[lbo-talk] Phyllis Wise, chancellor , Remains Piggish to the End

[Michael Smith]

Perhaps we can save the concept of stupidity if we regard
it as developmental rather than essential. People aren't
born stupid, but they make themselves stupid in a very
careful and deliberate way. Moreover it's quite selective;
you can be deeply stupid about one topic and quite penetrating
about another. It takes work, but it can be done.

I'm with Joanna on this one, though I generally don't like
to deploy stupidity as a polemical category. Wise's rationalizations
were not in fact crafty, I think. They were as Joanna suggests
stupid in my sense of cultivated stupidity. Wise has become
very accustomed to mobilizing fatuous, empty cliches in faculty
meetings and encounters with her superiors. It's always worked
before. We might regard stupidity in this sense as not only
something acquired, but an actual skill, if stupidity consists
in saying stupid things. The point is to say the right stupid
things to the right people; to align, as it were, your stupidities
with theirs.

The stupidity only appears as such when the alignment fails, as
it has in Wise's case in speaking to the larger public. It's very
much to her credit that she now obviously feels like an idiot.
Shows that she's not *essentially* stupid at all.

On Mon, September 8, 2014 10:06 am, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Joanna: That's partly because, normally, this type of people never have to
> deal with any opposition or criticism. It makes them ... stupid.
>
> -------
>
> This habit of  linking obnoxious behavior or stupidity of decisions to
> personal "stupidity" of the agent is one hell of a bad habit.