Subtler and Cruder Methods of Control
Noam Chomsky
Woman: How is it that the schools end up being an indoctrination system? Can you describe the process in more detail?
Well, the main point I think is that the entire school curriculum, from kindergarten through graduate school, will be tolerated only so long as it continues to perform its institutional role. So take the universities, which in many respects are not very different from the media in the way they function—though they’re a much more complex system, so they’re harder to study systematically. Universities do not generate nearly enough funds to support themselves from tuition money alone: they’re parasitic institutions that need to be supported from the outside, and that means they’re dependent on wealthy alumni, on corporations, and on the government, which are groups with the same basic interests. Well, as long as the universities serve those interests, they’ll be funded. If they ever stop serving those interests, they’ll start to get in trouble.
So for example, in the late 1960s it began to appear that the universities were not adequately performing that service—students were asking questions, they were thinking independently, they were rejecting a lot of the Establishment value-system, challenging all sorts of things—and the corporations began to react to that, they began to react in a number of ways. For one thing, they began to develop alternative programs, like IBM began to set up a kind of vocational training program to produce engineers on their own: if MIT wasn’t going to do it for them the way they wanted, they’d do it themselves—and that would have meant they’d stop funding MIT. Well, of course, things never really got out of hand in the 1960s, so the moves in that direction were very limited. But those are the kinds of pressures there are.
And in fact, you can even see similar things right now. Take all of this business about Allan Bloom and that book everybody’s been talking about, The Closing of the American Mind. It’s this huge best-seller, I don’t know if you’ve bothered looking at it—it’s mind-bogglingly stupid. I read it once in the supermarket while my … I hate to say it, while my wife was shopping I stood there and read the damn thing; it takes about fifteen minutes to read.
Man: You read two thousand words a minute?
I mean, “read”—you know, sort of turn the pages to see if there’s anything there that isn’t totally stupid. But what that book is basically saying is that education ought to be set up like a variant of the Marine Corps, in which you just march the students through a canon of “great thoughts” that are picked out for everybody. So some group of people will say, “Here are the great thoughts, the great thoughts of Western civilization are in this corpus; you guys sit there and learn them, read them and learn them, and be able to repeat them.” That’s the kind of model Bloom is calling for.
Well, anybody who’s ever thought about education or been involved in it, or even gone to school, knows that the effect of that is that students will end up knowing and understanding virtually nothing. It doesn’t matter how great the thoughts are, if they are simply imposed on you from the outside and you’re forced through them step by step, after you’re done you’ll have forgotten what they are. I mean, I’m sure that every one of you has taken any number of courses in school in which you worked, and you did your homework, and you passed the exam, maybe even you got an “A”—and a week later you couldn’t even remember what the course was about. You only learn things and learn how to think if there’s some purpose for learning, some motivation that’s coming out of you somehow. In fact, all of the methodology in education isn’t really much more than that—getting students to want to learn. Once they want to learn, they’ll do it.
But the point is that this model Bloom and all these other people are calling for is just a part of the whole method of imposing discipline through the schools, and of preventing people from learning how to think for themselves. So what you do is make students go through and sort of memorize a canon of what are called “Great Books,” which you force on them, and then somehow great things are supposed to happen. It’s a completely stupid form of education, but I think that’s why it’s selected and supported, and why there’s so much hysteria that it’s been questioned in past years—just because it’s very functional to train people and discipline them in ways like this. The popularity of the Bloom thing, I would imagine, is mostly a reaction to the sort of liberating effect that the student movement of the 1960s and other challenges to the schools and universities began to have.
Woman: All of Allan Bloom’s “great thoughts” are by elite white males.
Yeah, okay—but it wouldn’t even matter if he had some different array of material, it really wouldn’t matter. The idea that there’s some array of “the deep thoughts,” and we smart people will pick them out and you dumb guys will learn them—or memorize them at least, because you don’t really learn them if they’re just imposed on you—that’s nonsense. If you’re serious about, say, reading Plato, it’s fine to read Plato—but you try to figure out what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s a better way of looking at it, why was he saying this when he should have been saying something else, what grotesque error of reasoning did he make over here, and so on and so forth. That’s the way you would read serious work, just like you would in the sciences. But you’re not supposed to read it that way here, you’re supposed to read it because it’s the truth, or it’s the great thoughts or something. And that’s kind of like the worst form of theology.
The point is, it doesn’t matter what you read, what matters is how you read it. Now, I don’t mean comic books, but there’s a lot of cultural wealth out there from all over the place, and to learn what it means to be culturally rich, you can explore almost anywhere: there’s no fixed subset that is the basis of truth and understanding. I mean, you can read the “Good Books,” and memorize what they said, and forget them a week later—if it doesn’t mean anything to you personally, you might as well not have read them. And it’s very hard to know what’s going to mean something to different people. But there’s plenty of exciting literature around in the world, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that unless you’ve read the Greeks and Dante and so on, you’ve missed things—I mean, yeah, you’ve missed things, but you’ve also missed things if you haven’t learned something about other cultural traditions too.
Just take a look at philosophy, for example, which is a field that I know something about: some of the best, most exciting, most active philosophers in the contemporary world, people who’ve made a real impact on the field, couldn’t tell Plato from Aristotle, except for what they remember from some freshman course they once took. Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t read Plato and Aristotle— sure, there are millions of things you should read; nobody’s ever going to read more than a tiny fraction of the things you wished you knew. But just reading them does you no good: you only learn if the material is integrated into your own creative processes somehow, otherwise it just passes through your mind and disappears. And there’s nothing valuable about that—it has basically the effect of learning the catechism, or memorizing the Constitution or something like that.
Real education is about getting people involved in thinking for themselves—and that’s a tricky business to know how to do well, but clearly it requires that whatever it is you’re looking at has to somehow catch people’s interest and make them want to think, and make them want to pursue and explore. And just regurgitating “Good Books” is absolutely the worst way to do it—that’s just a way of turning people into automata. You may call that an education if you want, but it’s really the opposite of an education, which why people like William Bennett [Reagan’s Secretary of Education] and Allan Bloom and these others are so much in favor of it.
Woman: Are you saying that the real purpose of the universities and the schools is just to indoctrinate people—and really not much else?
Well, I’m not quite saying that. Like, I wouldn’t say that no meaningful work takes place in schools, or that they only exist to provide manpower for the corporate system or something like that—these are very complex systems, after all. But the basic institutional role and function of the schools, and why they’re supported, is to provide an ideological service: there’s a real selection for obedience and conformity. And I think that process starts in kindergarten, actually.
Let me just tell you a personal story. My oldest, closest friend is a guy who came to the United States from Latvia when he was fifteen, fleeing from Hitler. He escaped to New York with his parents and went to George Washington High School, which in those days at least was the school for bright Jewish kids in New York City. And he once told me that the first thing that struck him about American schools was the fact that if he got a “C” in a course, nobody cared, but if he came to school three minutes late he was sent to the principal’s office—and that generalized. He realized that what it meant is, what’s valued here is the ability to work on an assembly line, even if it’s an intellectual assembly line. The important thing is to be able to obey orders, and to do what you’re told, and to be where you’re supposed to be. The values are, you’re going to be a factory worker somewhere—maybe they’ll call it a university—but you’re going to be following somebody else’s orders, and just doing your work in some prescribed way. And what matters is discipline, not figuring things out for yourself, or understanding things that interest you—those are kind of marginal: just make sure you meet the requirements of a factory.
Well, that’s pretty much what the schools are like, I think: they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. If you happen to be a little innovative, or maybe you forgot to come to school one day because you were reading a book or something, that’s a tragedy, that’s a crime—because you’re not supposed to think, you’re supposed to obey, and just proceed through the material in whatever way they require.
And in fact, most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years—that’s the way I did it, for example. Like, you’re told by some stupid teacher, “Do this,” which you know makes no sense whatsoever, but you do it, and if you do it you get to the next rung, and then you obey the next order, and finally you work your way through and they give you letters: an awful lot of education is like that, from the very beginning. Some people go along with it because they figure, “Okay, I’ll do any stupid thing that asshole says because I want to get ahead,” others do it because they’ve internalized the values— but after a while, those two things tend to get sort of blurred. But you do it, or else you’re out: you ask too many questions and you’re going to get in trouble.
Now, there are also people who don’t go along—and they’re called “behavior problems,” or “unmotivated,” or things like that. Well, you don’t want to be too glib about it—there are children with behavior problems—but a lot of them are just independent-minded, or don’t like to conform, or just want to go their own way. And they get into trouble right from the very beginning, and are typically weeded out. I mean, I’ve taught young kids too, and the fact is there are always some who just don’t take your word for it. And the very unfortunate tendency is to try to beat them down, because they’re a pain in the neck. But what they ought to be is encouraged. Yeah: why take my word for it? Who the heck am I? Figure it out for yourself. That’s what real education ought to be about, in fact.
Actually, I happen to have been very lucky myself and gone to an experimental-progressive Deweyite school, from about the time that I was age one-and-a-half to twelve [John Dewey was an American philosopher and educational reformer]. And there it was done routinely: children were encouraged to challenge everything, and you sort of worked on your own, you were supposed to think things through for yourself—it was a real experience. And it was quite a striking change when it ended and I had to go to the city high school, which was the pride of the city school system. It was the school for academically-oriented kids in Philadelphia—and it was the dumbest, most ridiculous place I’ve ever been, it was like falling into a black hole or something. For one thing, it was extremely competitive—because that’s one of the best ways of controlling people. So everybody was ranked, and you always knew exactly where you were: are you third in the class, or maybe did you move down to fourth? All of this stuff is put into people’s heads in various ways in the schools—that you’ve got to beat down the person next to you, and just look after yourself. And there are all sorts of other things like that too.
But the point is, there’s nothing necessary about them in education. I know, because I went to an alternative to it—so it can certainly be done. But given the external power structure of the society in which they function now, the institutional role of the schools for the most part is just to train people for obedience and conformity, and to make them controllable and indoctrinated—and as long as the schools fulfill that role, they’ll be fine.
Now, of course, it doesn’t work a hundred percent—so you do get some people all the way through who don’t go along. And as I was saying, in the sciences at least, people have to be trained for creativity and disobedience—because there is no other way you can do science. But in the humanities and social sciences, and in fields like journalism and economics and so on, that’s much less true—there people have to be trained to be managers, and controllers, and to accept things, and not to question too much. So you really do get a very different kind of education. And people who break out of line are weeded out or beaten back in all kinds of ways.
I mean, it’s not very abstract: if you’re, say, a young person in college, or in journalism, or for that matter a fourth grader, and you have too much of an independent mind, there are a whole variety of devices that will be used to deflect you from that error—and if you can’t be controlled, to marginalize or just eliminate you. In fourth grade, you’re a “behavior problem.” In college, you may be “irresponsible,” or “erratic,” or “not the right kind of student.” If you make it to the faculty, you’ll fail in what’s sometimes called “collegiality,” getting along with your colleagues. If you’re a young journalist and you’re pursuing stories that people at the managerial level above you understand, either intuitively or explicitly, are not to be pursued, you can be sent off to work at the Police desk, and advised that you don’t have “proper standards of objectivity.” There’s a whole range of these techniques.
Now, we live in a free society, so you don’t get sent to the gas chambers and they don’t send the death squads after you—as is commonly done, and not far from here, say in Mexico. But there are nevertheless quite successful devices, both subtle and extreme, to insure that doctrinal correctness is not seriously infringed upon.
Let me just start with some of the more subtle ways; I’ll give you an example. After I finished college, I went to this program at Harvard called the “Society of Fellows”—which is kind of the elite finishing school, where they teach you to be a Harvard or Yale professor, and to drink the right wine, and say the right things, and so on and so forth. I mean, you had all of the resources of Harvard available to you and your only responsibility was to show up at a dinner once a week, so it was great for just doing your work if you wanted to. But the real point of the whole thing was socialization: teaching the right values.
For instance, I remember there was a lot of Anglophilia at Harvard at the time— you were supposed to wear British clothes, and pretend you spoke with a British accent, that sort of stuff. In fact, there were actually guys there who I thought were British, who had never been outside of the United States. If any of you have studied literature or history or something, you might recognize some of this, those are the places you usually find it. Well, somehow I managed to survive that, I don’t know how exactly—but most didn’t. And what I discovered is that a large part of education at the really elite institutions is simply refinement, teaching the social graces: what kind of clothes you should wear, how to drink port the right way, how to have polite conversation without talking about serious topics, but of course indicating that you could talk about serious topics if you were so vulgar as to actually do it, all kinds of things which an intellectual is supposed to know how to do. And that was really the main point of the program, I think.
Actually, there were much more important cases, too—and they’re even more revealing about the role of the elite schools. For example, the 1930s were a period of major labor strife and labor struggle in the U.S., and it was scaring the daylights out of the whole business community here—because labor was finally winning the right to organize, and there were other legislative victories as well. And there were a lot of efforts to overcome this, but one of them was that Harvard introduced a “Trade Union Program.” What it did was to bring in rising young people in the labor movement—you know, the guy who looks like he’s going to be the Local president next year—and have them stay in dorms in the Business School, and put them through a whole socialization process, help them come to share some of the values and understandings of the elite, teach them that “Our job is to work together,” “We’re all in this together,” and so on and so forth. I mean, there are always two lines: for the public it’s “We’re all in this together, management and labor are cooperating, joint enterprise, harmony,” and so on—meanwhile business is fighting a vicious class war on the side. And that effort to socialize and integrate trade union activists—well, I’ve never measured its success, but I’m sure it was very successful. And the process was similar to what I experienced and saw a Harvard education to be myself.
Or let me tell you another story I heard about twenty years ago from a black civil rights activist who came up to study at Harvard Law School—it kind of illustrates some of the other pressures that are around. This guy gave a talk in which he described how the kids starting off at Harvard Law School come in with long hair and backpacks and social ideals, they’re all going into public service law to change the world and so on—that’s the first year. Around springtime, the recruiters come for the cushy summer jobs in the Wall Street law firms, and these students figure, “What the heck, I can put on a tie and a jacket and shave for one day, just because I need that money and why shouldn’t I have it?” So, they put on the tie and the jacket for that one day, and they get the job, and then they go off for the summer— and when they come back in the fall, it’s ties and jackets, and obedience, a shift of ideology. Sometimes it takes two years.
Well, obviously he was over-drawing the point—but those sorts of factors are also very influential. I mean, I’ve felt it all my life: it’s extremely easy to be sucked into the dominant culture. It can be very appealing. There are a lot of rewards. And what’s more, the people you meet don’t look like bad people—you don’t want to sit there and insult them. Maybe they’re perfectly nice people. So, you try to be friends, maybe you even are friends. Well, you begin to conform, you begin to adapt, you begin to smooth off the harsher edges—and pretty soon it’s just happened. It kind of seeps in. And education at a place like Harvard is largely geared to that, to a remarkable extent in fact.
And there are many other subtle mechanisms that contribute to ideological control as well, of course—including just the fact that the universities support and encourage people to occupy themselves with irrelevant and innocuous work.
Or just take the fact that certain topics are unstudiable in the schools—because they don’t fall anywhere. The disciplines are divided in such a way that they simply will not be studied. So, for example, take a question that people were very worried about in the United States for years and years—the economic competitiveness of Japan. Now, I always thought the talk about “American declinism” and “Japan as Number 1” was vastly overblown, just as the later idea of “Japanese decline” is wildly exaggerated. In fact, Japan retains a very considerable edge in crucial areas of manufacturing, especially in high tech. They did get into trouble because of a huge stock market and real estate boom that collapsed, but serious economists don’t believe that Japan has really lost competitiveness in these areas.
Well, why has Japan been so economically competitive? I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, but the major reason is very clear. Both Japan and the United States (and every other industrial country in the world, actually) have essentially state-coordinated economies—but our traditional system of state coordination is less efficient than theirs.
Remember, talk about “free trade” is fine in editorials, but nobody actually practices it in reality. In every modern economy, the taxpayers are made to subsidize the private corporations, who then keep the profits for themselves. But the point is that different countries have different ways of arranging those subsidies. So, take a look at the competitive parts of the U.S. economy—the parts that are successful in international trade. Capital-intensive agriculture is a well-known case. American capital-intensive agriculture is able to compete internationally, because the state purchases the excess products and stores them, and subsidizes the energy inputs, and so on.
Or, look at high-technology industry. Research and development for high technology is very costly, and corporations don’t make a profit off it directly. So, therefore, the taxpayer is made to pay for it. And in the United States, that’s traditionally been done largely through the Pentagon system. The Pentagon pays for high-tech research and development. Then, if something comes out of it that happens to be marketable, it’s handed over to private corporations so they can make the profits. And the research mostly isn’t weapons, incidentally. It’s things like computers, which are at the center of any contemporary industrial economy, and were developed through the Pentagon system in the United States. And the same is true of virtually all high tech, in fact. And furthermore, there’s another important subsidy there. The Pentagon also purchases the output of high-technology industry, it serves as a state-guaranteed market for waste-production. That’s what contracts for developing weapons systems are [emphasis added]. I mean, you don’t actually use the weapons you’re paying for; you just destroy them in a couple years and replace them with the next array of even more advanced stuff you don’t need. Well, all of that is just perfect for pouring continuous taxpayer subsidies into high-tech industry, and it’s because of these enormous subsidies that American high-tech is competitive internationally.
Well, Japan has run its economy pretty much the same way we do, except with one crucial difference. Instead of using the military system, the way they’ve worked their public subsidies in Japan is they have a government ministry, MITI [the Ministry of International Trade and Industry], which sits down with the big corporations and conglomerates and banking firms, and plans their economic system for the next couple of years—they plan how much consumption there’s going to be, and how much investment there’s going to be, and where the investment should go, and so on. Well, that’s more efficient. And, since Japan is a very disciplined and obedient society culturally, the population there just does what they tell them, and nobody ever asks questions about it.
Alright, to see how this difference played out over the years, just look at the “Star Wars” program in the United States. Star Wars [the Strategic Defense Initiative] is the pretext for a huge sum amount of research and development spending through the Pentagon system here—it’s our way of funding the new generation of computer technology, lasers, software, and so on. Well, if you look at the distribution of expenses for Star Wars, it turns out that it was virtually the same allocation of funding as was made through the Japanese state-directed economic system in the same time period. In those same years, MITI made about the same judgments about how to distribute their resources as we did. They spent about the same proportion in lasers, and the same proportion in software, and so on. And the reason is that all of these planners make approximately the same judgments about the likely new technologies.
Well, why was Japan so competitive with the U.S. economically, despite highly inauspicious conditions? There are a lot of reasons. But the main reason is that they directed their public subsidy straight to the commercial market. So to work on lasers, they tried to figure out ways of producing lasers for the commercial market, and they do it pretty well. But when we want to develop lasers for the commercial market, what we do is pour the money into the Pentagon, which then tries to work out a way to use a laser to shoot down a missile ten thousand miles away. And, if they can work that out, then they hope there’ll be some commercial spin-offs that come out of it all. Okay, that’s less efficient. And since the Japanese are no dumber than we are, and they have an efficient system of state-coordination, while we have an inefficient one, over the years they succeeded in the economic competition.
Well, these are major phenomena of modern life—but where do you go to study them in the universities or the academic profession? That’s a very interesting question. You don’t go to the economics department, because that’s not what they look at. The real hot-shot economics departments are interested in abstract models of how a pure free-enterprise economy works—you know, generalizations to ten-dimensional space of some non-existent free-market system. You don’t go to the political science department, because they’re concerned with electoral statistics, and voting patterns, and micro-bureaucracy—like the way one government bureaucrat talks to another in some detailed air. You don’t go to the anthropology department, because they’re studying hill tribesmen in New Guinea. You don’t go to the sociology department, because they’re studying crime in the ghettos. In fact, you don’t go anywhere—there isn’t any field that deals with these topics. There’s no journal that deals with them. In fact, there is no profession that is concerned with the central problems of modern society. Now, you can go to the business school, and there they’ll talk about them—because those people are in the real world. But not in the academic departments: nobody there is going to tell you what’s really going on in the world.
And it’s extremely important that there not be a field that studies these questions, because if there ever was such a field, people might come to understand too much, and in a relatively free society like ours, they might start to do something with that understanding. Well, no institution is going to encourage that. I mean, there’s nothing in what I just said that you couldn’t explain to junior high school students. It’s all pretty straightforward. But it’s not what you study in a high school civics course—what you study there is propaganda about the way systems are supposed to work but don’t.
Incidentally, part of the genius of this aspect of the higher education system is that it can get people to sell out even while they think they’re doing exactly the right thing. So, some young person going into academia will say to themselves, “Look, I’m going to be a real radical here”—and you can be, as long as you adapt yourself to these categories which guarantee that you’ll never ask the right questions, and that you’ll never even look at the right questions. But you don’t feel like you’re selling out, you’re not saying “I’m working for the ruling class” or anything like that— you’re not. You’re being a Marxist economist or something. But the effect is that they’ve totally neutralized you.
Alright, all of these are subtle methods of control, with the effect of preventing serious insight into the way that power actually works in the society. And it makes very good sense for a system to be set up like that. Powerful institutions don’t want to be investigated, obviously. Why would they? They don’t want the public to know how they work. Maybe the people inside them understand how they work, but they don’t want anybody else to know, because that would threaten and undermine their power. So, one should expect the institutions to function in a way as to protect themselves—and some of the ways in which they protect themselves are by various subtle techniques of ideological control like these.
Then aside from all that, there are also crude methods of control. So, if some young political scientist or economist decides they are going to try to ask these kinds of questions, the chances are they’re going to be marginalized in some fashion, or else be weeded out of the institution altogether. At the extreme end, there have been repeated university purges in the United States. During the 1950s, for example, the universities were just cleaned out of dissident thought—people were fired on all kinds of grounds, or not allowed to teach things. And the effects of that were very strong. Then during the late 1960s, when the political ferment really got going, the purges began again—and often they were just straight firings, not even obscured. For example, a lot of the best Asia scholars from the United States are now teaching in Australia and Japan, because they couldn’t keep jobs in the U.S. They had the wrong ideas. Australia has some of the best Southeast Asia scholars in the world, and they’re mostly Americans who couldn’t make it into the American academic system, because they thought the wrong things. So, if you want to study Cambodia with a top American scholar, you basically have to go to Australia. One of the best Japan historians in the world (Herbert Bix) is teaching in a Japanese university— he’s American, but he can’t get a job in the United States.
Or let me just tell you a story about MIT, which is pretty revealing. A young political science professor—who’s by now one of the top people in the field, incidentally [Thomas Ferguson]—was appointed as an assistant professor right after he got his PhD from Princeton. He’s very radical, but he’s also extremely smart. So, the department just needed him. Well, one day I was sitting in my office, and he came over fuming. He told me that the chairman of his department had just come into his office and told him straight out “If you ever want to get tenure in this department, keep away from anything after the New Deal; you can write all of your radical stuff up to the New Deal, but if you try and do it for the post-New Deal period, you’re never going to get tenure in this department.” He just told him straight out. Usually, you’re not told it straight out, but you get to understand it. You get to understand it from the reactions you receive.
This kind of stuff also happens with graduate students. I’m what’s called an “Institute Professor” at MIT, which means I can teach courses in any department of the university. And over the years I’ve taught all over the place—but if I even get near Political Science, you can feel the bad vibes starting. So, in other departments, I’m often asked to be on students’ PhD committees, but in Political Science it’s virtually never happened—and the few times it has happened, it’s always been Third World women. And there’s a reason for that: Third World women have a little bit of extra space to maneuver in, because the department doesn’t want to appear too overtly racist or too overtly sexist. So, there are some things they can do that other people can’t.
Well, a few years ago, one very smart woman graduate student in the Political Science Department wanted to do her dissertation on the media and Southern Africa, and she wanted me to be on her PhD committee. Okay, it’s a topic that I’m interested in, and I’ve worked on it probably more than anybody else there. So, there was just no way for them to say that I couldn’t do it. Then, the routine started. The first stage in the doctoral process is that the candidate has a meeting with a couple of faculty members and presents her proposal. Usually, two faculty members show up; that’s about it. This time it was very different. They circulated a notice through the department saying that every faculty member had to show up and the reason was, I was going to be there, and they had to combat this baleful influence. So, everybody showed up.
Well, the woman started presenting her dissertation proposal, and you could just see people turning pale. Somebody asked her, “What’s your hypothesis?”— you’re supposed to have a hypothesis—and it was that media coverage of South Africa is going to be influenced by corporate interests. People were practically passing out and falling out of windows. Then starts the critical analysis: “What’s your methodology going to be? What tests are you going to use?” And gradually an apparatus was set up and a level of proof demanded that you just can’t meet in the social sciences. It wasn’t “I’m going to read the editorials and figure out what they say.” You had to count the words, and do all sorts of statistical nonsense, and so on. But she fought it through; she just continued fighting. They finally required so much junk in her thesis, so much irrelevant, phony social-scientific junk, numbers and charts and meaningless business that you could barely pick out the content from the morass of methodology. But she finally did make it through—just because she was willing to fight it out. Now, you know, you can do that, but it’s tough.