He added to his flag discourse a classic Bidenesque line: that he had recently been challenged about his pin after a speech in Boulder, Colorado by a "very attractive woman who looked like she just finished a sociology course at Bryn Mawr college, if you know what I mean." Judging by the blank reaction, most in his audience appeared not to.
Inside Higher Ed catches the head of the sociology department at Bryn Mawr playing dumb:
Inside Higher Ed asked David Karen, sociology chair at Bryn Mawr, if he knew what the senator was talking about. Karen's e-mail reply: "I don't know what the senator means. But if Senator Biden is implying that sociology students at Bryn Mawr College are 'very attractive' and more liberal than he is, I wouldn't spend any time trying to disabuse him of that notion."
Jeremy Freese, a sociologist at Northwestern, also claims to be baffled, over at the sociology blog Scatterplot.
Oh, give us all a break. Either Karen and Freese are playing dumb, or they are doing more than just playing at being dumb. Anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in the academic racket knows the stereotype perfectly well. If they want to say the stereotype is unfair, they should just say so. But anyone who has spent more than a few minutes in the academic racket knows the stereotype may not be fair, but it is not altogether unfair, either, and has met the type.
In Pictures from an Institution, the poet Randall Jarrell captures the creature in his imaginary Benton College, an elite northeast women's college, much like Bryn Mawr (although purportedly modeled on Sarah Lawrence, where Jarrell once taught).
If Benton had had an administration building with pillars it could have carved over the pillars: Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you feel guilty.
The sociologist is one Jerrold Whittaker, and this scene captures him:
After hesitating for a moment, he replied. He always hesitated before he spoke, like a child who has to translate everything from the vernacular into English; but with him, of course, it was the other way around. He was every inch a sociologist.
He said in a deprecating voice: "Most of my own reading in French has been in scientific French, I am sorry to say. But for a scientist to be only a scientist, I have always felt is — is worse than a crime, it is a blunder." A charming happy smile lit his gentle grey face; as he would have said, his quotation was quite àpropos. "You will agree with me, I know," he said to the president.
"I do, I do indeed," answered the president. Talking to Dr. Whittaker was like living abroad: your English changed.
"To have read a certain proportion of Molière's works is indispensable to a valid understanding of the cultural background of the French," Dr. Whittaker said. He always talked like this. He spoke reasonably even to pets. He talked the way a windmill would talk, the way a sentence would talk — as he spoke, English seemed to have been dead for many centuries, and its bones to have set up a safe, staid, sleepy system of their own, in respectable secession from existence.
And then there was Whittaker's wife Flo, whose reincarnation appears to have been Biden's questioner.
It didn't bother Flo: her daughter's fault's were, after all, only private. Almost everything that happened to Flo and her family and friends was, after all, only private; and to her real life was public, what you voted at or gave for or read in the Nation. Life seemed to Flo so petty, compared to real life. The trouble with women, people say, is that they take everything personally; Flo took nothing personally. If she had been told that Benton, and Jerrold, and John, and Fern, and the furniture had been burned to ashes by the head of the American Federation of Labor, who had then sown salt over the ashes, she would have sobbed, and sobbed, and said at last — she could do no other — "I think that we ought to hear his side of the case before we make up our minds."
