The privileges, interests, biographies, fetishes and investments of
researchers typically remain subtext.
—Michelle Fine, Working the Hyphen
I am frankly amazed at the intellectual ineptitude revealed by our recent Democrat First Ladies’ degree-awarded ventures in academic exposition and by the media adulation they have received for their efforts. Having recently published an analysis of Jill Biden’s doctoral dissertation, pointing out its utter inadequacy, I find it comes as no surprise that former First Lady Michelle Obama considers it a work of substantial merit and heaps accolades on Biden as “a brilliant woman who has distinguished herself in her profession.”
Michelle Obama is herself the recipient of an academic honor in the shape of a Bachelor’s Degree from Princeton for her senior thesis, “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community,” in which she attempts to estimate “an introspective measure of change, as perceived by the individual” in “the effects of a Princeton education on Blacks and Black students’ attitudes…pre-, intra-, and post-Princeton.” A putative achievement of this dubious nature does not confirm Obama (then Michelle LaVaughn Robinson) as qualified to comment on the brilliance of others.
Given the acclaim Michelle Obama has enjoyed for her influential public voice, it behooves us to consider where and how her career acquired its impetus — her vaunted thesis. True, the thesis was written many years ago, but let us not forget that it served as Obama’s ticket into the “new elite,” despite its being a gallimaufry of platitudes and pseudo-academic fustian.
Indeed, there are so many verbal and grammatical gaffes peppering the study that one scarcely knows where to begin. Almost immediately in her preamble, for example, we find a dangling modifier, the sort of thing that we used to have drilled out of us in grade 5: “As a future Black alumnus, this study is interesting…” A study is not an alumnus. Two words sometimes meld together as one, e.g. “underwhich,” reminiscent of my own students’ predilection for “alot.” Travis Kavulla at National Review flags “Predominately” for “Predominantly,” “their” for “there,” and blacks compared to “other” Third World Students. He might have added “accomlishes” and “effected” for “affected.” We note, too, there are very few references — a damning omission — as well as a citation with no source.
Obama regards Princeton as “infamous for being racially the most conservative of the Ivy League Universities,” an insult calmly accepted by her craven examiners. She is, obviously, a firm believer in affirmative action, “which provided numerous opportunities for Blacks economically, educationally, and occupationally” — a policy that predictably morphed into merely another form of installing racial quotas, against whites and Asians. The myopia of such thinking and the civic ruptures it opened were presciently foreseen by a genuine black scholar, namely, Carole Swain in The New White Nationalism in America.
Obama’s malaprop terminology is often painfully comical: “Tables 4.4 and 4.4a which show the percentage of respondents who are motivated or were motivated to benefit God, and the individual-level change in this motivation respectively demonstrate an increase in the percentage of respondents not motivated to benefit God.” “Benefit” is one of her category terms.
She focuses on “measur[ing] [the] degree of attachment to individuals of different races.” Plainly, such a determination is not a measurable quantity but a personal interpretation based upon intuition and questionnaires influenced by previous bias, as such artifacts always are. We then learn that “More often than not, one finds comfort in things with which one is familiar rather than in unfamiliar things. It is also more likely that one is more attached to things with which one is familiar than to things with which one is unfamiliar.” This is, of course, an empty platitude, a “subjective motivation” considered as a “dependent variable.”
This farrago of useless speculation is capped by the cluttered and ungrammatical assurance that “By measuring relative comfort respondents feel interacting with Blacks and with Whites as well as the time spent actually interacting with Blacks and Whites, the respondents ideologies, motivations, and attitudes towards the Black lower class, the study is providing an idea of the respondents’ familiarity with Blacks and Whites, which will influence the extent to which respondents are attached to Blacks or Whites, thereby indicating the extent to which the individual identifies with Blacks or Whites.”
Finally, her study bathetically declares itself to be irrelevant: “It is important to note that it is impossible for me to generalize these findings for all Black Princeton alumni because the sample for this study was much too small to make any kind of generalizations.” The only proper response to her thesis is embarrassment or, if one is feeling generous, a discreet indifference to so mawkish an undertaking.
The document is marred by a complaining and self-justifying tone throughout and treatments of a subject nobody can object to in a social climate infected with white guilt, is filled with politically correct patois, is grammatically challenged, and is, in a word, superficial beyond belief. The jargon is either pleonastic or impenetrable, a veritable spaghetti code of applied language.
Dinesh D’Souza was understandably unsparing when he wrote: “Anyone who has read Michelle’s college thesis—a document so illiterate and incoherent that it was written, as Christopher Hitchens put it, in ‘no known language’—will chuckle heartily at this one.” Clearly, he spoke from a profound sense of exasperation.
D’Souza was pro forma slandered in a hit piece in Newsweek and many other sites and magazines for telling it as he saw it. He was, in fact, characterized as something of a felon — he did time under a vengeful Barack for a minor donation infraction routinely forgiven of others. I am betting that very few, if any, of D’Souza’s detractors have ever read the full thesis and perhaps not even a single page. I cannot blame them, for it would be a trial and, worse, might compel them to tell the truth for a change. The identical caveat applies to Jill Biden’s doctoral thesis.
D’Souza’s and Hitchens’ judgments are as harsh as they are on point, but it should be said in her favor that even at a younger age Michelle Obama operated at a higher intellectual level than Jill Biden, showing herself already capable of mastering sociology’s glossolalia — no mean feat, speaking in tongues, despite its incommunicability. Let’s at least give her that. She’s considerably the smarter of the two. Nonetheless, Obama’s production is a tissue of clichés and academic sedatives which would have been best forgotten; it brings no credit to her, nor should it be used as a form of deference syndrome.
As I suggest, it is fair to assume that the manifestly inferior quality of Michelle Obama’s work is a product of relative youth and might be given a certain benefit of the doubt. This is arguable, but the act of certifying such work casts discredit on Princeton as an elite institution. So poor a confection is better written off as an academic indiscretion or mere apprentice work rather than acclaimed as a sterling achievement. But it led, as D’Souza shows, to a useful degree in “obviology.”
Obama’s thesis is not something to be proud of. The réclame that the media and party hacks have bestowed on it reflects badly on them as well, as does the profusion of puff pieces on Michelle Obama plastered all over the Net. Of course, books such as Becoming and The Light We Carry, which garnered multi-million dollar publisher’s contracts, are very different from the earlier work. They are adult publications, readily accessible, filled with personal detail, and an appearance of candor that obscures an undercurrent of Oprah-like self-infatuation.
They have received gushing praise from every conceivable quarter but are stuffed with platitudes, ringing life affirmations, and inspirational homilies — “when things go low, we go high” or “step out of your comfort zones and soar” — much like self-help books, celebrity memoirs, and vigil displays — in other words, not for serious minds. It is the same Michelle with a veneer of social adroitness, appealing it seems mainly to women, Obama groupies, and the Left in general, but no less ephemeral than her university thesis.
Vanity has no name like a First Lady — a Jill Biden or a Michelle Obama — who regards herself as an expert in an intellectual field or as a cum laude graduate of the University of Life, unlike the grace and class of Melania Trump who did not give herself airs. I might say in my defense that I would not have addressed so contentious a subject had the press, the talking heads, and the bien pensants — those I call intelleftuals — not extravagantly touted such mediocre efforts as pageants of superior accomplishment and intelligence. Their bloviations merely serve a political agenda rather than a scrupulous assessment of quality — which is, I submit, the curse of our age.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member