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
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
The erstwhile warlord of Liberia, Charles Taylor, who helped drench several African countries in blood during the 90s, is finally going down: he’s on special U.N. trial at The Hague. (It even involves Naomi Campbell.) A psychopath whose army specialized in child slavery, mass murder (via machete), gang rape, forced prostitution, theft of money and land and diamonds, and sometimes–supposedly–cannibalism, Tayler was also a fantastic thief, and stashed millions in various tricksy places, just like a good dictator should. If you would like to read a few great essays about the things that were happening in Liberia and Sierra Leone in the middle of the previous decade–and you should, because you live on this planet too–check out Denis Johnson’s non-fiction collection, Seek. Available on your Kindle or lap. Great novelists often do a great job with terrible events.
-TGR
It’s no secret that the American university has become a terrible, exploitative economic model, in which ever-rising undergraduate tuition and an ever-growing pool of cheap non-tenured academic labor (adjunct profs AND Ph.D. students) are being used to fund privatized defense & telecom research, athletics programs, and massive, risky investments in things like hedge funds (yes, universities are big players in the investment market which nearly destroyed the U.S. economy over the past decade). If you thought the academy was all about educating citizens, you are in for some nasty surprises.
One of the most trenchant critiques of this is Bob Samuels, a professor at UCLA who also works as a top-notch education journalist. You can see a brief TV interview with him here (it’s from “Democracy Now!”); during it he explains his basic critique of the nation’s university system, particularly the “public” schools within it. He also writes a superb blog called “Changing Universities.” Its focus is the beleaguered, mismanaged University of California system I am lucky enough to call my professional home for now, but the arguments he makes are germane to all colleges and universities in the United States. If you’re in college, or have been, or have a child who is going there, or are thinking about graduate school, or just got a graduate degree, you should be reading him. The system is rigged, but it isn’t fucked. There is still time to change this.
-TGR
Shite n’ onions, at this rate we’ll be the University of Phoenix within ten years. It’s bad enough that instructors are leaned on hard (the company term is more like “encouraged”) to use new-media technology even when it isn’t necessary. (E-mail and my laptop are great, but I don’t need a class blog or Twitter account to teach Walt Whitman.) Now the University of California has begun signaling its desire to move toward complete digitization. No more physical classes means more money for the schools (since online classes are cheap to produce, but tuition keeps going up), so who cares if it seriously degrades the education our young people are getting? Go here for Matthew Yglesias’ thoughts on the fucked-up economic model that is the American public university.
It is almost certainly accurate to say that in both the U.S. and Britain there is roughly the same ratio of reasonably educated, cosmopolitan people to dull, parochial ones (the kind some pedants still call “philistines”). Hugely disparate population sizes aside, there is probably an even richer variety of cultural activity in the U.S., which is, after all, one of the most ethnically, geographically, politically, and socially heterogeneous countries on earth. We haven’t been a backwater colony for a long time, and all one needs to do to silence any haters is point to someone like Emily Dickinson or Miles Davis. Sure, American culture exports a lot of shit. So does any culture. The British are the reason we have reality TV.
So why do many Americans, myself included, continue to assume, almost instinctually, that British people are somehow wittier and more articulate and better educated than we are? This is especially true of our reactions to English emigres, but Irish and Scottish accents are also redolent of cool. What is it about the national accent that seems posh (to use some British slang), even when it comes to dialects that in England are associated with the lower classes? Why does a vulgar dumbass like Simon Cowell have any cultural cachet?
Apparently this stereotype irks Britons, too, at least according to Andrew Sullivan, the (British-born) philosophy PhD who edits the great Daily Dish and writes for a ton of American and European outlets. However, he also argues that there’s some useful truth to the whole thing: impolite English outsiders have historically provided critical, alternative views of U.S. culture. Go here to see what he has to say. It’s a Times (of London) weekend commentary bit, which means it’s short enough to read while you eat a cup of yogurt or smoke a cigarette.
-TGR
From the late nineteenth century until the 1960s, the Western was the most popular form of mass entertainment in the United States. The genre is vast, comprising Buffalo Bill’s turn-of-the-century roadshow, cowboy poetry, good and terrible fiction for both boys and adults, widely reproduced photos & paintings & woodcuts, advertisements (especially ones for cars), political campaigning (Teddy Roosevelt and Reagan both loved bullshit about the glorious frontier), TV shows, and films. Lots of academic studies have been written about the various cultural functions of the Western–i.e. what it tells us about how different kinds of Americans conceptualize American identity—but by far the best and most accessible is Jane Tompkins’ West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns (Oxford UP, 1992). Tompkins is that excellent kind of professor: she combines a historian’s erudition with a literary essayist’s verve. In other words, Tompkins will entertain the hell out of you while also teaching you a whole lot.
Tompkins organizes the book by dividing the first half into chapters that each focus on a key Western theme or icon (Cattle, Indians, Horses, etc.) and then devoting the latter to chapter-length discussions of major Western texts (e.g. Louis L’Amour’s famous–and quite good–novels). You can probably stick to the first part of the book without missing much.
While she spends a good deal of time demonstrating how popular conceptions of the West, most of them produced and consumed by white people, tend to minimize or erase altogether the incredible complexity of American history, largely by ignoring the perspectives of Native Americans, Spanish/Mexican colonists, black settlers, and Chinese immigrants, her main argument is that the Western is all about policing gender roles. Westerns became popular at exactly the same time that the U.S. was becoming an industrialized capitalist empire, which made it difficult to maintain the longstanding image of Americans as courageous settlers who battled the wilderness and converted it to a rural, farm-based, Christian pastoral. In particular, it was especially hard for American men who now tended to work in factories or white-collar office jobs to think of themselves as powerful, tough-talkin’, pragmatic individualists. The Western responds to this panic about gender by offering a simplistic, consoling story in which men are quiet heroes and women are nurturing companions in need of male protection. Her implicit point is that many of our nation’s cultural formations are about exactly the same thing.
So if you like history or are at all interested in the byzantine origins of “American” identity, check this out.
-TGR
I watch a lot of sports, so I get to see many variations on three basic kinds of advertisements: car commercials, erectile-dysfunction medication commercials, and military propaganda. This latter category breaks down into two sub-genres: recruitment ads explicitly financed by the U.S. military (“The few, the proud . . . “) and self-congratulatory spots by defense contractors like Boeing (“Helping protect America against . . . “). The contractor ads are especially creepy; they look and sound like parodies out of Starship Troopers.
As a number of radical liberal theorists such as George Washington (in his 1796 Farewell Address) and General Dwight D. Eisenhower (in his Farewell Address, where he coins the term “military-industrial complex”) have argued, the establishment of giant standing armies runs directly, absolutely counter to the interests of a free republic. A permanent military devours enormous amounts of money which could be spent elsewhere (say on silly stuff like schools and health care), concentrates power in the executive branch (and in America’s case, creates a fourth branch of government called the Department of Defense), and reinforces the idea that a nation’s identity is inseparable from its military culture and interests. Consider that no person gets elected President of the United States without constantly praising the “integrity” and “sacrifices” and “nobility” of the armed forces; notice that for all his excellent left-of-center qualities, Barrack Obama will never, ever question the wisdom of spending more than half of the federal budget on the military. $1.5 trillion last year. Alone. That’s trillion with a T. Most of which is deficit-spending financed by China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. Even Obama’s newest Supreme-Court nominee, Elena Kagan, who is ostensibly a liberal, had to gush about how great the military is after conservatives attacked her for her opposition to military recruitment at Harvard. Almost nobody in the American ruling class not named Kucinich will even mention the warnings of patriots like Washington and Eisenhower.
Now, I admire the individual bravery and professional dedication of soldiers. (If you want a reason why, check out Frontline’s newest documentary, “The Wounded Platoon,” which airs this Tuesday on PBS.) My grandfather, one of the kindest, most intelligent men I have ever known, was a two-star general in the National Guard. But I do not think that soldiering is an inherently noble profession; in other words, I agree with General Washington. The time when the American military existed to serve the Republic (instead of the other way around) is long past. American political culture surrounds “our” troops with plenty of rhetoric about valor and sacrifice, but ultimately they exist to defend a narrow spectrum of imperialist and corporate interests, and they are generally treated as disposable goons, left to deal with their own physical and psychological agony once they’re discharged.
For decades, one of the most erudite, articulate critics of American militarism has been Chalmers Johnson. Educated at Berkeley, Johnson’s academic specialty is geopolitical studies, with an emphasis on the Pacific Rim; he spent decades teaching at Berkeley and UC San Diego before his retirement (he’s now a UCSD Emeritus). In addition to his astonishing knowledge of American military and political history, Johnson has two more great attributes: he isn’t a self-righteous twit who views the U.S. as entirely, invariably evil (like Noam Chomsky appears to), and he has a military background—he served in the Korean War and worked for the CIA in the 60s and 70s. Johnson was a serious Cold Warrior. But he was horrified by how the collapse of the Soviet Union did nothing to slow the growth of the U.S. defense budget, and he has since produced some of the best general-interest works on American neo-imperialism: among these are Blowback and The Sorrows of Empire. The philosophical thread which connects all of his writings is that while modern democracies need adequate armies and must stand against psychotic anti-modern forces like Islamic fanaticism, it is absolutely insane that the U.S. has hundreds of military bases around the world (most of them left over from the Cold War), and that we spend so much money on, and devote so much political devotion to, the military. We are still building new submarines and nuclear weapons (for instance). Last time I checked, Osama Bin Laden didn’t have a navy, and even military analysts don’t think that ICBMs will do much to deter terrorists from seeking to build a rogue bomb.
Anyway, watch the above interview. It’s about an hour long and will give you a clearer and more detailed summary of Johnson’s views than I am capable of writing.
-TGR
The General Reader 