Easily Distracted

Trouble in River City

Posted on June 20, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Let’s talk MOOCs, shall we?

There’s evidence that one reason some members of the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia decided they had to abruptly remove their president is that she didn’t have enough naive, heedless enthusiasm for massively open online courses (MOOCs). Should this turn out to be the case, they deserve every bit of withering scorn being heaped upon them. However, let’s be careful. There are some interesting and attractive aspects of MOOCs, if you understand them correctly. So I want to offer three very different kinds of responses.

1) Fad-Followers Are Wrecking Everything. Again.

There are really two kinds of popularizing works about trends in research and scholarship. The first kind is one of the finest, best traditions in nonfiction and academic writing and deserves a much higher reputation than it often has among academics. This is writing that explains a range of recent findings and ideas in a field of inquiry for a wider public without grossly dumbing down or simplifying that research, which creates a synthesis that clarifies the direction ahead for both researchers and publics.

Then there is work that crudely bowdlerizes and cherrypicks some body of research in order to turn it into a sellable product for use by hucksters, pitchmen, trend-followers and motivational speakers. Elmer Gantry and Harold Hill are alive and well wherever there are marks to fleece, money to take, and institutions whose guardians are easily seduced into turning over the keys. What they need is a regular supply of slick-sounding pablum that sounds authoritative and that in some way flatters the self-delusions of the marks in question, that can be converted into slogans that sound capacious and visionary, that promise an easy fix to difficult problems, that let would-be emperors strut the fashion runways in the very latest kinds of trendy nudity. There is a kind of book, a kind of op-ed writer, a kind of writing, that exists largely to feed the guys down in the boiler rooms the latest lines for talking up the policy equivalent of penny stocks.

Behind the idea and practice of massively open online courses there’s a deep history, several of them. And some serious thinking about that history from many of the people thinking about the concept. The channel that the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors was dialed into isn’t the channel where the deep thinking is going on. It’s the huckster channel, where strategic dynamists hang out, where subprime mortgages got sold, where Pets.com was a can’t-miss IPO, where the S&L crisis happened. It’s the David-Brooks-Explains-It-All-For-You channel. If you want to know whether someone’s tuned to the interesting channel or the conman channel, there’s a simple test: are they putting their own money, their own reputations, their own professions and futures on the line? Are they creating content, practices and ideas? Or are they risking other people’s money, other people’s institutions, other people’s future and trying to buy something ready-made off the shelf? If it’s the latter, they’re reading the wrong kind of stuff by the wrong kind of people. Or they are the wrong kind of people.

2) This Is Not The First Time Folks Have Tried to Democratize or Massify Higher Education.

MOOCs are the latest chapter in attempts to democratize and massify education. Considered against the backdrop of that history, they are both less novel and less exciting, as they have most of the old problems that have haunted such projects and some new ones of their own. Correspondence courses, open universities, maybe even chautauquas and other itinerant cultural and educational institutions, were all trying to do the same sorts of things. Broadly speaking, so was the original idea of public education period. All these projects have run into multiple gaps between their aspirations and their capabilities. Digital infrastructure in this case solves a few problems of scalability (if you don’t have to house tens of thousands of students in a physical place, you’ve dodged a huge problem) but it doesn’t magically resolve how to get to a homogenous result (a desired competency, skill or knowledge base) from an extremely heterogenous input. And the evidence is that no matter how many technological bells and whistles you add, some kinds of learning outcomes require feedback loops between teacher and student that cannot happen remotely, cannot happen impersonally, cannot happen reliably at very large scales except with subjects and materials that are digitally-native, where the procedural experience of education matches the environment within which the experience is happening. Much of this was the case in different ways with very large experiments in open education or correspondence courses: massification has costs and limitations that have to be accounted for up-front, and the more naively utopian the attitude is at the outset, the less likely it is that those limitations will be recognized, with bitter consequences sooner or later.

3) Maybe MOOCs Are an Exciting New Form of Publication, Not Teaching

I have a bunch of instructional books at home. Probably you do too. The “For Dummies” series sold a lot of books. Instructional writing is a form of education whose usefulness and limitations have been understood very well for a long time.

When do you turn to instructional writing?

When you want to get a sense of how difficult it will be to learn or do something new. When you want to get a start on learning something before you try it or do it. When you suspect that you can learn something new on your own with a bit of guidance. When you think what you’re trying to learn is something that has clear steps or processes involved, a recipe you can repeat for reliable results. When the stakes are relatively low. When you don’t have the time to take a course. When you’re not required to produce a formal certification in order to be allowed to do a task.

What were the limits of instructional writing before the digital age? That it has to describe in words what might be best shown in pictures, or that its pictures are static when they need to provide multiple perspectives and motion. That the writer can’t communicate synchronously with people who’ve bought the book, or respond quickly to questions. That it isn’t frequently updated as circumstances, tools and understandings change. That it can’t dynamically respond to what readers find unclear, difficult or confusing. That it can’t quickly incorporate material that readers want added.

A MOOC can fix all of that. It still can’t provide the really rich real-time material and human connections of a classroom, and it never will be able to, because that’s not the point. But as a technologically-enhanced kind of instructional writing? It’s a terrific improvement on what we’ve had to date with a lot of potential both as a supplement to existing education and as a product in its own right. I have maybe five, ten books on woodworking that I paid $15-20 each for. I’d gladly pay $50 for a MOOC on using a router or a table saw that had some kind of limited interactivity, well-filmed demonstrations, supplementary materials, and so on. MOOCs are a chance for the best universities and colleges to get into the adult extension and instructional literature game in a really interesting (and potentially revenue-producing) way.

They’re not a way to solve the labor-intensive character of teaching any more than the movie Armageddon was a solution to the costs of lifting payloads into orbit.

If you think about MOOCs in the right, very limited, way, they’re exciting. If you think about them the wrong way, check your wallet and your bank account. Guess which way the University of Virginia Board seems to have been thinking about them.

Go Big Or Don’t Go

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

There are folks–oh, say, Matt Yglesias for example–who can’t seem to resist being prompted to rush to the spectator stands at Thunderdome when an academic department or discipline has been picked out by managerialist bean-counters as the esoteric waste of resources du jour. But this is quintessential concern trollery. A German Studies Department at the University of Virginia is not the cause of low graduation rates at a non-selective branch campus of an underfunded public university system or community college. If the issue is poor retention and graduation of the most academically underprepared students in higher education, and the costs that they and their families incur, let’s talk about that. That’s a different conversation, and it’s one that has been going on for quite a while.

If the issue is, “What subjects should a liberal arts curriculum have? How many faculty positions should there be in an institution? What should be a major or a department?” you have to talk about those questions comprehensively. Letting yourself be led around by the nose or your own shoot-from-the-hip perceptions of what’s important may have a shits-and-giggles pleasure to it but it would a lousy, autocratic way to actually make decisions about resource allocation.

You have to start with an overall philosophy. If your first principle is, “The curriculum should privilege practical knowledge that can be put to immediate use in existing careers, and therefore be shaped by the declared needs of employers”, then ok. Recognize where that view leads you: most likely to some kind of vocational, pre-professional or trade school. It’s a viable approach, it exists in the world. You can hybridize this strategy with a liberal arts approach, aiming at creating “well-rounded” professionals, and that also can work. Or not. The downside to either is that the education on offer is narrow and highly instrumental, and that its content is largely set by organizations and interests outside of the educational institution itself. In a stable trade that has fairly straightforward technical requirements and a good economic outlook, this can make a lot of sense. (Let me know how many of those you think there are: my sense is, ‘Not many’.)

If you agree from the outset that an overly instrumental, externally-driven set of priorities is mostly the wrong way to go about designing and staffing an undergraduate curriculum, if you support some version of the liberal arts ideal, then you have a much harder and necessarily perpetually unfinished job ahead of you. Tenure complicates (and possibly enriches) your task somewhat in that many of your decisions about staffing will have lasting effect for twenty or thirty years.

But it’s crucial to think about the big picture first, last and always in imagining what you have to have in a liberal arts institution. No allocation of resources makes sense in isolation. Or perhaps the right way to put it is that all allocation of resources make sense in isolation. Almost all disciplines, departments, programs and specializations can provide a narrative about how they are essential and eternal.

In my view, they’re all right in some sense and completely wrong in another. There is, for example, no subject which cannot be taught in a way that is actively and aggressively opposed to the liberal arts ideal. Philosophy, history, biology, economics, math, classics, linguistics: you name it, if it’s taught as an exclusive stand-alone subject, a self-justified discipline, an isolate pursued in monastic purity, it’s against the liberal arts. Which means for one that when you’re making decisions about resource allocations, focusing on the subject can be a red herring. You don’t judge disciplines as a Platonic form. You judge them in usage, in practice, by actual people in actual departments. There is no subject in a liberal arts institution which is intrinsically obscure or forbidding. Any subject can be made relevant, powerful and transformative in the hands of the right professor, the right department, the right curriculum. So resource allocation is as much about the adroit management of people, about the cultivation of possibility, as it is about abstract metrics. Everything can be obscure. Everything can be vitally relevant.

You can solve the problem of the unlimited openness of such an approach with a core curriculum. The problem with a core curriculum is that it tries to dictate what must be earned, to invest authority on the deserving and undeserving alike. A core curriculum only works, in my view, if it’s strong, comprehensive and philosophically coherent. Adopted in a half-hearted way, they’re usually just a la carte exercises in institutional politics. A coherent core curriculum is a statement about what everyone must know: you should be able to justify it in the absence of any given faculty, any given institution, any given group of students. If there’s one thing wrong inside and outside of academia, it’s people who argue for a core curriculum only when it suits their immediate and self-interested needs. You are either in or out on this point. If there are essential subjects, you have to stick to that view consistently, and argue it in your classes and outside of them. Canons aren’t just weapons for sieges.

If you don’t have a core curriculum, and leave it largely to students to find their own path through their studies, you still have to consider where the traffic is. Our students, our communities, our publics have maps of what they think matters and what they think doesn’t matter. When you’re on the map in the latter neighborhood, it’s your job to get the world to beat a path to your door. When you’re in a crowded neighborhood that everyone wants to live in, it’s still your job to make your place special, enduring, meaningful, to not just coast on unearned adoration. But no matter how hard faculty and staff work, those maps direct the traffic. So at least some resources have to be allocated accordingly, just as in the real world: when people congregate, there’s only so much you can do to route them elsewhere. In the end, the key metric is, “How many students can you accommodate, and how small do you want or need your classes to be”? That’s determined by your total resources. After that, it’s a matter of shifting as many as you can from the overcrowded neighborhoods to the underused ones.

Changes in what we know and how we know it matter too. I’ve said before here that my own preference in curricular planning is less for coverage, which I think is a fool’s game whether you’re big or small, and more for heterogeneity. Especially in a smaller institution, I’d rather have fifty people doing fifty different things with fifty different methods than five groups of ten doing five things with five methods–as long as they were all prepared to talk with and understand each other, and teach students to do the same.

Continuity matters. What you have at any given moment, if everyone takes the liberal arts ideal seriously, is as good as anything else. That doesn’t help when there’s a question about what to change when someone retires or resigns, but it does mean that grass-is-greener arguments are always misguided and sometimes malicious. A subject that seems dead is just waiting for the right person to bring it to life. Or the right curricular design: more than a few departments in academia hurt themselves by clinging to a forbidding or hostile structure for a program of study. If it were practical, with every single vacancy at a liberal arts college, I’d write an ad that says “Interesting intellectual wanted, must be able to teach, must have an area of specialized competency but also be interested in other subjects and disciplines.” And then we’d sit down and sift through fifty thousand applications–which is why no one could really do it that way. (Hey, St. John’s, how do you handle your hiring?) But for the same reason, you could just as easily say that what you have is just fine, if you have enough intellectual diversity, if what you have is being approached in the right spirit and the problem of traffic management is considered as appropriate.

I’m very open in the way I think about these choices. There are more constrained ways to approach making these decisions. But the worst of all worlds is to be manipulated into throwing stones at some flavor-of-the-month discipline that the news cycle has thrown up as a self-evidently luxurious and pointless activity. What that usually involves is a kind of back-door vocationalism, a not-brand-X utilitarianism that really amounts to nothing more than whatever intellectual prejudices come to hand. Every discipline has its Henry Ford who will declare it bunk. Every discipline has its snake-oil salesman that can insidiously afflict it upon millions as an unwanted hurdle in their daily lives. And every discipline has its messiah who can show countless students how they were waiting all along to think about life in a new way.

Posted in Academia | 12 Comments

Would You Rather Be a Mule?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I have a soft spot for the song “Swinging on a Star”, first sung by Bing Crosby in the 1944 film Going My Way. Crosby’s character, a sort of proto-Vatican II priest who ends up befriending a group of wayward boys in a plot that now has all sorts of creepy resonance, writes the song for the boys’ choir in order to impress a music executive. The basic message is two-fold: go to school to improve yourself, and if you improve yourself, anything is possible.

The film and the song are both artifacts of a more optimistic–or if you like, cornball–cultural spirit than the present, for all that they appeared during World War II. But what interests me most about the song is its absolutely middle-American, totally mainstream celebration of education and the straight-faced promise that if you pursue education, “you could be anything you wish”. (If you don’t want to get educated, you’re a pig, a fish, a mule, a monkey, stuck in various kinds of willful ignorance.)

Most historians would be quick to point out that in 1944, this promise wasn’t on offer to anyone but white men, and not even really to most of them if we’re talking about higher education. After the war, the GI Bill opened things up some, and the social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s still further. The road we’ve travelled since then is pretty complex: the social capital produced by higher education has diffused throughout the society, the bachelor’s degree has become increasingly necessary for employment, and the gap between educational haves and have-nots has become sharply visible and associated, justly or not, with wider income inequality.

Unpacking how we got to the point where education (elementary, secondary and higher) is seen by Americans as broadly necessary but also increasingly the subject of anxiety, anger and scorn is a serious challenge. Let’s leave it at this for now: nostalgia is a trap if it makes us forget that there was not a golden age where the majority of Americans had as much access to as much education as they wanted, but there was a point in the past where the value of education was part of the American consensus, accepted across the social and political spectrum. That much has changed, and it’s a meaningful change.

Not just education is caught up in that shift. The promise of the Crosby song, “you could be anything you wish”, now seems not just innocent but mockingly cruel in contemporary American life. Neither of the presidential candidates really seems to believe in anything like this vision any longer. The closest you get is some rhetoric about helping people who follow the rules, or trying to allow the middle class back in the game, or something. How we imagine ourselves matters as much as what we are, and Americans don’t really seem to imagine themselves as people on the move, people chasing their hopes and dreams, people with hustle and imagination. If you’re in the elect, you want to hold on tight, and shake a lot of sticks at everyone else: knuckle down, don’t complain, settle for what you can hold on to, don’t expect too much. You don’t have the skills for tomorrow and you won’t be able to get them.

Believing that we could be what we wanted to be, untrue as it ever was, mattered.

—-

It mattered as a kind of social “soft power”, an engine of hope and energy. Strivers have kept on going in American life in the most improbable of circumstances: in Harlem in the 1920s, in immigrant neighborhoods in American cities, in mining towns at the end of the 19th Century. Often education has been part of their dreams, sometimes it’s been something else: gold mining, starting small businesses, running a farm, working a good job.

Now that seems increasingly like a sick joke. And it’s not the only joke of that kind now. In a recent New York Times report on abuses by Islamist forces in northern Mali, they managed to speak to a representative of the militants. He said, “‘We have bad memories of you because of Falluja and Afghanistan…You are not well placed to talk about liberty, when we see what is happening in GuantÃ¡namo, Iraq and Palestine.”

Again, it’s not as if this is a new complaint against the US: dictators and torturers have long tried to turn the tables, complaining of hypocrisy. Nostalgia is a trap here too. But there’s again a big difference between countenancing tyranny and torture behind closed doors, off the books, against the law, and changing the law to actively legitimize torture, assassination and military brutality. One of the things that struck me in my recent trip to the archives is how much internal concern there was within national security bureaucracies with legality and even morality in American foreign policy. “Soft power” mattered, and it was seen as resting on genuine commitments and sustained practices, not just slick rhetoric. There’s a reason that folks inside the CIA and other intelligence agencies freaked out about the Church Commission–because some of what they’d done was illegal, and they still worried about the consequences of illegality.

When a Cold War authoritarian accused the US of being a pot calling the kettle black, that charge was often easy to rebut, either in terms of proportionality or in absolute terms of truth and falsehood. I remember a classic Doonesbury cartoon that pointed out what a prisoner exchange between the US and USSR would look like, with the US getting artists, scientists, philosophers and the USSR getting, well, almost no one. But when a Tuareg rebel associated with mass abuses of human rights in Mali shrugs and suggests the US doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on, the charge drives home in a deeply painful way. Realpolitik has its problems at any point, but legalizing and sanctioning abuse and assassination opens the gates of hell pretty wide.

The current Administration hasn’t checked or reversed that direction. If anything, they’ve accelerated it. There is nowhere to turn inside the halls of national political power for relief or diligence. The only thing Congress seems worried about is leaks disclosing our involvement in information warfare and assassination, not with the behavior itself. You can only comfort yourself that these kinds of tactics are used only on bad people as long as they are only used by us against far away targets. Rather like poison gas in World War I, using them at all more or less makes inevitable their eventual use by all factions, sides and parties in increasingly casual and ubiquitous ways. There’s a reason beyond morality for centuries of struggle to maintain international standards of conduct in war and in peace: to put limits on the consequences of conflict and competition in an interconnected world.

It’s the silence in the halls of power that matters. That there is no one in political leadership left to speak for the naive, corny optimism of a particular version of the American Dream. No one who really believes in education except in the barest, most functionalist terms. No elected official or high executive leader who is bothered or worried about the legalization of a Presidential power to assassinate citizens, sanction torture, sabotage the infrastructure that supports free speech and communication.

The question for us now is not what happens to a dream deferred but to dreams that are forgotten–and what happens when you have no dreams to speak of.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off

Pictures From an Institution 12 (Archives)

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Archival research is another of those jobs that some faculty do that isn’t particularly photogenic, like reading secondary literature or doing peer review. At least many scientists have a machine that goes ping or a cage full of fruit flies, not to mention groups of students and postdocs who can assemble for a photo in the lab.

This last research trip was the first time I’d extensively photographed some of the documents I was looking at, though I also took a ton of notes and had some photocopies made. (The photocopies were of long reports where virtually everything in the document is interesting to me, and also that I might want to use in my teaching at some point.)

Archival work is what drew me to history in the first place. There are definitely days that I wish I wasn’t in a field that also has a necessary ethnographic component, because I’d often just as soon stay burrowed deep in a big pile of documents and images and artifacts. It’s the best example I can think of for explaining how some kind of ongoing research experience feeds back into my teaching. It’s not just that it keeps my expertise sharp, but each different archive, each different vein of documents or materials, helps me understand more and more what the relationship is between action (individual and collective) and representation or information, something that’s crucial for explaining to my students about the powers and limitations of classroom knowledge.

Posted in Academia, Pictures from an Institution, Swarthmore | 1 Comment

No Fig Leaves

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Going to try and catch up on a lot of blogging today. I just had a horrible week-and-a-half cold that really sidelined me.

—————–

Let’s start with the University of Virginia controversy. After reading Siva Vaidhyanathan’s commentary in Slate, I got some sense of the problems with process at UVA, but I still didn’t have a clear sense of what specific issues motivated a managerial, intrusive board to pull off such a clumsy and manipulative intervention into university governance. Speculation over the weekend focused on digital infrastructure, online education and similar questions, based in part on the email from the business school board that Vaidhyanathan quoted. This didn’t make much sense to me since Virginia is an innovator in those areas already, and Sullivan was by all accounts interested in extending many of those initiatives.

Now Scott Jaschik is reporting at Inside Higher Education that the conflict between some members of the Board of Visitors and Sullivan concerned particular academic departments that the Board wanted eliminated–German and classics are the examples being mentioned.

There are many ways in which I don’t want to consider the “bigger issues” involved in this case, because that lends some legitimacy to a completely bungled case of mismanagement and poor governance. You don’t fire a president who has served for two years, has the confidence of her institution, because you don’t agree with her about the fate of a handful of academic departments or administrative offices. A board that involves itself at that level of micromanagement might as well dispense with upper administration altogether and step into that role full-time. If it’s not a full-time board serving as a de facto president, it shouldn’t involve itself in that kind of micromanagement.

The role of a board of trustees in higher education is to insure the general financial health of the institution, to diligently secure the general management and welfare of a university or college, and to shape the general strategic planning that guides its affairs. If a board decides to get involved in the affairs of a single department, office or unit on its own initiative, overriding a president or provost, there damn well better be a serious question of malfeasance or gross mismanagement involved. Deciding whether there should be German or classics or any other particular department (or whether there should be three or six or fifteen assistant deans of admissions, or anything else of this kind) without a larger deliberative process shaping those decisions in a transparent, coherent way is managerial suicide. It would be managerial suicide at a corporation, too–this is further proof that either some business leaders don’t really know jackshit about best practices in their own neck of the woods or some of them feel comfortable screwing up public institutions with practices that they’d never countenance in their own domains. (See for example the ridiculously poor return-on-investment of some of the current policy initiatives of the Florida governor’s office, run by someone who is supposed to have business acumen.)

So let’s keep things clear: in some sense, the UVA decision is the UVA decision, about nothing more than mismanagement and malfeasance. If the board had a known, visible, describable process for thinking about the relative priorities of the university in the future, well, first off, it would have a process in which it would be working with a president, upper administration and faculty about the way forward, and a small faction of that board wouldn’t have needed to scheme to get its way. If a board felt that the long-term health of the institution required making a different calculation about what programs to strengthen and which to drop, it would have been working that conversation thoroughly and transparently all along, especially at a public institution. That’s not a confrontation that arises over a few months in secret.

I’m always keen to have the bigger conversation, about what constitutes the liberal arts and why that approach is important, and how to make coherent decisions about what to have and not have under that umbrella. But it should be had separately from the UVA discussion. Bunglers aren’t entitled to protective cover.

Posted in Academia | 6 Comments

From the Archives

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Working on a new project, first time I’ve been in a Presidential library archive (LBJ’s in this case). Always fun.

Really fell in love with the summaries from weekly intelligence briefings on the Congo during the 1960s. Around 1964, they’re just long narratives, but in 1965 they start having these insanely great summaries that I really think were being deliberately written in a novelistic or even soap-operatic style. It’s just too exaggerated to be an accident. Take a gander:

LBJ Library

National Security File
Country File
Africa–Congo
Box 87
Situation Reports
Vol III
Folder 1

CIA Directorate of Intelligence
Office of Current Intelligence
The Situation in the Congo
Weekly Report

April 21 1965

“The rebellion in the northeast still flickers. The main issue seems decided there, but rebel bands, some hardier than others, continue to ambush small mercentary detachments. In Albertville, by Lake Tanganyika, rumors abound of imminent attacks and of invasion from Tanzania, but few insurgents are to be seen. The rebels’ foreign sympathizers, increasingly aware of the schisms and weaknesses in ther rebel ranks, are following separate courses. Uganda and the Sudan are now aloof. Ghana, apparently unable to find a convenient arms route to the rebels, is sending a mission to consult with the Chinese. Egypt–seemingly torn between supporting a near-bankrupt cause or obtaining American wheat–may decide to make a virtue of necessity”.

April 28 1965

“The civil war drags on, with no Appomattox in sight. Egypt now claims it has stopped providing material aid to the rebels. The Congo Government is engulfed in personality and jurisdictional disputes. General Mobutu and the Belgians are suspicious of Colonel Hoare, who is peevish and threatening to quit. Kasavubu is concerned that Tshombe is after the presidency and probably he is right”.

May 5 1965

“The insurrection sputters on. Weary of harassment from Congolese rebels based in the Sudan, South African mercenaries sallied across the frontier from the Congo last week, and destroyed a rebel sanctuary. Khartoum has protested and increased its border guard. Egypt apparently is still helping the rebels, but the form of its aid is unclear. Having made peace with General Mobutu, Colonel Hoare is staying on. Tshombe and Kasavubu are increasingly at odds. Union Miniere, confident of the Congo’s future, is buying new locomotives to haul away the copper”.

Posted in Academia, Production of History | 2 Comments

Discharging Responsibilities

Posted on May 21, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Luke Mogelson’s excellent New York Times Magazine profile of emergency medicine in Afghanistan is in some ways an exercise in indirection. At first, it looks like it’s going to be entirely an admiring profile of the admirable Italian NGO Emergency and its attempts to care for the injured regardless of what side they are on in the conflict.

Midway through the article, another story emerges. Mogelson describes how a 14-year old boy sitting outside his house with his cousins was gravely wounded by a NATO helicopter attack. His uncle took the boy to the hospital at Bagram Air Base, a major American-run facility. It turns out that if a civilian is injured by a NATO attack, they can be treated at Bagram if the injuries are life-threatening–or if they require amputations and/or eye surgery. The boy had his legs amputated and the surgeons performed major abdominal surgery on him that included removing a section of intestine. This left the boy with 54 metal staples in his abdomen, internal compression sutures, and a pouch for fecal matter until a later surgery on his intestines. He was discharged after 23 days with an instruction to go see the Red Cross to be fitted for a prostheses. His discharge papers said nothing about care for the staples (which needed to be removed soon by a surgeon to avoid infection), nothing about further abdominal surgeries, or anything else. Mogelson is polite about the load of utter bullshit that he gets served by the facility at Bagram: they claim to have secured permission from a local hospital that has no surgeons and no equipment for the removal of staples to have the boy referred there, they claim to have tried to call the uncle’s cellphone many times but it didn’t work (the same cellphone number that Mogelson is able to call multiple times without problems).

It’s easy to get angry about the callous behavior of the medical professionals in this story (which has a sort of happy ending, in that the boy survived because Mogelson helped him get admitted to the French Medical Institute for Children in Kabul). The Italian NGO Emergency is clearly angry about it, as they make clear to Mogelson that they won’t treat the boy after his discharge because they don’t want to be an accessory to what they think is outrageous conduct by the medical facility in Bagram–that they will treat badly wounded civilians long enough to stabilize them, then release them whether or not there are Afghan facilities able to carry out any subsequent operations and care that are needed. The more you think about it, however, the more baffling the whole thing is, revealing the deeper terrain of moral and structural rot of technocratic institutions.

The quick thing to obsess about here is whether NATO forces have an obligation to care for civilians injured by its own forces and thence to get hot under the collar about an attempt to evade or cheap out of that obligation. That would miss just how odd the behavior that Mogelson recounts really is. The medical care he describes Bagram as providing wasn’t cheap or slipshod. The operations performed on the boy were expensive, and the surgeons who see him later at the French Medical Institute agree that the initial work was done very well. Why spend so much money and effort saving a life only to be so staggeringly indifferent to putting that life at risk through an early discharge and a lack of planning for subsequent care?

You could argue that this is simply a faithful recreation of the American medical system in an exotic setting: expensive specialist care in an emergency medical setting combined with an idiotic disinterest in long-term primary care, bean-counters pursuing senseless cost-savings, bureaucrats practiced in misdirection and doublespeak being left to explain the whole thing. Or you could argue that the driving consideration here is to save lives of civilians injured in NATO attacks so as to keep them from being counted as casualties–if they die a few months later of infections or complications, they won’t be tallied as our fault.

Or both, since skewing ways of counting and ennumerating illnesses, mortality and causality is the heart of a vast legal-managerial complex as pervasive and fundamental as the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us all about. James Scott has talked about how the high-modernist state reworked the material and procedural world around it so as to make human subjects more legible, visible and manageable. Whatever we want to call what has replaced that high-modernist state–it’s not “post”, it’s more like the Norma Desmond version of modernism, living slovenly on in the grotesque ruins of its dreams–whatever we call it, it is no longer devoted to making the world legible, but instead the exact opposite. It wants the human to remain illegible. To know the human in Afghanistan is to know that the war not only isn’t succeeding, it can’t succeed in the extravagant terms that a haunted modernism was forced to adopt as its own at the start of the conflict. To have to count its costs with any degree of moral or empirical subtlety is crippling. So states and their network of institutions hide what they don’t want to know, not just from prying outsiders, but from themselves. This isn’t info-war or propaganda. This is what technocracy does, it makes the world into quantities that set goals, meet quotas, prove productivity while making everything lived and felt and seen into externalities. It builds an endless line of fortresses and foxholes to defend an inner base of governmentality without being aware that the base has long since been deserted. Procedures and processes get made in order to protect institutions from fallible human judgment–and from intimate knowledge about being human.

So I don’t imagine that somewhere inside Bagram there’s a sensitive official who could magically turn the tide if only he or she will read Mogelson’s article. Neither do I imagine that there are bad people enacting bad rules or even banal people in Arendt’s sense. What we have are institutions and systems that have made a religion of not knowing, of rule-making, of counting for the lawyers and the higher-ups, a religion whose sacraments are briefing papers and communiques and protocols. Individual people in its observances, whether acting or acted upon, are pews and incense and candles, the material tools of ritual. They report or are reported, operate or are operated upon. Knowing those people as human beings takes something different: we don’t need better rules for who gets admitted to Bagram or for how long, or better numbers for how many people have been killed and by whom.

Posted in Academia, Politics | Comments Off

Crashing the Pity Party

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Timothy Burke

If you’re genuinely interested in a critique of Black Studies (or similarly constructed interdisciplinary or identity-based programs of study), don’t give into the temptation of making a martyr out of a blogger whose real mistake was a lack of intellectual rigor or standards and then a proud defense of lacking intellectual rigor or standards. I shouldn’t have to tell social conservatives in particular to avoid playing the victim card. Do the time if you really think that critique is necessary, useful or important: read the work (short and long) that will let you have some substantive ownership over that critique. If you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and work a bit, I think you’ll find that there are important criticisms of Black Studies as field within the field and outside of it, by white authors and black authors alike.

Some suggestions for the person who is genuinely seeking well-considered, ambitious criticisms:

Walter Benn Michaels, The Trouble With Diversity.
Michaela di Leonardo, Exotics at Home

Challenging critiques of identity politics and the academic study of identity from a broadly leftward direction–but that should be as interesting and useful a resource for conservatives as anyone else.

Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa
Stephen Howe, Afrocentrism

I would definitely get some flack from colleagues for suggesting the former book, but as long as you understand that Lefkowitz is primarily criticizing a specific branch of thought within Black Studies (Afrocentrism, and specifically forms of Afrocentric scholarship from the 1980s and early 1990s), I think it’s an interesting and important critique. Howe’s critically-focused intellectual history of Afrocentrism will help put the sharp exchanges between Lefkowitz and her critics in a longer and wider perspective.

Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House
Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism
Anthony Appiah, The Ethics of Identity
Paul Gilroy, Against Race
Hazel Carby, Race Men
Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People: A Memoir

I think these authors would not describe these works as rejecting the political project of Black Studies–indeed, they’re all taught and read as part of the canon in the field. But I think it’s possible to read these books as criticizing some prominent aspects of or ideas about identity and blackness, including how the study of those topics has been institutionalized in academic institutions. (Appiah’s dialogue with Amy Gutman in Color Conscious may also be of interest in this vein.)

Stanley Crouch, pretty much all of his non-fiction that isn’t about jazz, but especially The All-American Skin Game
Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Race Experts
John McWhorter, Losing the Race

Sharp, contrarian critiques of the institutionalization of identity politics, among other things.

Scott Malcolmsen, One Drop of Blood
Leon Wynter, American Skin
Jacob Dlamini, Native Nostalgia
Mechal Sobel, The World They Made Together
Clarence Walker, Mongrel Nation

All indirectly or directly raising big questions about whether the black or African (or other fixedly racial) subject is the wrong thing to be studying.

More? I can supply it. The point is, you don’t need a shallow, proudly uninformed rejection of Black Studies to participate in a critical evaluation of the field or of scholars within it. This isn’t a critique that somehow just now needs to get started: it’s a long-running, ongoing conversation. If you want to join the conversation, there are plenty of points of entry. Don’t excuse the inexcusable on the grounds that it’s a breath of fresh air. That’s like standing in the middle of a cesspool and wondering why you can’t feel the breeze on your face. It’s your problem if you don’t want to go where there’s the air is clean and the wind is blowing.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics | 10 Comments

Good

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Thank you to the Chronicle.

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments

One Eyeball More

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Timothy Burke

To Mark Bauerlein:

1. Bauerlein can’t even bring himself to say, “Hey, it’s not cool to attack dissertations you haven’t read in a field that you preemptively deem uninteresting about subjects that you aggressively maintain could never be of any interest whatsoever”. But hey, it’s not like Bauerlein has argued for preserving the serious close reading of canonical literature in a dedicated way. Or argued for knowing the context of texts so well that he’s requiring students to accurately summarize content. Because it would be crazy to believe in those things and yet be utterly indifferent to someone who condemns texts based on a prideful ignorance of their actual content or any domain of knowledge connected to them. This isn’t even good concern trolling, let alone remotely worthy of someone who claims to be interested in preserving academia’s sacred values.

2. Sorry, not clear on why literary study doesn’t have a social mission, indeed, several of them. Recalling in specific that Mark Bauerlein believes that literary study has to…reclaim its social mission to preserve national and civilizational traditions that bring us all together as people. Or was that several think-tank funding cycles ago? I have such a short memory.

3. Wait, also: I’m sorry, what kind of teacher are you if you don’t understand why someone writing in an influential industry publication attacking your students or colleagues from an aggressively ignorant position is seriously not cool? A good teacher is a mentor, a protector, a guide. You don’t ignore it when people you have nurtured, guided, valued, are attacked simply to score points with the peanut gallery. If you do, you’re not a good teacher. So this is a moment that divides the teachers from the self-interested intellectuals: what side are you on? A good teacher rallies to the side of fellow good teachers, despite any principled disagreements they have with the work that’s being defended. If you’re sure the work isn’t worth defending and the testimony of fellow teachers is therefore worthless, be goddamn sure you’re right on the merits of your criticism.