How Not to Support an Argument (or a Culture)

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

We’ve written a lot recently about the funding, management, and technological problems (all related to one another) currently affecting higher education. This discussion largely avoids what is going on within individual majors or disciplines. Frankly, I don’t know enough about what’s cooking (to borrow a phrase from Oppenheimer) in most fields to have an opinion about the usefulness of what happens in, say, a biochemistry class. I do, however, have a pretty good sense of what occurs in literature classes, in spite of the fact that I haven’ t taught one in almost two years now. And this is why I am slightly torn as to what to make of Lee Siegel’s recent article in The Wall Street Journal. 

I am generally skeptical of pieces about education and the humanities published in the WSJ. It’s a prejudice I should probably get over (Thomas Frank used to write for them!), but I doubt I will. And Siegel’s piece is very much in line with the ideology of the paper’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, in its call for literature to be removed from the largely public (and quasi-publicly-funded) realm of college curricula so that it can “flourish” in the private lives of individuals. Although he doesn’t come right out and say it, Siegel is essentially calling for the defunding of humanities education because, according to him, it doesn’t provide any skills that can be monetized. He writes:

The remarkably insignificant fact that, a half-century ago, 14% of the undergraduate population majored in the humanities (mostly in literature, but also in art, philosophy, history, classics and religion) as opposed to 7% today has given rise to grave reflections on the nature and purpose of an education in the liberal arts.

Such ruminations always come to the same conclusion: We are told that the lack of a formal education, mostly in literature, leads to numerous pernicious personal conditions, such as the inability to think critically, to write clearly, to empathize with other people, to be curious about other people and places, to engage with great literature after graduation, to recognize truth, beauty and goodness.

These solemn anxieties are grand, lofty, civic-minded, admirably virtuous and virtuously admirable. They are also a sentimental fantasy.

He goes on, predictably, to blame the decline in the quality of literary education on tenured radicals (I must be the luckiest guy on earth to have never had one of these as a professor in my ten years of undergraduate and graduate study), and it’s clear Siegel thinks he’s making a devastating point when he starts using his own experiences as evidence that not only does one not gain much from taking literature courses in college, but that taking them actively “extinguish[es] the incandescence of literature.” And that’s really what the essay boils down to: Siegel found his college literature courses so allegedly dispiriting that he thinks we should simply get rid of them, but not dispiriting enough that he refrained from studying literature in graduate school. It is the flimsiest of reeds upon which to hang an argument, especially when Siegel doesn’t even bother to address whether writing about complex works of art in a context where one can get constructive criticism of said writing might help one become a better analytic and descriptive writer. He simply asserts that it doesn’t. Finally, don’t even get me started on these unsupported (because unsupportable) passages:

Every other academic subject requires specialized knowledge and a mastery of skills and methods. Literature requires only that you be human. It does not have to be taught any more than dreaming has to be taught. Why does Hector’s infant son, Astyanax, cry when he sees his father put on his helmet? All you need to understand that is a heart.

…

The notion that great literature can help you with reading and thinking clearly is also a chimera. One page of Henry James’s clotted involutions or D.H. Lawrence’s throbbing verbal repetitions will disabuse you of any conception of literature’s value as a rhetorical model. Rather, the literary masterworks of Western civilization demonstrate the limitations of so-called clear-thinking. They present their meanings in patchwork-clouds of associations, intuitions, impressions. There are sonnets by Shakespeare that no living person can understand. The capacity to transfix you with their language while hiding their meaning in folds of mind-altering imagery is their rare quality.

…

Anyway, we have all been sufficiently sparked and stoked by literature to make it part of our destiny by the time we graduate high school. If there is any hand-wringing to do, it should be over the disappearance of what used to be a staple of every high-school education: the literature survey course, where books were not academically taught but intimately introduced—an experience impervious to inane commentary and sterile testing. Restore and strengthen that ground-shifting encounter and the newly graduated pilgrims will continue to read and seek out the transfiguring literary works of the past the way they will be drawn to love.

So why am I even a little torn after read this mostly vapid, abstract, and culturally clueless piece of criticism? Because I think Siegel is right that there are things wrong with the ways we teach literature. Literary “theory” is indeed “that fig leaf for mediocrity,” and the value given to it by a few professors is sad. Most of what Derrida, Butler, and Foucault (and even Freud) said that is of any use can be boiled down to a few sentences. And some professors don’t do a very good job of making clear connections between what students read and write in their classes and the lives they’ve led, are leading, and will lead once they leave the university. Siegel’s most salient critique though is of literary education on the high school level.  While I am not sure what he means when he says that survey courses should not be “academically taught,” he is right that we need to introduce students to an ever-expanding canon of great works (from the Bible to John Rechy and beyond) in their formative years. Siegel manages to botch even this simple point though, as he fails to mention the reason why even our smartest students are coming out of high school unable to write about or even really feel connected to complex works of literature: AP testing. Instead of cutting literary study out of the college curriculum, we need to eliminate AP literature courses that teach students to think about literature in terms of multiple choice tests and timed, short essay exams, and we need to eliminate these evaluative measures at the college level as well. Instead of helping students think about literature, these forms force students to focus on how to best “beat” the test. It becomes a game, and many of the kids I teach spend enough of their time playing games. The study of literature needs to be hard in order for it to be useful, so I thank Siegel for (kind of) gesturing toward this fact, even if most of what he says is laughable.

And this is where I come back to the fact that this piece was published in the Wall Street Journal. It seems that the mode of modern conservatism is to be as profoundly unconservative as it can be. Instead of trying to fix higher education and the social safety net (to say nothing of the social fabric of which its made), modern conservatism prefers to blow things up and “let the market sort things out.” This is a great strategy if you’re insulated from the market’s often violent reactions, but not so good for everyone else. If you care at all about culture, you try to pass it on to as many people as you can. You don’t write gushy paeans to ignorance.

Topical Verse: Detroit

Posted on by under Authors, Pooms/Poetry, Topical Verse

In honor of Detroit’s totally depressing and, according to Keith B. Richburg, entirely predictable bankruptcy (take heed, California), here is an offering by former U.S. Poet Laureate (and perpetual Detroit and Fresno Poet Laureate) Philip Levine. This selection comes from his later work, and if you haven’t read his more famous verses from the 1960s, especially “They Feed They Lion,” you should. Like Jim Daniels, Levine’s subjects are often working class, and his observations aren’t always politically correct. But his work is true and public, like the best rap music. We need more poetry like this right now.

What Work Is

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is—if you’re
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it’s someone else’s brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours of wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, “No,
we’re not hiring today,” for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who’s not beside you or behind or
ahead because he’s home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You’ve never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you’re too young or too dumb,
not because you’re jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don’t know what work is.

Weekend Beats

Posted on by under Weekend Beats

Happy weekend, y’all. Survive the heatwave if you are living on the East Coast. May classic joints keep your porches on point.

Also: What if they made you the minister of MOOCs? Could you stay saintly?

 

Murderrrrrrr, was the case that they (people with bad taste) gave The General Reader.

“A Natural Breather Time”

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

Looks like San Jose State’s outsourced MOOC adventure is off to a bright start. In fact, things are going so well that the school is going to do what American University already has, and just chill for a bit.

Translation from provost-speak to English: “Umm, we decided to do this, and facts aren’t going to change that now. Move along. As soon as you people stop paying attention to what we’re doing, we can go back to doing it.”

The Cost of Tenure

Posted on by under education, the polis

Being a young teacher who is lucky enough to have full-time work but not fortunate enough to be on the tenure track, I occasionally romanticize the material existences of the actual institutionally certified professors I know. Not the adjuncts; not even the lucky lecturers; no, the real professors who have tenure or who can maybe get tenure someday. Those folks. They must have houses to themselves and own their Priuses outright. Right?

Right?

Oh dammit. No, reports Katherine Harris, at least not if you teach at a public university. Her poignant, pragmatic essay is worth reading. Still, as Doc Sportello would say, Bummer.

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!