Category Archives: Other Critics

Free and Clear

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, the polis

Returning to our old hobby horse of higher education, I recommend that you read this excerpt in The Chronicle of Higher Education from Robert Samuels’ latest book, Why Public Higher Education Should be Free: How to Decrease Cost and Increase Quality at American Universities (Rutgers UP, 2013). I haven’t read the full book yet, but I plan to soon. Bob is someone I worked with, and I respect his opinions on how to make higher education better and a better deal for students, particularly those who don’t swim in gold coins like Scrooge McDuck. Although I am not sure that making public colleges entirely free is the best idea, I do think we could streamline the way public money ends up getting spent on education to bring costs down to reasonable levels (i.e., take the ridiculous and predatory loan system out of it). Any move toward tuitionless higher ed would have to come with really stringent guidelines about who schools could let in and what students would have to do to stay enrolled, as simply providing universities a per-pupil payment seems like an invitation for administrators hungry to replicate themselves to let in completely unprepared kids just for the government cash they represent, only to dump them in ever-expanding classes taught by bedraggled adjuncts and grad students. Honestly, that wouldn’t be good for anyone, save the new Vice Deans of Provostial Studies.

Now, I’d wager this potential problem of free public colleges being overwhelmed by students who aren’t prepared could be solved by radically reforming K-12 education. If we actually focus on making a K-12 education system that hones essential critical thinking, language, writing, quantitative, technological, cultural, and interpersonal skills, we might end up with a population that is prepared at 18 to either enter a tech-heavy workforce (everything from Silicon Valley to auto repair) or go to college. This will require more, not less, personal attention given to each student, active engagement by parents in the lives of their kids and local schools, the toppling of the “testing” and AP regimes, the firing of teachers who (after being given multiple chances and the tools to succeed) have proven not up to the task of educating, and the end of schools being run by administrators rather than the best teachers. No small task, I know, but so many of our problems in higher ed are the result of our largely failed K-12 system. So let’s fix it before we’re a nation of people with 4.4 GPAs who can’t write a coherent sentence in English, Spanish, French, or any other language.

This Will Get Ugly

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

Jonathan Chait has dashed off a piece in New York Magazine that’s a perfect example of how uninterested most MOOC boosters are in actually improving the quality of higher education. His post is a response to an article by Jonathan Rees (two Jonathans will enter, but only one will survive!) in Slate about how MOOCs are a bad deal for both students and professors. Predictably, Chait mostly focuses on the part where Rees bemoans what MOOCs threaten to do to the the employment prospects of faculty members. Most people are unsympathetic to the idea that we should preserve the current structure of higher education to keep a bunch of eggheads in their houses. Hell, I’m not even very sympathetic to that argument, and I have a vested economic interest in supporting it!

But Chait basically ignores everything Rees writes about why MOOCs will be a disaster if what one cares about is ensuring that people actually learn useful skills in college courses. Rees writes:

How do you teach tens of thousands of people anything at once? You don’t. What you can do over the Internet this way is deliver information, but that’s not education. Education, as any real teacher will tell you, involves more than just transmitting facts. It means teaching students what to do with those facts, as well as the skills they need to go out and learn new information themselves…

What makes this possible is that MOOCs, at least from an educational standpoint, are designed to run themselves. The lectures are pre-recorded. The grading is done either by computer or by other students in the class, should they choose to do the assignments at all. The average drop-out rates for existing MOOCs is about 90 percent, so while Coursera may offer access to higher education anywhere in the world where potential students can get the Internet, it offers no guarantee that anybody will actually learn anything…

While MOOCs may serve a purpose as nerdy edu-tainment for people who are so inclined, a workforce trained without close contact with professors of any kind might as well not attend college at all. Going to the library and reading a bunch of books would be equally effective, and probably a whole lot cheaper.

To which Chait responds:

But, uh – are we sure the only way to teach people what to do with facts is face-to-face? This seems like something that could at least conceivably be taught to more than one person at once. I can remember lots of professors teaching me what to do with facts via lectures in extremely large auditoriums, which is not that different than a lecture you watch online. Nobody claims that the technical barrier has been solved, but it’s amazing that Rees is already declaring it unsolvable…

The goal of the system ought to be making higher education effective and affordable for students. Rees waxes poetic about the joys of in-person liberal education, and I greatly enjoyed my classic college experience, with the gorgeous campus green and intramural basketball and watching campus protestors say interestingly crazy stuff at rallies. But insisting that’s the only way a student ought to be able to get a degree, in an economy where a college degree is necessary for a middle-class life, is to doom the children of non-affluent families to crushing college debt, or to lock them out of upward mobility altogether.

Chait’s equation of MOOCs, which are supposed to replace entire courses, with lectures is instructive; it reveals something that few of the MOOC boosters like to discuss: lectures and the information they transmit are only one small component of any college class worth its salt. The careful, personal evaluation by trained professionals of the material produced by students is why college is useful as anything more than a simple credentialing process. Even Rees referring to this as “grading” misses the point. The development of rhetorical, quantitative, and creative skills requires that someone who knows what s/he’s talking about explains to the student not just that they have done something incorrectly, but how and why they have done so, and how they can fix this going forward. Doing this well takes a lot of time per pupil, and this is why small class sizes are essential is some disciplines (any course that has a significant writing component, higher math, advanced science courses, art). Why do you think people send their kids to small, insanely expensive liberal arts colleges?

But the quality of the education received by students doesn’t really matter to Chait and other MOOC maniacs. He never defines “effective” because it’s only important that people get credentialed. Whether they can write or reason their way out of a paper bag is immaterial, so long as they have a BA. If Chait (and President Obama, for that matter) actually cared about improving the quality of higher education, they would understand that the solution to colleges offering too many large impersonal lectures for credit is not to make courses even larger and more impersonal. Information has never been more accessible than it is today. This is great, and everyone should take advantage of the internet to become more informed people. But information does not an education make. If we want education to have any real value we must invest in it, not in techno-fads masquerading as education.

Can You Fly, Higher Ed?

Posted on by under education, Other Critics, sports

We’ve written a lot in this space about both higher education and sports, but there’s a great new article up at the Chronicle that brings the two together in a pretty unexpected way. No, I am not talking about the amazing story of Ohio State President and football booster extraordinaire Gordon Gee’s rapid fall from semi-respectability. Any chump who spends $64,000 of public funds on bow ties (and bow-tie-related goodies) deserves this kind of humiliation. Pieces that highlight the arrogance and corruption of athletic departments at many of America’s top universities (usually aided by college administrators with alumni dollar signs for irises) are a dime a gross. What’s less talked about is how the academic division of labor at most universities tends to replicate itself in athletic departments.

Meet Elwyn McRoy, the visiting adjunct lecturer of college basketball coaches. After I read Brad Wolverton’s account of McRoy’s journey up to this point, I realized that I hadn’t thought much about all those guys on the sidelines or benches who aren’t head coaches. Like the thousands of freshly minted (or long since chewed up) PhD’s who wander the country lusting after the tenure that they’ll never get, coaches without high-level connections drift back and forth across the country, and sometimes across the globe, chasing a ring that only appears to be made of brass. More often than not it’s thin air. The few that get lucky and latch onto the right coattails at the right time might become head coaches, but even this is tenuous, as small schools that have no business demanding that their teams compete with the big boys think that they are just the right coaching staff away from being the next Gonzaga basketball or Boise State football. And so most coaches just drift.

Like a lot of adjuncts, McRoy gets tastes of success, even the big time, that keep him coming back for more when it’s probably in his best interest (to say nothing of the best interest of his family) to give up the ghost. I won’t recap Wolverton’s whole piece because I think you should read it for yourself. I do have to quibble with one thing he writes though:

The NCAA limits Division I programs to three assistant coaches, which means that there are roughly 1,000 positions at the top level. Few professions have such a scarcity of jobs, and with so little staying power.

The rest of higher education is hardly so volatile. The history department doesn’t turn over every two years, nor do librarians. Even presidents, whose positions are some of the most transient, usually get five or 10 years to prove themselves.

A guy writing a piece in the Chronicle should know that the rest of higher education is this volatile. His own publication reports that 70% of the people teaching at American universities could be in different positions next year. While some schools treat their non-tenure-track faculty better than others do (I’ve been lucky to work at such places), the fact remains that there are thousands of Elwyn McRoy’s who teach math, composition, French, and physics. A lot of them do it at five schools at a time (if they’re lucky to find that many gigs), not knowing if any of those schools will rehire them at the end of the term. And most of their students have no idea that the people standing in front of them aren’t well compensated members of academia every bit a part of their campuses as department chairs. So while I completely sympathize with McRoy, and wish him luck at his latest gig, his story should make us think about what can be done to fix all facets of higher education before it races off the cliff it’s rapidly approaching.

Falling Off

Posted on by under Authors, Other Critics

If you’re a writer or the kind of reader who doesn’t confine yourself to Dan Brown and Harry Potter, you probably believe that brilliance eventually triumphs: that even if a writer’s work goes out of print during his or her lifetime (e.g., Faulkner until the late 1940s), the obscurity isn’t permanent. Taste changes, after all.

But even if we leave aside talent that never got a chance to write in the first place (e.g., Virginia Woolf’s famous imaginary example, in A Room of One’s Own, of Shakespeare’s sister), is this actually true?

In a great essay published in the Boston Review in 1999, Stewart O’Nan (noice name) uses the American novelist Richard Yates to argue that it isn’t, at least not all of the time. Ironically, this piece helped revitalize Yates’s literary-historical fortunes. In the twenty-first century he has gotten reprints, a first-rate biography, a long essay in The New Yorker (unfortunately it’s by the staggeringly dull James Wood), and a Leo DiCaprio vehicle. Good on him. (That said, he’ll always be the Stone Temple Pilots to John Cheever’s Nirvana. And I like STP–but they aren’t Nirvana.)

But given the decline of reading among Americans (and lots of other people), you could say that every great writer is doomed to oblivion. Eh? Eh?

Frances Ha

Posted on by under guides and nudges, Other Critics, Visual

I’m not going to pretend that I’m some OG Noah Baumbach fan. The first time someone told me about Kicking and Screaming, I assumed she was talking about the youth soccer movie starring Will Farrell. I believe I even spent the next day thinking that said youth soccer film was some secret gem that I needed to see ASAP. I am glad the internet was able to clear that up for me. So no, I don’t have anything particularly deep to say about how Baumbach’s latest film, Frances Ha, represents an organic outgrowth of his previous work. I’ve liked the three of his films that I’ve seen, but none as much as Frances Ha.

It’s hard for me to describe why this movie is so good. It’s not, as many first-year composition students would say, “really relatable” (cue sound of me crying). I’ve never lived in Brooklyn or Manhattan, and have never been close enough with folks who do to go out and have a typical alt experience. I went to New York once for a wedding during a hurricane, and that’s it. And while I know what it’s like to be broke as hell at 27 while chasing some ultimately pointless dream (Frances wants to be a touring dancer, perhaps the only thing more unlikely than becoming an English professor), I didn’t see much of myself in Frances.

And maybe that’s just it. Baumbach and Greta Gerwig (his co-writer, lover, and the star of the film) have produced a character study of someone who reminds me of bits and pieces of folks I’ve met in my life without her being reduced to a “type.” Frances feels very much like her own complete person, which is rare in both the film and real worlds. I certainly am not the first person to say this, but Gerwig’s Frances works for the same reasons Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall and Jason Schwartzman’s Max Fischer do: she reads as authentic, so you find yourself interested in what happens to her, even if it isn’t much. I suppose that’s another way of saying that I’d watch Frances do just about anything, and since the film gives us a chance to do just that, I loved it.

There are many other reasons to see the film beyond the central character. It’s one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time. It’s shot well. There are a couple great music cues (but not too many). The film’s secondary characters all serve purposes realized by the actors’ performances. And it’s weirdly about what the financial crisis has done to people of my generation (cogent film analysis from the National Review?!?!).

But finally it all comes back to Frances, who Greta Gerwig just nails. I suppose the best praise I can give this movie is that I plan on buying a physical copy of it when it becomes available because I want re-watch it a lot. I can’t remember the last movie I said that about.

Yes, Read Gogol

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, Other Critics

From the Wall Street Journal, of all damn places. Murdoch owns them, but at least they still print serious book reviews. While I suspect Russians might take some issue with this—not the “vast and barbarous country” part (Russians are rightly proud of the fact) but rather the critic’s assertion that Dostoevsky, Gogol, and company “mysteriously” emerged from that country—the essay is a good piece a’ read. It’s the length of a cup of coffee, too. There is no Kafka without Gogol. Good Saturday, everyone.

Today in Allen Iverson News

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Other Critics, The Moronic Inferno

If you like watching fun basketball games, you probably liked watching (or like–thanks, YouTube) Allen Iverson ball. Dude was built like an elf and shot too many bad jumpers, but as a creative, articulate, borderline-psychotic volume scorer, as a player whose neurotic self-enclosed style ended up shortening his career in the NBA, he’s a Romantic hero. Cf. Kobe Bryant. Unlike Kobe he’s an acrobatic poet; he’ll break your heart.

Unfortunately his personal life sounds like something Percy Shelley or John Berryman would get up to. Highly recommended–the article, not the life.

Coming Clean

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Other Critics

While I don’t subscribe, I read Esquire sometimes. But even when the situation is a five-minute wait at Supercuts and I’m just flipping through it, I feel kind of sleazy, because Esquire is gross in multiple ways that matter, all of them tangled such that it is difficult to theorize said grossness. But, a few theses.

First, it’s that the thing is called Esquire, which sounds like an all-schoolgirls wank mag from 1950s  Britain. (Hastag, Philip Larkin.) Second, it’s the high-definition postindustrial lifestyle they sell: men’s jeans that aren’t Levi’s and cost $200, beard lube, Dwayne Wade’s bowties, a main-page tab called “Women.” Sometimes the magazine verges on Maxim territory. Third, it’s the embarrassing fact that like a lot of young professionals (stop snickering) I am insecure about stuff like my tie pin and my car, which was built during the first Clinton Administration, and so I read Esquire and worry about my abs.

The rub, at least for this coastal intellectual, is that they employ serious writers like Charles Pierce and Stephen Marche, so you end up reading them even when you aren’t at Supercuts. Come on, they are covering the death of the mighty George Jones like crazy, which is the only way to cover No Show’s shuffle off the mortal coil. They published this little ethnographic masterpiece. They put D Wade in a magazine that sort of reviews a few books from time to time. Esquire was a reasonably serious publication for fifty years during the last century, and it still carries a little of that cachet.

A favorite piece is A.J. Jacobs’s “I Think You’re Fat” (2007), which I’ve used in a number of classes. America’s children love it. Jacobs investigates the fascinating Radical Honesty movement, which espouses the unworkable but compelling idea that even little white lies constitute an existential wimping-out:

The movement was founded by a sixty-six-year-old Virginia-based psychotherapist named Brad Blanton. He says everybody would be happier if we just stopped lying. Tell the truth, all the time. This would be radical enough — a world without fibs — but Blanton goes further. He says we should toss out the filters between our brains and our mouths. If you think it, say it. Confess to your boss your secret plans to start your own company. If you’re having fantasies about your wife’s sister, Blanton says to tell your wife and tell her sister. It’s the only path to authentic relationships. It’s the only way to smash through modernity’s soul-deadening alienation. Oversharing? No such thing.

Queasy? Me, too. Camus can do, Sartre is smartre, but Blanton is striking and Jacobs makes deft experimental use of the good doctor’s philosophy. Have at it. It will take you ten minutes. You dick.