a rational basis for the deep hatred many liberals feel for President Bush. Chait opens: "I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it." While it sometimes seems that our critics attack us before they bother to read the first line of our articles, Chait's piece has clearly caused a stir, prompting excerpts and op-eds in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and appearances and discussions on such networks as C-SPAN and Fox News.

As you know, we're used to this kind of controversy. But the funny thing is, many of those who criticized the Chait piece failed to mention the article we published right along side of it: an articulate critique of "Bush hatred" by National Review Senior Editor Ramesh Ponnuru. If you haven't had the chance to read these articles, we've included portions of both of them below, and if you have, click here to see a video of Chait and Ponnuru speaking about this on C-SPAN.

We see our magazine as a forum for open debate, and we're proud to guide public conversation by presenting all points of view. It's what makes The New Republic unique.

Enjoy,

Peter Beinart
Editor

Copyright © 2003 The New Republic