Freddie deBoer sounds off on Pretendians and academic positions--pretending might be a whole lot easier than being (even if only by half)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/03/04/a-professor-claimed-to-be-native-american-did-she-know-she-wasnt
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/academias-pretendian-problem-stems

1. Certain jobs in academia are highly prized
2. There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce
3. Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically
4. Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed
5. Most crucially of all, the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts

...

He has a lot more where that comes from.  deBoer is the sort of socialist that some conservatives enjoy reading and sometimes misreading.  I think Freddie figured out that this had become one of those moments.

my copy of John Borstlap's newest book arrived this week

Borstlap's newest book is in hand.  Of course I'm going to read it and eventually write something about it.  I can tell through my initial perusal of Regaining Classical Music's Relevance: Saving the Muse in a Troubled World that Borstlap describes Friedrich Schleiermacher as a "philosopher".  

In Borstlap's earlier book Johann Gottfried Herder was also a "philosopher".  Fittingly enough I just recently finished Philip Bohlman's translation of Herder's writing on music Song Loves the Masses: Herder on Music and Nationalism!  It was even published the same year as the second edition of The Classical Revolution: Thoughts on New Music in the 21st Century. I was struck by how in that book Borstlap described Herder as a philosopher. Schleiermacher and Herder "can" be described as philosophers, I suppose, but somewhat in the way that Suzy Parker could have been said to have been in marketing and advertising. She certainly was ...  .  

But since I was seriously considering seminary/divinity school for a few years I tend to think of Schleiermacher and Herder as theologians and seminal figures in the emergence of the German liberal Protestant tradition, give or take.  That Borstlap describes them as "philosophers" helps elucidate one of various things we don't agree about.  I also have reservations about the confidence Borstlap has in claiming Herder's ideas were seeds for chauvinistic German nationalism and, later, fascism, when anyone who has read Herder can see he was more of an aesthetic pluralist than, say, Richard Wagner, who Borstlap regards as somehow less culpable for chauvinistic German nationalism than Herder.  Having read both I find Herder's nationalism grating but not as vitriolic as Wagner's.  That Schleiermacher in the new Borstlap book gets a positive mention suggests Borstlap has, perhaps, not engaged with the extensive Swiss Reformed critique of Schleiermacher's project (think of the big ,obvious figures like Karl Barth or Emil Brunner). 

I will definitely read the book and write about it some more in the future, or that's the plan.  The big analysis of Matiegka's Grand Sonata I took enough work that I have taken a bit of a break from blogging since then.  Grand Sonata II still needs attention.  Life happens and all kinds of projects can get derailed but, eventually, I mean to write about the new Borstlap book.