Batman Beyond

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Going to geek out a bit here, so skip to the next entry (whenever that comes) if that’s not your kind of thing.

There’s a good short piece by Allen Varney at The Escapist about some basic story-telling problems of the character Batman: Bruce Wayne’s weirdly repressed sexuality and closet misogyny, but also the mismatch between his motivations, his capabilities and his mission. It’s not impossible to tell a good story about the character that explores some of this schtick rather than takes it for granted.

When it’s played right, for example, the Wayne character’s rejection of real emotional and sexual intimacy reminds me of Patrick McGoohan’s take on super-spy John Drake, a kind of icy intellectual Catholicism that aims for mastery of the self through denial and reserve. There are some real-world historical individuals who might serve as models, but most of the examples I can think of were also obsessive, intense and arguably unbalanced.

The same goes for the contradictions of Batman’s war on crime. Here’s a character with massive financial resources and considerable technical and intellectual knowledge whose main response to crime is to dress up in a costume and beat up street-level thugs. From time to time, creative people working with the character try to think this through a bit more thoroughly, but whether it’s Sam Hamm or Christopher Nolan, that effort arrives at the same place: the character is a bit (or more than a bit) crazy.

That’s a very precarious position to maintain for a franchise that wants the character in Happy Meals as well as in the graphic novels section of Amazon.com.

One of my consistent fascinations as a cultural historian is how a felt and intuitive knowledge of past cultural and social moments gets embedded inside of long-running or recycled cultural properties. Batman (and most other comic-book and pulp characters from the time of his original appearance) draws a lot of his basic storytelling and setting from a moment when middle-class and working-class Americans were enmeshed in a complex national encounter with crime, law enforcement, corruption and Prohibition: a helpless frustration that the state couldn’t control organized violence and illegal commerce combined with a thrill at the lurid spectacle of gangster criminality and in more than a few cases, direct participation in an illicit economy of leisure that exposed the ludicrousness of middle-class respectability. One of the commenters on the Varney article very incisively observes that the result is that the Batman character is forever trapped fighting “Italian-American gangsters in pinstripe suits and crazy circus folk”. Much as I think Spider-Man’s basic setting is more or less marked by a perpetual return to the way criminality and urban life were represented in popular media in New York during the late 1960s and 1970s.

So the real question is not, “How do you fix Batman”? You don’t. As a character, he is what he is, and he’s got more renewability and plasticity than many superheroic or pulp-fiction characters. My question is more, “When will we have a pulp character with a similarly catchy look and schtick, with a similarly generative storytelling engine, who is rooted in the national experience of early 21st criminality and corruption”?

Pulp vigilantes of the 1930s were all about countering the flamboyant spectacle of gangster criminality with equal extravagance on one hand, but also about the fantasy of an equal and opposite individual response to that criminality outside of the ponderous and frequently compromised apparatus of government law enforcement. In a way, they allowed readers to imagine an extra-historical moral position that didn’t require either feigning tight-lipped loyalty to temperance or naive trust in municipal police forces while also appreciating the allure of Dillinger or Capone.

So where is our contemporary Batman or Shadow or Doc Savage or Dick Tracy to counter Dennis Kozlowski, Kenneth Lay, or Joseph Cassano, our 21st Century Prunefaces and Jokers, a character born not from the trauma of a street crime mugging but of a family or town destroyed by unaccountable individuals and institutions? It’s time for a new cycle of mythmaking even as we continue to enjoy the recycling of old ones.

Posted in Popular Culture | 12 Comments

All the Information You Need

Posted on February 2, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I’ve said many times before that I’m sympathetic to families and applicants who find it difficult to get the information they really need to make a decision about where to go to college. At the same time, I’ve suggested that one of the limits on that information is that some of it is experiential: the comparison I once made was to buying a house. There’s only so much you can know before you live in a house or attend a college.

That said, there are some red flags which, if sighted, should end any doubt right there and then. Say, for example, this story about Edward Waters College in Florida, [via IHE] which has forced employees to sign a confidentiality policy which classifies all campus issues and materials as confidential. This blog, for example, would be impossible if I were a faculty member there. The way I read the policy, I’d be unable to talk about my institution at conferences or meetings without explicit clearance. I wouldn’t be able to talk about the content of my classes or how I thought about the pedagogical challenges of my work.

If you were looking at that college, I don’t think you could get a clearer warning that this was an institution with something to hide, something it doesn’t want a prospective student or student’s family to know. But perhaps even more importantly, you’d be looking at an institution that had essentially seceded from academia as a whole, that wasn’t really doing what it claimed to be doing. Sending a student there would be like placing an order with a factory that no longer actually made the product you were buying.

It also happens to be an HBCU with a recent history of financial mismanagement and plagiarism and a strong religious affiliation (the AME in this case), and a graduation rate under 20% from what I can tell. That’s important information, too, but you almost wouldn’t need to bother with that data once you found the confidentiality policy, because the existence of a strong confidentiality policy of this kind is a good predictor of other issues.

Higher ed administrators who want freedom from accountability sometimes run through a series of calculations: that they’re too small or marginal for anyone to care, that they labor under special constraints and deserve special consideration, or in this case, if you’re not black and an AME member, why do you have an opinion anyway, it’s none of your business.

As long as any college or university wants accreditation that verifies that its graduates have completed a program of study that meets some minimal standard, it is the business of every other academic. As long as any college or university wants to claim to be a part of a common cultural and social system of higher education, it’s everybody’s business. When you turn your back on the free flow of knowledge and information, you’re not an academic institution any longer. It doesn’t matter who your students are, or the constraints you’re operating under.

Posted in Academia | 1 Comment

Is Our Students Learning?

Posted on February 1, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse calls attention to the curious statement by James O’Keefe, he of Mary Landrieu’s phones and ACORN-pimping infamy, about why he chose to become a conservative while a philosophy major at Rutgers University: his fellow students, influenced by the liberal professoriate, were “drowned in relativism, concepts of distributive justice and redistribution of wealth.”

Harry is concerned about O’Keefe’s mischaracterization of the intellectual alignment of scholarly philosophy. I’m concerned about something else. Let’s assume this was a much looser sense of “relativism”, one that I often see coming from cultural conservatives: an argument that liberal, secular culture doesn’t have any firm or fixed moral commitments, doesn’t believe in ethical commitments which transcend circumstance. Leave aside whether that’s true or not or even whether there’s a good case to be made that some ethical commitments should resist “relativism” in this sense.

My question is this: if that’s what O’Keefe (or similarly minded cultural conservatives) believes, why isn’t his first political calling to demonstrate non-relativistic ethical commitments? Such as, for example, scrupulous regard for intellectually rigorous processes of research and investigation. Honesty and transparency seem like good things to add to the list. Generally obeying the laws of a democratic society seems like it might be a non-relativistic ethical commitment.

So in that spirit, let’s suppose you have the non-relativistic ethics that your liberal peers scorn and you hear that a United States Senator reputedly is ignoring constituent feedback received by telephone about health care. You think this is a problem and should be looked into. Do you:

1) Investigate whether offices of Senators and Representatives typically take large amounts of telephone input from constituents about pending legislation, and what variations there are in practices from office to office?
2) Investigate the overall quality of constituent services in Congress, so you have a good sense of what the baseline expectation is?
3) Ask direct questions of Senator Mary Landrieu’s staffers, her colleagues in the Senate and any other sources in order to try and determine whether her office’s responses are notably divergent from general trends?

Or:

1) Dress up as telephone repairmen and otherwise falsely represent yourselves in an attempt to infiltrate her office in violation of federal law with an as-yet unclear understanding of how this would provide better non-relativist information about the above questions?

That’s what I worry about when I hear that there are too many “relativists” around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments

Puzzlement

Posted on January 28, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I don’t get the iPad, except as a Kindle and Nook killer. It doesn’t seem to me to offer more than a netbook or other tablets. Arguably it offers less, in a more closed and proprietary environment that has some back-end costs to it.

The iPhone felt to me like a hugely different product from its cellphone competitors. If you just compare it to the Kindle, I suppose the iPad is quite different. But the Kindle doesn’t pretend to be an almost-computer, and it doesn’t cost what an almost-computer would.

Now if Apple had concentrated instead on getting the cost of ebooks to where it ought to be, given the vastly lower overhead involved in producing them, that would be different. That was the trick of iTunes that made the iPod significantly different from its competitors at the time that it launched: it got the digital music market right. (Though with some nasty DRM embedded inside of that solution.) I don’t see that here with this product. The pricing and availability of ebooks seems a bit better than with the Kindle, but not dramatically so.

Maybe design aesthetics and reputation will win out again. But about the only thing I can see coming out of this rollout is that other ebook readers are in big trouble.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy | 8 Comments

Customer Dissatisfaction

Posted on January 27, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I made a few comments on a thread at Inside Higher Education concerning UCLA’s recent decision to stop the streaming of video materials for classes behind password-protected course management systems, in response to pressure from the Association for Information and Media Equipment.

The comments thread ended up touching on some broader perennial issues on copyright, fair use and academic publishing which I’ve frequently discussed at this blog, and probably will discuss again. Let me focus here on the particular question of the classroom use of video material and a simple but powerful response that I think academics in general could and should offer to AIME and its clients.

Once upon a time, if you asked your library to acquire audio-visual material, you generally assumed that you would need to schedule a time for all members of the class to watch that video. That was what the technology afforded. This was far from ideal compared to assigned reading. You didn’t have to manage the schedule of all members of a class to ensure that reading took place before a class session. You assigned it, students did it at their convenience. Coordinating a film showing in contrast was a serious pain in the ass. This tended to cap the numbers of faculty willing to make heavy use of such materials in their courses.

Coupled to that, the relative price of films and the technology necessary to show them was up until relatively recently was very high compared to most print materials.

This began to shift somewhat as viewing technology became cheaper and more ubiquitious. Now you could reasonably assign students to view a film at their own convenience. On the other hand, there was still a bottleneck compared to a reading assignment. If asked 35 students to view a film within a two-day interval and made no further efforts to coordinate showings, I almost guaranteed that some would not be able to do the assignment. This was equally true, however, when assigned readings were based on a limited number of copies kept in binders on library reserve.

Being able to make short fair-use selections of larger texts available digitally changes the game for reading, and the same would be true for film which is streamed to a course member’s individual computer at their convenience. (I should add that we don’t do that here at Swarthmore at the moment.) This is, in short, a simple case of technological progress, of a new technology responsively solving a long-standing problem and improving the basic infrastructure of teaching. It lets us teach from a wider range of material in a more effective way, to accommodate the real schedules and needs of our students.

So along comes AIME, acting on behalf of its clients, and says, “If you want to do things that way, you need to pay us more, and pay us in a format where we may at some later date unilaterally revoke or change the terms of end-user licenses whose terms have never really been legally tested.”

Let’s leave aside all the endless quarrelling over what fair use is or is not under current law, or even what it should be. Let’s also leave aside mainstream commercial film and video distributors, who aren’t especially dependent upon the educational marketplace. (Though with DVD sales declining rapidly, maybe even they can’t afford to scorn any significant customer base.) Let’s just talk about most of the companies who are AIME’s clients. Bullfrog. PBS Video. California Newsreel. Various other educational video producers.

Educational institutions are their customer base. Period. So here’s a simple response that is easily within the collective reach of educators: don’t buy the products of media companies that will not affordably accommodate a major technological innovation which substantially enhances our classrooms. No, we won’t pay a crazy-high institutional use fee that doesn’t even permanently resolve the question of future uses of that material on future technological platforms. Sell us material at the reasonable price you sell to individual users and allow us to use it to teach with.

If that puts you out of business, too bad for you, media producers. Because here’s what I think faculty need to remember. In most courses and most subjects, you don’t need film. Yes, you ought to have it, it’s important to have it, it’s useful to have it, but you can do without. So if the producers won’t accommodate the financial situation of our institutions and won’t accommodate the enabling technologies of our classrooms, bid them farewell. Someone else will eventually figure out how to make and distribute visual work which does make those accommodations.

Don’t leave this to the lawyers and the administrators. These are issues where faculty and librarians can decisively resolve matters the simple way any customer can. Where the product is sold to you under highly unfavorable terms, don’t buy.

I might add that there’s an additional step that would help even more: at least some producers of educational video also depend on academics as unpaid or low-compensated creators of content. Don’t participate in that fashion in making materials which will not be made available to other educators on favorable terms.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property | 7 Comments

Hearts and Minds

Posted on January 25, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I can always work my way through an issue intellectually in a fashion that dissipates or checks my quick, easily manipulable gut feelings about the political news.

Take the Citizens United decision. My quick emotional reaction was, “Well, that’s it, then, that puts a stamp of approval on the inexorable decline of the United States and its experiment in democracy.”

The push-back from my brain:

1) Come on, what past era of American democracy are you thinking of? The entire second half of the 19th Century, when national, state and local politics wallowed in flamboyant corruption that would make the worst corporate whore today green with envy? Huey P. Long? Lyndon Johnson, when he was in Congress? Nixon?

2) Come on, didn’t the Supremes merely confirm what we already know, which is that all existing efforts at statutory restraint of corporate and special-interest influence have failed utterly, that most U.S. politicians are already in some pocket or another, that the whole system long since drowned in a riot of competitive interests buying favors?

3) Sometimes the interests of particular groups or institutions serves a larger public, if often by accident. Important and useful past public initiatives have been backed by groups and businesses who stood to make a buck. Nothing worthy happens because of a high-minded altruism that’s above any self-interest.

But somehow my heart isn’t responding to that push-back this time. Some people have gotten very angry. I’m more in the class of people who feel completely despondent about the political and social events of the last few months. It just feels to me as if there are many things which could happen which would improve the lives of many Americans which are not going to happen and perhaps cannot happen.

——

Take health care, for example. I can read and parse and think about the proposed legislation that actually exists and see it without hyperbole, as an okay if scattered series of modest initiatives. Whatever. I think I have a fairly good handle on the underlying cultural and social infrastructure of the debate over health care. Like many of the “controversies” of our moment, it is both less and more than it appears, and in either case, pretty well intractable and hopeless for anyone who isn’t jumping into the fray as an enthusiastic combatant. Also whatever. I can Monday-morning quarterback as well as any other chattering-class person and complain about the uninspired tactical blundering of Democratic leaders and the obstructionism, untainted by consistent principled objections, of Republicans. But again: whatever.

When I think of my own health care and slip the leash of my intellectualizing, some different thoughts come to mind. I have a decent HMO plan. I’m guaranteed to have it while I have my job, at least until or unless I’m not guaranteed to have it because the provider unilaterally renegotiates the terms of its deal with workplaces that it sells plans to. My job is as secure as you could hope for in early 21st Century America. I’m not rich, I’m comfortable. If I need medicine or surgery, I’m not likely to go broke. If I develop a pre-existing condition, my continued coverage is guaranteed by my employer.

On the other hand, remember those commercials back during the Clinton Administration, “Harry and Louise”? Remember all the horrible things they said would happen if we changed our system? They mostly did happen. Here I’m not talking the grand scale, I’m talking my own intimate experience of health care.

When I first started working at Swarthmore, I had a PPO plan called Personal Choice. It was a great health care plan. I had to stay inside the network for non-emergency services, but I could make appointments myself, no referrals necessary. It paid for preventive medicine as well as other medical services. Doctors were compensated at a slightly higher rate for PPO patients and so I felt that when I did show up, I was treated with some degree of respect.

That plan got priced out of reach because the people who had it tended to actually get medical treatment more than people with the HMO tier. Which made it clear that the HMO tier is designed to discourage usage of medical services. Which for me at least it does. Now when I see my regular doctor, I get a very strong feeling that I’m on the clock. She has ten minutes, no more, for me. I get a very strong feeling that the pressures on her and the overall network also lead her to push me towards tests and drugs, partly to get me out of her office and partly to bump up fees or build relationships with pharmaceutical companies. I don’t feel I can make the same choices about specialists, and the referral procedure feels like a barrier. I get a sense that people who know nothing about me, and perhaps nothing about medicine, are making the choices that really count behind the scenes about my own treatments, and about the entirety of the services to which I have access.

Like a lot of middle-aged men, my own health is a subject about which I feel unreasonably fragile. My heels hurt from what I assume is tendonitis. I don’t know that there’s any point in seeing anyone about that, so I haven’t. I have an odd sporadic pain on my left side that when I mentioned it the first time, led to a bunch of seemingly pointless tests and a brusque encounter with a senior doctor at the local hospital who used me as a testing dummy for two interns (to show how to check for hernia) but didn’t answer my questions. I should get a colonoscopy, but I hated the man who did my last one and I don’t know how to find someone else. I’ve had several horrible experiences with dentists and so I haven’t seen one for four years. I don’t feel that there is any doctor I can even imagine who might have a sense of my overall health picture: everything about my experience of medical care is now fragmented.

A lot of this situation is my problem. It’s where I’m at, how I feel, it’s not the fault of the system. Other people around me with the same coverage either ask more aggressively for the services they want or take care of their own health more forthrightly. But some of the issue here for me is an issue of trust. I need to be able to trust what a doctor says to me, to trust that there will be an appropriate match between solution and problem. I don’t feel that I can, and I don’t feel I’m alone in that.

When I widen my awareness to friends and family in a variety of professional and life circumstances, the discomfort and uncertainty I feel about my relationship to a vast, complex health care system gains some additional elements. I have friends who have gone without coverage for significant portions of their life, living in fear about what might happen. I know people who cling to terrible jobs just to retain their health care. People who have thought they had coverage for something only to find that someone changed the rules on them and now they don’t. And yes, I’ve know people who have found fabulous doctors and surgeons and dentists and hospitals that they trust. I really like my daughter’s pediatricians, for example. (We needed to go to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia recently to have her seen about what turned to be a minor matter. I felt like a medieval serf who had only been to the local straw-thatched church before but was suddenly walking into Notre Dame.)

Some of what bothers me isn’t the structure of the system, it’s the culture of contemporary medicine, about how doctors are trained. I recoil intensely from all medical service each time I have an encounter with a brusque, unpleasant, hostile or incompetent medical professional. Being infantilized or treated like an assembly-line product is like nails on a blackboard for me.

Some of it is structural. Am I paranoid to wonder about whether a drug is being prescribed to me because I need it? To wonder if I really do need to lie in an MRI? To wonder which procedures I need and which I don’t? To wonder if my doctor actually is listening to me or is just finding the quickest way to diagnose and shove me out the door? Before I ever investigate the medical system with my mind, my heart senses that the incentive structure of the whole thing is wildly out of whack, that it’s not doing right by me, a person with adequate coverage, and even less so by almost everyone else. When I have to get a blood test in the local outpatient clinic, I’m sitting glumly with worried families who’ve had to come to the emergency room for basic medical care, whose encounters with the system are far more fragmented and anxiety-ridden than my worst nightmare.

What my heart senses is that it doesn’t have to be that way. I know what it costs my employer, because I’ve gotten a good look at the budget over a series of years: the costs have skyrocketed while the quality and form of the service product bought for that money has fallen. I know that my doctor and most doctors don’t like it any more than I do. That maybe even the insurers don’t like it.

But here we are, all helpless. All talking about the wrong things. All strangling in the poison of scoring points against each other in a game that long since stopped being real, that then became farce, and is now just a sick joke. My head isn’t involved: I’m not going to whip out a better ten-point policy plan or even pretend to care to have undying passion for single-payer or this plan or that initiative, to judiciously stroke my chin and puff my pipe while I commend the approach of Sweden or Singapore or Massachusetts.

It all feels wrong, not just health care but so much else. And I think I give up now any hope that it can become right in anything like a well-ordered, incremental process where the participants just want to do the right thing. What it is, it is.

Posted in Politics | 10 Comments

Hester Prynne, Schmester Prynne, or Sarah Palin’s Ressentiment Clubhouse

Posted on January 19, 2010 by Timothy Burke

A friend of mine recently remarked that her 16-year old was frustrated by having to read The Scarlet Letter and other works of classic literature being pushed at him in his high school English class. She’s helping him stick to it, observing that since he wants to go to a good college, he’s just going to have to do it.

———

Many of you have seen the moment in Glenn Beck’s interview with Sarah Palin where she struggles to name any of the Founding Fathers. Like many other teachers (or former students) I recognize the initial bullshitting in that video clip (“I like all of them!”) for a stalling tactic and as a revelation of an underlying ignorance.

What more than a few commenters still don’t seem to understand about that moment, however, is why it endears Sarah Palin to many viewers, and maybe even rouses some sympathy in people who otherwise reject her.

There are a lot of Americans who themselves wonder why they need to know who the Founding Fathers were, or why The Scarlet Letter matters.

The ramrod forms of authority that simply replied “Because I said so” and had the power to enforce that authority have dissipated, stabbed to death by a thousand tiny cuts from Animal House to Paolo Friere. Good riddance. The problem is, however, that educators haven’t arrived at a substitute rationale that’s both persuasive and pervasive.

So the substance of older educational regimes still shambles its undead way through K-12 schooling across the country, sometimes joined by newer projects and content which is equally shorn of a persuasive justification. So maybe a kid has to learn the Founding Fathers and learn about Sacagawea, but it’s not as if the latter knowledge speaks for its own importance more than the former.

So later on a lot of Americans get along perfectly well in life having forgotten all of what they had droned at them until age 18, or if they went to college, probably most of what they had droned at them until age 21.

If they get reminded of what they’ve forgotten, it’s probably because some asshole who remembers it all chooses to rub their nose in what they don’t know. Or–and here’s where the really key issue comes in–because they come up against a chalkboard ceiling in their working lives, where a promotion or other advancement is tied first to some educational credential but more crucially to the possession of cultural capital. To take the next step, to aspire, they suddenly need to know all those things, to have that set of references, but not because that knowledge is immediately functional to the job or skill. Or so it might seem from the perspective of ressentiment precisely because of the lack of a persuasive logic for why any of that knowledge matters.

That’s a picture straight out of Bourdieu, I know, and I don’t mean to remain that reductive about this issue. But that’s where we have to start in untangling this whole repeated moment in American public life (and it’s stunning to me that so many thinkers on the left seem to need a reminder about this reference point).

So as it stands, the kids who read Hawthorne or study American history with something more than the attitude of a convict breaking rocks in the penal yard are kids who either embrace the need to preserve or acquire cultural capital or the even rarer kid who honestly develops a passion for the substance of literature or history or philosophy.

(I’m leaving out the sciences and mathematics here because I think they’re far more effective at making a socially persuasive case for their utility, if not for their higher philosophical value.)

If a family already has cultural capital and uses it, the only kids who really fight off jumping through the hoops are those determined to leave the social world of their upbringing. If a teenager has a fierce determination to be socially mobile, they’ll often see that acquiring cultural capital is part of that–and they may understand early on the kind of alienation that’s going to produce between themselves and their families. (For some, that might be the attraction).

For the kid who grudgingly accepts the need to maintain social standing by doing the required work, we typically do little to help that go beyond obligation. And so when someone says (even indirectly and dishonestly, as Palin does), “Why the hell should I have to know any of that shit?”, a small secret thrill of agreement springs to life. For the kid who accepts the need to do the same in order to climb the social ladder, much the same feeling may arise.

———

So what should we be saying to my friend’s son that helps him consent enthusiastically to reading Hawthorne, that brings him on board as a willing participant?

This is one place where conservative humanists simply fall flat on their faces, unable to tear themselves away from constant petty whining about the Multiculti. What’s their persuasive vision of why classic works of literature or the core historical narratives matter? The best you’ll get from most of those critics is that a tightly prescribed canon is necessary for building a unified national identity. Leaving aside the underlying creepiness of that proposition for the moment, there’s certainly nothing persuasive about it for a 16-year old. “Read The Scarlet Letter so you can be a REAL AMERICAN, kid!” Yeah, that’ll do it. The only way to make this hook persuasive is to reacquire the harsh and unquestioned authority of official institutions of some largely imaginary yesteryear, and that’s not going to happen, nor should it.

Now, this is the rhetoric that Glenn Beck and other pundit-populists sling about the Founding Fathers and so on, and it was amusing to see the slight incredulity on Beck’s face when confronted with Palin’s stalling. He shouldn’t be surprised, though, because even for him, the Founders are totemic figures. What they actually said, the actuality of their times, the complexity of their thinking and action, is pretty much unimportant to him and many like him. In this sense, some of “classic” canon functions as an alternative form of cultural capital: where I say Mandela, you say John Adams, and so on. That approach merely mirrors the defects of mainstream elite approaches to cultural knowledge. At the Long Island cocktail party for middle managers, maybe you need to name-drop The Scarlet Letter when someone mentions how the mob is hounding investment bankers. At the Tea Party protest, you name-drop it when someone complains that their kid had to read Invisible Man in high school. In either case, the content of the novel doesn’t matter, it’s just a sign that you know the secret handshakes and belong in the clubhouse.

There are humanists who you might broadly call “conservative” who do a compelling job being persuasive about the generalized value of the real content of literature and history. Harold Bloom on Shakespeare, for example. And there are humanists who do the same in arguing for the generalized social value of multicultural or anti-canonical works and knowledge. I have some very strong criticisms of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, but it’s a good example of a work which takes seriously the need to persuade general readers of the importance of the knowledge it contains, rather than just resting on a sense of cultural obligation to know it.

So this would be the first way to undertake persuading a 16-year old to read The Scarlet Letter: to make a case for why it’s brilliant and important and exciting. There are those teachers in K-12 and higher education who succeed year after year after year in doing just that. But I think most of us would concede that they’re a very small minority and that most of what makes them persuasive is unique to them as individuals.

Could we generalize passion for literature or history in a way that would persuade more Americans to more consistently value their content? Train teachers to be passionate? I think so, but that has to start by picking the right foundation to stand upon. One of the reasons it’s hard to find a high school teacher who really catalyzes students to love The Scarlet Letter is that The Scarlet Letter is mostly unloveable to contemporary teenagers. Or maybe anybody. I re-read it a while back and while I totally concede its importance to American literary history, I would never read it again unless forced to. The language is remote and icy by contemporary standards, and most of the underlying situation of the characters equally so.

We throw a lot of classic works at kids that require a forty-year old’s emotional and intellectual experience to really click. Or we throw works and knowledge at them whose potency is only clearly visible in contextual relation to many other works. In a lot of cases, we do this because of the structural weight of past curricula, as a kind of cross-generational hazing. You’ll have to read Heart of Darkness, kid, because I had to.

The alternative is not work or material solely picked for its relevance and contemporaneity. We don’t have to throw Catcher in the Rye overboard so that we can teach Twilight. (Though to be honest, I actually think those two examples are a lot closer in character than some might think.) It does take asking with an open mind and few prior assumptions why a particular work or historical era might be powerful or important or resonant to a broad range of people.

Distributing a passion for the content of literary and historical knowledge will take a much smarter selection of material than present convention allows. Getting there would require both left and right to disarm in the culture wars to a very significant extent, because neither of their vested projects tends to invest a lot of effort in closely reading texts for how compelling, exciting, or engaging they are, for teachability in this sense.

This is also a commitment that requires standing down from mandatory examinations to a very significant extent. “Teaching to the test” is the antithesis of persuading students right here and right now that a work of literature matters or that a particular historical era matters. There are people who can overcome that circuit break, but not many.

———-

The other approach we could take to convincing my friend’s 16-year old is practicality, about arguing that cultural and social literacy is a tool that has genuine value in many kinds of work, that we don’t look for it just to keep the clubhouse door closed to the unwashed, but because it matters.

Contra The History Boys, I don’t think this approach is antagonistic to arguing for the human and personal value of humanistic knowledge, but neither is it the same as that argument. I tell students that I think studying African history can help anyone grapple with important and difficult questions about human experience, that there is a passionate encounter with meaning at the heart of that knowledge. But I’d also argue that you can learn about phenomena and systems that will give you a comparative insight, that you can generalize, and that this knowledge will have practical payoffs that I can’t anticipate or foresee but that I’m confident will exist.

I think many people, even Sarah Palin’s devotees, might concede under pressure that having a President who has a strong baseline knowledge about the world, about American history, about economics, and so on, is a good thing. Not because we necessarily want an executive who is himself or herself a policy wonk, but because it lets that executive make more judicious choices about what policies to approve or reject. Many of the worst policy disasters under Bush the Lesser can demonstrably be traced back to the bedrock fact that he was easy for his courtiers to manipulate because he didn’t have an independent knowledge of his own on many issues, just a kind of personal appraisal of his staff that appeared to mostly revolve around obsequious loyalty.

Making the case that humanistic knowledge pays off in a more generalized way is a bit harder. One way to begin to make that argument is not to upbraid publics for their ignorance but to appreciate what people already know and why they know it. That’s one of the underlying propositions in my Production of History course, which comes from insights I learned from my graduate advisor. There’s a lot of embedded knowledge already out there about history and culture. Much of it retreats when people feel they’re being interrogated or judged for what they don’t know.

There are some professions where the practical value of humanistic knowledge is obvious. You don’t have to convince an advertiser or a scriptwriter or a social worker that knowing something about culture, history and society has a payoff. (Though knowing too much is equally clearly a problem: that’s a subject for a separate column.)

The harder job is explaining to sales representative or fast food manager or civil engineer why humanistic knowledge is useful. Mostly that’s harder because of existing pedagogy, not because it’s an intrinsically difficult argument. Many of us (K-12 and higher education) don’t teach to utility either because we philosophically reject the appeal to utility as vulgar and reductive or because we’re struggling to work from a dog’s breakfast of administrative mandates and ed-school jargon about the usefulness of humanistic knowledge.

Cultural and historical literacy enriches your rhetorical and interpersonal skills. It helps you imagine other people, which is the key to so very much in life: to love well, to raise children well, to live in community well, to self-develop, to choose when and how to fight for yourself and your beliefs.

I’ve been in a lot of houses where Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer” is kept around somewhere. The knowledge at the core of that prayer is fundamentally a knowledge of history, social structure and cultural contingency. What cannot be changed, what can be, and the difference. It’s not hard to convince people that the terms of the prayer are at the heart of being a successful person in work and in private life. It shouldn’t be that hard to convince them that knowing more about history and culture and philosophy help. But we can’t convince others unless we consciously teach to those terms, without trying to control or dictate the end results of how our students will work out that equation in life and work.

Posted in Academia, Politics, Production of History | 9 Comments

The Conspiracy to Destroy Conspiracy

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Timothy Burke

A friend of mine once asked me why I so disliked the use of George Lakoff’s concepts of “frames” by political operatives, after reading me complain here about those ideas several times. After all, my friend argued, there’s some truth to the idea, political outcomes are in fact decided by the rhetorical and conceptual shorthand that comes to dominate public discourse: say, in the difference between considering something warfare versus seeing it as law enforcement, or in terms like anti-abortion, pro-life, pro-choice.

Yes, there’s some empirical truth to the concept, that how we commonly speak about political and social problems leads to the privileging of certain kinds of actions. The problem with how political elites use Lakoff, however, is that they assume that the association between a frame and the real embedded knowledge of people about their world is arbitrary and infinitely mobile, that all you have to do is find the right key to unlock hearts and minds. It’s a way of thinking that had a much more sophisticated double or echo in Stuart Hall’s meditations about Gramscian thought back in the Thatcher era. Hall was upbraiding his colleagues on the left for thinking that their major challenge was to mobilize the appropriate social formations, that Thatcher’s public rhetoric had no relationship to her political power. Instead, he argued, they needed to take that rhetoric very seriously, because it was an important source of her political success. That was an important point, but Hall didn’t quite take it far enough, in that he never fully thought through why Thatcherite ideas were popular even among social groups that the British left hoped to mobilize.

What I’ve written about here before is what happens when political organizers and experts of all ideological predispositions believe that they’re engaged in “rehanging frames” is that they fall quickly into a self-destructive elitism, a cack-handed vanguardism. They come to believe that they somehow have an x-ray vision understanding of the rhetorical landscape which the general public does not have, they separate the world into knowing magicians and dumbfounded marks. Even when a political elite has a pretty good ear for how things play in Peoria, once an aspirant frame-mover sets himself outside of the lived world of various publics, it’s only a matter of time before they misfire completely in word or deed. It’s the domestic equivalent of expecting Iraqis to throw flowers at occupying troops.

I mention this discussion because of a Glenn Greenwald column about some writing by Cass Sunstein, in which he calls for a consensus-politics liberal-leaning version of COINTELPRO, more or less. Rather than restate Greenwald at length, just go read his critique. Read it because for one, the bone-headedness of the position paper by Sunstein that Greenwald discusses is breath-taking. Forget the obvious and legitimate slippery-slope arguments for a moment. Purely in terms of the argument of the paper, it’s impossible to conceive of a “solution” more guaranteed to actually aggravate or even just create the problem that it defines.

If it was just a dumb argument, that would be one thing. But it’s not: I think it’s emblematic of what has happened to the political elite on both sides of the aisle. Whatever happens in elections, most of them feel like they can’t lose. Certain prizes change hands, sure, but the circuit of their power and influence remains largely unbroken. They know that even if a candidate comes into office seemingly riding a wave of insurgent sentiment, they’re going to have to fill out the ranks of government with experts of one ideology or another. Where else are you going to go? And if you try seriously to reach outside the usual suspects, the usual suspects are going to find ways to fuck with your authority. Because if there’s one thing the policy and bureaucratic establishment (right and left) is good at, it’s sandbagging and subverting policy directions they don’t like or don’t endorse.

Sunstein’s paper exemplifies what I was writing about last week, about the inauthenticity of political and social life at the moment. As I said then, it’s not just Sunstein’s problem. Far too much public conversation is driven by a similar conceit, a belief that you can move obstacles to your favored goals by pushing constantly at them with half-truths and manipulations. But Sunstein in this essay is a poster child for just how deep in the tank much of the Beltway elite has gone–and how they’re dragging any hope of meaningful social change down into the pit with them.

Posted in Politics | Comments Off on The Conspiracy to Destroy Conspiracy

Whose Dime?

Posted on January 15, 2010 by Timothy Burke

I meant to talk about this compelling post by Brian Croxall back when I first read it via 11d. Croxall has a lot of interesting things to say about the problems of academic labor but I want to focus on one particular point he raises: the cost of attending professional association meetings for job candidates.

I think the cost of membership and attendance is high no matter what your circumstances are, though I’d agree that the American Historical Association and the Modern Literature Association have worked fairly hard to return some kind of value to their members in various ways, which isn’t always the case with these kinds of groups.

But Croxall is quite right about the specific problem that confronts job seekers. Even if you don’t have screening interviews, if you’re hoping to keep your name and work in circulation, you often feel an obligation to be at the annual meeting. Set against that, though, is the expense of attendance, which is especially brutal to adjuncts or junior faculty in low-paid contract positions. But they’re the people who can’t afford to pass it up, either, especially if they’ve got some interviews.

So Croxall says that the profession as a whole needs to find a better way to do this. I’m inclined to agree, but I have to say that I’m stumped when it comes down to workable alternatives. So let’s look at the problem a bit.

The interviews at the heart of the issue take two forms. First, there’s the “screening interview” that wealthier institutions often undertake when filling a tenure-track or long-term contract post. Typically, these are with the candidates who had the top 8-10 dossiers that a search committee selected. The goal in this case is to identify a smaller number of candidates to bring for a full on-campus interview, typically three.

Second, there are institutions that are conducting their one and only interview for a vacant post of some kind: a contract or visiting position, a leave replacement, or even a tenure-track post, with no plan to have a follow-up on-campus process.

The first kind of interview is often done (and is sometimes required by association rules to be done) in a hotel suite. The second kind is often done in a large room at the conference site that has partitions drawn between different teams of interviewers. If you’re being interviewed, neither experience is a comforting or relaxing one, but I found the big-room cattle-call especially depressing when I was on the market. Benches full of awkward, anxious candidates being called in, conversations surrounded by a sussurus of other interviews going on all around you, a sense of wam-bam next please about the whole thing.

Both sorts of interviewers have a strong motivation to seeing candidates face-to-face before making further decisions. Candidates often surprise their interviewers, in both directions: some seem far less impressive than their dossiers, others seem more so.

The reason both kinds of interviews take place at the national meeting of a professional association comes down to money. Essentially, the interviewers are deferring the cost of a face-to-face evaluation of candidates onto the candidates themselves. The interviewers still incur some costs, typically paying the travel expenses of their own faculty and some kind of rental fee for the interview space. But they don’t have to deal with the expenses of the candidates.

So what are the alternatives?

First, what about screening interviews for tenure-track or long-term contract positions?

1) Just skip them altogether: go straight from dossiers to three finalists and bring them to campus.
2) Conduct screening interviews by phone or video conferencing system.
3) Expand the pool of people for a campus interview to five or more.
4) Pay some or all of the travel expenses incurred by candidates at the national meeting, while perhaps the professional association could waive or drastically reduce costs of registration for attendees who are there to be interviewed.

1 and 2 are not likely to benefit the pool of job-seekers generally. Smaller numbers of finalists means that fewer people will get an opportunity to persuade an institution to give them a look. In my own experience, I’ve often seen the committee’s opinion shift to formerly underappreciated candidates during screening interviews. It’s pretty hard to evaluate how a potential professor might be in the classroom or explaining research just from a curriculum vitae.

Phone or videoconferencing interviews are generally pretty awkward affairs that undersell or diminish the actual skills of job-seekers.

3 and 4 seem like they’d be much more expensive for the interviewing institutions. In this budgetary environment, I doubt that would fly. Also, in practice, I suspect this would put strong pressure on the size of interviewee pools, which again probably doesn’t work to the advantage of the entire field of job-seekers, just for the people who are most impressive on paper.

However, I wonder a bit about whether option 3 costs out close to the expense of paying for three to four faculty members to fly to the association meeting and renting a hotel suite. It would depend on a lot of variables: how expensive is it to fly candidates to where the hiring institution is, how expensive is it to accommodate them there, versus the cost of the association meeting. But there’s also a question of the time and effort involved: I frankly quake at the idea of five or six full-day on-campus interviews followed by dinner with the candidate, and the logistical labor involved in coordinating all of those is a cost in and of itself.

With option 4, there’s a half-way point possible. I think professional associations should completely waive the fees for attendance for anyone who is a confirmed interviewee at that meeting, first off. Second, institutions which are wealthy enough to pick up faculty costs of travel and rent a hotel suite should be willing to defray some of the costs of candidates coming for a screening interview: half the cost of airfare or some portion of hotel accomodations.

How about institutions which use the professional associations to hire a candidate on the spot rather than select a group of finalists? What alternatives do they have? Again, phone or videoconferencing is one possibility.

Another is to simply insist that they bring candidates to campus, but there are many, many institutions of higher education that simply can’t afford to do that on a regular basis. If that was the standard, then in practice they’d no longer draw from a national pool of candidates and stick strictly to a local pool instead.

Other ideas?

Posted in Academia | 16 Comments

Everybody Out of the Pool

Posted on January 14, 2010 by Timothy Burke

Modest proposal: not just Google, but every single multinational company offering online products and services should get out of China. Not as an embargo designed to force improvements in human rights, but out of self-interest. Why operate in a country that is determined to interfere with the core operations of your business, engage in nationally-sponsored industrial espionage directed at your most sensitive internal operations, impede the development of your market, and is just using your company until it can manage to wrangle some technology transfer to pseudo-parastatal dopplegangers?

Manufacture there if it makes sense. But don’t bother trying to sell products and services.

Microsoft, out. Yahoo, out. Blizzard, out. Everybody. You’re all being played for chumps. Now, if that move coincidentally happened to help a push for political liberalization, that’s a silver lining.

Posted in Information Technology and Information Literacy, Intellectual Property, Politics | 3 Comments