Category Archives: in the news

Your Sunday Rage

Posted on by under in the news, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

Decaying middle-class incomes? Fewer and fewer jobs that pay a decent wage for hard work? Higher and higher health-insurance premiums? (Or maybe your job just disappeared altogether, along with that great HMO coverage.) Sure does suck to be you, American worker, even if you toil in a sector that is supposedly run by good-hearted Prius owners.

But hey, at least you can admire the gated communities going up on the edge of town, browse Stanford’s website (they’ll even let you take an online course), maybe cruise the Whole Foods parking lot and try to guess which shoppers buy what percentage of their grocery list there, knowing that at least a few of your betters are doing just dandy.

Here comes the LA Times to cheer you up some more. From a Sunday feature story with a somewhat euphemistic title, “The Tougher Workplace”:

Employers once wanted long-term relationships with their workers. At many companies, that’s no longer the case. Businesses are asking employees to work harder without providing the kinds of rewards, financial and psychological, that were once routine. Employers figure that if some people quit, there are plenty of others looking for jobs. […]

The workplace is even tougher for the millions of Americans who have lost the security of a steady paycheck, as companies rely more on temporary staffing agencies. Temp jobs used to be a gateway to permanent employment. Increasingly, they have become a way of life. About 25% of the workforce is temporary, according to research firm Aberdeen Group, up from 17% in 2009.

Woah, slow down, Upton Sinclair! You could take the glass-half-full angle, and see this as an economic environment where workers are given the opportunity to explore creative employment pathways they didn’t even know existed. One man’s untreated chronic illness is another man’s steroidal profits.

For more on the brave new neo-liberal paradise we’re slouching toward, check out this great new documentary.

Saturday Links

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, guides and nudges, in the news, Other Critics

Here’s a weekend reading/viewing list for your edification and pleasure:

A Moment of Heresy

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, education, in the news, Other Critics

If the point of a positive book review is to get the audience to want to read the book under discussion, then Robert Dean Lurie’s brief piece in The American Conservative about the new Selected Letters of William Styron  does its job admirably. As much as I find myself disagreeing with many of the political points that get made in TAC (Pat Buchanan is the king saying something totally sensible about why we should avoid war, only to follow it up with an appalling xenophobic or anti-gay screed), I appreciate that it still bothers to publish aesthetic criticism. Given that the magazine’s brand of conservatism is more Eliot and Burke than Romney and Ryan, this makes sense. Still, it says something about the state of our political discourse that one is shocked to find a website or magazine that discusses public policy also talking about Darkness Visible (one of the best books of any kind ever written) and the puffed-up preening of Styron and Mailer.

But The American Conservative has recently gotten something much more important right as well. Tom Pauken, the former chair of the Texas Republican Party, wrote a piece in January denouncing “No Child Left Behind” and the culture of standardized testing it has spawned. We are all familiar with these mind-numbing, bogus tests that create perverse incentives all up and down the academic food chain. Right now 35 teachers in Atlanta are under indictment for fudging their students’ results because the higher the students score, the more teachers (both good and bad) keep their jobs or make more money. As bad as the War in Iraq and the financial meltdown have been, No Child Left Behind might be the most damaging legacy of the Bush years.

But the Obama administration doesn’t seem to understand what is really wrong here either. It’s not testing per se that’s the problem, but that we have educational tunnel-vision. Whenever I hear Barack Obama talk about how we need to send more kids to college because people with college degrees earn more money, I cringe. If it is this simple, why don’t we just mandate that all colleges simply let in anyone who applies? A college degree is supposed to signal to employers that you have done something hard and are therefore a good candidate to complete difficult tasks in the future. But what if everyone has college degrees? What then?

What is needed is real reform at the K-12 level, something everyone seems to acknowledge, but never actually happens. Too many people have said too many things they can’t take back without losing face or money or power, and so kids keep going through this ringer of irrelevance, racking up accomplishments or failures that ultimately tell us very little about who they are and what they could be. Tom Pauken’s solution might strike some as retrograde, but it’s actually similar to the approaches in many other western democracies whose education systems outperform ours by most objective and subjective measures. He writes:

We need to allow for multiple pathways to a high school degree. One academic pathway would emphasize math and science. Another, the humanities and fine arts. A third would focus on career and technical education. All students would get the basics, but there would be greater flexibility than under the “one size fits all” existing system which pushes everyone towards a university degree.

This is a common sense approach to preparing young Texans to be college-ready or career-ready. It is time to end this “teaching to the test” system that isn’t working for either the kids interested in going on to a university or for those more oriented towards learning a skilled trade. Let’s replace it with one that focuses on real learning and opportunities for all.

In the past, when public frustration hit the boiling point, the testing establishment would simply roll out a new test with a new acronym and promise that the new test will fix everything. That is why, from 1991 to the present, the acronym of the Texas standardized test has gone from TAAS to TAKS and, now STAAR.

It’s that last sentence that really gets me. Education today is a sick combination of the worst kinds of conservative and progressive ideologies. It’s the same shit in a new box, sold to us by people who stand to lose a lot if anything actually happens.  And so nothing changes.

I imagine that Tom Pauken and I would agree on very little.  Again, he was the head of TEXAS Republican Party, for Christ’s sake.  Still, humanists of all stripes need to come together and wrench education in this country away from the technocrats, especially when they are doing everything in their power to make education a business devoid of human subtlety and emotion. Standardized multiple-choice testing has been around for years. Computerized writing analysis is knocking on the door. If we do nothing, those of us who actually care about educating complicated and whole human beings will find ourselves begging for change outside of the house we used to own.

Can’t Keep a Good Blog Down

Posted on by under guides and nudges, in the news

All blogs go to heaven. Some come back from the dead.

Maybe God was like, “You have too many awesome posts left in you. Get back in there.” Maybe the rent was too high or it was crowded; maybe the co-op rejected your application. Maybe your book-length commentary on the later work of 2 Live Crew didn’t get posthumously picked up by that East Coast publisher, the one with the free bottled water, and you were steamed. Maybe you finished graduate school and decided this was more fun than a whole lot of academic life. Maybe you like the idea of running a website despite having no knowledge of basic coding or visual design or marketing.

My “maybe” is somewhere in there toward the end. In June of 2012, I finished a PhD in English; soon thereafter I remembered that keeping TGR updated was one of the most pleasurable aspects of my entire grad-school tour. That said, I don’t plan for this iteration of the Reader to be a solo job.

In the short term, The General Reader will be entirely online, and a small group of authors will produce it. It won’t have any sort of mission statement, genre affiliation, or well-defined lump of topical concerns, beyond the general aegis of Arts and Culture. And I mean generous: if you ever thought, “Man, wish there was a place to read about American literature, mid-shelf wines, rap music, sports, climate change, US and world politics & current affairs, yoga pants, gardening, urban planning, lyric poetry, YouTube comics, furniture, exercise regimes, Calvin and Hobbes, and midcentury film,” a crew of over-educated, plaid-shirted amateur genies just rolled up at your front door. No big deal. We do this for free.

Tell your friends.

Bad Lieutenants

Posted on by under in the news, the polis

In Werner Herzog’s quirky dark comedy The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call–New Orleans (a remake of an earlier Harvey Keitel vehicle), Nicholas Cage plays a cop who is a serious dick: he’s an irritable, capricious, drug-gorged gambling nut who robs civilians and happily serves as a mole for a local narco-king (a job for which he gets paid in cocaine).  But Cage’s portrayal—his first halfway decent work in a long time—also renders Lt. McDonagh a kind of damaged Romantic hero.  He’s a selfish prick, but he’s also smart, ironical, and tenacious.  Herzog’s film is the best fictional treatment of post-Katrina New Orleans that anybody has done in the five years since that catastrophe, and you should see it.

In real New Orleans, though, things aren’t so charming.  Bad cops are just bad, and unfortunately the NOPD has a nasty habit of employing (and promoting) lots of them.  Add this to an unprecedented civic disaster during which everyone was understandably losing their shit, stir in decades of terrible race relations (like most urban American police departments, New Orleans’ has a shitty track record re: poor black and brown people), and you get a situation like the one Frontline‘s most recent documentary, Law and Disorder, unpacks in saddening detail.  In the first days of the great flood, a young black man who was apparently doing nothing worse than gathering stray foodstuffs in a shopping mall’s parking lot got murdered by a nervous NOPD rookie, after which high-ranking members of the city’s S.W.A.T. force attempted to conceal things by personally torching the man’s body in his car (and beating the shit out of friends who got involved).  Frontline is the best in-depth news program in the U.S., and here they’ve partnered with journalists from Pro Publica and the New Orleans Times-Picayune to produce an incisive, if depressing, story about some of the ethnic tensions, many of them institutional, that continue to trouble “post-racial” America.  Watch it here.

-TGR

Long Drive

Posted on by under in the news, sports

John Updike writes somewhere that sports are a rational, justifiable waste of time.  (Spoken like someone who was a huge NBA fan.)  I would cite the actual sentence, but the piece it’s from is somewhere deep in a Collected Essays, Vol. 8 or whatever, and I don’t feel like hunting for dog-ears.  This isn’t a scholarly blog anyway.   Got a feeling y’all wouldn’t want footnotes.

There are no dumb sports.  Except for golf—golf is a dumb sport.  I don’t say this just because I find it astonishingly dull.  There are broader reasons to dislike the game.  First, it is an environmentally destructive one.  By this I mean that, for all the pretensions of its new “green” landscape engineers, golf is a huge waste of space that requires the conversion of existing, functional ecosystems into heavily managed (think of all the lawn mowers and herbicide . . . ), entertainment-oriented, homogeneous, artificialized environments.  Shaved Bermuda grass replaces deer and wetlands and herons and cacti and what have you.  As such, the golf industry is a coeval of the big-box stores, suburban subdivisions, gas stations, and ugly highways which have metastasized across the U.S. since World War II.  Second, it is, socioeconomically speaking, a proud register of divisions within industrialized Western societies which those societies like to deny: clubs and green fees are pricey, and so only relatively privileged people, most of them white, can afford to indulge.  There’s a reason American presidents must pretend to like golf; and I suspect that one of the reasons Barack Obama makes so many middle-aged white voters uncomfortable is that he doesn’t love the links.  Golf isn’t like basketball (the President’s preferred sport), which poor people can play because all you need is a ball, a hoop, and some flat space.  It ain’t gonna colonize the South Bronx.

S0 I guess it makes a kind of evil sense that someone has finally built a golf course in the Amazon basin.  It’s in a remote area of Peru that the course’s website—I can’t believe its URL wasn’t already taken by someone with a sense of humor—calls the “last outpost of civilization.”  Evocative, eh?  The company that runs the place is working hard to convince prospective visitors that the course is perfectly integrated with its natural surround, that it may in fact be totally natural!   There are boas in the sand traps and piranhas in the water hazards.  And native trees along the fairways.  And colorful nature reserves and indigenous peoples nearby.

To be fair, the course was hacked out of “second-growth” forest, which means land that had already been slashed-and-burned by people out to get valuable old-growth rain-forest lumber and (temporarily fertile) farmland.  Surely this will speed its recovery.

I can’t decide if this exemplifies reductio ad absurdum or ad nauseam.

-TGR

Addendum

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis, Visual

In the previous post, I might have made it sound like few professors are openly confronting the problems facing universities.  This isn’t the case: not only have the best books on university decay been written by academics (Chris Newfield, Frank Donoghue, Mark Bousquet, and Louis Menand, among others), but plenty of progressive younger professors–including ones with tenure–are speaking up eloquently.  Trouble is, nobody in a position to change things listens.

-TGR

School Daze

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis

The university tenure system needs to be reformed.  Saying this makes me anxious, because I feel like I’m putting myself on the side of lame, anti-intellectual, (usually) conservative critics of the academy, the people who love to proclaim that academic scholarship and criticism make no contributions to the culture at large, to howl about professors being “tenured radicals” who corrupt innocent children with their evil leftist classes, and to fantasize (implicitly) about a time before so many durn brown people and lesbians got into universities, gripes that are rarely supported by evidence or extended argument.  Their whining is creepy and boring, and it belongs on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal.

Now, it is the case that some academics are pompous ideologues, and it’s true that a lot of academic writing is pretty awful and that some professors avoid teaching at all costs.  That said, most of the professors I’ve known during my time in a Ph.D. program are superb, balanced, sympathetic teachers, and many of them are fantastic writers whose prose is fun to read, or at least clear enough for any curious, reasonably intelligent person to understand.  The flaw in the system isn’t the people who get tenure–they’ve worked real hard for a very long time to earn what they’ve got (most people are 40 before they even sniff tenure), and by and large they deserve secure jobs.

If they can get them.  And most young academics can’t.  The problem isn’t the tenured: it’s the tenure system.  It would be difficult to survey an American university landscape that, over the past twenty years, has come to rely on armies of underpaid, expendable adjunct professors and graduate-student TAs instead of full-time teachers with real job security, and not come away deeply worried.  When tenure becomes a lottery that only a minority of academics–however gifted–can hope to win; when it seems more like an advertising tactic to lure new students into graduate programs (students who will take several years to realize that they don’t have much of a shot at a good job); when everybody else slaves away at a doctorate for 5, 6, 7, or more years, only to finish and realize that there are few positions that give you health insurance and a livable wage; when a gift for teaching young people will not improve your chances of getting tenure at all; when the entire graduate-education system seems designed to provide cheap labor for increasingly huge lecture-hall classes; when getting the most “prestigious” degree in the land–a doctorate–ends up being a personal torment (try giving up a chunk of your youth to slave away in a deserted library or alone in front of your computer, writing something few people will ever read) and a huge financial mistake (you graduate with gigantic amounts of loan debt but can’t get a gig that will let you pay it down), something is seriously, well, fucked.

Some intelligent reform ideas have been batted around, but, as you would expect, most of these have been ignored.  Tenured academics are skittish, because they realize how many “reform” proposals are tendered by people who despise academia as a whole, while university administrators have no desire to change a system that, from a fiduciary perspective, works quite well: the University of California might screw its undergraduates and most of its teachers, but it’s more and more profitable every year, despite all the political banging-on about (fake) funding crises.  And most graduate students don’t have time to think much about this, and/or they realize that rocking the proverbial boat will damage your already slim career chances.

There are basically two theories for how to fix the teaching system.  Some critics propose abolishing tenure altogether and replacing it with multi-year contracts that would be renewed if a professor turned out to be a good scholar AND a good teacher, thus preserving an adequate level of job security while getting rid of a system that clear isn’t working.  This blogger, however, is skeptical about this ever happening, because it would ultimately mean that schools would have to pay contracted (but non-tenured) professors more money.  In his view, the lawyers and investment bankers who dominate high-level administration have no economic interest in doing so.  It’s hard to blame the vampires.

Other reformers have argued that we could replace the current tenure model, which only rewards professors who pump out critical work (the whole publish-or-perish deal), with a three-tiered one.  Some faculty would be able to earn tenure simply for being good scholars; equal numbers would earn it by being great teachers, regardless of whether or not they produce scholarship; and an elite cadre composed of people who are skilled at both research and teaching would be able to get tenure, and would be paid more money, given their double-barrel skills.  Again, though, the upper-echelon managers who run American schools have no financial incentive to switch to this model: it would mean giving the majority of your devoted faculty job security, which is expensive.  Why not just keep relying on adjunct slaves?

Feeling terrible yet?  Finish up with Thomas Benton’s “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go,” an essay that was published in the Chronicle of Higher Education last winter.  As you might guess from the title, Benton is pessimistic about the ability of humanities programs to get out of their death-spiral.  Then you can read an interview with Andrew Hacker, co-author of Higher Education?, another intelligent, depressing survey of what’s happening to universities and colleges.

Twelve more months (fingers crossed) until my Ph.D. and I are working the register at Borders.

-TGR