Easily Distracted

The Shameless Style

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Timothy Burke

When people feel no shame, watch out. Any cultural or political system that depends on participants living up to minimal commitments for quality, integrity, or diligence where there are no consequences besides embarassment for outright discarding those commitments can thrive right up to the moment that someone stands up with a big shit-eating grin and blithely drops through the ground floor. As they fall, they often pull everyone with them into an abyss–because no one wants to be the last chump trying to live up to quaint standards and expectations.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has decided to be a case in point by giving Naomi Schaefer Riley a chance to pull their coverage of academic institutions and life through the event horizon of shamelessness. If you haven’t read the columns, this summary will do: in column 1, Riley deemed some dissertations and their graduate student authors in Black Studies to be worthless, ridiculous wastes of resources and effort without reading the dissertations in question or knowing anything about the topics covered. Riley judged, for example, that “black midwifery” in the 19th Century U.S. is self-evidently an absurdly overspecialized and pointless subject to study. In column 2, Riley doubled down and said that in writing a column about dissertations in a publication about higher education, it was “not her job” to read those dissertations.

I am maybe less surprised than some the Chronicle of Higher Education has so aggressively punched a hole into the sewer, though I’m hoping a bit that they can rethink it a bit before jumping in behind their columnist. I’m not so surprised because CHE has plainly struggled with digital culture, like many mainstream media publications that had a sense as late as the early 2000s that their business model was immortal and invulnerable. When you don’t have a commanding vision of your own, you’re vulnerable to the pitches of snake oil salesmen. In this case, the Chronicle fell for the idea that the only way to command attention in an online age is to hire a bunch of rodeo clowns and let them enrage the bulls, that you get your daily dose of eyeballs through handing a megaphone to the most aggressively careless person you can find and then coming along afterwards to say that you only wanted to “start a discussion”.

This isn’t the only way to build a readership: there are plenty of other models. It’s an especially unsuitable way to approach building a digital presence for a publication devoted to academia. I’m feeling somewhat vindicated about my own decision to not move this blog inside their architecture when I was invited to do so. I don’t think I’d want to move in any event as I’m proud of this blog’s continuing presence inside the information architecture of my own institution. But publications that suddenly decide to throw their considerable weight behind the next new thing often make bad mistakes as they rush to catch up. They learn the wrong lessons from consultants and advisors rather than work their way towards authenticity along the slower, harder road of home-grown practices.

I’m not particularly interested in rewarding the Chronicle for bowing to the shameless style. If they want to continue to try and get my eyeballs–or links–with this kind of writing, I’m not going to oblige. And I think that if it keeps up, I’ll be asking my colleagues to reconsider our institutional subscriptions to the print edition.

The Four-Year Itch

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Timothy Burke

We have a group of very smart, energetic, interesting students asking the college to divest from a list of fossil fuel companies. This puts me in the somewhat predictable situation of being the guy who fought for a cause when I was a student that I’m against as a middle-aged member of the establishment. Well, not exactly: I’m supportive of the goal (break the hold of big energy companies over the economy and over our political system). Just as the people who hesitated to divest from firms doing business in South Africa were strongly opposed to apartheid.

——–

I’ve been thinking back to my involvement in divestment when I was in college. Now, keep in mind that I was always a trial to some of my fellow activists. I was one of two students elected as a liason to the Investments subcommittee of the Board of Trustees, along with a guy who eventually went on to be a Rhodes scholar and who is presently a prominent businessman in South Africa. At one point we went into a meeting to deliver the demands of a crowd of protesting students outside and I came out and ambiguously said to the crowd, “Well, they’re kind of good folks and they sort might try to meet a few of our demands and I don’t know, maybe we can’t expect much.” Way to get the crowd fired up, right?

But as I think back to the divestment movement, I think we got some things right, some things wrong, and some things none of the above. What we got right was that the international campaign to isolate and taint South Africa’s government played an important role in bringing about the end of apartheid. (The other main factor, in my view, is the internal uprising after 1976 that made the townships ungovernable. With a side helping of the impact of the battle at Cuito Cuanavale in 1987-88.)

On the other hand, what we got wrong was the importance of our particular objectives (forcing institutional divestments from firms involved in South Africa, with the possible outcome of forcing American companies to disinvest from South Africa). We understood the history of South Africa and apartheid quite well, and were particularly influenced by the rising orthodoxy of radical South African social history and its argument that apartheid’s genesis lay less in a historical culture of racism and more in the functional needs of industrial capitalism following the 19th Century discovery of diamonds and gold. But the blindspots of that body of thought in the 1980s were our blindspots: the role of manufacturing capital (local and international) in that history was poorly theorized and understudied at the time, and it was largely assumed that what went for mining and agriculture went for manufacturing as well.

I came to feel very differently about that point in the course of my own graduate work on consumerism and commodification in southern Africa. But underestimating the difference between manufacturing and mining in relationship to racial capitalism was the least of our shortcomings. Many of us (myself included) didn’t really understand how institutional endowments, mutual funds, the stock market or multinational corporations worked. We didn’t spend very much time learning about any of those issues, in part because we didn’t trust our trustees and administration to educate us. And so here we also revealed our reliance on a script for activism that had been written for us by the students of the 1960s and 1970s, in which the university was either a direct enforcer of the conformist orthodoxies of American social life (and therefore a legitimate target) or was directly involved in supporting national projects like the Vietnam War (and therefore a legitimate target). By the mid-1980s, in loco parentis was completely gone, the cultural revolution on campus largely secured. And many campuses, especially those that had never been in the main pipeline of the military-industrial complex, had at least notionally embraced playing a more socially positive role in their communities. We wanted to crown ourselves in the same glory that surrounded the Boomers, and so we engaged in a form of historical re-enactment.

What exactly did we think would happen if we forced institutional buyers to sell their holdings in companies doing business in South Africa? We sometimes believed this would pressure those companies to leave South Africa, and would somehow therefore put an unspecified pressure on capitalism more generally. I don’t think most of us understood that “leaving” in this context often involved selling a bare-majority stake in a multinational to a local holding company while retaining a 49% share. Or that leaving might in a few cases really mean leaving lock, stock and barrel–and if so, that capital flight might pose its own problems for post-apartheid South Africa someday. The Sullivan Principles probably got more US companies to leave than divestment did, for all that we liked to mock them then as weak and pro-corporate. (Honestly, I think few of us believed a post-apartheid South Africa was imminently possible, any more than it seemed possible in 1985 that the Berlin Wall would fall four years later.) I don’t think we even really understood exactly how our university handled its investments, or what it expected from them–at a time when endowment income was really beginning to be an important part of operating budgets in higher education. I think we expected most crucially that divestment was a way to express moral disgust with South Africa that went beyond just saying so, that it put our institutional money where our mouth was, made speech meaningful. In that sense, if we’d been convinced that it could lose the university a small fraction of its expected return, we might well have seen that as making the sentiment even more powerful, that sacrifice showed seriousness of intent.

What really made the difference in putting international pressure on South Africa? Divestment, I think, was the least important tactic. Its main significance was that it allowed many young people who wanted to show a disdain for apartheid to do so in the most conveniently local setting and therefore to make the revulsion for apartheid more powerfully global. More important by far in terms of making that revulsion felt within South Africa was the sports boycott. I remember some activists I knew seeing that as trivial, but that just showed how little we understood the mass psychology of South Africans. American college students building shantytowns was easy to sneer at, but not being allowed to play rugby abroad? Shit got real at that point.

As far as bringing real pressure to bear on South African politicians and businessmen? After 1985, U.S. and European banks began to restrict or call due loans to South Africa, or at least gave serious consideration to such action. They did so a little because of pressure from activists, but largely this was a result of their judgment that South Africa was increasingly a bad credit risk because of apartheid. (Back in the days when banks still cared about such things.) Now, mind you, the attempt to produce disinvestment through divestment was one of the thumbs on the scale that made that assessment seem more credible. But really, at least in my group of activists and some of the other college networks that I knew about, the banks were less in our sights than our own university endowments. Nor would we have known how to talk the language that would have helped us convince the banks that South Africa was a bad risk.

In the end, divestment was a huge effort that sucked up most of the air in the activist scene of the 1980s (the other big causes that I remember were resisting draft registration, demanding a nuclear freeze, and generally opposing the Reagan Administration). For all that effort, we ended up with relatively little to show for it: often a grudging, late agreement to a one-time, one-case divestment from companies defined by incredibly restricted criteria. No continuing anti-racist campaign, no continuing attention to the question of what made for socially responsible capitalism (if indeed we were prepared to allow that such a thing could exist), and really no continuing attention to South Africa itself, which dropped off the map of things-to-care-about in 1993 except for people like me who had become so fascinated by the place itself that we went on to study it. We did manage to leave behind us a sort of ghost remnant of moral distaste for things South African–I still run into people who think you’re not supposed to buy South African wine, or who instantly regard a white person speaking with a South African accent as ipso facto racist.

————

So to today’s divestment campaign. As in our case, I think it’s partially a consequence of looking for a strategy which will allow campus activists to work collectively but doesn’t require extensive day-to-day coordination across multiple institutions. I also think like our campaign in the 1980s, it’s about aiming at the most convenient, available target, knowing that campus administrators are obligated to listen and respond to student demands in a way that the more distant targets–fossil fuel companies–are not. But even the biggest university with the most fossil-fuel friendly researchers is really not the soft underbelly of the energy sector. Let’s assume that most universities and colleges could be persuaded to divest from the 20 worst-acting energy corporations. That might be a useful step towards morally tainting them, which might in turn be a useful step towards shifting some kind of political consensus. Is it the most efficient or powerful step towards producing that moral taint? I don’t really think so. It’s just the one that college students see as being most readily available to them in the four years they’ll be enrolled.

Will divestment actually produce financial pressure on those companies? Not really, unless it succeeds in depressing their stock prices. In the 1980s, even that might not have made any difference, but today more executives have more of their compensation tied to stock price. That might actually hit some of them where they live. On the other hand, I am not a lawyer, but I’m guessing setting out to deliberately suppress the value of particular stocks through collective action is probably a federal crime. Moreover, If I were going to try and make a case that some fossil fuel companies are bad risks in the medium-term, I don’t think I’d have to resort to something as elaborate as getting institutions to divest to do it.

I’m tempted to write off my own criticism as an example of the conservatism of age, that I’m defending my own interests. That kind of skepticism about action isn’t just self-centered, however. It’s also that over time you come to see a different side of institutions. The longer you inhabit one, the more you understand what their long-term trajectories look like, the more you can imagine a thing which has lived on for centuries and wants to live for centuries still. That perspective can be the source of fatal complacency, a deafness to new ideas and energy. It’s not enough to just say that you’re looking out for the long-term fiduciary health of an institution: that can lead to stasis and death. The four-year turnover of students, however, often makes it impossible for them to see the whole institution over time or to feel viscerally connected to plans and projects whose outcome will be deferred years, even decades, after they are involved.

If the issue at hand is both something that can change rapidly and that a college or university can rightfully be held directly accountable for, then there’s no reason to be deterred by someone invoking long-term interests. Student activists should be demanding the embrace of open-source publishing (with a potentially huge impact on social justice at a global scale), they should be targeting the mistreatment of adjunctified teaching, they should be staging sit-ins at the offices of state legislators who are slashing education budgets, they should be fighting the advance of standardized testing, and they should be asking sharp questions about how higher education plays a role in growing income inequality in the United States. There are issues at hand where change is possible and higher education has a direct share of involvement.

If we’re talking climate change or environmentalism, on the other hand, the really radical or daring ideas aren’t short-term ones. I’d be much more motivated by a plan to take Swarthmore College as much off-the-grid as possible by 2030. Sure, that’s about when I’ll retire, but if we started moving in that direction steadily I could expect to see many impacts to my working life: much more attention to energy usage, much more mindfulness about our material practices. That’s already part of our local sustainability campaigns, and to be honest, I think it’s often small-potatoes stuff that doesn’t sum to that much. Where it might get real is the construction of alternative-energy infrastructure on campus, some of it at the expense of other things we might build or landscape we might want to preserve. That part of the idea can’t be faulted for conservatism, at any rate. If I wanted to come up with something that might scare fossil-fuel producers, I think a national movement by institutions and organizations and building owners to go as off-grid as possible would be considerably more threatening than a complex, indirect campaign to morally taint them.

For students–or anyone needing to feel that the urgency of their cause is matched to a potentially rapid return of results–this kind of vision may lack appeal. Or seem, as the Sullivan Principles and similar propositions seemed in the 1980s, to be a delaying tactic intended to wait until the activists grew tired and switched to another cause.

Only, you know, Leon Sullivan stuck with it, and in the end, made a major and lasting contribution to global campaigns for socially responsible capitalism.

Posted in Academia, Africa, Politics, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

TL;DR for Historical Scholarship

Posted on April 10, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Because all the cool kids are doing it, let me dash off a quick thought on William Cronon’s essay “Professional Boredom”.

I’m very sympathetic with Cronon’s reasoning on almost every point, particularly with his sense that what ought to matter as “expert” historical publication or dissemination should be very broadly defined and with his celebration of communicative, readable scholarship. I don’t have any problem with using words like “agency” or “contingency” (one of my current projects is centrally about agency) but I think he’s right that scholarly historians should pause and explain at least some of the conceptual vocabulary they rely upon, to widen their vision of who might be reading and who might want to read. These are familiar themes for me here.

But here’s an slightly different idea riffing off of Cronon’s concern about history being boring. Some years ago, I wrote an essay about the Zimbabwean historian David Beach after his death. (JSTOR link, for those of you with access.) Much of Beach’s work would probably be considered ‘boring’ in some sense, but not because it uses impenetrable theoretical jargon. His writing style was plain and accessible, and his subject straightforward. It’s just that even many Zimbabweans are not altogether that interested in the fine-grained narrative recounting of the political histories of various Shona-speaking chiefdoms and states. Most of Beach’s work was history for historians, though he was delighted by the thought of a wider local or international public taking an interest in his scholarship. (At the time of his death, he was working on a project of much bigger scope, modelled on the Annales historians, that might well have reached a wider readership.)

What I wrote in my appreciation of Beach was that he’d converted me to valuing this kind of fine-grained empiricism more than I previously had. I came to admire the professional craft that it took to research and relate this knowledge (and Cronon notes that he similarly values this kind of effort) but I also realized more completely how scholarship is a very old and deep practice of collaboration between thousands of people separated by time and space. The exciting, engaging, communicative work that Cronon and I esteem often relies upon scholars who do “boring” work. You can’t synthesize or generalize without specialists doing their work first.

But let’s go beyond the usual huzzahs for pluralism or intellectual diversity here. Perhaps the problem is that specialized historical research is peculiarly ill-suited for the long-form monograph. Perhaps this is what makes specialized research “boring”: that its strengths and contributions are best expressed and disseminated in some other form. Here I think Cronon could take a page from Kathleen Fitzpatrick: that the issue is less with historians who are boring and more with the genres in which they communicate, the structure of what Swarthmore’s president Rebecca Chopp refers to as “knowledge design”.

So if being boring is a problem, let’s think about better ways to communicate findings from specialized research such that this knowledge can benefit the widest range of practicing historians and for that matter, history’s publics. There are established forms of publication that historians don’t use very often compared to other disciplines: the short research note or update in a journal; republication of a primary source accompanied by annotations or commentary; conference proceedings as a terminal form of publication aiming primarily at giving information about a specialized issue or question. More excitingly, using Fitzpatrick as a guide, I think we can imagine many novel digital forms of dissemination. Live or serial reports (short or long) from within the process of archival study or working through a historiography; a specialized weblog tracking fine-grained questions about interpretation and evidence; and other short-form modes of dissemination.

Inventing new channels and forms,or renovating and using underused ones, is more than just a matter of making work available, of course. It’s also about making sure that such work is highly valued. I recall sitting on a grant panel some years ago and being told by the funders that they simply never gave awards to reference works. This is what I discussed in my essay on Beach: that the incentive structures in academia, particularly in hiring and tenure, tend to work against both what Cronon calls “boring” and what he calls exciting and engaging, to valorize work which is in a very narrow middle zone of being “interesting, if you’re trained properly” (the sort of move that Claire Potter rightly suggests is being made when we say that someone’s work is “smart”). This is of course the issue that most strongly motivates Fitzpatrick’s critique of existing forms of scholarly publication: that even when alternatives make enormous sense, there are serious professional risks for scholars who pursue them.

If we can work out new covenants and infrastructure, however, the potential seems enormous. Imagine a huge cluster of well-preserved reports fresh from various archives, small interpretations generated straight out of the work of making sense of particular documents, research notes that identify the cutting edge problems facing specialized study of particular times and places. That would be both more useful to a range of publics and less “boring”, more a fulfillment of the collaborative and social responsibilities that scholars have traditionally exalted, than what we have now. Cronon’s not wrong that there are many monographs that we and our publics could live without, but he might be wrong about whether the research that has gone in to such works is equally dispensible.

Posted in Academia, Digital Humanities | 7 Comments

Debt: The First 500 Comments At Crooked Timber

Posted on April 4, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Some years ago, I was talking with a senior scholar that I had known well while I was in graduate school and in my early career. This person’s scholarly work is amazing stuff, a huge presence in African history, and I also am quite fond of this professor personally. But over the course of a couple of phone calls that year, I came to a decision that I really didn’t want to keep up with those sometimes lengthy conversations.

The primary reason was that I’d been feeling a strong desire to get beyond a mode of imagined relations with other scholars and their works that had been a part of the ethos of graduate training (not just at my institution, but at all of them, from what I could see). Even though my main advisor was a sensitive, kind person and my closest friends in my graduate program were wonderful, engaging thinkers, I still found that we got into discussions about scholars and scholarship that felt like a story by Shirley Jackson. We didn’t necessarily start our discussions in that tone but eventually someone, often a professor or graduate student outside of our little affinity group, would take it there. The stakes would ramp up quickly, loyalties would be declared, terms and definitions would be invested with world-shattering significance, footnotes would be scrutinized for evidence of mortal sin, and so on. It was even worse at some other places. I hung around the University of Chicago for a while during my write-up, and you’d think that the custodial staff would have needed to put in overtime to clean off the blood on the floor after some seminars in the anthropology or history departments. (Which might not be irrelevant to what I’m responding to in this posting.)

In my long-standing warning to students about graduate school, this cultural predisposition is one of the things I have in mind. Even when you don’t like it, you can’t escape it, and because you can’t escape it, you get remade by it. It then takes a lot of self-work and discipline to get to a more joyous, open and pluralistic habitus, not the least of which because at least some of the people you work with have accepted that the work of intellectuals should be more like a never-ending session of fraternity hazing. This is why I stopped wanting to talk with my friend: our conversations were substantially about all the many books that this person felt were stupid or incompetent and the many scholars who were weak. After a time, I mostly listened, or half-heartedly protested that I rather liked this book or that person’s work.

I just didn’t want to do that any more, at least not habitually. Yes, sometimes I still offer strong criticisms of published work, both by academics and other writers. Sometimes I say critical things in classes about the work of other scholars. Intellectual life shouldn’t be a pollyanna parade or a group hug. But neither should criticism be a habit, nor should we casually arrive at judgments about the character of other professionals from a critical reading of the work they produce. (One of my other graduate professors taught me that: an awesomely talented historian who was also a jerk.) Ad hominem is more than a logical fallacy, it’s a bad way to live. The emotion I want to feel first as an intellectual is passionate joy: what a world we have, in which there is so much to know and read and say and think.

What I’ve tried to do over time is embody more and more of my main advisor’s approach to critiquing the work of his students and colleagues. He didn’t want to break you on the wheel, convert you to his church, capture you for his tribe: he generally tried to help people make their work better, more acute, in their own terms, to help them find the best versions of their claims, the richest grounds for convening debates.

———–

I offer this as a prologue for my reaction to the ongoing discussion of David Graeber’s book Debt at the weblog Crooked Timber. Some words that come to mind: horrified, distressed, squicked. Yes, ok, the car wreck you can’t look at away from and all that. It really gives me all over again that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way.

Reading back into an exchange that has gotten to this point is about as welcome as Hephaestus trying to mediate between Zeus and Hera. My starting place is simply that I like Graeber’s book a lot, even when I don’t agree with some of his analysis or his conclusions. I want more “big theory” like this in academia, I want scholars to be able to write expansive, loose, multidisciplinary work. Liking and wanting this kind of work obliges scholarly readers to relax in response: stow the disciplinary gatekeeping, be generous, find the most interesting debates that can come from it.

So I read back to Henry Farrell’s original appraisal of Debt at CT, given the intensity of Graeber’s response to it. Then I re-read Chapter Twelve in Debt, the focus of the dispute. Here’s basically how I score the fight:

1. Yes, there’s a difference between Chapter Twelve and the rest of the book. At least some of that is the same kind of difference that you’d find between Marx’s general social theory and his specific reading of specific political events during his lifetime, or between Foucault’s general thought and his ventures into post-68 activism or his engagement with the Iranian Revolution. Graeber’s underlying reconceptualization of debt and his critique of the competing ur-narrative of mainstream economics is stimulating. You can do a lot with it, it’s good to think, as many other CT commenters said. Chapter Twelve you might not like if you don’t like Graeber’s much more specific reading of our own political moment. Or you might legitimately disagree with his analysis of the postwar world-system, in terms that are not mere quibbles about facts.

2. I suppose that you could fault Henry Farrell for not spending more time on what he liked in the book. Or that he makes his disagreement with Chapter Twelve rest too much on footnotes, on questions of evidence. Or that the intensity of phrases like “flat-out wrong” are too much. As I say to my students sometimes, your adjectives can pick a lot of fights that you don’t want or need. The core of the disagreement seems pretty legitimate and interesting , though. Basically, Farrell argues that the postwar system is contradictory, full of unintended or indirect outcomes, factionalized within and between states, and so on. He argues that Graeber does not see it that way. Farrell does imply that this difference in their views is between a complex, evidence-based perspective (his) and a simplified, ideological and evidence-poor perspective (Graeber’s). Within scholarly communities, even a professorial Gandhi is going to find it hard not to rise to that bait. I think you can stage that disagreement in a more generative way, but there’s no getting around that it’s a real disagreement which is both about the substance of scholarship and about our political choices.

2a. Disclosure: I’m much more on what I perceive as Farrell’s side on that big point. I tend to see both the world-system and various contemporary micropolitical situations as complex, emergent, contingent, shot through with unintended outcomes, and so on. I don’t think power always knows what power needs, I don’t think power always gets what power wants, I think that even when power knows what it needs and acts to get what it wants, there’s all sorts of other stuff that gets in the way, much of it not resistance in any sense. But, as I said in a talk I gave recently at Juniata, not universally so. Occasionally there really are conspiracies, occasionally systems of domination are relatively seamless, sometimes empires do act with conscious, aggressive intent in pursuit of instrumental outcomes which really do extend or preserve their capacity for domination. More importantly, there is a complex account of power (empirically complex, theoretically complex) that disagrees with Farrell’s views and my own views, and I would say that Graeber’s work is a good example of that sophisticated account.

3. So: yes, Farrell’s commentary mixes together a genuine disagreement (of the kind that you’d hope was envisioned in Graeber’s hope for “public debate” inspired by the book) with some insinuations about poor craftsmanship and some assertions that Graeber is simplistic or straight-out factually wrong. Evidence and fact play some role in this disagreement, but it’s also very much about questions of perspective, preference, habitus. Stuff that you can kill a pint over if you can keep it friendly, or kill a friendship over if you can’t. So would Graeber be right to feel a bit nettled and annoyed with Farrell coming into his reply to the CT commenters? Yes, sure. Would he be right to voice that annoyance? I guess, but there are ways to do that and ways not to do it. My feeling is that Graeber goes the latter route and then some. He doesn’t even stick to the more modestly ugly tone that the CT commentariat sometimes settles into. I found myself going back and forth from Farrell’s reply to Graeber’s, trying to figure out what was going on. Some explanation comes when we hear that there’s been a series of acrimonious Twitter exchanges. But I mean, jesus, the intensity of Graeber’s reply heads at warp-speed for WTF territory.

4. The CT commentariat makes a valiant attempt to rescue some meaningful disagreement from the wreckage, but it isn’t long before people are being forced to either withdraw from the conversation or to pick sides.

5. I’ve said that I want to keep my views about people separate from my views about scholarship, and to be welcoming and generous in my views of the latter within my intellectual practice. So to stick to that: Debt is a great book, a great project, and you should read it. It’s a generative book that makes you think about things you’ve known for a long time in new ways, and is suggestive of research projects a-plenty for a rising generation of scholars. But Graeber hasn’t done himself any favors on the personal side of things: it’s really hard to unthink this exchange and the visceral feelings it creates in me.

Posted in Academia, Blogging, Generalist's Work, Oh Not Again He's Going to Tell Us It's a Complex System | 13 Comments

Yo Rick

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Wow, you learn something every day. I had no idea that the majority of the University of California schools don’t teach any American history at all. Thanks, Rick Santorum! Gosh, I wonder what they do teach, then. History of Lesbian African Marxist Muslims, probably. Or maybe he means that the defunding of public education has gone far enough that the UCs have completely eliminated the humanities, so it’s a sort of trick point, because they don’t teach any history.

Hey, I guess I should go look at their catalog because now I’m kind of curious.

Oh.

American history courses taught at UC Davis:

History of the United States, two-semester survey course
Social History of American Women and the Family.
Nature, Man and the Machine in America
Colonial America
The American Revolution
The Early National Period
Jacksonian America
Civil War and Reconstruction
The Civil War in American Film
Selected Themes in 19th Century American History
American Environmental History
Becoming an American: Immigration and American Culture
The Gilded Age and Progressive Era
War, Prosperity and Depression: US 1917-1945
Selected Themes in 20th Century American History
American Intellectual History
Cultural and Social History of the United States
History of Black People and American Race Relations
Race in America
Asian-American History
American Political History (2 semesters)
Religion in American History
The Frontier Experience
History of Sexuality in America
History of Science in America
History of Technology in America
California History

And it’s the same everywhere except for UC San Francisco, which has decided in that peculiar way of medical schools that it should focus on medical training.

Gosh, does that mean Rick Santorum said something that’s so wrong it isn’t even a lie? How could that be?

Posted in Academia, Politics | 5 Comments

Pictures From an Institution 11 (Events)

Posted on April 3, 2012 by Timothy Burke

I keep pining for the creation of an “events czar” who would rule the college calendar with an iron fist, cutting down the sheer number of events while also keeping them from overlapping. It’s not going to happen, because each event has a purpose for the group or individual who has convened it: no one could possibly have a big enough vision of what’s going on to know which events should happen and which shouldn’t happen. It’s frustrating simply because there are so many events I want to attend.

Sometimes, the event is very directly part of my work, most often when I’m speaking or presenting. I had a wonderful opportunity to speak at Juniata College in March, for example. It was a chance to catch up with an old friend and also meet her colleagues on the faculty, who were terrific, energetic, and smart without exception. The students impressed me even more: they asked really intelligent, pointed, intriguing questions and kept me on my toes for well over an hour after the talk ended.

Sometimes I’m at a meeting or event because it’s strongly connected to a course or program that I’m working with during the semester. Which doesn’t mean that’s just an obligation, there’s always something for me in these events: a new idea or an old one clarified, new information or a reminder of something I’ve known for a while, an encounter with a new perspective or a soothing reacquaintance with a familiar one.

Sometimes I’m just there because I’m interested. It’s what being in a college community is all about. Often that’s when I’m keen to share what I’m hearing via Twitter or this weblog. Though that didn’t go so well at the recent TEDxSwarthmore event, where there was a weird anti-Twitter, anti-information technology policy in place. (Ahem. First letter in TED is…?)

Pre-Twitter View

Post-Twitter Seating

Posted in Pictures from an Institution | 1 Comment

Pictures From an Institution 10 (Spring)

Posted on April 2, 2012 by Timothy Burke

Ok, I give you this, spring around here is beautiful.

But I rarely experience it as exuberance. The cool weather in fall always energizes me, but that’s probably because I have energy to spare. By the time I hit April, I always feel absolutely worn out. The students feel it too: there’s a three-week period from the end of March into mid-April where they are all tired, ill or both, and usually preoccupied with overwhelming obligation to a particular course or extracurricular activity.

Somehow around mid-April that feeling shifts a bit: the end of classes is in sight, the crush of events and committees desperate to finish some business before the year ends is easing, you make peace with the things you didn’t write, didn’t finish, didn’t say. By then usually I’ve missed the chance to plant peas and my garden is a sorry mess, but at least the weather brings some joy.

Posted in Pictures from an Institution | Comments Off

The Last Enclosures

Posted on March 27, 2012 by Timothy Burke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Academia | 27 Comments

Bystander Training and Other Acts of Management

Posted on March 26, 2012 by Timothy Burke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Academia, Politics, Swarthmore | 6 Comments

Kony Heads

Posted on March 12, 2012 by Timothy Burke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted in Africa, Digital Humanities, Politics | 6 Comments