The Last Enclosures

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Another day, another “professors only work 15 hours a week” know-nothing shooting his mouth off in the public sphere. Except in this case, David Levy surely knows something, given his professional background and present business interests.

Sometimes, I cut people slack when they believe that the hours spent in the classroom are the only work that a professor does. The profession doesn’t do a good job in general of explaining the work we do, one reason why I started doing my “Pictures From an Institution” series. Even when you can get people to understand that every hour in a classroom requires at least two, more often three or four hours of preparation and design work, they still tend to see the rest of the work life of professors as an optional extra. Sometimes faculty themselves help to create that impression. We all love to disparage administrative or service work, for example. But it’s not an optional extra: most of what faculty do administratively is a necessary part of their work as teachers and scholars. When I meet with my departmental colleagues to talk about our next job search, about end of year assessment of our classes, about the design of our major, about participation in college-wide curricular initiatives, I’m doing my work as a teacher. Those meetings are as much a source of the added-value of my pedagogy as time spent in my office reviewing the readings, designing my syllabi and grading papers. When I meet with visitors to campus, attend guest lectures and events, give a lecture myself at another institution, I’m making myself a better teacher. When I write my weblog or work on my research, I’m working on my teaching. It all adds to that goal.

So yes, we could explain better. And yes, there are faculty who abuse autonomy and do much less work than they should. Give me unfettered access and an invisibility cloak and I’d wager I could find a similar proportion of people letting everyone else carry the load in any workplace. You can always find people who are compensated far in excess of their contributions. Some of them might even be CEOs. The idea that market competition or at-will termination relentlessly identifies and punishes such individuals is a fairy tale. Every complex organization has its parasites who burrow in and adroitly use political and social strategies to retain their place against all scrutiny. This is an inevitable tax that large-scale social institutions have to pay.

But David Levy? He really ought to know about the workflow that goes into high-value teaching. He really ought to know that even with the protection of tenure and considerable autonomy, most faculty in most higher education put in long hours because they believe in their profession. So what’s going on here?

I think it’s fairly simple. You know the classic “First they came for the X, then they came for the Y, and I did nothing, and then they came for me?” schtick? This is one of those stories. In fact, it’s the end of one of those stories. They already came for the doctors and the psychiatrists. They already came for the lawyers. They already came for the accountants and auditors. They already came for all the professions. Professors are the last to be broken on the wheel, the last to be put at their station in the new assembly lines of the 21st Century Service Economy.

The early Industrial Revolution, in the first decades of the 19th Century, was not focused on the giant factories and mass economies that were characteristic of its later height: it was about replacing artisanal and household production through relatively small efficiencies and reorganizations of labor and property. This is what’s happening now to the professions. The professions were the great engines of bourgeois culture in mass society. They were provided human capital by the massification of education but they also provided services to much of society that couldn’t be duplicated or replaced by industrial capital, services that were seen as public goods in newly democratizing societies.

In the early 20th Century, most of the professions came to see autonomy and self-governance as the precondition of providing high-value artisanal service to both elite and mass clientele. The relations the professions created to clients were simultaneously intimate and impersonal. Patients sought doctors they could personally trust but that trust was a product of the doctor’s calling to a vocation with values and obligations bigger than his own interests. Businesses and governments looked for auditors who were independent but also had a skilled and sympathetic understanding of fiduciary workings. And students looked for teachers who were committed to an educational mission bigger than themselves but who also taught out of a fiercely independent and individualized vision of craft. Think of the exalted archetypes of teaching in 20th Century fiction for examples, like Mr. Chips or David Powlett-Jones.

The post-industrial service and knowledge-based economies of the last thirty years have relentlessly chipped away at the autonomy of the professions, because professions are service. They could no more be allowed a semi-monopolistic right to set their own value than artisans and guilds could be allowed to continue to set the value of clothing or printing in the face of early industrialization. I’m not playing with metaphors here: I think it’s a pretty close analogy. And as an analogy, it lets us see both what will be gained and lost if the David Levys of the new economy manage to enclose all the professions, all forms of knowledge work.

What might be gained is simple: affordability, scalability, massification. At some point the Veblen-good pricing of higher education and the post-GI Bill, post-1950 massification of higher education were going to collide. We appear to be at last coming to that point. I’ve long argued that the consumer cultures that grew out of early industrialization had an emancipatory and generative side, that we shouldn’t be telling that story strictly as all dark satanic mills and disenchantment. And it’s equally true that the professions in the mid to late-20th Century had grown arrogant, that their inflexibility could be as deadly and stultifying as the most stereotypical case of inflexible union procedures for changing lightbulbs. We do have to change, not just to address affordability but also to embrace opportunity. In many ways, the technological and material infrastructure of the early 21st Century could have been (might yet be?) a chance for most of the formerly autonomous professions to make good on their public obligations and higher missions in completely new ways.

What’s lost? Well, in a word, quality and individual attention except for the precious few that can pay for the full luxury version of such services. The rich still had their suits tailored at Savile Row after everyone else was buying a mass-produced shirt. But in this case, those values might be more precious and important to the larger human missions of education, medicine, psychiatric treatment, auditing and so on. That’s really what you lose: the sense of vocation, of calling, of dedication to something bigger. The new publics of liberal democracy understood that education, medicine, law, accounting and so on were important to their resilience and thriving in a way that artisanal consumer products were not.

You lose innovation and imagination too because when professionals don’t work for themselves but for the David Levys of the world, they have no more incentive to do more, dream more, create more. It’s no surprise that Levy cuts researchers and not teachers slack: that’s because Levy and people like him are already pretty confident that they can capture the value that researchers produce inside a corporatized university. The mechanisms are already there, including ways of cutting value-producing researchers in for a share of the profits. Teachers, on the other hand, are just for moving the products (students) down the assembly line: any pretenses to the contrary need to be crushed. What do you lose also? Well, the distinctiveness that has made American higher education the envy of most of the world. Just as they’re trying to figure out how to do it the way we’ve done it, we’re going to crush all that and do it the way they’ve done it. One more story of self-inflicted American decline.

And for this reason, maybe we shouldn’t expect that affordability will actually follow as a consequence of the enclosure of the professions. It hasn’t happened to medicine, even as doctors have had to come inside of large corporate structures and work to the tune of the insurance industry. Quite the contrary: Americans pay more than ever for medical care and receive poorer and poorer results for it all the time. It hasn’t happened in law, even as an almost unremarked-upon depression grips the profession and most of its members work increasingly as salaried and highly supervised laborers. Look at the for-profits in education and you can see the same thing going on. The quality is vastly lower even as the poor old scapegoated professors get turned into digital widget makers punching the clock, anonymously pushing their consumer-product students down the line. But the prices? As high as ever even without the overhead of brick-and-mortar facilities and frustratingly autonomous professionals with their own ideas about the mission of education.

So who really gains? Well, I’m pretty sure David Levy does.

Posted in Academia | 27 Comments

Bystander Training and Other Acts of Management

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’ve been thinking recently about what distinguishes small residential colleges and universities from vast research institutions. My first thoughts always turn to curriculum, teaching, scholarship, the practices that are a part of my training and work. That’s what I write about a lot here. The other obvious place to turn, however, is the residential as a defining feature of these places.

The problem with that move is that faculty don’t see themselves as responsible for and engaged with residential or community life at small institutions. We recognize that a lot of learning, in the broadest sense, happens outside of classrooms. We are within community ourselves as activists, speakers, mentors, participant, colleagues, friends. However, relatively few faculty see community life as part of their work or as a domain of intentional, professional practices. For one, we’re already busy enough. For another, we have colleagues on staff whose primary job is to work with residential life and community.

The deeper obstacle is that I’m not sure contemporary students would welcome the transformation of the entirety of the community’s life into an intentionally educational experience. That would make community life subject to some of the same responsibility for balancing commitment and skepticism, breadth and depth, control by teachers and self-directed agency of students, intellectualism and pragmatism that at least notionally attends on students’ work within the curriculum. A curriculum may not always succeed in directing students to set a balance between each of those pairs, but we try at least.

Perhaps some of the same balance gets struck in community experience simply through experience. In life, after all, most of us are constantly adjusting where we want to be in these kinds of ranges. But college is four years in a pressurized, intensified and very expensive environment. We may aim to enable students to learn for themselves by the time they graduate, but we do a lot of work intended to secure that objective. Approaching community in the same spirit should mean doing more than just hoping that everyone learns a bit here and there about how to deal with life and do what they want to do.

Doing more at the present moment would mean untangling a frustrating and potent contradiction in residential higher education. Even if we don’t want to make community life a platform for some kind of intentional facilitation or learning, we might want to do a bit of untangling anyway. What I think we’re dealing with at the moment is a slow-motion collision between the comprehensive rejection of in loco parentis after 1968 and the increasingly comprehensive demand for managerial governance of community life within colleges after 1980. Where this leaves us is the contradictory demand, often from students themselves, that we should be everywhere and nowhere in the life of our community, that community life should be both totally controlled and completely free, that administrators should know everything about the lives of students and nothing at all about them.

At Swarthmore this semester, for example, some students were deeply annoyed that the administration attempted to enforce a rule against parties between midnight and 2am on Thursday nights (or Friday mornings, to be more precise). Other students are this very minute angry that the administration has not acted more forcefully, rapidly or directly against incidents in the past week of homophobic graffiti being scrawled at the edge of campus and a visitor brandishing a Confederate symbol during a party Friday night. More rapid or direct action in the vision of some students, considering that the Dean of Students sent an email Monday morning about an incident that happened Friday night, seems to involve more mandated training about diversity, speech, discrimination and similar issues. Or even in some views, more surveillance, proactive control and policing of the community.

I don’t feel this is the only time I’ve seen these contradictions in the community life of the college, or at other colleges: a split between resenting the authority of the college over community affairs and desiring that this authority be used more assertively, capaciously, comprehensively to remake the community into a more perfected or ideal reflection of the aspirations of some of its members. Students often complain that they feel managed, placated, diverted by administrators or ignored by faculty in the making of these simultaneous demands for less and more control. Some of them want both comprehensive inclusion in deliberative practices within the community and comprehensive use of centralized executive authority over community. Some students want one or the other, not both. Some want neither, seeing their ‘community’ as something largely separate from the college or as something almost entirely integrated into their program of study.

I’d like students to understand that if they feel managed or ignored that’s partly a consequence of the unmanageability of these aspirations, both individually and in their contradictory combinations. The easier thing to do for faculty and staff by far is to go underground, hide, avoid, at some of these moments and leave it to the deans to absorb the charge. As a junior faculty member, one of the most unnerving things I ever did was to accept an invitation to be one of several faculty who went to listen to a large group of students who were profoundly, deeply upset about the perception that the college’s Intercultural Center had been vandalized by smeared feces and vomit. I completely understood (and still understand) why these students were upset: this Center was a safe space in an unsafe world, a world that often seems to be getting no more accepting or just, and they felt violated that someone here had done something so ugly and aggressive. But many of the students wanted the police on campus, or the FBI: they wanted the perpetrators of a hate crime found, expelled and prosecuted. I nervously felt it was important to point out that they really didn’t want that, that they wouldn’t want an aggressive police presence on campus as a general practice, that they were asking for something that would set a precedent that we’d all regret and that contradicted most of their own deepest political convictions. It wasn’t long afterwards that we all found out that the feces were cake batter, that maybe there wasn’t vomit, and that it was hard to tell what the intent had been–to deface? a drunken attempt at making cake?

Inside the curriculum, my first and last commitment as an academic is to create a safe space for unsafe thoughts, to explore different sides of difficult issues, to let heresies and orthodoxies walk hand in hand, to open up conversations wherever possible, to problematize and perturb. And to try, however I can, to make room at the table for all sorts of identities, all sorts of ways of seeing and being, while trying to make sure that everyone has to deal with their share of challenges and doubts. I think that’s how I add value as a teacher. If I were to expand or extend that ethos into community, I feel as if it would be unwelcome. I also think that’s the only way to move beyond students being “managed” or deferred in their demands or complaints.

It makes me nervous to consider that move. I tried a bit earlier this semester by sending a quite critical email to a group posting anonymous fliers in my building about compensation and other administrative policies and immediately doubted that I had done the right thing. I think some of my students would laugh to hear that I find this extension into community life an intimidating prospect, but I do. Intimidating partly because I hate to disappoint or criticize students that I like and admire. The group back in 1998 that was upset about the Intercultural Center included some students who are among the people I’ve felt most fortunate to teach and know in my whole career. Intimidating too because I can’t decide if it helps or hurts to play the role of a teacher in this context. Older people are cautious for good reasons and bad reasons, but maybe it never helps (right or wrong) to try and tell someone younger that they they’re making a mistake. Maybe that’s what’s educational: try a campaign, make a demand, create a project and then try to figure out why it didn’t work out as you’d hoped it would. Maybe faculty should just stay away for that reason.

But that leaves our administration having to carry the weight of community as an intentional project. And that can lead to long-term institutional changes that everyone with an interest in the long-term will regret. Case in point from this week’s fallout: some students want the Dean’s Office to insist on officially mandated “Bystander Training” that will instruct students (and others perhaps: these things have a way of spreading) how to act if you’re a bystander when an incident of racism, hatred or discrimination happens in your presence. The whole idea bothers me enormously. First, because I think there’s not much evidence that extensive drills or rehearsals of what to do in the case of emergencies or incidents that are by their very nature idiosyncratic when we actually experience or witness them does much to produce optimal or ideal responses. Secondly because I find the idea of optimal or ideal responses in this case severely troubling. “Bystander Training” takes a profound, ancient ethical problem: am I my brother’s keeper? and tries to turn it into a cleanly technical matter, the province of a technocratic system and a command hierarchy. If there’s anything that we should be debating, making messy, exploring, it’s “what are my obligations to other people, and how should I live up to them?”. Equally and relatedly, “what do some words and symbols and acts mean to other people, and how should we come to know that?”

All this alone is reason to be involved: because we’re stakeholders in community too. Maybe we shouldn’t be teachers, but we can certainly be participants. The problem, of course, is that in a college, the first, best way for faculty to participate as stakeholders is in the roles that they’re best accustomed to, with the responsibilities that they’re most inclined to carry on their shoulders.

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

Kony Heads

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I’m not alone in my fascination with the YouTube video Kony 2012. It splits me right down the middle, tears at opposing sides of my identity as an intellectual. When you’re opened at the middle, your heart is exposed. So let’s go to the heart of the matter, to my heart.

Let’s get past the detour of pedantic correction, which some of my Africanist colleagues can’t seem to pass up. Honestly, it doesn’t matter if Joseph Kony is in the Congo now. It doesn’t matter (as a pure factual correction) if the Ugandan army is also guilty of human rights abuses (which is assuredly is). It doesn’t matter if the American people didn’t “demand” anything when it comes to Joseph Kony or Uganda. Yes, sure, getting the people inside the Beltway to write some proclamations isn’t the same as a huge popular upswelling of support, as the video itself acknowledges at 22:56.

I’m tired of this particular staging of the conflict between activists and scholars. It allows us to adopt a neutral pose, to act as if we’re just about accuracy, about facts, about truth. It’s acting as if all the world is an essay to be marked. It’s a misdirection, a cover for our deeper discomforts.

What I love about Kony 2012 is that it puts into action everything I push my students to consider: to understand how to speak effectively, to leverage the digital public sphere into an end run around the tired cynicism of our political elites. I love that it’s technically well-done, that it’s smartly circulated, that it weds organizational work to a powerful narrative. It’s a brilliant way to put a different kind of pressure on Kony. It’s basically taking a tactic from Amnesty International’s bag of tricks and amplifying it a thousandfold through new media.

What I hate about Kony 2012 is that it puts into action everything that I push my students to consider. I don’t want to get too distracted by the self-aggrandizing, self-congratulatory, white-man’s-burden tone of the video, though that certainly grated on me as much as it has on many others. I don’t want to get distracted because it’s true, as its makers have pointed out, that you don’t mobilize people by telling them that they don’t matter, that they don’t have a right to act or have an opinion, that every time they might care about an issue in Africa they need to issue a long string of pre-emptive apologia for having that opinion. An automatic genuflection towards local, from-below ‘voices’ can be just as troubled a gesture as the instantaneous dislike of Westerners talking about doing things for or to African societies. At its worst, this is a move straight from a hyper-nationalist playbook, a way to capture all ‘voices’ and hand them over to a small autocratic elite, as the UN New World Information and Communication Order sought to do.

That the tone does irritate me even when I feel I shouldn’t be so easily annoyed helps me to understand what it is that really bothers me. It’s not facts I want to correct. It’s something far more elemental. I want to correct the social theory behind the video. I want to contest its underlying philosophy. When I respond, my knee-jerking frantically all the while, that the world is just more complicated than that, I’m not marking up a point with red ink, I’m not being anal-retentive about the facts. When I and other commenters say that there’s a history here that runs far deeper than the filmmaker knows, I’m not just wagging my finger schoolmarmishly.

The heart of the matter is that when I see the video, I realize that I largely believe in a kind of inaction. Suggesting that the situation is really very complex is just a polite way of saying, “It won’t make much difference if you actually capture Joseph Kony, and it might actually make things worse if you succeed in making him the singular, obsessive focus of an international campaign.” If we lived in a world with superhuman ninja assassins or suavely indestructable British spies, you know what? I would totally support one of them sneaking through the northeast part of Equatorial Africa and blowing Joseph Kony’s head off. An international trial in which he was found guilty of every crime imaginable and thrown in jail for life, executed, you name it, would be a satisfying moment of justice in a world largely absent of it. But Kony is not a monster who clawed his way out of some subterranean hell. He came from the history of his place, out of the circumstances of his time. He has lived in a sociopolitical world full of warlords, guerilla leaders, state presidents, and generals whom he resembles and who resemble him. He is not the only person to take children as soldiers, maim civilians, order the rape of women, facilitate a shadow trade in weapons and drugs, operate in porous physical and institutional spaces at the boundary of national sovereignty.

In real life you don’t get to throw the Emperor down a shaft in the Death Star and watch all the bad guys crash and burn. The world should know about Joseph Kony, but then, they should know about a lot of leaders in Central and Northeastern Africa. They should know about Kony’s kidnapping of children, but then they should know that most rebel movements and national armies in the region have resorted to the same tactic. They should know about Kony’s use of rape as a weapon but then they should know that the war against women washes through the entirety of eastern Central Africa. Outsiders should know about the Lord’s Resistance Army but also know that there are deep recurrent forms of militant prophetic leadership in the region that go back into the colonial era. Catching one man hardly matters against that backdrop. It certainly would not make any warlord, general or autocrat feel any fear of the same thing happening to them.

If with its current resources and aid, in a simple or unobtrusive way, the Ugandan army and American advisors can catch or kill Kony, that’s great. Making this the singular, surpassing international demand by the world, making this the objective that launches a million postcards from American schoolchildren, pouring whatever resources might be available into that goal? Not only does it miss the forest for a single tree, it runs the serious risk of turning into precisely the kind of crusade that does more harm in the end than it does good. A very similar rhetorical logic was used to sell the war in Iraq: get Saddam Hussein at all costs. A similar logic drew the American military into a disastrously misconceived crusade to “get” Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia. Real life isn’t Roy Rogers, it’s Unforgiven. Going after the bad guy often makes more bad guys, or gives other bad guys a gold star and lets them pretend to be the sheriff.

“Direct action” in the Invisible Children sense is all about instant gratification: it’s pushing 1-Click on “Change the World”. And the world just doesn’t work that way. Fundamental change is hard, it’s slow, it involves the messy working out of lives in the local, lives in the global.

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Politics | 6 Comments

How to Read Departmental Webpages (And How to Make Them Readable)

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Timothy Burke

So today I turned my attention to a bit of institutional homework I was assigned, to find out how some of Swarthmore’s peer institutions approach neuroscience, whether it’s a department or a program, how many positions are dedicated to it, etcetera.

Let’s talk about how someone who knows relatively little about academia might view such a page. Let’s say it was a 16-year old high school student who was absolutely certain they wanted to study neuroscience and also absolutely certain they wanted to attend a small liberal-arts college.

Let’s say our aspirant neuroscientist starts with Swarthmore. Unusually, Swarthmore (at the moment) lists its programs of study on its front page. Most colleges bury that listing two or three pages deep. So no digging required in this case: the prospective student will see the following right at www.swarthmore.edu:

No neuroscience. Or so it might seem. Here the classic problem that it takes some knowledge to get some knowledge rears its head. Hopefully the aspirant neuroscientist knows where this discipline is coming from (biology and psychology in the main, though as we’ll see, there are exceptions.) So maybe she’d notice the following at the Psychology Department’s departmental page:

But how to interpret this? There’s a major, but it’s not listed. Worse yet, if the prospective clicks on that link, they’re going to be pointed to a Google doc that you have to have permission to view. Which this person won’t have. So here we see the first problem with departmental webpages at your average college site. They offer an uneven range and quality of information without a clear picture of the multiple audiences that might be seeking information. (Trust me, we’re typical in this respect: I am not singling out my colleagues here.) What should our prospective conclude in this case? That whatever Swarthmore has, it’s new or not a strong part of the institution’s curriculum.

Let’s just say our prospective wants to be absolutely sure and proceeds to look at Psychology’s faculty listing. This kind of listing also varies enormously in formatting. To an outsider, much of the information on a typical listing of faculty will be difficult to decode. Some simple rules:

Faculty described as professor or associate professor are usually tenured faculty. Meaning they have met the requirements for tenure and that they are likely to be around for the foreseeable future until they retire or move to another institution. Faculty described as assistant professor are tenure-track (meaning they will come up for promotion to tenure in the future) but have not been tenured yet. Faculty who have a “named position” (“Dorwin Cartwright Professor of Social Theory and Social Action”) are senior faculty who have been appointed to special “chairs”, often a sign of prestige or accomplishment. (A “chair” in this sense is different from the department chair, who is the current administrative head of an academic department.) All of these faculty occupy regular “lines”: counting them gives you a sense of the stable size of a department relative to others at the same institution. You might get some rough sense of the age or seniority distribution in a department by noting the distribution of ranks within it.

Faculty listed as emeritus or emerita have retired. You can’t tell much from the listing alone of whether they’re an active presence in the department. Faculty listed as visiting assistant/associate professors are generally some kind of experienced temporary faculty. Lecturers are faculty who are often (though not always) temporary who may be hired to address additional subject areas or to address short-term pressures on an existing department. Faculty who are described as none of these terms are also likely to be either temporary or to have institutional responsibilities besides teaching. In some cases, senior administrative officers of a college (such as a president, provost or dean) may be listed in the faculty of a given department. These are sometimes honorary listings, but in any event, these officers are usually not active teachers in that department while they are serving in administration.

Basically, count the tenure-track faculty for a reliable measure of the predictably available teaching resources.

The final thing you might find on a departmental listing is the research and teaching interests of faculty. This also is variable: some departmental webpages treat this information like it is a secret, or put it in a separate layer below the departmental listing. At Swarthmore Psychology’s webpage, you’ll see some concise, clear listings of interests under each faculty member’s name. In our department, you won’t see “neuroscience” as a single word, but if our prospective knew something about the field, they’d probably spot about 2, maybe 3, faculty with interests lying within neuroscience.

Let’s try neuroscience at Williams.

Where do you go? Well, there’s always the expedient trick of Googling “Williams neuroscience”. But let’s do it the old-fashioned way, by drilling down the links. At the Williams main page, you’ll see:

“Academics” is generally going to be the place that you find listings of departments, programs, majors and other curricular items. The next page at Williams has another listing to parse: “Departments and Programs” is what’s wanted. One page deeper and our prospective is eagerly scanning down the list of departments. It’s not there! But wait, look at the second column, under “Programs Offering Concentrations”. Bingo! There’s neuroscience.

Only, what’s a “Program Offering Concentrations”? Do NOT expect college webpages to ever explain like this anywhere but about five fathoms deep in their official handbooks. In general, a department is a more stable, longer-established administrative unit that offers a regular course of study and some kind of certification on graduation. “Program” means something a bit more tentative, often newer. “Department” means “discipline”, “Program” often means “interdisciplinary”. But this is not always the case. Swarthmore has programs older than some of its departments, some of its programs think of themselves as offering a discipline, and a few programs have more participating faculty than some of the smallest departments. Students (and faculty) often perceive departments to be more powerful, resource-rich and prestigious, but some programs are deliberately loose or unstructured for some purpose and yet have plenty of resources. In short, it’s hard to say what exactly this means when you see it. As a rule of thumb, you can guess that a “program offering a concentration” or any similar phrase means a course of study that is an institution is trying to do in a more tentative, potentially reversible way by bootstrapping the resources of some existing departments in a new direction.

Let’s click on Williams’ program. Hey, snazzy graphic, but also a pretty clean page in terms of the information navigation it offers. Betcha didn’t know that neural systems came in Williams’ colors.

Before you click on anything in the left-hand menu, take a second to parse what each of those links will likely tell you. “Program” usually means a description of the structure of a major or minor, though that might also be under “Courses”. “People” usually links to faculty and staff, and “Research” will often tell you about what they do but also about what labs or work they’ve been doing with students. Some departmental websites have a listing of additional resources about this area of study, though these are often badly out of date. The “Essel Program” listing tells you that this program has a stable source of external funding–which our aspirant neuroscientist might realize could translate into some sort of support for internships or research fellowships for students.

Let’s say our prospective decides she wants to see what courses the program offers. Here she’ll find a disappointment that is very common to college websites. The course titles are available but they are not linked to anything more detailed. If they are linked, it’ll often just be to a one-paragraph description in the catalog. Very rarely will a departmental website facilitate an information-seeker to drill down into syllabi or any more detailed information about courses. Nor will links to faculty or research typically connect to actual publications by faculty. At best you might find an abbreviated c.v.

Still, the Williams site gives the prospective some sense of what neuroscience at the college is like. Looking at the “People” link, the prospective will find out how many students have chosen the concentration since 2009 (a hint that this is when the program might have started) and will find faculty listed as “Professor of Biology” or “Associate Professor of Psychology”. What does the “of Biology” mean in this kind of listing? That this faculty member’s tenure line is not in Neuroscience, but in that other department. And here we see the most common meaning of “program” versus “department”: departments control tenure lines, programs “borrow” their resources from elsewhere. But this doesn’t tell you anything about what that commitment is like: sometimes faculty in departments are much more strongly committed to a program than their “home” department. It does tell you that faculty might be pulled in two directions, however.

Let’s try two more quickly. How about Pomona? As with Williams, it’s three links deep to the listing of departments. (That Google search is looking better and better all the time.) When you arrive at Neuroscience, you find it’s a bit difficult to tell: is it a department? a program? The language seems to imply it’s a department. Some faculty are listed as “Professor of Neuroscience”, a suggestion that their tenure line is in Neuroscience, not something else. But, if you can navigate the somewhat confusing faculty guide embedded in the department’s webpage to look at faculty profiles (click on the little chess piece icons),

you find that the faculty listed as “of Neuroscience” are in their own profiles listed as “of Biology” and “of Psychology”. (Also, the vaguely conspiratorial notation that these profiles are “External Only” appears.) This is going to take a bit more sleuthing, which means leaving Pomona’s web architecture. Lo and behold, one Google search later, we find that Professor Karen Parfitt has left a presentation up on the web that explains everything. It was a program that started out of student interest, it grew enormously, and in 2010-11 it became a department. Current faculty have tenure lines in both neuroscience and other departments but the “of Neuroscience” presumably means that this is where those tenure lines will be in the future.

This is all information that you’d be able to get pretty quickly if you were at Pomona, I think. But it’s not what college websites are used to communicate, for the most part.

Let me point to a college website that I found frustrating: Bates College. It’s got a strong graphical design that’s consistently held several layers down. Good for them. But when I drill four click layers down to get to neuroscience, here’s what I find:

Still a default to big pictures and words. The superficial admissions-brochure description of neuroscience actually requires me to scroll down at the default display size to even read the whole thing, and the pictures are utterly banal images of happy students, nothing to do with the department, program or whatever. When I click on Faculty and Staff in the mid-page banner, here’s what I get:

To look at the faculty and staff associated with neuroscience, I have to pull down the menu from Faculty & Staff and look at each one of them individually. I can’t call up a page with all four of them. No, it’s worse than that, I need a pull-down menu for each faculty person to separately look at their teaching, research, and so on. (Though I can get a .pdf of syllabi, so that’s nice.) Seriously, this makes clear that Bates doesn’t think I’m going to want to go that deep, or that if I want that information, I’ll find it elsewhere: the webpage is for nice pictures of nice students associated with nice-sounding ad copy.

—————-

A few modest proposals:

It wouldn’t hurt anyone if college webpages had an archival or curatorial function, particularly at the departmental level. I keep a Twitter window open to the keyword Swarthmore: I get a pretty interesting picture of what’s being said about the college that way. I should be able to find Karen Parfitt’s slides from inside Pomona’s web architecture. Most importantly: I should be able to go straight from faculty directories to syllabi and at least some online publications. That should be standard within the next decade. Honestly, it should be standard now.

It wouldn’t hurt anyone if the descriptions of programs were punchier, more engaging, more real. Faculty love to complain about administrative-speak, committee-speak, but I’d make a guess that many of the deadliest, most abstract descriptions of departments, disciplines and programs were written by faculty.

College webpages in general should very quickly yield in their architecture to different kinds of searchers. The prospective who is exploring, the colleague who is doing institutional research, the outsider who is looking for a directory, the alumni who is trying to find out what’s up back at the alma mater, the journalist who wants to know what “Cultural Studies” is, the community member looking for a class to audit, should within three clicks find themselves in an architecture of link structures and discovery that is friendly to their intent.

Colleges should provide a clear lexicon both of terms and concepts common to higher education as a whole and specific to their curricula and it should be one click away at all times.

Listings of programmatic resources (faculty or otherwise) that obscure the quantity or stability of those resources are at the least confusing, at the worst deceptive. I’m not linking to the worst I saw in this search, but there’s a couple of institutions that struck me as actively puffing their programs up to two or three times their real size.

Links that lead to dead, old, or private pages are bad and yet are also surprisingly common.

Posted in Academia, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

On How Not to be Foxhog College

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Let’s try a thought-experiment.

Imagine a college which goes well beyond St. John’s College, Hampshire or the College of the Atlantic in the experimental premise of its design. Call it Vulpine College. It has a faculty of 100, a student body of 1000. Every semester, the 1000 students write down four separate courses of study that they’d like to embark upon in the coming term. The faculty sit down and read the requests. Those that are identical or nearly so are sorted into piles: everyone who wrote “Discrete Mathematics” or “The History of the Civil War”, for example. Courses of study that are fairly close to or contained within an existing pile are added to that, say, someone who listed three or more topics belonging in a discrete mathematics class, or someone who wanted to study US history from the Jackson Administration to Reconstruction put with the Civil War bunch. Those requests that are completely idiosyncratic would be kept on their own.

Then you’d match up faculty to the student selections. Maybe you’d try some rough matching to expertise, but the central conceit here would be that Vulpine’s faculty are highly adaptable, widely experienced liberal arts intellectuals whose job it is to facilitate student learning and not to be “sages on the stage” who hold forth about a fixed body of knowledge that they believe students ought to have. They would impose no restrictions: what the students want, the students get, whether that leads to a host of one-person tutorials or one thousand people studying how to program in Python.

At this most radical extreme, what would not work? For one, no matter how much you prefer the Fox to the Hedgehog, let’s get real. Some specialization of knowledge is necessary. There can’t be many people out there who would be equally comfortable teaching Farsi, C++, ethnographic method, inorganic chemistry, Chaucer and the military history of World War I. You can teach people to think critically no matter what the topic, but no single person can teach people to think well through or within any subject. You have to know something to be a good teacher even if you redefine that role as facilitation. In a small-scale, face-to-face, intimately-scaled college, you will never have the critical mass of faculty to sustain anything this open-ended, even if you had some sort of creative “backend” solution for linking students to crowdsourced knowledge networks.

For another, even the best autodidact at the age of 18 is limited in two crucial ways. First, unless they were home-schooled or attended one of a handful of equally experimental private schools, this kind of radical agency over your own learning would be substantially alien. If Vulpine College didn’t spend time preparing its students for this kind of openness, most of them wouldn’t know what to do with it. That preparation might arguably take up one, two, or more years of study. At which point, Vulpine College has become a fairly standard liberal-arts college with an exotic culminating exercise.

Second, even skilled autodidacts need to have a certain amount of fuel shoveled into them in order to jump-start their own engines. You have to know something to know something more. A late colleague of mine tried to approach the teaching of college biology partially by asking students to recapitulate the history of inquiry that generated contemporary biological science, but even he started at a baseline at which “biological science” was already the conceptual banner under which the class convened, in which much was already known. At least some knowledge requires deferred gratification or indirect routes. An 18-year old Vulpine student who had done a bit of algebra but wrote “stochastic calculus” as a course of study would have to be told that there were some intermediary steps that just couldn’t be skipped. Once Vulpine’s faculty were in the business of saying that to students, a more standard curriculum would inevitably come into view.

Third, the infrastructure of Vulpine would either be parsimoniously reliant on digital sources or it would be improbably expensive. Even in the latter case, there’s no way Vulpine could support hands-on or experiential learning to match the potential range of student interests. You can’t have an infinite number of laboratories ready to roll out at a moment’s notice, you can’t support students looking to do situated or ethnographic work in all possible sites, you can’t have all the artistic or performing resources students might ask for.

Fourth, Vulpine could make no representations whatsoever about what its students know, do or are capable of, except that they know how to decide what they want to learn next. That’s important, but the world is not and will not be Vulpine, no matter how crowdsourced and networked it might become. Vulpine could certify almost nothing about its students, and would have almost no ‘view from above’ of their learning experiences. A corollary: individual faculty would also have a hell of a time assessing the work of students in any given course or tutorial. If you have highly individual motivations for wanting to learn something, who’s to say that you’re not meeting your goals? If I decide that learning C was the wrong language for my goals after a bad semester full of failure and switch to Python, or even abandon computer programming altogether, isn’t that a very good example of the kind of learning that Vulpine is committed to?

I could go on: Vulpine in this extreme formulation is as impossible as Borges’ Library of Babel. Like the Library, however, the act of imagining it raises the more fundamental question: if we could have it, would we want it? Entropy is a precondition of life; boundaries and limits, natural or invented, are a precondition of knowledge. Vulpine’s radical concession to the agency of learners might well end up being the antithesis of the liberal arts: saying that we should always choose what we want to know next implies that there should always be some utility to our choices. At least some of the time, we learn best through accidents and serendipities, through what other people choose for us. Vulpine is also radically amnesiac, completely ephemeral: there is no sense that it is helping to produce knowledge, only consume it. It depends on a world that approaches education and scholarship in a more traditional mode. In a way, Vulpine would be like the one family that refuses to get vaccinated for anything, hoping to free-ride off of the community’s immunizations.

Vulpine isn’t just impossible, in some sense, it’s a bad idea.

———–

Let’s look at the opposite thought-experiment, Hedgehog College. At Hedgehog, with 1000 students and 100 faculty, all the professors are deep specialists in a single area of scholarly knowledge. Hedgehog has decided that what they have now is exactly what they will have forever: that every existing allocation of resources to every existing discipline is precisely as it ought to be. Each specialist will of course be responsive to how their field changes over time as knowledge accumulates or shifts in that field, but each specialist will also be completely autonomous in their command over their field and over the portion of the curriculum assigned to that field. In essence, every faculty member is a department of one, and is exclusively in charge of hiring their replacement. Continuity and tradition are Hedgehog’s watchword. Hedgehog is well-endowed: each member of the faculty has adequate resources to support their area of instruction and research. It has spared itself the burden of ever having to decide the comparative worth of different areas of knowledge or to make difficult judgments about resource allocation.

So what wouldn’t work in this case? Hedgehog would run into a mirror of Vulpine’s problem with its first-year students. Even in 2012, the curriculum they encounter is likely not to be the same as the education they’ve had up to that point. By 2030, 2040, 2050, that problem will be more and more acute each passing year, no matter how responsibly each faculty member represents the changing status of their own field. Just as Vulpine can’t easily create a sequence of required classes designed to prepare autodidacts, Hedgehog will have difficulty creating an integrated or shared introduction to its fixed fields of study.

Vulpine’s faculty would face the nightmare of having nothing to call their own, of having to redefine themselves every six months. Hedgehog’s faculty would seem to own their own domains, but in truth, the domains would own them. If in the course of a thirty-year career, a Hedgehog faculty member decided that they were more interested in a new field of specialization than the one they were hired to teach and study, they would in some sense be following a love that dare not speak its name: the college itself would have no way to recognize or institutionally benefit from the growth or evolution of that faculty member. No research at Hedgehog could argue for a fundamentally new field of study, or argue against an old one. At retirement, the position would go back to Go and not collect $200. At some point, it might become nearly impossible to find a replacement, or for a person practicing something like a fixed field to recognize Hedgehog’s job advertisement as something they were qualified to teach.

Hedgehog might have enough resources to deal with changes in what faculty require to carry out their research and teaching. Equity in teaching labor would be a different problem, however. Hedgehog has no way to deal with or even acknowledge evolving student demand for its offered subjects. It might well have to adopt strict quotas, caps or some other traffic control. But since it doesn’t have any way to discuss connections between subjects or overall courses of study in a coherent, evolving way, it couldn’t adjust some kind of required course sequence over time to adapt to changing student demand. That would take believing that the relations between areas of study are dynamic and having some way to describe and imagine that dynamism that is both structural and intellectual.

Hedgehog’s individual faculty could readily certify that individual students had progressed in their specialized command of the subjects offered by the college. But they couldn’t easily collectively attest to a student’s general competency, or to learning outcomes that trumped or bypassed those areas of study. The faculty would have very little way to accommodate or support a student who was engaged in a unique recombination of several areas of specialized learning because they would only be able to evaluate or advise the portion that related uniquely to their own field.

The problem for Hedgehog is that even though its individual faculty might have tremendous dynamism in their own practice and be involved in all sorts of conversations about shared or connected problems, the curricular and organizational structure of the college could never acknowledge or benefit from that dynamism and connection. Nor could that structure ever deal with or even officially recognize changes in the interests of students and the world at large. Vulpine is all driven by student agency, Hedgehog is never driven by student agency.

I think even the most erinaceinaedic intellectuals can see why Hedgehog would be more unpleasant in many ways than Vulpine. You can see Hedgehog actually existing for a while, it’s just that it would become useless and reactionary very quickly. The only way to hold the line this hard is the way that St. John’s does it: not in terms of disciplinarity and specialization, but in terms of a core body of knowledge and inquiry that you believe has eternal or unchanging value. And even St. John’s periodically tinkers with their definition of the Western tradition: it’s fairly hard to celebrate an intellectual tradition that exalts innovation, progress and skepticism while permanently rejecting any possible change in how you study and practice that tradition.

——–

All I have to do is recite the fields of study that Hedgehog wouldn’t have if it had frozen in place in 1960 in order to properly horrify most academics. I sometimes feel there is a disconnect between the way in which many academics welcome those changes and their willingness to countenance or imagine a similar array of changes from this point forward. Part of the reason for that is that most of the changes in academia between 1960 and 2012 took place through institutional growth, whether we’re talking Swarthmore or UCLA, so new fields rarely seem to have been included at the cost of old fields. But some were, and more will be in the zero-sum future.

Excessive hedgehoggery makes it impossible to talk of change except as loss and violation, makes all planning into trauma. But a blithe fox, in love with his or her own humbuggery, tramples on the passions that sustain scholarly research and focused teaching, and doesn’t seem to understand the fineness of the line between a cosmopolitan jack-of-all-trades and a dispossessed vagabond. So how do we all stay open to the future in planning, stay provisional about our practices, without risking that dispossession? How to institutionalize restlessness and prevent rootlessness?

Here’s what I’d suggest:

1) Demand, enrollment, popularity are not sufficient reasons to shift resources, but they’re always relevant. It’s not just about giving students what they want. What students (and parents and wider publics) believe that they need from higher education is a fantastically useful map of what they already know or think they know. Every teacher should want to constantly refresh their view of that map: it’s the best way to avoid becoming an ossified hedgehog, to speak persuasively about what you know to people that you believe ought to know it.

2) “Coverage” is a weak rationale by itself in curricular planning, especially at small liberal-arts institutions. Here I skew pretty hard to Vulpine’s side of the spectrum. If the goal of a liberal arts education is improving intellectual flexibility, adaptability, open-ended problem-solving, creativity, critical thought, then any subject and all classes should work towards those goals. Coverage without very strong beliefs about canons, core knowledges, and essential traditions is just an alibi covering over “you do your thing and I’ll do mine, tend to your knitting and leave me alone”. A lot of the time contemporary faculty at many institutions want to have it both ways, rising in defense of disciplinary traditions which are subverted, discarded or harshly critiqued as soon as the venue shifts. Any assertion of the essential character of one subject ought to always require a comprehensive vision of the total universe of essential and elective subjects, but that burden is usually subcontracted out to some vague academic geist or put off as a luxuriously difficult problem that will be discussed at some always-deferred future moment.

3) Instead of coverage, what I prefer is something like heterogeneity. I am in love with the metaphor of ecological diversity to describe what the goal should be: filling all the observable intellectual niches; having a rich range of methods, epistemologies, temperaments, experiences represented within a faculty; insisting that every course of study is related or connected but in more flexible ways than a core curriculum or fixed canon allows. What you get if this is your guiding view is an institution which I think has an intrinsic beauty (as with biodiversity) but also robustly adaptable to changing circumstances.

The difference between trying to maintain a diverse intellectual ecosystem and trying to achieve coverage can be subtle, but it is sometimes pronounced. Coverage asks, “What must we have?”, and when denied, maintains that the resulting curriculum is inadequate, failed, weak. For a small institution, being driven by coverage usually means thinking of yourself as a shitty little university rather than a productively intimate college. Ecological diversity asks, “What’s another way to think about this problem?” or “What would be interesting, what would be generatively different from what we have already?”. Coverage doesn’t scale, but diversity does: it can guide decisions about a faculty of ten or ten thousand.

In a lot of places, institutional decision-making ends up producing a sort of ungainly Frankensteinian jumble of fox parts and hedgehog parts. I think there’s a different middle possible.

Posted in Academia | 6 Comments

UnConference or MutateConference?

Posted on February 9, 2012 by Timothy Burke

This morning I was drawn to a post by Mitch Joel claiming that the “unconference movement” is dead.

I hadn’t encountered Joel’s blog before, so I hope I’m not reading this piece out of the context of his usual commentary. In any event, my response isn’t entirely about this one entry. I’ve only been to two events that were trying to be “unconferences” in some sense, and I’ve never been involved in trying to facilitate one, so there’s nothing about his critique that strikes too close to home, no wound it inflicts on me.

But there is something in the response that frustrates me, and it’s not just about unconferencing. There’s a pattern here that extends across a much vaster terrain. As I said in my Twitter feed, “Do as thou wilt” and “Ur doing it wrong” don’t add up. Joel is hardly the first person to try and say both of them at once.

Let’s take unconferencing. The idea here, as I see it, is to not just systematically question everything that doesn’t work about an existing model of conferencing, collaboration, and meetings but to invent new forms and practices that act on that critique. That alone makes the movement or whatever you want to call it a great thing: there’s nothing worse than endlessly circling around an awareness of how broken or stale existing practices are while feeling condemned to repeat them indefinitely. The one time I sat on a major professional association’s program committee a decade ago, I suggested that it would be a great idea if we just dropped virtually all of the standard paper-presentation sessions in favor of roundtables, workshops and spontaneous discussions, a sort of proto-unconferencing move. But there wasn’t any space in business-as-usual to entertain that idea. It was clear that if I were serious about it, I’d have to make it a crusade. My colleagues weren’t against a change exactly, but they felt there were reasons why we had a lot of small, boring sessions attended by six or seven people who passively listened to papers being read to them and changing that would cause serious problems for many members. Crusading on this subject struck me as a bit lower on my priority list than getting an unnecessary root canal. Smarter by far to just do an end run and invent new practices under new banners, as unconferencers have.

It’s the new practices part that seems to me to be the point: that unconferencing opens up what had been a closed, ritualistic and expensive domain that put very high transaction costs on collaboration, discovery and conversation between people with shared interests and projects.

It sticks in my craw when a move to openness becomes an occasion for a new closure. Which is how I read Joel’s complaint: that the unconference should have a purity test, its own Dogme 95 policed by dour adherents, that it has to be the dialectical opposite of the conference in every respect. In that case, you do not mean UN, you mean ANTI. Which will require the perpetual zombie reification of an ancien regime mode of conferencing as well. Every anti- needs its pro-, every post- needs its unhyphenated Other. To “un” something seems to me not to commit to a perfect opposite but to seek a massive radial evolution of new forms, to open a space, to emancipate.

What I hear in Joel I hear a bit of when #Occupy meetings insist dogmatically on human mics, circles and so on. Or the way that I can remember student activist meetings I participated in the 1980s mandatorily concluding with a sort of offbrand pseudo-Maoist self-crit session. Moves intended to criticize the rigidity and hierarchy of some other form of group or collaboration sometimes harden quickly into their own form of exclusionary orthodoxy, their own fetishized manners. To me a perfect unconference or rally or online collaboration or what have you would be a jam session, a moveable feast. Improvisation has signal, it has pattern, it has structure, it has plans, but it also has the freedom to say or play what it seems right to say or play at that moment. Whatever works is what I want to be free to do, what the work of the “un” ought to accomplish, to make working an always-provisional, always-scrutinized, always-open value. Let a thousand models bloom, and then cross-pollinate.

This isn’t just about one mode or tradition of collaborative practice. Ultimately this distinction, this different sense of what it means to “UN-” something, strikes right to the heart of the most extravagant and exciting promises that congregants gathered in the house of Shirky try to uphold. I really believe you cannot set yourself against attempts to protect worn-out traditions through enclosure and monopoly with your own enclosures, your own moves to exclusive ownership. Otherwise it just comes off like an attempt to evict the old sheep farmers so that you can breed goats on the same fenced-in pastures, a casting of one brand name against another, a strategy of transfer-seeking.

Openness is a sensibility long before it is found expressed in anything more concrete, and it requires a delight in the mutations and adaptations that follow from an intervention into a closed space. It rests on a gentleness of regard towards the practical and imaginary moves made by others, an encouragement of remixing and reinvention.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 5 Comments

The Work of Criticism

Posted on January 20, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Jumping straight out of my Twitter feed about THATCamp Games, I want to work a bit more on a reaction I had to a morning panel on teaching games in a higher ed class.

I heard a pretty strong strain of thought that naturalized the proposition that the first thing to do with games in a class is to interrupt the activity of play, to stop the fun, to compel students to a critical attentiveness to the content and experience of a game. The student who knows how to play video games well was taken to be a sort of pedagogical enemy, both because they ‘split’ the instructors’ attention between the skilled player and the students who have never played and because the expert gamer was taken as a figure who actually has few or no critical thoughts about their consumption of games.

The problem of a class with split levels of preparation, competency, or cultural capital is a real one that comes up in much of higher education, so I don’t mean to belittle it. But because it’s so common, it might be a good thing to not see as specific or special to games except in who has that expertise or cultural capital within a classroom.

But the idea of the expert gamer as a sort of idiot savant who doesn’t want to talk about games, doesn’t think about games as a critical subject, and who is having altogether too much fun with games to be trusted as a practicioner of criticism worries me. Here too I don’t think this construct is limited to games as a cultural form. There’s a mirroring construction in film and television studies, indeed, in the relation of most bodies and pedagogies of academic cultural criticism and communities formed around and through cultural consumption. Literature professors often encounter and complain about the student who arrives in their classes with a professed ‘love of literature’. We sometimes come to see our job as grimly breaking those blithe spirits on the wheel of the hard labor of criticism and dismissing them from our company when they refuse to come into the quarry and break stone.

We set our teeth to this bit first because we hold dear the notion that criticism is work because it has work to do, that criticism has a function which requires training to perform, which is desperately needed as a part of the critical transformation (or preservation) of some wider sociocultural project, and towards which there will be opposition. A labor to learn, a labor to enact, a labor to endure.

We also do it because something which is fun, pleasurable or passionate seems an easy target for elimination within the academy, or indeed any contemporary institution with limited resources and a productivist sensibility. Yet it is against this sentiment particularly that humanists so often howl in protest in other ways, resisting the idea that what they do should ever be reduced to its naked, barren utilities. Why then it should be so urgent to disrupt, prevent or spoil the experience of culture when it seems passionate, pleasurable or fun is something of a mystery.

Nor do I think there is much sense in making the expert gamer, the romantic reader, the artist who creates for personal satisfaction, either an enemy of criticism or absent of a critical faculty. “Expert gamers” engage in a great deal of criticism: it simply isn’t expressed in terms that are native to scholarly enterprise, nor is it often concerned with the things that earn academic critics their reputation capital. But there’s a lot of value in the discourse of expert gamers for academic critics, and I think academic critics would find that this door swings both ways: there are things expert gamers want to know that they would gladly look to scholarship to engage.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Games and Gaming | 5 Comments

A Way To Think About Online Courses (By Apple, For Example)

Posted on January 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

So Apple’s big education-oriented product announcement has come and gone.

I’m going to tread softly here about what it might lead to, because I’ve been wrong before on tech rollouts (both overestimating and underestimating impacts). In general, most of what was discussed in this announcement seems to follow Apple’s established pattern of looking at what other companies and institutions have been trying to do and doing some redesigns of the hardware and delivery channels for those services or products.

Back in the middle of the first dot-com boom, I was asked with some other Swarthmore faculty to attend a presentation by a tech company trying to sell us on digitizing courses and moving to some kind of online delivery of a portion of our curriculum. The main argument they offered was that if we didn’t get on board right now, with their company, we’d be out of business tomorrow because everyone else would be on board with them and we’d be the last analog dinosaurs left on an Earth for small, nimble mammals. For a residential liberal-arts college that emphasizes high-quality teaching in a small, intimate community, that seemed like roughly the Stupidest Idea Ever. It was like an undertaker showing up and trying to convince you that you could save a lot on a funeral plan if you’d just commit suicide right now.

One thing that struck me during the meeting, though, was that if you created a really rich body of materials that looked somewhat like an “online course”, what you really might be doing was crafting a completely novel form of publication. Imagine a work of historical scholarship that included video of the author giving an explanatory lecture at the beginning of a section of the reading; that had direct links to a huge body of archival pictures, audio recordings, maps, and other supporting materials; that extensively linked to relevant (or competing) analyses available in digital collections like JSTOR; and where the author would appear live once every week to take questions from students reading the book in a class.

If you think about it, some “online courses”, whether the Khan Academy or the AI class at Stanford or maybe what Apple’s putting forth, are beginning to converge on something like this design: publications which incorporate materials that have a pedagogical or instructive dimension to them. As a straight-up replacement for an actual small, focused face-to-face class, it’s pretty clear that any online course is going to fall seriously short. But as a kind of publication that works alongside of classes, or that imports some of the substance of classroom pedagogy into their multimedia mix, and which are a guide to self-guided learning or a supplement to a course led by a teacher? I think there’s some real potential.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Swarthmore | 3 Comments

There Is Nothing You Possess That Power Cannot Take Away

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Timothy Burke

…to paraphrase what Belloq says to Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The problem with a rights-based liberalism is precisely that it is not and never can be the end of history, that it is never secure or stable, that every liberty claimed through toil and protest, no matter how acclaimed and cherished and generative, is one day away from the firing line when some powerful interest decides that some right or practice is inconvenient.

It doesn’t even matter if the end of a right, a freedom, a possibility will ultimately hurt that powerful interest. The contemporary businesses who have registered a powerful stake in exceptionally restrictive monopolies over intellectual property have themselves been enormous beneficiaries of a conception of the public domain as a fundamental and irreversible right of a free society. No matter: they would now see it ended. Better to kill the future than live in a present where you can only have two Ferraris in the driveway.

Hollywood and the music industry have tried repeatedly to kill media technologies and practices which ultimately have returned them enormous profits. I have in my basement industry-produced videotapes that if Jack Valenti had had his way would never have been sold to me. There was money that left my pocket and went to the businesses he represented. And yes, I have videotapes I recorded off of television. Many of those I purchased in another media format later precisely because having videotapes sustained my desire to have those films and shows available for viewing. Videotaping (or making audio tapes) was the precondition of the explosive growth of a market for older visual culture as a consumer commodity. Think back to the early years of television: it never occurred to any of the people producing and owning that intellectual property that it might have value in the future. The more that we have been able to buy and copy, the more that we want. And much of the time, the more that we will pay for.

Enclosures don’t just hurt the commons, they ultimately hurt the new lords of the manor. This is part of the point of rights, of limited government, of checks and balances: that to safeguard the future even of the powerful, you have to restrain everyone from getting everything they think they want right here, right now.

What’s increasingly apparent about law, rights and liberties in the United States is that we have lived in our times in a bubble, an interregnum, a moment where some agencies and operations of the U.S. government, most particularly the Supreme Court of the United States, have moved to align the operations of law and authority with a properly expansive vision of human freedoms and Constitutionally-protected rights. That moment is passing, the pendulum swinging to more Gilded Age norms of brutalist law enforcement, oligarchic license, and an open sanction to the use of military power at the whim of the executive.

Nowhere is this clearer than with intellectual property and the public domain. The Court’s majority in the Golan v. Holder decision are only the stone that seals the tomb, not the murderers who slit its throat. Which means what it has always meant: that those of us who believe in a public domain, whose professions are defined by a sacred commitment to its existence, whose lives were enriched by its existence, will have to fight every day forever to bring it into resurrected glory and then to hold dear its life when we do so. Waiting for the Court, the Congress, the President, the government, the powers-that-be, to live up to the trust they hold, or even to recognize where their own long-term self-interests lie, isn’t good enough. It was comforting for a time to see justice and freedom advance from those precincts, but that led to leaving the door unlocked for burglars.

Posted in Intellectual Property, Politics | 4 Comments

Just Because You’re Paranoid

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Last month, I had a really interesting opportunity to participate in an open peer review for the project Writing History in a Digital Age. Somewhat to my dismay, I found myself falling into old-fartism in various ways as I made my comments.

One of the responses I had at various points, though, isn’t just limited to that project. Thomas Malaby and I wrote an introductory essay for Game Studies a while back that got an interesting reading from Alex Golub over at Savage Minds. One of the things that we suggested is that disciplinary enclosure of most areas of conceivable study will happen sooner or later, with an accompanying loss of generative, imaginative ways to think about that subject matter.

There are signs of that at times in work that self-identifies as digital humanities, and it’s something of the same split move we saw in game studies, between those that would like to create a new, separate disciplinary project and those that would like to safely domesticate “frontier” subject matter for incorporation into the safe metropole of an existing discipline. Digital humanists, however, are both consciously fretful about those possibilities and in many cases ideologically committed to avoiding them. This is one of the main sources of the “meta-ness” and self-referentiality of much DH discussion, which sparked a good deal of tweeting and blogging in the last week, of how to avoid, disrupt or defer moves towards enclosure by disciplines or towards splitting digital humanities off as its own discipline and keeping alive an insurgent challenge to business as usual.

One of the dangers to that commitment is a tendency to invest too much in an abstract imagining of the Other of digital humanism, a sort of pervasive tormenter and antagonist who is everywhere and nowhere at once in the academy, a sort of superset of all academics who are not expressly committed to the use and exploration of digital culture, information technology, open access, and so on.

Some of the practices and structures in academia which are most inimical to the professed goals of many digital humanists are supported largely by inertia rather than strongly felt commitments. That’s actually harder to overcome, but it’s important not to personify inertia or give it more intentionality than it has.

This is not to say that there are not opponents to digital technologies, open access publishing, blogging and so on within the academy. There are. Some opposition is passive or snarky, largely about the comforts of that inertia. Some is much more active, passionate and articulate. I’d rather deal with the latter, because that’s a conversation that can take place largely within the idealized norms of scholarly debate and process. It’s mostly the former, however. That’s where the danger of overimagining an opposition comes into sharpest focus.

The peril is threefold. First, that digital humanists come to anticipate too much that they will be uniquely the target of passive-aggressive opposition, which is bad for both the future development of an institutional project and for the individual careers of scholars, particularly junior scholars. I happened to be reading in the last few weeks within several different strands of the history of various scientific and technological research projects and with stunning regularity the individuals whose work has eventually become foundational orthodoxy were treated with disdain or bemused condescension at the outset of their careers. To some extent, casual and thoughtless snark and condescension are famously everywhere and anywhere in academic life that you care to look for them. If you’re a junior academic, you can pretty much count on the fact that at least some of your senior colleagues think (based on no real engagement or knowledge) that your work is trivial and that you’re a lightweight. Most of the people who think that way won’t have the malice or energy to act on it. But some of them might if they sense a vulnerability, and one of the ways to communicate that is to seem overly anxious about whether there will be opposition to your work or ideas. This kind of passive-aggressiveness is like the old saw about dogs only biting if they sense fear: the best way to keep it at bay is to act as if it doesn’t exist at all, to be as serenely and matter-of-factly confident about what you’re doing as you possibly can be.

The second problem is that arguing in favor of a project or idea through a repeated recounting of its marginalization relies on a construction that has become ubiquitious in almost all struggles for resources or power. E.g., so much advocacy for any program, project or policy seems to require situating it as the victim of some dominant program, as the periphery of a center, as the underdog. Part of the danger of that construction is that it relieves a pressure to make fully conceptualized arguments on behalf of such a program, resting instead on a moral appeal against persecution. But more pertinently in this case the problem is this strategy is now often the prelude to becoming a disciplinary orthodoxy in academia, the way we make a place for ourselves and then settle in to hold the line against the generation behind us. For digital humanists, that strategy is far more inimical to the substance of their ideas and commitments than it would be for, say, rational-choice analysts or social historians.

The third problem, and the one I think is most pertinent to Writing History in a Digital Age, is that stressing out too much about opposition often leads you to miss out on allies who substantively agree with everything you have to say but who work on a completely different subject, in a different medium, or in a different context. So, for example, the digital humanists who believe strongly in the potential of information technology to commingle public, ‘amateur’ and scholarly productions of history, or to circulate scholarly knowledge in new ways, shouldn’t overlook other clusters of scholars who’ve been laboring to accomplish the same things without digital technologies.

I don’t want to be pollyanna about these issues. Junior scholars do need to watch for serious antagonists, and do need institutional protection. Some changes only happen because they’re argued for forcefully, and some forceful argument requires calling out unjustified or irrational opponents in precisely those terms. However, a lot of change in institutions that have long memories and that plan for their long-term survival happens a bit magically, as a critical mass comes together. A theory or a project or a methodology can seem isolated, lonely, persecuted and then hey presto! everyone’s doing it and it’s hard to remember the days when they weren’t. I think the road to that moment is smoother when there’s less angst about opposition along the way.

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