What Meets in Vegas, Stays in Vegas

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I wouldn’t quite say I was surprised at this report of unrest within the American Sociological Association over the choice of Las Vegas as the location for the 2011 meeting. And I’m fairly certain that some of the more extreme sentiments of disdain for the choice of venue reported in this Inside Higher Education article will eventually be disavowed as misquotes or distortions by the scholars quoted in the article. (Despite the fact that they’re fairly detailed comments.)

Most professional associations of academic disciplines rather markedly avoid Vegas as a venue. Despite what gets said by some sociologists in the IHE article, that can’t be about cost. Las Vegas is consistently one of the cheapest airfares in the country from almost any location within the United States. It has a huge price range of accommodation, particularly if you’re willing to stay somewhere a bit away from the Strip. There are way more beds at affordable prices in Vegas than in Chicago, New York, or San Francisco, the perennial favorites of most of the big disciplinary associations. In the current recession, which has had an especially sharp effect on Vegas, I would think that most professional associations could negotiate deeper discounts than in any other major American city with a large range of hotels and services. If you really wanted to do graduate students and adjunct faculty who may need to attend a professional meeting to be interviewed a favor, you’d put the meeting in Las Vegas every single year. I’d even bet that at least some hotels or conference centers in Vegas gouge less on providing projection services or wireless connections to presenters. It would be nice to attend a major professional meeting where presenters aren’t left to scrounge for their own presentation technology, as has happened at some of the meetings I go to, because “it’s too expensive for the association to deal with”.

So take cost off the table. What’s the problem with Vegas? Some of the sociologists interviewed by IHE complain that Vegas is more complicit in the exploitation of women, the reproduction of capitalism, or the exploitation of low-wage workers than other possible venues. It’s odd, you know. I’ve attended big professional meetings in San Francisco, New York and Chicago where the main hotel venue is right around the corner from one of several red-light districts or businesses without hearing that this makes that venue unacceptable. I’ve been to New Orleans for meetings, both pre- and post-Katrina, in hotels right on the edge of the French Quarter, where solicitations to come inside sex-related venues are found in plenitude, drunken young men harass women, and gambling is right nearby. Philadelphia will soon have yet more gambling near its downtown. If you’re so upset by capitalist excess that you don’t want to go to your professional meetings, I assume you always complain when the meeting is in New York.

I’m not saying that you have to like Vegas as a destination. I have weird, conflicted feelings about it as a place, like many people do. I straightforwardly like some things about it (the restaurant scene is great, I like poker, and there’s some beautiful places to hike nearby.) I personally dislike the timeless, adrift feeling of most of its internal architecture, which is totally intentional. But that’s the problem with this whole story: that it should be a non-story. Meaning, that it’s fine to say, “Look, I find this is a creepy place, that’s just me, I have more fun or prefer or enjoy another venue,” in which you admit that at least one of the reasons why you attend a professional meeting is because you enjoy the venue. And in which you admit you are drawn to some aesthetics and not to others, that you find some places pleasurable and not others. I can completely sympathize. I didn’t attend one professional association meeting once because it was in Gary Indiana. Not because I object to Gary for political reasons, or believe there is something uniquely critique-worthy about it. Because I didn’t want to go there. That’s all. Nothing grand, nothing I’d make a fuss about, no sentiment that I’d care to soapbox about.

For some reason, this really reminds me of a passage in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle. Describing his father’s commitment to being “Conscious Man”, he writes “To be Conscious Man was more than just the digestion of obscure books that happen to favor your side. It was a feeling, an ingrained sense that something major in our lives had gone wrong. My father was haunted. He was bad at conjuring small talk, he watched very little TV, because once Conscious, every commercial, every program must be strip-mined for its deeper meaning, until it lays bare its role in this sinister American plot.”

I don’t think the academics who go beyond personally disliking Vegas as a venue to argue that there’s something structurally or institutionally wrong with being there are Conscious People in quite this sense. It’s more that they think performing Conscious Personhood is a necessary affect of their professional identity, like a psychoanalyst’s couch or a physician’s lab coat. Vegas is like TV: it presents a surplus of meanings that can’t be accepted or enjoyed as such, that allow no escape into some safe meeting ground between bourgeois academia and the Authentic Masses. It’s all small talk, it pre-empts profundity.

Which, honestly, might be a good reason why more academic conferences ought to be there.

Posted in Academia, Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Good Quote, Bad Quote, Popular Culture | 6 Comments

On “Stop Doing Cultural Studies”

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Timothy Burke

A quick follow-up to yesterday’s post. Reading Toni Bowers’ excellent post about a panel at the American Society for 18th-Century Studies in which Cliff Siskin and Bill Warner called for scholars of literary studies to “stop doing cultural studies”, I kept thinking: this feels familiar. I think the stance of Siskin and Warner has some kinship with what I was talking about in yesterday’s post.

What’s interesting in these moments is that they reveal how disciplines are not really markets, nor are they composed of a series of persuasive speech acts, though we sometimes act as if or claim that either or both are true. E.g., we sometimes argue that disciplines change because their practicioners have new interests, priorities or techniques, that they have a supple if slow-paced response to a kind of intellectual market. You write what you think is important, and the field either “buys” it or it doesn’t. And we sometimes say that the priorities of a discipline are determined by persuasion: that scholars do work and then argue for its importance or necessity. If they argue well, ta-da! knowledge.

What’s uncomfortable in a call to NOT do something is that both of those narratives are rather openly pitched over the side. Rather than waiting to see if there is a “market” for getting cultural studies and literary studies messed together like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, or accepting that if such work is persuasive in its arguments for itself, there must be something to it, the “we” invokes an invisible off-stage governmentality. Doesn’t seem so innocent or magical to me, though neither is it realistic–so much of this kind of call to governmentality in disciplinary life is rather like the Wizard of Oz in his humbug mode, fire and flash but just little people behind curtains when it comes to it.

But this is also part of what sets up the kind of narrative that I was critiquing yesterday: it’s the first positional move in a longer game. First you call for an unnamed disciplinary sovereign to safeguard the traditions of the disciplinary nation. Or you harrumph that changes have taken place in your discipline and your institution without your consent, without a plebiscite. When the restoration of your treasured norms by sovereign fiat doesn’t follow, you can begin beating the O Tempora O Mores drums, and paint yourself into the margins. From there you can get a pretty clear sighting of a kingdom of unhappy exiles, the Land of Violated Traditions, and should you wish, they’ll be happy to stamp your passport and show you to the refugee camps.

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Hunger Artists (TIAA-Cref Edition)

Posted on September 1, 2011 by Timothy Burke

In the last few years, I’ve had a few conversations with colleagues here and elsewhere in which they insist that good humanistic inquiry is necessarily defined by its fundamental aversion to instrumental justifications of its own work and that teaching in the humanities should not be reduced to the development of skills, competencies or the transference of highly concrete bodies of canonical knowledge to students. Instead, they suggest, humanistic inquiry and teaching ought to be shaped by ineffable, unpredictable, highly intrinsic values, that it should refuse to reduce or quantify meaning and interpretation, that humanist inquiry is an end in and of itself, that it is more about process and less about results.

I’ve said before that I think this view sets up false or unnecessary antagonisms, partly because I’m quite partial to the idea that humanistic work disrupts, defers or messes up mechanistic or instrumental schemes of all kinds. Job one in my teaching and my writing is to confound and scramble attempts to render societies and individuals transparent, manageable, predictable, legible. I steer my boat by the star of James Scott.

I know some of the folks who feel most strongly on this score see their views as under threat primarily from outside of the humanities, associating instrumental or reductionist approaches to academic inquiry and teaching with the social sciences and natural sciences (or with administrative managerialism and corporatization). I find that rather odd given that one of the dominant approaches to humanistic scholarship and teaching over the last thirty years has argued that humanistic work must forcefully critique existing social formations, discursive regimes, constructions of identity and subjectivity and so on. If the humanities are threatened as this complaint alleges, then the threat comes first and last from within their own domain. (I’m especially frustrated when friends who would otherwise argue for humanistic inquiry to intervene quite instrumentally in ongoing political and social struggles suddenly opt for a description of humanistic work as anti-instrumental, irreducibly intrinsic, ‘inquiry for inquiry’s sake’.)

There’s another problem with this description of humanistic inquiry when it is coupled with a defense of existing academic programs, projects or prerogatives, however. Namely, that many of the best examples of humanists and intellectuals whose life’s work best matches the purity invoked in this vision weren’t academics employed by the postwar American academy. Mostly, we’re talking about intellectuals who did critical and creative work before modern research universities came into being, before tenure became an institution, before academic departments and specialized inquiry defined scholarly community, before TIAA-CREF and health benefits. Or if we’re talking post-1945 intellectuals that would serve as widely admired exemplars of a purer dedication to humanistic work, I suspect that many of the names that would leap to mind across the humanities would be people who may have taught in universities at times but whose lives were significantly untethered to the academy, financially, socially and intellectually.

I’m not saying that 19th or early 20th Century humanistic intellectuals in the West lived without compromised reliance on money or support. Some lived off inheritances or spouses, others wheedled money and support from patrons or indulgent friends. And I don’t think there’s anything good to be said for dying alone, ill, impoverished, as more than a few intellectuals have. But there is something very odd about the conflation of humanistic inquiry as an overall project with the fate of particular academic disciplines in the highly particular institutional architecture of the American academy as it has developed since 1965 or so. The grand vision that defenders of a purer humanities enunciate, if it has existed at all, existed vigorously before the university systems of today, before the comfortably professional and middle-classness of professorial lives today, and might reasonably be expected to exist in some other form after them, if they should disappear or markedly transform.

If that’s not a reasonable expectation, it falls to humanist academics who understand themselves and their projects in these terms to fill in a missing piece of their argument. How and why did humanist intellectuals become so strongly located within and wholly dependent upon the American academy and its particular institutional norms? And no fair describing that process as a process of subjugation, loss, capture or domestication, because any of those labels imply that the real priority of humanists should be to seek emancipation from academic institutions, not the preservation of their position within them. This rhetoric inevitably has to be about conservation, stewardship, the protection of an inheritance, a belief that something wonderful happened when humanists came inside the ivy-covered walls and left their starveling Parisian garrets, that a good middle-class salary and benefits enabled some new possibilities for humanists which should be valued by the society at large, which is paying for those possibilities in some way or another. (A side note: good luck describing that value in terms that don’t end up appearing instrumental or extrinsic.) Even more importantly, a humanist taking up this position has to argue that at some point in the not too distant past, those possibilities were so valued. Otherwise, why complain now of the encroaching menace of instrumentalism and managerialism? This is a stance that is very ill-served by the donning of a sackcloth and ashes, that should not complain of eternal marginalization and exclusion, nor crown itself in thorns. If it makes any sense at all, this is an argument about what the humanities gloriously achieved after 1945 by observing more and more specific kinds of disciplinary forms, by professionalization, by participation in and responsibility to institutional life, by coupling the production of intellectual work to the education of most young people rather than the instruction of a small privileged elite. This is an argument made from a presumed center, even if perhaps one which believes it is time to re-center humanistic practice in academic institutions.

I suppose it’s clear that I think this is the wrong road to travel. I think we can learn a lot from recognizing that many admirable humanist intellectuals have carried out their work outside of or at a distance from the norms of contemporary disciplines within the humanities. The lesson in that is not that the humanities in the academy are disposable, absolutely not. It might be, on the other hand, a sign that the contemporary disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practice of humanists in the American academy isn’t a necessary condition of vigorous, challenging and desirable humanistic work within contemporary universities and colleges. There are other ways to skin that cat. It might even be that intellectual work by humanists as my more traditionalist friends defend it is best served by much looser structural and organizational practices than in other divisions of academic work, that this would bring the practice of humanistic scholarship inside of the academy more in line with the deeper history of this kind of intellectual work. And maybe, just maybe, that move would also solve much of the much-fretted about “crisis of the humanities” by permitting a reconnection or reacquaintance between wider publics and humanist intellectuals.

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Pictures from an Institution 7 (Advising)

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I would wager that if you could chart the most restlessly revised institutional systems at small liberal-arts colleges, you would find that advising would be one of the top two or three on that list at most colleges.

Students seek advice from departments

Advising is certainly a perennial favorite as a scapegoat for the ills of the curriculum. When students graduate without some of the skills or competencies that faculty expect them to have, we often blame advising. When students avoid some disciplines or cluster in others, many faculty believe that poor advising is the reason, and the same goes for when students perform poorly in a particular course or program of study.

Partly we know that most of us were given little advice on how to advise students about their course of study. Rather like skill at teaching, skill at advising grows organically out of the discretionary practices and insider knowledge of faculty. When I first arrived at Swarthmore 17 years ago and was asked to advise first-year students, most of what I did was make sure that they were taking what they needed to take and that they knew about the resources available to them. (Most of which I had to look up in various booklets and catalogs myself if the question arose.) Sometimes I connected to a student more deeply and was able to be a more subtle guide to their curricular and life choices, but you can’t make that happen by fiat. That’s still the case: no matter how much more I know and understand about academia, I can’t be a mentor to everyone, because not everyone needs a mentor in the first place, and very few of those who do need me in particular.

What I’ve tried more consciously to offer to my assigned advisees over time is a frank explanation of the structure of the curriculum, conceding where appropriate its ungainly or baroque character. At this point, I think I can tell my advisees a lot about what each department studies, why they study and teach it in the way that they do, and what trade-offs are involved in both practical and intellectual terms in taking on a particular course or major. I want my advisees to have some insight into why the hip bone connects to the leg bone, at least insofar as they’re interested in or seeking that kind of perspective. I think that’s what faculty can do as advisors that can’t be done as well by others in the college community. Conversely, we aren’t as good as connecting advisees to support services, or knowing when our advisees need counseling of other kinds. But I think we’ve collectively gotten to the point where we recognize that spending time just doing an audit of a student’s transcript is a waste of a face-to-face meeting.

When we recognize that students aren’t getting all the advice that they might want or need, however, I’m not sure what to do about that institutionally. As I said, you can’t force a mentoring relationship. You also can’t force a student who doesn’t want advice or is afraid of what an advisor might say to actively seek it out. I’m also not sure you can compel faculty and administrators to have a richly contextual understanding of the big picture of a given curriculum or institution.

Posted in Academia, Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | 4 Comments

The Way Things Work (at Swarthmore)

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I’m thinking of doing a series this fall of really basic, short and frank explanatory essays aimed at current Swarthmore students (and any other interested readers) about some of the college’s central structures and practices. My aspiration is to demystify some of the cultural and economic underpinnings of selective higher education with an eye to helping students engage more satisfyingly with the institution during their time here.

Here’s my starter list of topics that I’m sure I would want to discuss. I’d love to hear from Swarthmore students, alumni or other readers about other topics that they think I should include: things every student should know, things you wish you’d known about college when you were in college.

Tenure, Recruitment, Retention of Faculty
Revenue and Expenditure: The Swarthmore Budget
Curriculum Design and Structure
Intellectual and Programmatic Relationships Between Disciplines
Governance
Return on Investment: How Students Use a Swarthmore Education
Financial Aid

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 16 Comments

Pictures From an Institution 6 (Course Design)

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Timothy Burke

I usually spend time in the last half of the summer, somewhere around the end of July onward, working on the design of upcoming courses. I think I’m probably at one end of a spectrum as far as making more work for myself in terms of course preparation and syllabus construction: I would guess that over 17 years or so at Swarthmore I’ve taught on average about 1.5 new courses a year. I don’t think I’ve ever had a year without at least one new course. I also tend to rip up and redesign established courses, even when there hasn’t been any issue with them. It’s just how I focus my attention on near-term teaching. I try to keep my survey courses a bit more stable as it seems to me that there should be some continuity between each iteration, but even there I try to have three or four substantially new readings each time.

Syllabus maintenance and construction is one of the quintessentially invisible parts of a professor’s job. I’m still stunned from time to time that many people outside of academia or education think that a professor or teacher just walks into a classroom and recites knowledge at students. I read a large range of books and essays that never make it into the syllabus as I’m thinking about lectures or discussions I’d like to convene. I look back over evaluations and consider how past assignments have worked or not and what kinds of pedagogical tweaks or experiments I might try in a given course. I’m usually still shifting around a few things here and there a day or two before the semester starts. (Well, and afterwards, but that’s a different kind of project.)

There’s also a lot of annoying logistics to deal with most semesters. Right now I’m shifting some readings onto Moodle from Blackboard, which just takes a bit of adaptive adjustment to Moodle’s interface and design. Courses that make more use of technology or have more ambitious media usage require a bit more logistical foresight.

I spend a certain amount of time during the summer thinking about courses I might teach in the future as well. That’s the best time to read and explore in new areas, not just because my schedule is a bit looser but also because I’ll need to be ready when the deadlines to get new courses on the schedule hit in the middle of a busy semester.

Posted in Academia, Books, Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | 3 Comments

Science a la Carte

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Waiting for the candidates to reveal all of their positions on particular scientific paradigms is getting to be a bit of a fan dance. We hear a little bit here about how climate scientists are all in it to make a quick buck, then a little bit there about how evolution is just one of those ideas like iambic pentameter or Manifest Destiny. I can’t stand the suspense: what science will get put in its place next? It’s time for a new standard in Presidential campaigns: a comprehensive position briefing on the candidate’s views of relevant scientific knowledge.

Here’s a suggestion for what the standard briefing document should look like.

Does the candidate believe in…atomic theory?
Relevance to voters: Need to know if a possible President will treat our atomic arsenal as imaginary, as a material manifestation of the wrath of the Old Testament God, or as a confirmed scientific reality.

Does the candidate believe in…weather forecasting?
Relevance to voters: If all climate scientists are in it for a quick buck, presumably all weather forecasting is suspect. Need to know if possible President will disregard satellite pictures of hurricanes forming in the Atlantic and regard all weather events as a manifestation of Providence.

Does the candidate believe in…the germ theory of disease?
Relevance to voters: anti-evolution candidates presumably don’t really believe in the germ theory of disease and can be expected to shut down the Centers for Disease Control, direct the FDA to allow antibiotics to be freely manufactured and sold because what the heck they’re no different than herbal supplements, and cease all funding for disease-related health research. Also the possible President might be able to cut health care costs by refusing to pay for soap in hospitals and medical facilities. Who needs it?

Does the candidate believe in…gravity and heliocentrism?
Relevance to voters: Possible President may choose not to fly on Air Force One as planes should not exist, and will therefore be slower to visit parts of the country and the world away from Washington. Presumably would have no interest in monitoring for near-Earth asteroids, planetary probes, solar flares and other astronomical phenomenon connected to mere theories of gravity and heliocentrism.

Does the candidate believe in…Boyle’s Law and other gas laws?
Relevance to voters: Candidates who do not believe that there are formula that can describe the relationship between pressure and volume of gases might not believe that guns exist and function, since gas laws are an important part of how guns actually work. Not believing that guns exist might be a stealth form of gun control.

I’m sure folks can think of other things the public needs to know.

Posted in Politics | 15 Comments

Polenta Soup and the Terrible Awful No-Good Cost of Higher Education

Posted on August 18, 2011 by Timothy Burke

While I don’t think there’s much I could say that could satisfy a recent commenter hereabouts, the question of the cost of higher education is an old theme at this blog, and longtime readers know that I worry about it a great deal. So let’s sort out some of the fundamentals once again, using a piece by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus in the current Atlantic Monthly as a jumping-off point.

1) Does all higher education cost what highly selective private institutions cost? No, as Hacker and Dreifus point out. So for one let’s keep in mind what’s much more affordable, what used to be much more affordable, and what’s expensive. Much more affordable: most community colleges, some public four-year universities, and some small private colleges. Someone seeking higher education who values only what an institution costs should attend these institutions. Hacker and Dreifus make this point prominently. If you object on a primal level to the current cost of highly selective colleges and universities, you have plenty of alternatives. If you feel you or your children must go to more expensive institutions, then you need to think about why you feel that. It implies that you think they do something better than the affordable alternatives, so figure out what it is. (Hacker and Dreifus think it’s all puffery and that the low-cost alternatives are exactly identical to their higher-priced equivalents. Inevitably, that means that the only explanation they have for why they aren’t preferred is conspiratorial Jedi mind tricks of various kinds.)

2) It’s worth asking why applicants (and their families) often do not have strong price selectivity. Or perhaps to put it more precisely, they do, but it’s not towards institutions which are at the lower price-point within their marketplace, it’s the opposite. This is an important contributor to high costs. Universities and colleges have increased tuition because they can, because people are willing to pay. This either means that higher education is now considered absolutely necessary (like health care) or it means that higher education is a Veblen good, that people actually see price as an informational signal of quality and that they are voluntarily willing pay higher and higher premiums for an improved quality of service, thus driving a constant process of upgrading and improvement. If it means that higher education is considered as necessary as life-saving health care (it doesn’t matter what a doctor tells me heart surgery is going to cost if it means I’ll die if I don’t and have a good quality of life for a considerable time if I do: I’ll pay it), then the question is why? It didn’t used to be that way. If it is that absolutely necessary, that has to involve a socioeconomic transformation far bigger than higher education itself, and not under the control of institutions of higher learning. At which point, if the cost is the problem, the solution involves something besides colleges and universities themselves.

3) Let’s say instead that the steady increase in the cost of highly selective higher education has mostly been driven by internal factors. If so, what drove the price up in the first place?

3a) Financial aid.

Many students attend expensive institutions at a discount, sometimes a considerable one. This has a big cost to the bottom line, and the cost is growing as a proportion of operating budgets at most highly selective institutions. The highest prices are charged in substantial part so that families of lesser means can afford to send their children to the same institution. You might wonder if just cutting the price in half with no discounts wouldn’t make it affordable for all (I know I have!) I think the answer is that this would make elite institutions far more affordable or burdensome for the upper middle-class (say, families with incomes between $100,000 and $250,000) but it would probably make it impossible for families at the lower end of the income distribution. That’s a discussion that’s worth revisiting, maybe, but this isn’t just some kind of greedy calculation on the part of universities.

3b) Waste.

As with almost any institution, everybody’s favorite target of clearly identifiable “waste” or “discretionary expenditure” is so miniscule a part of most budgets that you might spend more money trying to identify targets for cost-cutting than you would save when you finally found them. A serious reduction in the cost of selective, quality higher education will take eliminating or drastically reducing one or more areas of fixed costs.

3c) Externally driven costs.

Big areas of budgetary growth in the last two decades that are driven from outside include energy, health care and information infrastructure (libraries and IT). The first two have been issues for most employers. There are ways to cut those costs through best practices, and I suspect most universities have at least made a good start. The only way to make big rapid cuts are to simply stop doing some things that consume energy (reduce or eliminate heating, eliminate air conditioning, don’t have laboratories, etc.), to drastically reduce or eliminate health care to employees, or to lay off a lot of employees. The latter is something that employers have done in other sectors of the economy, and have already done in much higher education as well. Contract faculty and many staff at a number of universities and colleges receive poor to non-existent health care benefits, and are frequently let go any time belt-tightening is required. Libraries and IT are perhaps a more particular cost center in higher education. You can reduce libraries to a bare minimum or require students and faculty to pay most of their own IT costs. This seems to me to run pretty squarely counter to the point of higher education, so if you want to go that way, it might be faster to just eliminate higher education overall.

3d) Faculty salaries.

Some folks seem to have a hard time understanding this point, but if you take higher education on average, faculty are already paid much less than most professionals while still being required to possess extensive credentialing that has a substantial opportunity cost to obtain. Tenure is already absent in much of higher education. Much of the work of teaching is done by adjunct or contract faculty. Whatever the cost of the salaries of tenured senior faculty, the bottom line is that they’re not a terribly important contributor to the overall cost of higher education. Where they are, as in selective private institutions that focus heavily on the quality and breadth of teaching, you could achieve some substantial savings by reducing salaries and benefits to a significant degree. In some fields of study, you would very quickly hit a point (many colleges and universities may already be right at that point) where you could no longer hire quality faculty, because they would have employment options outside of higher education. Economics, biology, chemistry, engineering leap immediately to mind. You could probably staff a college full of amazing humanists for half the financial cost, though you’d pay other kinds of prices for doing that.

Tenure itself costs little, by the way. Or more precisely, it costs nothing compared to the idea that you’d just keep extending the contracts of strong teachers and researchers until retirement. The cost of tenure is institutional and programmatic, not financial: it keeps a university from responding rapidly to changing trends in knowledge. Arguably, this is a good thing independent of its costs. Some believe that an important responsibility of academia is the conservation of intellectual traditions as opposed to chasing momentary trends. Tenure is only a financial cost if you want to follow the growing norm in white-collar labor of firing people when they’re in their fifties even if they’re still doing great work simply to save on their salaries. Maybe that is what some people want, to have everyone in the same miserable situation except for the billionaires. I’d rather see if the whole society can’t go in the opposite direction and increase job security for most people.

The other big potential savings would be to just gut out a huge range of subjects taught in the contemporary academy. This is a popular option among those most disgruntled not just by the cost but among those who basically hate professors, intellectuals or anything approximating either. All I can say is if that’s the way you feel, you also have plenty of options. There are universities with nary a Women’s Studies professor in sight. Name your curricular phobia and you can find somewhere that will scratch that itch. So go ahead and scratch it and stop complaining about cost, because in this case costs aren’t what’s really bugging you. You’re just being a culture warrior hoping someone will pull the wooden horse inside the walls.

3e) Administrative salaries.

Faculty love to point to administration as the cost-growth villain. (I’ll probably write soon about Benjamin Ginsberg’s new book The Fall of the Faculty, which is a classic example of this genre of critique.) It’s true that growth in administrative salaries and positions outpaced faculty growth by a considerable margin at most institutions over the last twenty years. But in many cases that growth is a reflection of new missions that faculty, students, parents and government have demanded from higher education.

This ties into Hacker and Dreifus’ argument that what has driven up the cost of elite higher education is a huge expansion of facilities and services and the administrative staff necessary to run them. They mention “vegetable polenta and butternut soup” at Bowdoin as an example, which strikes me as a bit odd since that’s actually a pretty cheap-sounding soup to make. (I think this is typical of the way they fashion this argument, actually, via little sound bites about bicoastal elitism and obtuse descriptions of things like ‘no-loan’ programs that I think wouldn’t be out of place at a Tea Party rally.) But the overall point is a reasonable one to consider. The problem is, what’s driven the expansion of facilities and services? Largely it’s the customers themselves.

I’ve written before about what a no-frills non-residential college with an ambitious and innovative curricular design might look like. It would certainly have a much lower price tag. But you wouldn’t be able to have a college of that kind in many places in this country. You can’t enroll 500 18-21 year old students at a no-frills in a rural community with no rental stock and no other facilities or retail. This isn’t about creature comforts: you would have to build at least the minimal infrastructure to support those students as residents at that location.

If a college or university were in an appropriate location, a no-frills approach means that students would have to find their own athletic facilities, their own transportation, their own food, their own health care (physical and mental), their own extracurricular activities, their own information technology and broadband provider. The college wouldn’t be responsible at all for diversity issues or indeed for any relationships between students outside of the classroom. It really couldn’t afford to take an interest in the learning disability or individual circumstances of its students, and probably couldn’t afford financial aid, which is a complicated administrative burden. Addressing the career placement or other post-graduate situation of alumni would have to be very carefully circumscribed. A no-frills approach requires a rather old-fashioned idea of the classroom as a completely bounded and finite space, with no learning or activity that spills over into wider communities or connections. Enrolling students would certainly have to sign a waiver a zillion miles long: one thing the no-frills college couldn’t do without is a big legal staff.

Every subtraction of staff and facilities hits at some group of students, parents, alumni, publics or professors who demanded something of higher education beyond instruction, or who recognized that a teaching-intensive mission required an approach to instruction that went well beyond getting up in front of 300 students, lecturing at them and leaving the room. So subtractions in the name of cost-cutting are going to have to be accepted by those constituencies, which means they’ll have to value cost-cutting more than they value those services as a part of the overall package of higher education. I’d be curious to see what would happen at Swarthmore if an administrator seriously proposed lopping $10k off the tuition price in return for having no mental health services, no tutoring or academic support staff, no staff devoted to diversity or multiculturalism, no athletic facilities and no student activities funding. I think almost all of the students and their families, no matter how much they might object to the price tag, would regard those all as necessary to the institution.

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Which in the end makes this conversation an interesting mirror of the larger conversation about debt, cost and services in American society as a whole. Drastically reducing taxation, and subsequently government expenditure, sounds great to many people until it comes time to cut either entitlements or a range of expected services. You’re not serious about cutting budgets and costs on a major scale as long as you’re giving out Golden Fleece awards or bitching about butternut and polenta soup. Or for that matter even just lopping 10k off of the salaries of senior faculty. You’re only serious when you start specifying major areas of activity that you believe an institution (university or government) ought not to be engaged in. It’s nice to think that Hacker and Dreifus believe that there’s no difference at all in the classes at Glenville State College in West Virginia and Amherst College, though that’s roughly like me saying that I don’t see any difference in aesthetic quality between Kung Fu Hustle and Citizen Kane: it’s an opinion I honestly believe in but it’s also a pretty classic de gustibus non est disputandum sort of claim. On a lot of areas that can be compared outside of what Hacker and Dreifus thought during a guided tour, there are some pretty substantial differences. (Not the least the cost of living in the two communities.) Anybody serious about costs has to get real: what do think should not be done? Not having faculty, not having tenure, paying faculty far less regardless of the location of a university or college, shifting all operations online, are not serious answers beyond a certain point. You’ll also have to decide what other expected and demanded services to not have. And whether shit on a shingle really saves a lot of money over polenta soup.

There are also things that are hard to compare easily. It’s not straightforwardly that Amherst has more subjects or a wider curriculum: Glenville State has areas of study that Amherst doesn’t have. But those differences are telling in terms of a deeper set of differences: Glenville’s curriculum is substantially more directed towards applied and vocational subjects. This is a huge and very different discussion (one that I’ve convened here a great deal), one about both intellectual adaptability in a changing world and about the sources and character of cultural capital. The first consideration is one that selective higher education is usually happy to discuss, the second is a bit more fraught and difficult. But these are questions that also have to come into the room if we’re asking why people value some education as highly as they do.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 22 Comments

The Social Media Minimums

Posted on August 16, 2011 by Timothy Burke

Grizzled old Internet hands like me, we like to think we’ve seen it all. We were using our modems and marvelling at the strange intimacy of having threaded text conversations about science fiction or politics or woodworking with people you’ve never met way back on some BBS or on GEnie. We were playing Adventure and Zork on the campus mainframe at 2am after working on papers on an NCR-manufactured terminal with PCWrite. We got a virus on our desktop computer back when viruses were weird little stunts, and we got phished back when the worst thing that could happen is your browser would open endless windows until you Ctl-Alt-Deleted (or unplugged) the machine. We wrestled with updating graphics drivers in MS-DOS.

I’ve got extra protection: I’ve also studied marketing and advertising, so I have a whole other skepticism that I can bring to bear.

But no matter how experienced you think you are, you’re only one moment away from falling for something if you let your guard down. Case in point, I took at look today at Americans Elect without doing what I’d normally do, which is search out the organization and learn a bit before I get too deep into the site itself. (Obviously I am recommending that you do otherwise before following that link and diving into things.) No, I let the initial design and the seeming aspirations of the project draw me in. Political organizing through social networking, an end run around the two-party system, a chance to escape the toxicity of inside-the-Beltway gamesmanship: all my buttons pressed, and so gently. (Later, as I looked deep inside the community forums, I found that many participants had gone through the same sequence of emotions: pleased at first, annoyed later and then way beyond annoyed after going through the whole exercise.)

Yeah! A social network harnessed to create a new kind of political conversation between delegates, that lets people explore connections across existing political boundaries and to examine their own convictions with a fresh eye. Follow that distraction! So I sign up and dive in. About six or seven questions about my political preferences later, I’m getting really annoyed at the terrible phrasing of the questions. A fifth grader using SurveyMonkey might do better. About another seven questions later, I’m beginning to think that this is a classic instance of having to decide whether some group is stupid or conspiratorial. Either this whole thing is just a scam that’s hoping to herd a bunch of cattle towards some third-party aspirant who is secretly funding the whole thing or the people doing it are immaculately unacquainted with survey design and polling.

By this point I’m on the case, as I should have been at the start. I’m going to leave aside the sleuthing into who/what is really behind the project, which turns out to be a big theme in online discussions of the group. Let’s just talk about what minimal expectations we should bring to any novel social media project, site or outlet that we encounter. Not best or ideal practices, but features and conditions which if unmet should result in failure and rejection by potential users or participants.

1. Disclosure. If I can’t find out specific, detailed information about the organization, individuals and funding behind any social media project, particularly a non-profit project from clicking an easily found, prominently placed link within the site itself? Failure. If I can’t find out how community participation and the governance of the sponsoring organization intersect or connect? Failure.

2. Strong feedback, correction and user annotation of any participatory or informational content. In the case of Americans Elect, if I can’t tag flawed survey questions at the site of the question itself, suggest and create better questions, and expect that there is a quick feedback loop between user contributions and the architecture and content of the social media itself? Failure.

3. A social media site with aspirations to create new forms of community and mobilize those new community networks for some larger purpose has to own and design and imagine its own forums or other communicative interfaces. Outsourcing your community management to a generic corporation that just sees your site as another client, offers you generic services? Failure. Having community-management representatives who don’t participate in discussions as peers, aren’t part of the project or community and who do nothing more than placate users and deflect questions? Failure.

4. Going live with a social media site that doesn’t let people change their mind about participating or having their information associated with the site? That doesn’t let you change privacy settings? Especially a site that’s aiming to mobilize participants for some larger political or social project? Seeing this as an optional feature to be patched in later? Facebook and a few others get away with this by grandfathering. Nobody else should. Of all the disappointing or pathetic things on this site, the fact that the community-management babysitter is awkwardly stalling for time while they supposedly look for a way to allow participants to change their information or level of participation is the most shameful. You don’t ever start something like this up if you’re not already prepared for this basic functionality. Failure.

If you don’t see these commitments in place the moment you find a new social media project, it should be the equivalent of getting an email that says “You have to see this!” with an .exe file in the attachment. I know I’m going to remind myself of that the next time I follow a promising link to a shiny new social media site.

Posted in Digital Humanities, Politics | Comments Off

Some Small Ideas About Big Ideas

Posted on August 15, 2011 by Timothy Burke

At first, I thought that Neal Gabler was singing my song in his ode (and eulogy) to the “Big Idea”. Part of his argument turns on a familiar theme at this blog, that overspecialization has its costs, and that one of those costs is the fragmentation and overproduction of knowledge.

But not so fast. There are Big Problems with Gabler’s view of the Big Idea. The first I suspect is going to turn up in critical responses around the Web today, namely, that he turns to a trite-and-true villain to explain the decline of the Big Idea, the Internet. The argument goes something like this: the Internet makes too much information available to too many people and doesn’t require the users of information to actually know or master that information themselves.

This common sentiment seems particularly beloved among middlebrow intellectuals of an older generation, the sort who harbored ambitions of appearing on The Firing Line and then going to dinner at Elaine’s and having Norman Mailer wave to them. They would have done it too, if it weren’t for those darned online kids. There’s a shining, golden moment that they have in their memories when the vast postwar American middle-class was willing to watch a symphony on TV, read a novel by Roth or Updike, and try to understand the theories of Einstein. Sure, Stevenson might take a shot for being an egghead, but at least everybody who was anybody knew who the Van Dorens were.

This memory isn’t completely rose-colored. Gabler knows better than anyone, given his interest in Disney, that there really was a cultural moment that now seems increasingly remote, where Walt Disney, as safely middle-American as anything could be, got on the television screens and told kids and their parents about the wonders of science’s big ideas. This is a bit of what Gabler’s getting at when he suggests we’re living in a post-Enlightenment, post-reason time.

But blaming it on the Internet just underscores what’s wrong with this memory, namely, who’s the we here? Did most Americans in 1960 really know and appreciate the Big Ideas, really take in a redacted and reprocessed version of high culture? I’m thinking not. What’s being remembered here is the public peformance of self within a certain segment of the middle-class in certain places. Push back Gabler’s account further and this gets even more sharply clear. Euro-American working-classes were far more familiar with a range of sophisticated literary work than contemporary elites suspected in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, but I still suspect that the Big Ideas on Gabler’s list circulated far less widely than his rhetoric implies. He uses “we” throughout: I think he needs a different pronoun.

It’s a Goldilocks eulogy: what’s being mourned is an imagined past where just the right number of people had access to knowledge, just the right number of people were in that “we” that cared about Big Ideas as well as the smaller “we” that had the ideas in the first place. It’s not too much information, in the end: it’s too many people. It’s not that we’ve gone from a society that valued Enlightenment reason to one that doesn’t, it’s that all the people who never signed on for Enlightenment reason have become visible, speaking subjects.

——

Two other problems with the Big Ideas as Gabler describes them, though. First, most of the things he labels as Big Ideas weren’t necessarily perceived or voiced as such when they were first articulated. What he’s really describing in many cases are retrospective labels created by popularizers and interpreters of denser or more complicated writing and research. “God is Dead”, for example, is not something that Nietzsche just said off the cuff on the Charlie Rose show some night, nor did he mean it as a simple “Big Idea”. Most Big Ideas, scientific and humanistic, appear only as such after a considerable time, and by the time they appear as a Big Idea, they’re often misleading summaries of more intricate or specialized works.

Equally to the point, a lot of what Gabler describes as Big Ideas turn out to have been actively wrong or at least misleading in the wrong hands, and one of the reasons is not the insights and findings of their initial creators but the seductive refashionings of later popularizers. The process that made Big Ideas into two or three-sentence applause lines that can be rattled off in succession in an op-ed in the New York Times is often what allowed them to turn into ideology and dogma.

If the informationally overloaded present is resistant to Big Ideas, maybe that’s not because we’re too busy watching YouTube videos of Jennifer Aniston playing with a cat. Maybe it’s because we’re acquiring an immune system resistance to the salesmanship of middlebrow middlemen trying to extract saleable Big Ideas from the raw material of knowledge production.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Popular Culture, Production of History | 1 Comment