Category Archives: Other Critics

Thursday Links

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

I know this is breaking with tradition, but seeing as I wrapped up my grading a couple days ago, I have more time to read and write for pleasure. One of my goals going forward is to try and post here more frequently, including more links to the abundance of great stuff available online. So here’s some post-hump day fare:

  • Ryan has commented on Wesley Morris’s greatness before, but it bears repeating: Wesley Morris is the best film critic in the game right now. But that doesn’t even really cover it. He might be the best writer about our contemporary cultural productions in general. His latest piece on the body in the media is the kind of stuff academics should be writing, though most don’t have the chops to do so, to say nothing of the humility to write about culture without the crutch of theoretical jargon. He also manages to weave in his own life in a way that’s not at all cloying, just heartbreaking. Can’t wait for this guy to put out a book of his essays. Bonus Grantland:  Mark Harris’s “Academy Taxonomy” is a great breakdown of how we end up with the Academy Award nominees we do. Even if Wesley Morris wasn’t writing for them, Grantland would have excellent movie coverage from smart folks like Harris. The fact that he is though makes the site indispensable.
  • Mark Yakich has written a defense of poetry that isn’t at all defensive. The fact that The Atlantic saw fit to run it is encouraging, as poetry gets dogged on all the time (often by the people who write it and write about it) for being “useless” in contemporary culture. The fact that people say this at a moment when rap music is at its most diverse and Twitter is reminding us of the importance of form and diction is frankly why many poets and critics deserve their poverty and obscurity. Pro tip: if you want people to think you matter, don’t trash your own creations. People respect confidence, not whining self-pity.
  • I’ve recently started watching The Rockford Files on Netflix. In another life I wrote a dissertation on bachelorhood in American literature up until the mid-1960s. One of the nice things about not being on the tenure track is that you don’t have to revisit your dissertation ever again if you don’t want to. But if I was going to redraft it, there’d have to be a chapter on James Garner’s Jim Rockford, a 1970s update of Chandler’s Marlowe. Instead of living in a Hollywood apartment, Rockford lives in a junky trailer on the beach in Malibu that would run him at least $4000 a month in rent now. He’s an ex-con (though he swears he didn’t rob that bank), and as he remarks to one of the show’s rotating cast of beautiful women: “I’m eligible for anything but marriage.” Every episode has at least one car chase, and the guy who plays Rockford’s dad (who’s also keepin’ it bach) is only 15 years older than Garner. You should watch this instead of any of the crap ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX are churning out.
  • I’ve never heard of James Delbourgo before, but I think he might be the kind of academic TGR can get behind. I’m not convinced yet, but this article in The Chronicle about curiosity cabinets and the internet is pretty interesting. Still, I have become so wary of academic discourse that I am constantly in “distrust and verify” mode when it comes to this stuff. He cites Evgeny Morozov though, so that’s a plus.

This is Criminal

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

Matt Yglesias catches a lot of flack from folks on both the Right and the Left for everything from his faulty prose to his sometimes ill-conceived ideas. I will admit to finding Yglesias’s work occasionally too rich-kiddy Neoliberal for my tastes, but there’s a reason he’s been paid to write about economic policy by many publications for as long as he has: he’s very good at quickly getting to what’s important. His latest piece on unemployment insurance is a perfect example of this. If reading this simple take on what the Ryan-Murray budget will do to the long-term unemployed doesn’t make you want to move to Sweden (or Switzerland), I don’t know what will.

It is especially important for articles like this to make the rounds in the wake of Rand Paul’s odious suggestion that we should cut off unemployment benefits after 28 weeks to light a fire under the lazy 47%ers who are mooching off the system (and voting Democrat). Rand Paul mouthing off like this is not surprising, but given his father’s bizarre appeal to a small segment of young voters, it is worth worrying about. Paul the Younger is a major voice within the GOP and presumptive candidate for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination. In his mind, ending unemployment is really just a question of eliminating the pretty minimally humane incentives we extend to people who happened to get thrown off the electric kool-aid acid bus of capitalism. It’s unemployment insurance that’s preventing these people from bootstrapping themselves into the middle (and may even the upper!) class. This is nonsense, and many smart people have said as much, but it’s important that sites like Slate, which caters to younger readers, put things as bluntly as possible:

Mailing unemployment insurance checks to people who aren’t so much unemployed as unemployable is obviously not an ideal public policy. But simply doing nothing for them is cruel and insane… We’re going to do nothing. We’re going to tell people to go out and look for work, even though employers looking to hire can still afford to be very choosy and generally refuse to even consider the long-term unemployed as job applicants. The country failed these people first by letting the labor market stay so slack for so long that they became unhirable, and now we’re going to fail them again.

Matt Yglesias may not be the prose stylist David Foster Wallace was, but he doesn’t have to be in order to point out the cruel insanity that’s ruling the Republican Party, and that’s apparently infected the Democrats as well. People who can’t find work are simply screwed under this new budget, and if folks like Rand Paul get their way, anyone unlucky enough to be unemployed for even six months (and I know many people who’ve experienced this) will be too.

Snark, Smarm, and Rhetorical Correctness

Posted on by under in the news, Other Critics, Uncategorized

I’ve been finding it difficult to watch The Daily Show lately. I used to catch it all the time, but now I can’t even get through a half a clip online. It’s not that John Stewart isn’t funny (he is), and it’s not that I disagree with the show’s politics (I’m more or less sympatico with their brand of liberalism). The show just doesn’t do it for me anymore. According to Tom Scocca, this may be evidence that I’m a smarmy, smarmy man.

Let me explain. Scocca’s got a long article up at Gawker that defends “snark” as a legitimate response to “smarm.” Here are his definitions of both terms:

The word, as used now, is a fairly recent addition to the language, and it is not always entirely clear what “snark” may be. But it’s an attitude, and a negative attitude—a “hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt,” is how Heidi Julavits described it in 2003, while formally bestowing the name of “snark” on it, in the inaugural issue of The Believer.

…The decade that followed did little to clear up the trouble; if anything, the identification of “snark” gave people a way to avoid thinking very hard about it. Snark is supposed to be self-evidently and self-explanatorily bad: “nasty,” “low,” and “snide,” to pick a few words from the first page of David Denby’s 2009 tract Snark: It’s Mean, It’s Personal, and It’s Ruining Our Conversation. (I bought the Denby book used for six bucks, to cut him out of the loop on any royalties.)

……………………………………….

What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can’t everyone just be nicer?

…Smarm should be understood as a type of bullshit, then—it expresses one agenda, while actually pursuing a different one. It is a kind of moral and ethical misdirection. Its genuine purposes lie beneath the greased-over surface.

Scocca goes on to give a ton of examples of smarminess in action, and he’s particularly hard on Dave Eggers, David Denby, and conservatives in both major political parties (poor Joe Lieberman gets just roasted–as well he should). In some respects, “On Smarm” is in the tradition of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” DFW’s “Tense Present” and Bromwich’s “Euphemism and American Violence” in that tries to explain problems in our culture by looking at what is happening to our language. But Scocca doesn’t focus on the words and rhetorical devices we use, but rather on what we say to each other about who has the right to say what they say the way they say it. Got all that?

As a denunciation of smarm, the essay is great. Like Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy, “On Smarm” sees the desire for respectability as the impetus for both smarm’s misdirection, and for smarmers’ attacks on snark and the snarky. What the essay fails to really deal with though is the fact that both snark and smarm are forms of irony, though irony employed in very different ways and for very different purposes. Stephen Colbert combines both forms into one character  as he snarks a smarmy game in order to make the smarm of the right apparent to his respectable liberal audience, who already feel the way he wants them to feel, but who enjoy getting to laugh snarkily anyway. Is this joke even funny anymore?

So yes, smarm is fought with snark, which gives birth to more smarm. The snark-smarm cycle ad infinitum. I hate smarm too. Every time someone gets misty-eyed when using words like “liberty,” “freedom,” “equality,” or “democracy” without explaining what they mean, I want to barf. They’re just abstractions masquerading as facts. People should be asked to define their terms, pressed for hard evidence to back up their assertions, and called out when their real motives become clear. Snark is one way of doing this. But it’s evasive and gives the snarker the out of saying that he was “just kidding.” It probably isn’t the most effective way if what you actually want to do is convince the people you’re calling out to be less smarmy. And if you believe that some groups of people are inherently smarmy, and therefore not worth engaging directly, aren’t you making an argument remarkably similar to the one Mitt Romney made about the “47%?”

Near the end of “On Smarm” though, things make more sense. This hasn’t really been a defense of snark or a hit piece on smarm. No, it’s about Scocca’s irritation with people he finds irritating dismissing the “little” people who criticize them. These last few paragraphs are frankly hard to read:

Recall that what set Eggers off, in his exchange with the Advocate, was the letter writer’s impolite reference to “selling out.” Him? Dave Eggers? He was getting the money he needed—deserved—to pursue the brave and thrilling projects he picked out for himself (Tom Peters: “A project-based world is ideal for growing your brand… Today you have to think, breathe, act, and work in projects”). He was giving money away to charities. How dare some snotty college kid cast aspersions on the success he had made?

Why, the whole idea of selling out was a terrible, bitter lie, told by “wimps” to justify their wimpiness. That was a peculiar position to take if you had just lived through the ’90s, as Eggers had, a decade that saw Disney eat Miramax and Creed sell more copies of its first two albums than Nirvana had sold of Bleach and Nevermind. But again, Eggers wasn’t making a point. He was taking an attitude. He was naming an enemy…

…Above (or beneath) it all, they are little. Eggers writes of his former critical self, “I was a complete, weaselly little prick.” He asks: “What kind of small-hearted person wants an artist to adhere to a set of rules, to stay forever within a narrow envelope which we’ve created for them?” He answers, and answers, and answers: “the lazy and small … small and embittered … narrow-hearted … the tiny voices of tiny people.”

The actual answer, and his actual fear—the fear that keeps the smarmers tossing on their bullshit-stuffed mattresses on the beds of bullshit they would have us all sleep in—is this: We are exactly the same size as you are. Everybody is.

Yes, everyone is the same size on their bullshit mattresses, but Dave Eggers is a more successful writer than I (or Scocca) will ever be. More people will read what Eggers has written. He’s made a lot of money off his writing. And even though I teach kids to write clearly for a living, Dave Eggers has probably done more to help kids write through his 826 Valencia projects than I have in teaching composition classes. And that’s fine. I still feel free to critique his work, but I don’t expect him to care, and I wouldn’t expect him to hold his tongue if something particularly dickish I said got back to him. Why should he if we’re just two similarly-sized people?

And you can add “selling out” to that earlier list of vomit-inducing words. (Seriously, what the hell is he talking about with that living through the ’90s stuff?) Scocca’s piece is really a long way of telling us that he would never sell out like the smarmers he snarks on. Which is absolutely perfect given that the kind of snarky negative criticism he would like to see more of (and that I have totally written myself–might even be writing right now) is always more about the critic than the idea, text, or person being criticized. So what have we learned? Tom Scocca is not smarmy and will never sell out. I feel better knowing this. Honestly.

Humanities for Everyone! (Whose Parents Have the Capital)

Posted on by under education, Other Critics

This is your semi-daily reminder that if you want to see what works best in schools, look at what people arrange for their children when money is no object. Over at his Just Visiting blog, John Warner notes the curious gap between the prep-school education that Bill Gates and his children enjoy (small classes taught by well-paid experts who emphasize serious books and lots of writing) and the kind of education that Bill Gates would like most everyone else’s children to enjoy (corporatized curriculum production, online classes, standardized testing, more standardized testing). Unfortunately, unlike most people with extremely stupid ideas about how teaching human beings actually works, Mr. Gates has many billions of dollars to pour into America’s ongoing effort to dismantle the remnants of its public-education system.

The same holds true at the college level. The Obama girls are not going to Ohio State or NOVA; they will matriculate at Stanford or Amherst or someplace comparable. Thomas Friedman might love MOOCs, but his daughters attended Yale and Williams, respectively.

There is a deep scumminess to how American economic and cultural elites (including many left-leaners like Gates, Obama, and Friedman) expend enormous amounts of capital on maintaining intimate, bucolic academies where the students read Dostoevsky and ponder Hume alongside tenured professors who make a decent salary, then turn around and assure the rest of us that twenty-first-century America has no time for small classes or the humanities, not if we are going to Win the Future, to quote Mr. Obama.

UPDATE: A better title for this post might be “Small Classes for Everyone! (Whose Parents Have the Capital).” As a humanities partisan, my instinct was to emphasize that side of the issue, but you could easily extend this to science and math classes. To reiterate, look at what elites procure for their children from preschool through college: small classes in schools where teachers have the freedom to design challenging, rigorous, creative, reading- and writing-intensive curriculum for their students. It works. Few if any affluent education “reformers” would send their kids to institutions that do otherwise. Reform is only reform if it is committed to small classes for every child.

I’m Not Dead Yet!

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, Other Critics, the polis

A few articles making the rounds this week capture the mixed-upness of our feelings about the “value” of writing in today’s society. According to some people, the novel has been dying for quite some, leading critic Sam Sacks to write that “[t]he vocabulary of literary ennui is now so familiar that it produces its own kind of boredom.” Most of the people poking the novel’s exquisite corpse well know that plenty of people still read on beaches, in planes, and sitting in armchairs. The novel, then, isn’t dead or even dying; it’s just not novel enough for some critics. It moved out to the suburbs and invested in some durable, comfy pants.

Now, I’m by no means saying that I think enough people are sitting around reading serious fiction. I find it particularly distressing how many young people I’ve come across in the past decade or so of teaching at highly selective colleges who not only haven’t read many seminal and age-appropriate classics (The Sun Also Rises, The Age of Innocence, Black Boy, etc.), but can’t name a single novel of any kind that they’ve read within the past few years. It seems that many stopped reading for pleasure once they finished the Harry Potter series, and found ways around actually doing the work in their vaunted AP classes. Thanks, SparkNotes.

Obviously, this isn’t the case for all of my students, and I’ve had and continue to have some who read and write for pleasure. And many, when forced to write for or about themselves, produce thoughtful work. But landing a decent job teaching, writing, or writing about literature feels as realistic as becoming a professional athlete these days, so even kids who are passionate about literature end up majoring in something like Business (whatever that actually entails) or, if they’re smart, one of the science fields. Reading and writing are weekend pursuits, if that.

Regardless of their major, most of these young people spend a good chunk of their time on social media (increasingly Instagram and Tumblr over Facebook) and watching streaming videos via one of hundreds of services, most of which I’ve never heard of. This probably explains why when asked to write about about the status of the written word today, they often end up saying something remarkably similar to the point former USA Today reporter Chuck Raasch makes in a recent piece over at Real Clear Politics. His argument is a warmed-over mixture of Orwell, Carr, and Postman (who himself parroted a lot of McLuhan), but I liked the following passage, if only for its use of the word “devaluing”:

In the century and a half since [the Civil War], we have evolved from word to image creatures, devaluing the power of the written word and turning ourselves into a species of short gazers, focused on the emotions of the moment rather than the contemplative thoughts about consequences and meaning of our actions. Many everyday writers in the mid-19th century were far more contemplative, far more likely to contextualize the long-term meaning of their actions. They meticulously observed and carefully described because, although photography was the hot new medium during the Civil War, words remained the dominant way of communicating thought, memory, aspiration, hope.

Still (and later moving) images have been a fundamental tool of personal and group expression dating back to cave paintings. Writing itself is a stylized form of the still image, so the sharp distinction Raasch draws between the two is debatable on first terms. But I get what he means, and I think students sense this too, especially when they tell me that they don’t like writing. Full stop. What they mean is that it’s hard to write well, and given the seeming dominance of visual culture, they aren’t sure if all the work it takes to write good prose is actually worth it. In other words, they aren’t sure how valuable writing actually is and will be going forward.

If you read this this blog, you like reading and writing, and are probably old enough to know that being able to write well actually has tangible benefits in the “real” (“business”) world. It may not make you a millionaire, but it’s a skill that you can pair with other skills (and gobs of charm) to support a decent middle-class life. But it’s hard to see this sometimes, particularly when one is young, and I don’t think that a piece like Raasch’s actually helps make the case for the importance of writing, especially because the idea of writing losing its “value” seems silly when you read about the $2 million advance Knopf recently gave Garth Risk Hallberg for the right publish his first novel, City on Fire. You read that correctly. A guy who hasn’t published a novel yet is getting a solid middle-infielder’s payday. Sure, this sum could be based on future film royalties Knopf hopes to get from an adaptation, but that’s still a hell of a lot of money for 900 pages of words our culture supposedly doesn’t value.

Writing isn’t dying any more than the novel itself is dying. False declarations to this effect do more harm to the written word than Instagram or Netflix ever will. Where and how we read are changing, and the relationship between image and text is more important than ever. It is up to people who appreciate good writing of all kinds to make it clear to young people that writing matters because writing is everywhere and bound up with everything they will do if they want a stimulating career and life.

Sunday Links

Posted on by under Good Reviews, guides and nudges, Other Critics

For most people, not reading is just about the easiest thing in the world to do. But if you’re someone who visits this site, you aren’t one of these people. We try to give you good writing, whether ours or written by others, to feed the need. So once again, here are some pieces we think are worth reading with your Sunday morning coffee (or whenever you get around to it).

  • This Newsweek (yeah, I didn’t know it still existed either) profile of the writer William T. Vollmann reveals that the FBI kept (and possibly still keeps) tabs on him and suspected that he might have been the Unabomber. I must confess to never having read an entire Vollmann book, but the excerpts I have read are outstanding. I never would have thought of him as a contender for the Nobel, but given his politics production, the suggestion actually makes sense.
  • Two of the most interesting pieces I’ve read on the Richie Incognito affair couldn’t come from more different sources: Grantland and The National Review. Brian Phillips takes on the contrived (and frankly offensive) warrior culture of football in his Grantland article, writing: “Because this — this idea that Jonathan Martin is a weakling for seeking emotional help — this is some room-temperature faux-macho alpha-pansy nonsense, and I am here to beat it bloody and leave it on the ground. Every writer who’s spreading this around, directly or by implication; every player who’s reaction-bragging about his own phenomenal hardness; every pundit in a square suit who’s braying about the unwritten code of the locker room — every one of these guys should be ashamed of himself, and that’s it, and it’s not a complicated story.” I tend to agree with this sentiment, but Daniel Foster offers another take over at NRO: “Phillips affectingly writes of America as a ‘nation of gentle accountants and customer-service reps who’ve retained this one venue’ — the National Football League — ‘where we can air-guitar the berserk discourse of a warrior race.’ But he says that like it’s a bad thing. On the contrary, this compartmentalization and channeling of destructive impulses into less harmful endeavors — recognized in Freud’s concept of sublimation and William James’s ‘moral equivalent of war’ — is the hallmark of a civilized people. Every institutional order needs it. The Amish need their Rumspringa, Europe needs Amsterdam, and a nation of gentle accountants needs the National Football League.” Like I said, I agree with Phillips that the less we tolerate meathead culture the better, but I don’t think Foster is wrong to suggest that if we want that, we might need to accept the end of football.
  • I probably don’t need to tell you how awesome the Paris Review is, but it bears repeating: The Paris Review is awesome. Check out this interview with Nabokov and try to tell me otherwise.
  • Helen Vendler’s review of Linda Leavell’s new biography/study of the works of Marianne Moore will get your excited to read the works of one of America’s least obviously weird and radical poets.
  • And finally, if you have not checked out my friend Drew’s multi-platform project Artbound, this video and article will give you a sense of the kinds of fascinating stories you are missing out on.

The $10K Race to the Bottom

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

In a recent article, adjunct activist Rebecca Schuman wrote about the sham $10,000 BAs and “competency models” that Republican governors are trying to push as solutions to the outrageous cost of going to college. As usual, Schuman provides the kinds of insights that only those of us whose primary job is actually teaching undergrads can. She writes:

[T]he $10,000 B.A.—which, again, does not include room, board, books, transportation, or child care for the many college students who are single parents—is largely a chimera. But even if it did exist, what kind of message does it send students, or potential employers, that there is now another stratification of college degree: elite private, public flagship, public regional, and now public regional cut-rate? And besides, if a college education can be given for $10,000, why isn’t it available to everyone?

…A semester-long course is not just the (temporary) accumulation of (dubious) knowledge or skills—it’s a journey in which, if it’s a good class, students come out different than they were when they started. They not only learn course material, but also develop as thinkers, readers, writers, mathematicians, experimenters, useful humans. I guess you have to hand it to the competency model for giving up entirely on the prospect of growing as a person and instead just offering diplomas you can buy.

The push to get people advanced degrees by any means necessary is, as Ryan and I have noted many times, bipartisan, and President Obama is as guilty as anyone of repeating the fallacy that getting any college degree means that money suddenly appears in your pockets. When I was driving home the other night, I heard a story on NPR about community colleges in Michigan that are scouring their records to find students who have qualified for but, for whatever reason, not yet received their Associates degree. Sounds like a great public service, right? Well, there’s this:

[A]ccording to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, workers with an associate degree on average earn $132 more per week than someone with just a high school diploma. People with degrees are also less likely to be laid off.

Lots of community colleges are getting into the act now, trying to lure back students who’ve dropped out or moved on.

…And there’s another payoff: As colleges and universities face pressure to boost graduation rates, finding former students who are ready to graduate right now — but don’t know it — is an easy way to do that.

Hooray for easy! Actually preparing students to be able to graduate (or even keep track of their credits) is soooooo hard! And if people having AAs means that they will earn $132 more per week, why don’t we just give everyone AAs instead of high school diplomas? Problem solved! We look forward to the President awarding TGR the Medal of Freedom at his earliest convenience.

But I digress. Of all of the $10,000 BA programs, one that Schuman’s article doesn’t mention stands out to me as the most awful. Anya Kamenetz has made a name for herself as a mouthpiece for the creative destruction of traditional higher education. She’s trying to build better MOOCtraps and consorts with people dubbed “Edupunks” (how edgy!). She’s the kind of “education” expert folks in Silicon Valley and the editors at Reason Magazine love to quote, in spite of the fact that I can’t find evidence that indicates she’s ever been on the faculty at any college or university.

Kamanetz’s “$1 Trillion and Rising: A Plan for a $10K Degree” was published by the Third Way Foundation, a nominally center-left think tank that apparently turns full neoliberal when it comes to education policy. To be fair, a couple of Kamanetz’s proposals in this paper make sense, and they’re ones that TGR (and just about every other sane observer of higher ed, including Schuman) has advocated: ending administrative bloat and drastically reducing spending on college campus amenities. Both of these things need to happen, like yesterday. Just about everything else Kamanetz proposes though, is pure technocrat crap, and I will tackle each of her six proposals below.

Reduce and Restructure Personnel: Thomas Frank is right when he says that “the business side of the university has been captured by a class of professionals who have nothing to do with the pedagogical enterprise itself.” Kamanetz acknowledges as much, and proposes cutting the amount of money spent on administration. We agree! However, instead of explaining how universities will function with fewer deans, benefits officers, and staff members, she leaps into a plan to reduce and restructure the faculty at universities. I fail to see what this really has to do with cutting administrative bloat. Rather, even in this first step, Kamanetz’s inner utopian comes out.

At her $10K university, there will apparently be three kinds of employees: Advisors, Instructors/Instructional Technologists (such a creepy term), and Professors/Instructional Designers (again, creepy). “Professors” in this model basically exist to produce MOOCs that can be disseminated throughout the university system. “Instructors” are basically glorified TAs who spend 20 hours a week in the classroom helping kids figure out how to do stuff with said MOOCs. And “Advisors” email kids and keep track of their progress via “a computer system.” Are you noticing a trend here? Nowhere in her explanation does she mention who will be responsible for grading and commenting on essays and other assignments. I bet she has a computer in mind for that too.

End the Perk Wars: On this point, I mostly agree with Kamanetz’s suggestion that if it comes down to spending money on education or something else, then something else needs to go. However, her plan to do away with residential facilities entirely strikes me as unwise. Making spartan dorms for first-year students available at a reasonable cost seems like a solid compromise, as the residential experience is often an important way that students begin forming adult social networks that will help them “win the future” at least as much as their BAs will.

Focus on College Completion: Here’s where things start getting nasty. Kamanetz and Third Way are your standard credentialists, as they seem more concerned with people getting BAs as quickly as possible than with them actually learning anything in college. As such, Kamanetz wants to count EVERYTHING for college credit. And if your goal is to graduate people, not teach them, lower standards inevitably follow, and tests that measure competency seem like a great way to simply pass on ill-prepared students who might be able to regurgitate some content once, but without the formal knowledge of how to apply that content later. People graduating from college is a great thing, but only if they actually deserve to graduate.

Scale Up Blended Learning: It seems to genuinely pain Kamanetz that MOOCs have thus far been a total disaster. But rather than look at the data and think, “Hey, maybe it’s kind of a good idea for professors to write their own lectures and cater them to the students and conditions in their classrooms,” and, “Hey, maybe there’s value in students having to actually get themselves to a class and pay attention for an hour straight,” she’s continuing to push for MOOCs as a primary conveyor of content, with professors (or technologists, or whatever the hell weird thing she calls them) serving as a kind of support staff for students. She uses another (equally stupid) acronym for this model: SPOC (Small, Private Online Course).

Anyone who teaches college already “blends” by using course management software. I put all of my readings and handouts up on a school-run website, and my students print them out as needed. Other teachers I know use the site for message boards, chats, and peer review. It’s a wonderful supplemental tool, but not a substitute for what goes on in the classroom and office hours, where students get to know one another, say things they regret but then learn from, debate real breathing people (not avatars), and cultivate important non-cognitive skills, like being attentive to others and NOT multitasking (RIP, Clifford Nass).

Streamline Offerings: The fact that Kamenetz wants to reduce the number of majors isn’t very controversial. I tend to agree that there are a lot of departments on any college campus that could be eliminated by allowing students to specialize within the traditional fields of the liberal arts and sciences. But let’s look carefully at what Kamenetz actually proposes:

[T]he $10K BA should offer challenging interdisciplinary majors in economics (including the practice of entrepreneurship), accounting, and rhetoric (English Language Arts and communication).

The remaining “long tail” of undergraduate majors, and the full universe of learning beyond that, should be covered at the flagships and available for independent study throughout the system. In choosing what degree paths to offer and support from year to year, the system should follow a “vote with your feet” or “student election” model where a critical mass of signups directs resources toward a particular path or paths. The university community will continue to be responsible for developing and updating the full MOOC course catalogue to serve these needs.

More MOOCs, of course, but the bolded line is the real humdinger. Theoretically, funding for one’s major could be cut by a popular vote, leaving students at the mercy of their peers. This would also mean zero job security for any faculty members, as they might get voted off the island if their department is deemed unnecessary (or if they don’t inflate their grades). They’d effectively be adjuncts, which Kamenetz claims her Instructional Technologists wouldn’t be. Any college with no institutional memory or intellectual ethos doesn’t deserve to be called one.

Rethink College Architecture: No, Kamenetz is not talking about knocking down Brutalist buildings. It’s so much worse than that. Kamenetz’s public university system is a four-tiered model of “Cohort Colleges” (basically community colleges), “Adult Online Universities” (basically University of Phoenix), “Flagship Institutions” (more on these in a second) and “”Micro/Pop-Up Schools” (basically Apple Stores of “knowledge”). The Silicon Valley Speak is laid on thickest in this section of the paper. Check out this passage describing the role of “Flagships”:

In a $10K BA plan, the flagship universities most resemble their previous historical role. Each consists of a physical teaching and learning campus maintaining a large professional payroll of faculty engaged in both research and teaching. Prominent among the interdisciplinary departments will be a robust research faculty, combining the latest in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, data analysis, human-computer interaction, psychology of motivation, user interface design, and other components of technology-enabled teaching and learning.

This is Google’s dream university, where teaching people to read, think, and write is less important than doing cool things with analytics. But the worst is yet to come:

Flagship institutions in the $10K BA plan will have different entrance requirements than the old top-tiers. In recent years, flagships like UC Berkeley have had low acceptance rates, around 20%. In a few short years, however, the MOOC model has allowed millions of students from hundreds of nations and all backgrounds to experience classes as taught by professors at Stanford, Harvard, and MIT. A few of these students have proven themselves as able as any one of the undergraduates at these ultraselective campuses. Accordingly, $10K flagships will focus on openness, not exclusion.

While there is certainly a place for excellent students at the flagships, there needs to be significant cognitive, social, and economic diversity, because the flagships will be serving as testbeds for the learning technology that is disseminated far and wide. The freshmen admissions process will take into consideration not only the typical transcripts and test scores, but students’ demonstrated ability to create and participate in engaging learning experiences. In addition, the students who excel in the other learning models will be offered the opportunity to rotate through the flagship campus to complete their degrees.

This is, to my mind, absolutely unconscionable. What she’s basically doing here is making the gap between public universities and elite private schools wider. Anyone who knows even a little bit about higher ed can tell you that the professors at Harvard aren’t what make it an elite school. They have the same degrees (PhDs from great universities) that professors at San Jose State have. The difference is that Harvard’s selectivity creates a hothouse environment of motivated, competitive students who challenge one another to do better work. By saying that “Flagship” universities must let in just about anyone who applies, Kamenetz is ensuring that the excellent students in a public system aren’t getting an excellent education. They’re getting a mixture of MOOCs (some of which are just recycled from elite private schools with their AMAZING professors), huge courses filled with wildly unevenly talented and motivated peers, and some facetime with an Instructional Technologist (maybe even an Instructional Designer!). Excellent students who graduate from $10K UCLA will no longer be thought of as on par with Ivy League students, because they won’t be. And while I don’t want to imply that Kamenetz has anything other than pure motives in trying to dismantle traditional modes of public education, it must be noted that she graduated from Yale. She should know that high admissions standards lead to better educational environments, and she should want that for public school students.

But as I said earlier, better educational environments aren’t what Kamenetz and Third Way really care about. They care about credentialing people, and if that’s your ambition, letting everyone in and focusing on getting people through as quickly as possible is the best way to do it. Standards are so pre-internet. Now, I will concede that there may be some crazy logic to all of this. Perhaps by degrading higher education so much the $10K University will help force the necessary changes at the K-12 level that will make it so people don’t need fake credentials to get jobs that don’t require a college education. But seeing as Kamenetz never mentions any K-12 reforms, I don’t get the impression that she really understands what our most pressing educational problems actually are. Maybe she should listen to some of her own parting words:

Acting to create a radically low-cost version of public university education is risky. The primary unintended consequence would be the use of the model as a pretext to continue to defund public education and to exacerbate and reproduce existing social inequalities. The focus of the redesign is to bring the highest quality education possible to as many people as possible, which the current system does not do.

What’s that saying about the road to hell?

Sunday Links

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics

If you’d like to increase your own brain power while you watch grown men drastically reduce theirs, may we suggest the following exercises:

Happy Sunday, folks!