Release the Kraken!

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I have a sneaking feeling that movie critics won’t be that impressed with the remake of Clash of the Titans, coming out this week. Maybe I won’t be, either, given that it has the potential to be a sort of tedious spawn of God of War and 300, a bunch of CGI in search of a film.

On the other hand. One of the things that middlebrow film criticism habitually gets wrong is identifying what tomorrow’s fondly remembered nostalgias will be, which pop-culture cheese is going to satisfy future appetites.

I don’t think too many critics at the time appreciated the first Clash of the Titans or the various Sinbad films, for example. And it’s not just the Harryhausen special effects which made those memorable for the kids who saw them in their initial theatrical runs or in syndication on television. What made them memorable was really their good cheesiness, that they were the mirror image of films that end up being grist for Mystery Science Theater 3000‘s mill.

Space Mutiny, for example, is not the opposite of Raging Bull or Casablanca. It’s the opposite of Logan’s Run or George Pal’s Time Machine or Quatermass and the Pit. The cheese that we love in retrospect is composed of a peculiarly perfect mixture of damn cool things, accidentally iconic things, and laughably bad things. Bad cheese is just laughably bad or sometimes boringly awful.

So take the original Clash of the Titans. The mechanical owl Bubo and the fight against Medusa were damn cool. The original delivery of the line “Release the kraken!” was one of a number of accidentally iconic bits in the film. The laughably bad was Hamlin’s performance (and his perpetually half-naked chest, which looked as if someone had run a belt sander over it), various embalmed stars like Olivier and Andress collecting their paychecks as the Olympian Gods, and so on. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was memorable because of Tom Baker’s excellent scene-chewing villainry, but also because of Caroline Munro’s bodice.

The right audiences at the right time tend to spot memorable cheese the instant they see it. It doesn’t require time and repetition. I remembered and cherished the Sinbad films the very first time that I saw them. The works which fall into the gap between laughable badness and memorable cheese are more complicated, often ending up as guilty pleasures which require special pleading to qualify as great cheese. (Krull or The Ice Pirates, say.)

But this ability to recognize cheese is rarely found in critics, or for that matter, in adults who overly treasure their respectability or adherence to middlebrow standards of good taste. I don’t suppose it’s that important for the success of the films themselves, which tend to find their accidental audiences well enough. But it is important in terms of engaging the tastes and sensibilities of the culture as a whole, because it’s cheese that generates the enduring catchphrases, icons and subcultural connections that drive so much of American (and now global) popular imagination.

Posted in Popular Culture | 5 Comments

My Books, My Selves

Posted on March 25, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Having one of those stretches where it is really hard to get my head above water. Most of the time March and April are like this. One thing I’ve been doing when I have a spare moment is adding books to LibraryThing and reconnecting with the community there. I still have most of the basement’s books to add, which is quite a few.

LibraryThing is a great site for teaching people about folksonomies and metadata, and the interestingly debatable choices and problems they present for organizing information in a digital age. But it’s also one of my favorite examples of social networking in several respects, and looking at it again has been opening up some wider thoughts about blogging and social networks.

I spoke earlier this semester to a really interesting group of students at Bryn Mawr about how I see blogging as a form and practice as I think about it reflectively. One of the things I talked about with them is an issue I’ve occasionally reflected upon within the blog, which is how the voice that I’ve crafted here is both a treasured accomplishment and a frustrating confinement. I might have an inaccurate understanding of myself and the impression I leave in person, but I often feel like I’m looser, jazzier, more amusing, less pompous, in my daily work as a teacher and colleague than I am as a blogger. But when I try to write in that voice, it comes out snarky, barbed, and maybe altogether too typical in the hurly-burly Punch-and-Judy show of online discourse. So the Man of Reason is what I’ve made myself out to be, and so I’ll largely have to remain.

How does this connect to LibraryThing? Well, partly because LibraryThing is one of the sites that solves for me the problem of connecting me to those connections that I’d both ideally like to have and finding for me those connections which I never knew that I wanted but that seem indispensible once I discover them. It also gives a clearer, truer picture of who I am in many ways than this blog or my Facebook page or various other public selves I have on display. That’s always been the driver for me in online writing and reading: the hope of serendipity, of strange attractors, finding people and ideas and conversations that I can’t find in my immediate environment, but also of self-definition.

Partly also because LibraryThing is a likeable design. One of the things I said to the Bryn Mawr class was that I don’t do more in the online environment that their class is being taught within (Serendip) because I find it frustrating to use. I have enough trouble with organization when I have complete control over my environment, so finding my way through a non-standard UI maze not of my own making is often a non-starter for me. So the way that words and interfaces connect on the screen is part of what makes online sociality work for me, the same way that the architecture and acoustics of a room can have a profound impact on how well a group works together or converses in that room.

What LibraryThing does is balance the strange attractors with a sense of discovering dopplegangers. It produces the warming, pleasant feelings of confirmation that the online world sometimes allows, a revelation that out there somewhere, there are people who are strikingly like yourself in some respect, who have navigated the dizzying variety and complexity of contemporary culture with an eye to the same guiding stars.

In every online venue I’ve been involved with, I hit a point where those discoveries start to grind to a halt. The warm and fuzzy security of discovering that you are not entirely freakish in some of your affectations and habits fades, and you often start to discover that the person who looked like your twin is really not nearly so alike as their online persona might suggest.

At some point, in a given space, there is no more novelty, no more unexpected voices. Or the unexpected voices that remain are simply too alien or difficult or repellant: I find my boundaries and no matter how notionally open I might be to their rearrangement, to a continuing traffic across that frontier, I have no desire to remain infinitely open. That feels too much like surrender, like a complete loss of individual distinctiveness.

I think this is one place where I sometimes part company with my friends at Bryn Mawr who are interested not just in studying emergent processes but in deliberately incorporating emergent principles into their own institutional and personal lives. Some of what I have learned and continue to learn by exposure to online community and discussion feels emergent in that sense, but I’m not willing to cast off the line of my boat and just drift anywhere the sea chooses to take me. One of the things I told the students was that the individual authorship of my voice (even the stilted, sometimes pretentious, always verbose voice of this blog) is also a big priority for me. I don’t see that there’s anything attractive about embracing dialogue so completely that your next thought is always directly produced by the last thought of a dialogic partner, a smothering tit-for-tat. Some good thoughts come from solitude, from the unexpected recesses of the self, from not answering to the last reply or bouncing off of the last link.

Posted in Blogging, The Mixed-Up Bookshelves | 2 Comments

There In Spirit

Posted on March 23, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve got a number of meetings at the college today, so I can’t be there myself, but my sister is right now at her confirmation hearing for her appointment to be Director of Operational Energy Plans and Programs at the Department of Defense. Watching the webcast right now: Carl Levin just introduced her a moment ago. Sounds like one of her fellow appointees is going to get some hassles from Senator McCain. Very proud!

Posted in Miscellany | 2 Comments

Bad Books and Bad Commentariats

Posted on March 12, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’m far more deferential to general criticisms of professors than most academics are. At a certain point, however, it’s okay to just squawk about kneejerk anti-intellectualism.

So, for example, take this response by Carolyn Kellogg at her LA Times book blog to the American Book Review’s recent “Bad Books” article.

Kellogg has a point about the Bad Books essays, but it is a point that more than a few of the critics themselves acknowledge, that the question of what makes a book “bad” is an open one. Bad in terms of how the book has been read or used? Bad in relationship to an author’s other good work, bad in the sense of an author unable to live up to high expectations? Bad in the Mystery Science Theater 3000 sense of bad? Those all seem valid possible ways to approach the prompt, and some of the critics have some interesting things to say about how they define or view badness. Indeed, that’s sort of the point of asking scholarly literary critics to write about bad books, to stimulate intellectual reflections about what makes for bad literature. If you just want a list, you could pretty much assemble a group at random, and in fact, that’s often what makes 10-best 10-worst lists fun to put together and to read.

Whether the nominees put forward by the ABR’s writers seem genuinely bad depends on whether you accept the particular critic’s approach to badness. You can’t really disagree with Jonathan Eburne’s description of Nelson Hayes Dildo Cay as a MST3K-type bad novel, for example. You can only disagree by arguing that this kind of badness doesn’t deserve attention from literary critics, that it’s a clay pigeon.

I don’t agree with a lot of the critics in the ABR piece in the end, either in how they define badness or in what they nominate as being bad. Bonnie Wheeler’s description of Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror as really bad, and popular only because of a marketing strategy, seems completely wrong to me, for example. But collectively they’re perfectly right to suggest that it is as hard to come up with a clear definition of what makes something bad as it is to say what makes something good. That’s a good entry point to an interesting conversation.

What’s frustrating about Kellogg’s commentary is that she doesn’t really respond to ABR’s exercise in its own terms. What, for example, would be her definition of badness? Don’t any of the 40 responses correspond to her own definition? Some of the critics would doubtless feel as Kellogg does about naming a book like The Great Gatsby as bad.

However, what’s really tedious are the comments which follow from people who haven’t bothered to read the original piece and go straight to the usual “college professors are horrible writers and arrogant” tropes. The admittedly bad phrasing of Amy Elias’ argument as quoted by Kellogg seems to me to be an outlier in the ABR piece. Readers quickly select one or two sentences that sound like something they already believe and then comment to that effect. Mbgriffith, for example, advises the critics to try reading the books–but he didn’t read the ABR piece, or he would notice that some of the critics do concern themselves with books being “badly written” and others very much agree with his concerns about the politics of an author supplanting the truth of characters.

This is the kind of moment where I’m inclined to give some credit to the conventional criticism of blogs-as-echo-chambers, that the net effect of online conversations at this point in time is to draw people active in those conversations into tighter and tighter feedback loops that only confirm what they already know and feel. It’s hard to see how it might be otherwise at this late hour. I had thought, for example, of posting this entry as a comment at Kellogg’s blog, and even tried to do so (technical error of some kind kept it from appearing), but what’s the point? The conversational moment is passed and the people who took cheap shots aren’t likely to join in making a better discussion anyway.

You have to have a steady commitment to a particular site to hope to push or move the conversation in a particular way, and even if you can do that, that tends to result in steady culture at that site to which its regular participants conform or adapt because they find it congenial, meaning that all you’ve done is make for another confirmation-bias loop of some kind. When conversational cultures that are more provisional and unpredictable flourish, they also tend to be fragile and short-lived, at which point it’s legitimate to wonder if the work needed to create such a culture is worth it.

Posted in Blogging, Politics, Popular Culture | 3 Comments

What Color Is Your Leaden Weight?

Posted on March 11, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Strictly in the department of anecdotes-don’t-make-data and a single year doesn’t make a trend, there’s been a slight acceleration in movement in enrollments this year at Swarthmore towards the sciences, particularly chemistry and biology.

Reading enrollments anywhere is hard, even over the longer term. There are a lot of variables that shape enrollments in any particular course. For example, the time that a course is scheduled for an early morning slot will inevitably have lower enrollments than it would if it were taught at another time.

Enrollments are also one of the most sensitive subjects in conversations between faculty. Attempting to compare enrollments for individual professors almost invariably leads to hurt feelings, not the least because there are some very granular and significant disparities in workloads that may be caught up in that comparison.

So with all those cautions in mind, a hesitant suggestion that if both long-term and short-term enrollment trends towards the sciences and towards more tangibly applied disciplines like economics have been observed at most liberal arts colleges, it may be time for those kinds of institutions to really have a very open heads-on confrontation with the implications of that trend.

I do not think that trend means that every subject which is not pre-law or pre-medicine needs to become a kind of remnant curriculum designed to help tomorrow’s lawyers, doctors and bureaucrats seem a bit more sparkling in cocktail party conversations. I do think it means that more of the curriculum needs to give a tangible and concrete sense of what applications it might have in life and work. Critical thinking, ethical intelligence, informed citizenship: those are nice but vague. They’re not enough. If some of those trends are real and general across institutions, they are not a sign that most students just plain love the sciences or hard social sciences and scorn everything else. They’re a sign that some disciplines do a better job at connecting intellectual knowledge, concrete skills with flexible utility, and a long-term narrative vision of what you do with a major in that subject later on.

Most of the long-term careers and life outcomes that humanistic disciplines cite as flowing from study within their precincts are in the throes of serious long-term structural transformations within the global economy. Yes, it’s still clear that tomorrow’s economy will require advanced education and that it will require flexibility and adaptability (and thus, “critical thinking”). But the security blankets provided to humanistic faculty trying to envision the careers of their students by journalism, publishing, advertising, translation, media production, civil service and so on are being stripped away at a steady rate. Sometimes they’re being replaced by other tangible professions and niches which many of us do not teach very well or at all (such as digital media production). Sometimes it’s hard to see what, if anything, will replace some of those jobs or niches.

Thinking about applications doesn’t have to involve a radical change in what you teach, I think. It’s just a shift in emphasis that leads to a slightly different selection of reading materials (more efforts to on materials which go outside narrowly specialized scholarship, or efforts to weigh the value of specialized scholarship against general-purpose syntheses). Or to more work with producing content in a wider range of ways (writing, digital media, and so on). Or more work on making skills like research methods transferrable outside the context of a specialized topic. To some extent, in the past, this is the kind of labor that faculty in many disciplines have left entirely up to students, to connect the dots of their studies and discover on their own possible applications for them. Maybe it’s time to own more of that work ourselves.

However, a curriculum that strives for more tangible connections to the world beyond its institution also is going to need a redistribution of teaching resources in the longer haul, both in terms of subject matter and curricular structure. I’ve been fretting about this kind of shift for a while. You can accomplish some it within established courses, subjects and tenure-track lines with changes in pedagogical emphasis. You can recognize what you’re already doing that is hands-on or experiential and extend that across the institution. That’s what labs in the natural sciences are for, so just consider what labs in the humanities might look like.

However, I also think you need new concepts and structures. I’ve argued in the past that a college like Swarthmore might consider bringing professionals of various kinds in for a year (lawyers, doctors, civil servants, journalists, investment bankers, entrepreneurs, software engineers, architects) to teach a “practicum”. Not to teach a standard professional-school course, but a liberal-arts reflection on what work in those professions is like, what the tangible problems and issues are, and so on. It would be hard at first to find people who have the appropriate professional experience who would also be comfortable in front of a classroom of students in the mode of teaching preferred at an institution like Swarthmore, but I think over time we’d get the hang of it.

Another thought I’ve had recently is that we could use a quarter-long, half-credit series of courses on non-disciplinary technical skills that confer no certification. (Trying to make these actual certification programs, I agree, leads to serious transformations in institutional mission). Carpentry, plumbing, computer assembly and repair, agriculture, food preparation, and so on. The practicum I’ve described above is something we could plausibly accomplish through a single major donation, because it would only be funding a single position like our current Lang and Cornell professors. This shift, on the other hand, would take some serious repurposing of resources. For some of these tangible skills, there is faculty or staff expertise available, but the institution would have to decide quite programmatically to commit more resources to this kind of teaching and fewer resources to the teaching we already do. Arguably some of this kind of instruction could be had on the cheap by comparison to tenure-track faculty.

Now this is the kind of suggestion that I expect that almost all of my colleagues would smile politely upon hearing it while privately tagging me as “far loonier than I thought he was”. Quite reasonably, one could suggest that this is the sort of teaching that other kinds of institutions do better than we do, and that students looking for this kind of knowledge can get it later on in life, as needed. But I think this is the kind of knowledge that makes the liberal arts meaningful and that would give our graduates some far better visions of what to do next in life (here I completely agree with Matthew Crawford). I think you’d be better off being working for four years as a plumber who had a wide range of interesting knowledge and training and then going to graduate school than being an underpaid and underutilized white-collar worker in a struggling think tank or community non-profit frustrated by the dysfunctions of your organization and by the drone-like quality of the work you’re assigned to do. Better off not just financially but intellectually. So yeah, I’d just as soon snatch up the equivalent of 5 tenure-track positions and put that money into a “side curriculum” of this kind.

That’s a pretty radical shift in orientation, and I don’t expect it soon (or at all). But I do think the general problem of how to make what we do seem to have tangible payoffs is a challenge that liberal arts faculty can’t afford to completely subcontract out to admissions officers and career services advisors any longer.

Posted in Academia, Swarthmore | 9 Comments

Teacher Teach Me

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Like a lot of other bloggers, I was impressed by Elizabeth Green’s article on teacher training in the most recent NY Times magazine.

Green describes some movement towards improving the process of training teachers both before and after they’re on the job. I’m somewhat convinced by the case she builds, but not entirely.

I’m still inclined to think that there’s something about highly effective teaching that can’t be taught prior to the act of teaching, that you can only discover how to teach through experience, and so prior training in teaching itself has its limits. Also, I’m still inclined to think that there’s an art to teaching that you have to discover in yourself that draws on your own distinctive store of knowledge as well as your emotional resources.

Where I think training beforehand has the most impact is with the most specific and technical kinds of pedagogical challenges in a particular subject or classroom setting. After someone starts teaching, someone who can dispassionately coach or observe you teaching is a big help (though if you’re able to listen and read between the lines, your students are sometimes coaches in this sense). A bad coach is worse than no coach at all, and as the article observes, that’s the situation more than a few student teachers find themselves in.

I like the approach of Doug Lemov’s “taxonomy” as described in Greene’s article. Lemov set out to collect as many cases of highly successful teachers and their techniques as possible and sorted through them looking for patterns or commonalities. That’s how I think about good teaching, through examples I’ve witnessed.

The problem with the taxonomy is that many of the tricks and techniques Lemov mentions only work because they don’t appear to be techniques. I could do a taxonomy of persuasion in conversation, but when you’re in a conversation and someone appears to be using a set of techniques, when their management of the conversation is transparent, those techniques stop being persuasive. Just like a magic trick stops being magic when you see how it is done. I found out the other day that something I’ve done for years in classes actually has a name as a formal technique: “jigsaw reading”. The basic gist is that you hand out different reading assignments to groups within a class and have them report back to the class as a whole. It’s a good way to ensure everyone has some more focused responsibility for the content as well as a good way to get multiple perspectives on a single issue into the discussion. I didn’t adopt that because I learned a technique: I discovered it independently as a commonsense way to handle some common pedagogical challenges. Taxonomy may help teachers hone and perfect things they’re already inclined to do, to be sure.

I’m not wild about making success on standardized tests the main benchmark of good teaching, either. I got a 5 on the Biology AP when I was in high school, but almost nothing of what my high school biology teacher taught me has stuck with me in any degree of specificity. (Some of my general knowledge of biology is so cumulative over repeated exposures from multiple sources that I may have a hard time attributing what I learned from any one source, I concede.) On the other hand, I can tell you with intense specificity where I learned some things that I continue to use daily. My senior AP English teacher led us in a reading of Invisible Man which was very directly memorable and useful. My undergraduate professor who taught Middle Eastern history was such a gifted lecturer that I can remember the specifics of many of his lectures. But I can also think of teachers who made me want to learn, or taught me how to think and communicate, where I’m not as clear about the specific granular knowledge they transferred to me. Not all good teaching has the same goals or the same character.

That’s why I liked the example of Deborah Loewenberg Ball’s 3rd grade math classroom, in which she has enough confidence to get off the lesson plan. When a student’s enthusiastic if wrong ideas about what makes a number even or odd comes up, she lets the class work up a definition of even and odd for themselves rather than efficiently squashing the diversion and hammering home the right answer by rote. Again, though, this only works if the teacher is already a confident thinker, knowledgeable about knowledge. The classic “coach who is reluctantly forced to also teach high school US history” is pretty well screwed if students want to get off the textbook’s narrow roadway, not just because he may know little beyond the textbook but also because he may not be confident about thinking about history, about why we think we know what we think we know, and how we came to know it.

I know it’s not helpful to say that the good teachers are already doing what Lemov identified and the bad teachers not only are not, but possibly cannot. The I-know-it-when-I-see-it approach to what makes for “good teaching” doesn’t help much when it comes to making public education better. I’m not sure that yet another doctrinal one-size-fits-all approach is the right alternative. Educational policy, like economic development, is a massive graveyard of orthodoxies pushed for a decade with religious fervor and abandoned unceremoniously when the next shiny distraction comes along. At some point in both cases, you’d think the sight of the bleaching bones of past doctrines and dogmas would lead to lowering the perceived stakes, a humility about limits and goals, and a healthy taste for heterodoxy. At some point.

Posted in Academia | 8 Comments

That’s So Funny I Forgot to Laugh

Posted on March 10, 2010 by Timothy Burke

In the middle of a New York Times story on corruption in the World Food Program’s aid to Somalia, there’s this gem:

“We have to tell these folks that you cannot go on like this — we know what you are doing, you can’t fool us anymore, so you better stop,” said President Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon, who was at the United Nations, where his country holds the presidency of the Security Council this month.

Ali Bongo Ondimba, you say? Son of the recently deceased Omar Bongo, one of the most fabulously corrupt heads of state on a continent famous for fabulously corrupt heads of state? The Ali Bongo Ondimba who is following in his father’s illustrious footsteps in more ways than one?

That quote from Bongo is to cynicism what a black hole is to an ordinary sun: it punches a hole straight through the fabric of ordinary cynicism into a new realm of absurdism.

There are days where I think John Bolton may have had a point about the United Nations. As an institution, its operations often don’t stand markedly apart from the character of the state regimes which compose its membership, even when its rhetorical commitments might suggest otherwise.

Posted in Africa, Good Quote, Bad Quote, Politics | Comments Off on That’s So Funny I Forgot to Laugh

Sacrificing Your Isaacs

Posted on March 9, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Sorry for the long silence. Busy couple of weeks and a stretch where I just felt impossibly fatigued.
———–

I’ve been thinking a lot about the politics of budgets, a Gordian knot if there ever was one. Whether we’re talking something as huge in scale and significance as the federal government’s budget or something as local as your own university’s budget (or maybe your family budget, in fact), there are some common obstacles to making any progress when adjustments are necessary.

The first problem is simple literacy. There’s a budget committee at Swarthmore which includes faculty. Faculty on the committee commonly point out that there isn’t really anything to be decided by the committee, that the meaningful decisions are made elsewhere. That’s true, but I’ve always seen the committee as having a primarily educative purpose anyway, to show faculty how the budgetary sausage gets made. (Not all of it: we don’t tend to see the really fine-grained budgetary information that governs daily operation of various departments and units within the college.) The basic thing you learn is that most of the budget is set by fixed costs, and making significant savings takes cutting into fixed costs somewhere.

I suspect most institutional and governmental budgets present in this fashion. Moving a program or project into long-term fixed costs is the best way to safeguard that commitment if you believe in it or you are a beneficiary of it.

On the flip side of this insight, if you’re listening to someone present as a budget hawk or an advocate of a leaner, smaller operation and they don’t talk about giving up on some significant current commitments, with a full sympathetic accounting of the consequences of that decision, ignore them. Someone who talks about making up big savings from efficiency or cutting waste is usually full of it. Yes, in the good times, institutions and governments can get careless with their budgetary commitments, and in the lean times, that generosity of spirit fades fast and reaps a certain amount of the excess that resulted. (Too bad, sometimes, because that’s often how interesting blue-sky projects get a chance to come to life when they might not otherwise.) “Waste”, however you understand it, is just never going to get a budget that has major deficits back into line.

Let’s suppose you’re a federal bureaucrat or U.S. politician genuinely concerned with fiscal responsibility. It’s hard to pursue that concern if you’re surrounded by folks whose use of budgetary rhetoric is at best illiterate about the realities of revenue and expenditure and is (more likely) thoroughly insincere, a phony justification for squashing other people’s projects and ideals. Nobody wants to go to the effort to run a tight ship in their own area of responsibility while watching other managers get a blank check, especially if profligate department heads and their political allies are just going to snatch still further from the tight-ship operator.

I suppose there’s no point in suggesting to your average Tea-Partying devotee of “small government” that they’re either playing a con on other people or having one played on them. But on the off chance that some of the people who talk about budgetary rectitude are remotely serious about it, here’s what I think the basic litmus tests for the fiscally responsible ought to be.

1. Know the consequences of the cuts you recommend, take them seriously, and plan for them. I don’t care how trivial or excessive a budget item might sound like: someone out there has planned their future around that allocation. If you subsidize the shearing of merino sheep, there are shearers and sellers and sheep-owners who inhabit the new economic niche you’ve created. That doesn’t mean that’s an obligation in perpetuity, but someone who just ridicules budgets is someone who isn’t serious about cutting them. This is one reason at the governmental level why serious budget-cutting in a recession is a very dumb thing to do.

2. Everything is notionally on the table. This does not mean that when a budget has to contract, it should contract evenly. Advocating an across-the-board freeze (effectively an even contraction) was one of John McCain’s sillier moments in the 2008 campaign. Just as some commitments warrant more money than others, and each new budget commitment has to make an independent case for its merits, you have to do the same discretionary judgment when you cut a budget. However, a budget-cutter who doesn’t put their own favorite projects and commitments on the table and rethink them backwards and forwards isn’t a serious budget-cutter. That’s where a serious budget-cutter should start: with a tough, skeptical look at the commitments they’re inclined to believe are the most important. If you’re a typical U.S. conservative looking at the federal budget, start with the military, with crime enforcement, and so on. Anyone who ever advocated military action in Iraq or Afghanistan who took little to no interest in the benefit-to-cost assessment of that action is someone who should shut the hell up about small government or fiscal responsibility now.

2a. Don’t lie to yourself or others about your own interests. Some of the most conservative Congressional districts in this country are big net recipients of governmental money. Some of the most ardent Tea Party devotees I’ve talked to are the beneficiaries of a whole range of government expenditures. (And yes, this happens on the other ideological side just as much.) This kind of disassociation gets even worse in smaller institutional settings. It’s impossible to make progress in a budgetary negotiation when one constituency’s interests are accounted in entirely selfless, idealistic terms while another constituency is painted as just protecting their own interests.

3. Don’t be stupid about revenue. Especially don’t ever make a budget where expected future revenues based on a highly theoretical projection will make or break current budgetary obligations. Especially don’t cut into current revenues before you envision budget cuts to match–and justify doing both things simultaneously.

4. The underlying logic of cost-to-benefit arguments should be made as philosophically clear and coherent as possible. It doesn’t have to be consistent across an entire institutional or governmental budget: you can have heterogenous ideas about cost-to-benefit supporting different kinds of commitments. But no player should ever get a free pass to Go to collect $200 if they aren’t able to transparently and clearly account for how they convert all resources given to them into value or benefit for the institution they’re a part of, and how that conversion takes place at the most favorable ratio possible.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 1 Comment

Rock and Hard Place

Posted on February 18, 2010 by Timothy Burke

When I was in graduate school, I had a strong reaction to Susan Harding’s ethnography of American evangelicals. Partly but not entirely for the sake of argument, I wrote a critique where I claimed that this was a case where an anthropological approach amounted to unilateral disarmament in vitally important social struggles, that accepting the framework of Harding’s scholarship made it impossible to respond oppositionally to the cultural and social political campaigns mounted by religious conservatives.

That was a salad-days argument for me: I’m much more inclined to take Harding’s approach today. But I think there’s still a complicated perspectival choice between trying to study a group of people or an institution ethnographically and engaging them as fellow citizens with whom you intensely disagree. If I set out to understand a group in their own terms, to gain an emic understanding of their rhetoric and practices, if I see the world as they see it, I achieve insight at the potential cost of having a permanently asymmetrical, insulated relationship to that group and its goals. That is, unless they take a similar interest in understanding me and my world in a similarly curious, open-minded, investigatory fashion.

There are times where I think it’s more honest and in a roundabout way more respectful to just come out with your dukes up and straightforwardly fight against initiatives or ideas from socially or ideologically distant groups that threaten your own values, no matter how much their ideas are rooted in an authentic habitus of their own. There’s a kind of equality in that struggle, an acknowledgement that you’re engaged in a fight over institutions or policies with people who have an equal right as citizens to push their beliefs.

I was thinking about this choice while reading this liveblogged account of a meeting of the Texas Board of Education. There’s one part of me that wants to think about why and how history matters to a man like Don McElroy, and to consider how he speaks for an entire constituency’s understanding of how the past and the present relate, to see things from the inside out of that perspective. There’s another part of me that reacts with white-hot anger at my perception that McElroy and his allies have contempt not just for specific historical truths that I think matter but for the entire enterprise of a reasoned, fair-minded, methodologically transparent, standards-driven investigation of the past.

There’s a muddled impulse in me to split the difference, too. If I thought I was in an honest dialogue with people unlike me, and there was some respect towards me and my world, there are points that McElroy raises that I could see as reasonable enough. No reason, for example, why high school American history shouldn’t focus on the resurgence of conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s. And so on. But I wonder what the point of conceding ground might be when some of the other insertions and demands seem so aggressively dishonest or distorted. The side of me that wants to just wage an unqualified battle against this kind of culture-war campaign despairs at the perpetual and circular quality of these debates, at the life sentence of a thousand tiny cuts that they seem to promise.

Posted in Academia, Politics | 9 Comments

One Story Is Enough

Posted on February 15, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Why aren’t individual stories good enough? This is a question that has occupied a lot of my time for the past decade.

I have a good sense of why various concentrated kinds of intellectual projects (such as social history) have so consistently pushed to typify or generalize from vividly idiosyncratic instances of a single person, institution or community. And I know that no matter how particular the case in front of us might be, we eventually have to relate it to something other than itself to make sense of it. Meaning-making is always a comparative act.

Still, there’s a common impulse to very quickly fit a local or individual narrative neatly into some larger issue, and in so doing move beyond the unsettling contradictions that any closely-examined life will inevitably reveal. So it’s been with the story of Amy Bishop, accused of killing her colleagues at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. Reading around the web today, I’ve seen numerous conversations that take in the details of the case in a quick glance and proceed from there to argue that it tells us something about gun control and gun rights, about tenure and collegiality, about the pressures on scientists to produce, about the dilemma of youthful achievers when they hit middle-age, about autism-spectrum disorders, or about gender inequality.

I honestly don’t get it. Isn’t Amy Bishop herself interesting enough, as we learn more about her background and life? For that matter, aren’t the feelings and trauma of her colleagues’ families and her institution sufficient to draw our attention and sympathy? Amy Bishop seems to me for the moment to explain primarily herself. Of all the stories she is said to stand in for or suggest, in any of them, she is pretty much the only person to have done what she did. There have been many tenure denials in the last five years, but no one has gone into a meeting and shot their colleagues but Amy Bishop. In every story she is being made to carry or exemplify, she’s the completely idiosyncratic exception.

This isn’t just about scolding the weakness of our pattern-recognizing skills in the public sphere. (Another example: whatever you think about the science of global warming, one unusual month of snow in one narrow band of North America doesn’t tell you shit about it.) I also just get depressed that we feel such a need to rush past the mysteries that confront us any time there’s a rupture in the fabric of everyday life. We spend our lives guessing about even the people we know most intimately, often having to add surprising new information or unguessed-at dimensions to that knowledge. When an event like this comes along, staging the autopsy of a stranger’s life for a nation of coroners, there should be enough to occupy our conversations and trouble our uneasy hearts in that spectacle alone.

Additional note: Margaret Soltan’s been doing a great, eloquent job making this point. I guess what interests me is that there is a tremendous resistance to this kind of riposte to the public chatter.

Elsewhere, the use of Bishop to score cheap points or soapbox continues unabated, and as it gains momentum, becomes more and more indecent. One of the latest trends is to fasten on to her supposedly radical political views, known largely through a single reported characterization by a colleague, and pronounce this case to somehow reveal something about liberal professors.

Posted in Academia, Miscellany | 6 Comments