Category Archives: The Moronic Inferno

Just Stop

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

Jonathan Franzen is the second best essayist of his generation, just behind David Foster Wallace.* Amanda Hess is the 12,067th best essayist of her generation, so you can imagine the tenor and quality of her burn on Franzen over at “XX,” Slate‘s answer to a question Jezebel never asked. Sure, Franzen should get some ribbing for his long, fist-shaking Guardian article about how just about everything sucks now (even though he’s basically right). But that ribbing shouldn’t read like a drunk-text written by a college sophomore three weeks into her first Media Studies class. Hess writes:

Literature’s preeminent dude-bro took out his frustrations at a girl he “decided” not to have sex with (isn’t that how it always happens!) by fantasizing about old women destroying their bodies as they scrounge after his discarded fortunes. Franzen writes that he learned to overcome his youthful anger when he became a novelist, and was moved to empathize with other humans in the service of great literature; “to imagine what it’s like to be somebody you are not” is the “mental work that fiction fundamentally requires,” he now understands.

But Franzen is less enthused about the prospect of other humans actually responding to his stories—or, God forbid, telling their own stories without the aid of Franzen’s refined literary filter. Since Franzen came into this world in 1959 and human communication promptly went to hell in a handbasket—by the way, does that make Jonathan Franzen one of the horsemen of his own apocalypse?—people who do not look like Jonathan Franzen have leveraged the explosion of literary outlets to publish their own writing, tell their own experiences, and gain voices in the conversation. (Jennifer Weiner has already filed her response to Franzen’s essay in The New Republic, in a piece entitled, “What Jonathan Franzen Misunderstands About Me.”) But Franzen fails to draw any connection between the segregated swimming pools of his youth and his own ability to “find my place” as a writer in the long tail of that old world. Franzen briefly acknowledges the diversity argument just to knock it down. He expresses disappointment with the literary magazine N+1, which he says “denigrates print magazines as terminally ‘male,’ celebrates the internet as ‘female,’ and somehow neglects to consider the internet’s accelerating pauperisation of freelance writers.”

If Franzen had published his wistful German train station anecdote today, the “penny-pinching old German woman” could tweet evidence of Franzen’s insufficient tip; the hot girl could tell the world how their interaction really went down in an xoJane IHTM. That doesn’t mean that writers today have lost the ability to seriously explore the human condition. It means that a much wider and diverse group of humans now has the power to inform privileged literary voices like Franzen about what the conditions are actually like on the ground.

Honestly, I don’t even think Hess knows what she’s trying to say here. Cliched “he’s a bad tipper” Reddit posts and the just pathetic “please, somebody validate me” tripe of the reality TV/blogging/vlogging/TVlogging-sphere are not “conditions on the ground.” They are cries for help from people who can’t deal with the fact that the world hasn’t recognized how special they are, not literary criticism. Jonathan Franzen couldn’t care less about folks tweeting at him, let alone second-rate pop-feminist blogs saying that he does. But as Jennifer Wiener has made clear, there are second careers to be had griping in Franzen’s wake.

*For the record, I think Joan Didion is probably the greatest essayist of any generation.

Damage Control

Posted on by under guides and nudges, The Moronic Inferno

Over at Deadspin they’re running a piece proclaiming 1978’s Superman vs. Muhammad Ali “the greatest” (get the joke, eh? Eh?) comic book ever. This woke up the little nerd who lives inside my gut, because it’s clear these people have never heard of Damage Control, a cluster of comics spread across two decades about a team of engineers using “engineering techniques that are much more advanced than the competition which enables them to perform their job in remarkably short periods of time.” That quote is from Marvel’s Wiki. I apologize for the ghastly phrasing. In any case, the Damage Controllers’ job is cleaning up the mess after superbeings destroy buildings and such. I was lucky (unlucky?) enough to own a copy of Damage Control Vol. 1, #1 when I was a kid (I think I traded a Frank Viola baseball card for it), and I remember feeling confused when I read it. It was basically about working in an office, something both my parents did. I imagine some guild of civil engineers put Marvel up to publishing it. Otherwise, I have no idea why this comic was made, let alone why there have been four limited series. I invite some poor grad student in need of a publication or conference appearance to dive into the wreck (er, stacks) and make a case for why Damage Control is some sort of protest against neoliberal values. Me, I’ll just bask in its bureaucratic glory and think of Frank Viola.

We Should be Concerned

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

Peyton Manning’s 7 TD, 450-yard passing performance the other night leads me to believe that this NFL season will be one of the best yet, as the league’s talent level among both players and coaches has never been higher. That’s a statement that could get me hissed at by some old people who think the game peaked with Johnny Unitas or Dan Marino, but I stand by it. But the recent massive settlement the NFL reached with former players about the still-not-totally understood ramifications of football-related concussions reveals that all’s not well in the NFL, and watching the first game the other night was enough to make me queasy: heads snapping back and forth after guys took massive hits; knees bending the wrong way as three-hundred-pound men undercut other three-hundred-pound men; and subtler blows on every play that could be stripping these men of the ability to function later in life. Football is a nasty, awful sport that no kid of mine will play. And, of course, I’ll watch every game I can this year. Call me a hypocrite. It fits.

I have no time for people who hate on sports or act like they aren’t a significant part of what constitutes a culture. You’re allowed to be uninterested, but not dismissive. In general, Americans love sports, and in this way we’re not unlike people in other countries. However, our relationship with sports is uniquely screwed up. In a short and smart “Daily Comment” over at The New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert thinks about the ramifications of the fact that sports play such a central role at many American high schools. She writes:

…I was watching my fourteen-year-old twins play soccer. It was the day before school began, but they had already been going to J.V. soccer practice two hours a day for nearly two weeks. I wondered what would have happened if their math teacher had tried to call them in two weeks before school started to hold two-hour drill sessions. My sons would have been livid, as would every other kid in their class. Perhaps even more significant, I suspect that parents would have complained. What was the math teacher doing, trying to ruin the kids’ summer? And why should they have to make a special trip to the high school so their kids could study trig identities?

As she makes clear, we miss the point when we worry about or praise the effect of playing sports on a kid’s academic performance. What we should be concerned about is the messages we send when we make sports seem like a stitch that holds the fabric of education together. It isn’t true. In other countries, people who are excellent at sports are paid from young ages to train and entertain. And other kids either throw pickup games together. In the U.S., kids are taught to do it for their schools. For free. Who cares if the schools they’re doing it for aren’t giving them rigorous educations? FOOTBALL!

Obviously, this problem continues on past high school into higher education, where it gets even smarmier. Major college football and basketball programs serve as de facto minor leagues for the NFL and NBA, and small college programs exist to entice alums to donate money. There’s nothing essential to the educational mission of a university about a football program sending hundreds of people on chartered flights to go give concussions to kids at another school. And yet today I’m sure I will find myself watching several college football games . Again, hypocrite. Meanwhile:

Poland is a surprising educational success story: in the course of less than a decade, the country raised students’ test scores from significantly below average for the developed world to significantly above it; Polish kids now outscore American kids in math and science, even though Poland spends, on average, less than half as much per student as the United States does. One of the most striking differences between the high school Tom attended in Gettysburg and the one he ends up at in Wroclaw is that the latter has no football team, or, for that matter, teams of any kind.

Nothing to see here, folks. Enjoy the games.

 

 

Et tu, Obama?

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno

As is usually the case in these matters, I agree with everything Ryan wrote the other day about President Obama’s farcical plan to “win the future” by devising a federal rating system for colleges and universities. No doubt the President and his mandarins will be able to create a totally ungameable system that will not encourage waste, fraud, and abuse, the holy trinity of government cliches. University administrators will definitely see it as an opportunity to invest in high quality undergraduate education, right? What could possibly go wrong?

Obama’s doubling down on the kind of systematic education policies of the Bush administration is right up there on his list of follies with his failure to close Guantanamo and his fulsome embrace of the surveillance state. And, like Ryan, I say this as someone who voted for the guy twice, and who thinks he’s done some helpful things in the face of unprecedented opposition. But good grief, whenever he opens his mouth and talks about higher education, I cringe. Like Jonathan Chait, Obama appears to think universities should be like factories where “skills” are fastened onto students like lasers onto toy robots. I doubt his own college career at Occidental, Columbia, and Harvard bore much resemblance to the melange of MOOCs, huge classes taught by adjuncts, and standardized tests his new gold-plated system will inspire. We’re well on our way there already.

I know we’ve said it a thousand times, you guys, but if the politicians and pundits who profess to care about college and college students so much actually did, they would sit back and think about what made their own college experiences so helpful: difficult, small courses taught by secure faculty members; a focus on cultivating critical thinking skills by making students read and write about hard texts, some even written a long time ago; universities that actually thought of themselves as universities, not mini-hedge funds; and an administrative class that didn’t wag the dog, or at least that was staffed by people who cared about undergraduates.

The President should work on fixing our broken economy so that people who don’t actually have any interest in going to college don’t feel like they have to take out huge loans to enroll in online classes that are basically just cut and pasted from Wikipedia and a few out of date textbooks. If our choices in life are college or McDonald’s, we’re no superpower. Or he could start pressuring states to fix our criminally mismanaged K-12 systems. Or (here comes the pipe dream), he could start talking about the virtues of higher education being difficult and not for everyone. He could use the bully pulpit to make Plato, trigonometry, James Baldwin, coding, and Spanish, seem like things worth working hard to understand because they will help you lead a more interesting life and figure out a way to make decent money because you’re a well-rounded, savvy, likable person. He could talk about these things. But he won’t.

Strange Bedfellows

Posted on by under education, in the news, Life of the Mind, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

As Ryan has pointed out, it’s hard for us to not comment a lot about the state of higher education because we both have a vested interest in seeing it not completely destroy itself. It’s a topic that makes for strange bedfellows and challenges the political categories we all too easily apply to ourselves and others. For instance, Bob Samuels is the president of UC-AFT (the union that represents non-tenured faculty in the University of California system), while Alan Jacobs teaches at Baylor University and writes for The American Conservative. By conventional metrics, one is a progressive and one is a traditionalist Christian conservative, but both have written a lot about how the push toward eliminating small classes in favor of MOOCs is a terrible idea for students. Both Samuels and Jacobs are educational conservationists. These aren’t people opposed to making meaningful changes to the way universities are run (everyone but administrators admit that administrative bloat must be reversed), but rather people who want to conserve what higher education does best:  introducing students to new ideas and people through lectures, personal instruction, debates, and meaningful face-to-face social interaction. Having to share space with someone and their ideas is a really powerful thing. As anyone who reads internet comment boards knows, the web specializes in letting us (and training us to) talk past one another because the other person isn’t actually there to respond. This is one of the reasons why segregation, whether written into the law, de facto, by choice, or via technology is so awful: it prevents us from doing the messy work of having to argue with others, defend our own positions, and think on the fly. There is no lag-time in real life, and no substitute for having to look someone in the eye and treat him as a real, valid human being, even as he says things that challenge your sense of how the world works. That’s an education, and the kind that will benefit one in almost any career.

Similarly, the folks running down traditional educational models and/or pimping MOOCmania are also an eclectic bunch. From Ivy League-educated “libertarians,” to the virtuous conservative Bill Bennett, to the mostly Democratic mandarins of Silicon Valley, the crew trying to tell us how traditional models of education are outdated is hard to pin down politically. So, to borrow a term from one of our favorites here at TRG, Evgeny Morozov, these folks can best be understood as “solutionists.” They see a problem (and as Ryan and I have made clear, there are tons of problems in higher ed that have nothing to do with MOOCs), and their first instinct is to blow things up. They also love blaming professors, as if professors run universities (or even university systems) anymore. There are reformers who aren’t “solutionists,” like Vance Fried, and while I don’t agree with some of his ideas (consolidating all of the humanities into one major is dumb, and he seemingly thinks teaching 5 writing-intensive classes is the same as teaching 5 sections of algebra), I at least get the sense that he understands that education is about much more than the transmission of information. People of good faith can disagree about how to fix things, but they must sincerely be interested in fixing things in order for the conversations to be productive.

The latest smart take from the “hey, maybe we should be a bit more critical of MOOCs and the people who are pushing them” camp comes from Scott L. Newstok, a professor at Rhodes College. His basic thesis is so simple and obvious that I am amazed that it hadn’t occurred to me:

The corporate world recognizes the virtues of proximity in its own human resource management. Witness, for example, Yahoo’s recent decision to eliminate telecommuting and require employees to be present in the office. CEO Marissa Mayer’s memo reads as a mini-manifesto for close learning:

“To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

Why do boards of directors still go through the effort of convening in person? Why, in spite of all the fantasies about “working from anywhere,” are “creative classes” still concentrating in proximity to one another: the entertainment industry in LA, information technology in the Bay Area, financial capital in New York City? The powerful and the wealthy are well aware that computers can accelerate the exchange of information, and facilitate low-level “training.” But not the development of knowledge, much less wisdom.

Newstok’s entire piece is worth reading, as is Alan Jacobs’ response, wherein he reminds us to spend less time listening to the solutionists, and more time observing them:

If physical presence is as important in education as the technologists’s actions say it is, then perhaps their energies are misapplied. Instead of looking for ways to eliminate or bypass brick-and-mortar schools — and, not incidentally, making a hefty profit for themselves in doing so — maybe they should bend their considerable intellectual powers to the more challenging, less destructive, and far more meaningful challenge of making college education more affordable for everyone who can truly benefit from it.

And lest you think that conservationists are simply trying to prop up traditional learning models in order to line their own pockets, and are therefore no different from the Silicon Valley folks trying to tear these models down, keep this in mind: 75% of people teaching at American universities aren’t tenure-track, will never make salaries comparable to what people in the tech sector make at mid-career, and could actually probably make a lot more money by jumping on the MOOC train now.

Boooo MOOCs

Posted on by under education, The Moronic Inferno, the polis

When a culture endlessly suggests to its children that the humanities are frivolous and effeminate, and when that culture looks the other way while institutions conceived in the Enlightenment ruthlessly downsize the support given to people who safeguard and pass along humanity’s intellectual traditions, you end up with an economy-strangling clusterfuck distinguished by “not only relatively fewer humanities majors but also a generation of students who get out of school and don’t know how to write well or express themselves clearly.”

Given how much TGR has covered the decay of American higher education (hey, it’s the sector we know best), this sounds like something Dan or I would say. But since it isn’t, the quote is probably from some idealistic niche publication, like n+1 or the New Yorker. Maybe even Slate. Yeah? The kind of outlet that gets links on Arts & Letters Daily.

But no. It’s Business Insider. Turns out that some corporate managers are terrified by the applications they’re getting from the current labor pool. Turns out they’re desperate for art-history romantics and inveterate readers.

If you are a liberal pro-marketeer like me, as opposed to someone in favor of anti-market corporate oligarchy, you’ve shivered while surveying the road map adopted by American university regents over the past few decades:

1. Cut funding for undergraduate education. In other words, spend less on giving your students (who pay more in tuition every year) access to classes that have been lovingly curated by experts who are intensely dedicated to the education of those students.

2. Build a gym or a stadium or something.

3. Cut funding for undergraduate education.

4. Stock up on administrators.

5. Cut more funding.

6. Keep cutting. Exploit or invent a crisis if you have to.

7. Realize that enough members of the public are slowly getting wise to the fact that this shitshow doesn’t actually teach kids to be rational, creative adults who can participate in a mature democracy. Schedule some press conferences, preferably with rich people who work in Silicon Valley/have given TED talks/are the governor of California.

8. Announce frantic, heavily funded effort to have private companies fix things because the public sector is so poor and dumb and inefficient. Emphasize gigantic online “classes.”

9. Hope that people, even those in a position to send their kids out to get four-year degrees, are too busy fighting to keep their health insurance to care about the solution not being a solution.

One of the grimmer ironies of the past decade is that the decay of American higher education, and in particular the decline of its commitment to humanism and the core sciences (i.e., the liberal arts), has moved a number of professors to write excellent books, articles, and blogs about said collapse. For example, there’s Chris Newfield’s  Unmaking the Public University; Frank Donoghue’s The Last Professors; Cary Nelson’s No University Is an Island; Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works; Benjamin Ginsberg’s Fall of the Faculty; and Bob Samuels’s “Changing Universities” blog, which focuses on California and has for years tirelessly mapped the dangers of joining “the Republican desire to shrink big government and privatize public institutions . . . with the Democratic need to be associated with progress and private-public joint ventures.”

On that note, from The Awl back in January, here is Maria Bustillos with a fitting title: “Venture Capital’s Massive, Terrible Idea for the Future of College.” The depressing takeaway:

Now California state universities are set to begin enrolling students in MOOCs for credit. Earlier this month, the president of San Jose State University, Mo Qayoumi, announced that his institution will commence a pilot program: 300 students will receive course credit for online classes in remedial algebra, college algebra and statistics. Qayoumi was joined at the press conference by California Governor Jerry Brown and Sebastian Thrun, the controversial ex-Stanford prof and co-founder of Udacity, which will supply classes for the program at the cost of $150 per customer, er, student.

“This is the single cheapest way in the country to earn college credit,” Thrun “quipped.”

It’s not quite free, as early MOOC proponents began by promising. It is worth mentioning, too, that Udacity is a venture-funded startup, that classes will be supervised not by tenured profs but by Udacity employees, and that Thrun declined to tell the Times how much public money his company will be raking in for this pilot—or what more may have been promised should the pilot prove “successful.”

Okay, fine, but let’s get this straight: public money has been mercilessly hacked from California’s education budget for decades, so now we are to give public money, taxpayer money, to private, for-profit companies to take up the slack? Because that is exactly what is happening. Wouldn’t it make more sense to just fund education to the levels we had back when it was working?

A more recent post here on TGR deals with how this pilot program turned out.

And take funding back to prior levels? I feel like the cop in that scene from The Big Lebowski where the Dude goes to retrieve his car from the impound lot. Leads!

Always Been a Soft Touch

Posted on by under Book Recommendations, The Moronic Inferno

I am shallow when it comes to books, and buying most of mine used hasn’t compromised my pickiness; it has deepened it. The aesthetics of a cover, of a spine, of a novel’s typeface, are important to me. An ugly cover; a brutalized spine or floppy, grubby corners; a big USED PRICE sticker on the back, below the final blurb; too much marginal notation from a previous owner; a clunky font; whatever, and I’m out. Indeed, the terrible covers favored by Vintage Contemporaries in the 1980s (see examples here and here) have led me into a half-decade-long project of replacing my copies. (Poorish young people end up with these dated designs when people who used to be young and poorish upgrade.)

Regardless of how well-kept or aesthetically pleasing a book is, I don’t care for hardcovers. Besides costing too much, they take up more space in your bag; long experience as a student using public transit taught me to hate them. Moreover, they don’t turn up nearly as much in used-book stores. And there is also something earthier and more democratically authentic about paperbacks. I like their portability both on a personal level and a philosophical one. They pass through a lot of hands, they make many people happy, or at least divert them, until they end up on some dork collector’s bookshelf.

Pretty archaic, huh? Print media. Wow. What with all the Internet and the technology, it must be dying out, that format.

Granted, most of the Digital Natives in my college writing classes prefer printed texts to digital ones (over and over, despite their general addiction to screens, for class they want something they can highlight and underline with a pen), and, granted, nobody ever seems to adduce hard statistics to prove that digital formats are anywhere close to universally favored by the buying public, but nonetheless one of the contemporary West’s favorite narratives is that printed books can’t compete with e-books, which are just too slick and easy to get. Print is dying, people don’t read print anymore, print is too expensive, print is old-fashioned, and despite whatever your teacher with his/her graduate degree in the humanities might tell you, print is, you know, dying. Haven’t you seen any TED talks or read a Thomas Friedman column? Print is dead, y’all. Long live digital things.

Leaving aside that it is historically stupid to believe that some new Technology is going to ecstatically solve every tedious efficiency the world presents us with, and leaving aside the fact that this is true even though humans, as a tool-making species, are always coming up with new technologies (e.g., the wheel and antibiotics), there is another gigantic, flashing reason to be skeptical about the extinction narrative: the enormous companies that produce e-books profit enormously from convincing people that only e-books are worth buying nowadays.

Always be on the lookout for the percentage. In other words, ask who stands to make money off of some “inevitable” trend. It usually turns out that some large player (or more often, a small set of players) has an interest in playing up the supposed inevitability:

Gerry Donaghy, book buyer at the largest indie bookseller in the US, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, says that the major publishers have a compelling reason to perpetuate a paperbacks-are-dying narrative, for one simple reason: because paperbacks are the most common books to be bought secondhand. “Publishers have a vested interest in keeping the e-book dominant—it allows them to control the ecosystem, because there are no used e-book sales,” Donaghy says. A paperback copy of, say, Eat Pray Love, can be sold and resold ad infinitum, thanks to Amazon and your local used book store. But for multiple people to read that same book on a Kindle or Nook, each of them has to buy it for $10.

Read the rest of the article here. Or read a summary here: “Paperbacks will survive in many prominent genres and only die out if enough consumers buy into the corporate publishing industry’s greedy bullshit.”

Used paperbacks are a desperately needed form of cultural continuity (all those texts passing through all those hands); in a purely material respect they are more varied and interesting than the latest e-book download; they don’t need batteries, and they aren’t scared of dust or the occasional blip of moisture; they are usually cheap. That final factor always helps me make up my mind.

If you love post-middle-class America, buy paperbacks, even if you buy them from . . . Amazon. But, figuratively speaking, fuck your Kindle.