School Daze

Posted on by under education, in the news, the polis

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 Bigger They Are

Posted on by under Authors, Book Recommendations, in the news, the polis

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

BRRRR

Posted on by under mainly rap music

It’s been a great summer for hip-hop.  Big Boi’s first solo effort, Sir Lucious Leftfoot: The Son of Chico Dusty, is amazing (I haven’t felt this way about a rap album since Clipse released Hell Hath No Fury back in 2006), and puts to rest any debate about who the more “creative” member of OutKast is.  Andre 3000 might have cool hair and hipster clothes and be a great MC, but BB is a genius.  The Dream’s Love King is also out, and it should assuage any residual longings you have for R. Kelly; in fact, you might decide he’s even better than Kells.  Both albums available wherever you buy/steal MP3s.

Further, Gucci Mane is out of jail!  He recently dropped a very good mixtape, Mr. Zone 6 (with DJ Drama), which you can get for free after a quick Google search.  I think “Normal” is the standout track, but the whole thing is great.  One might argue that, like Lil Wayne (also due out of the clink soon), Gucci does better work on his mixtapes than on his actual albums; while I wouldn’t go that far, this new stuff is dope.

She a snake charmer, / Anaconda, / A real man-eater / Like Jeffrey Dah-mah.

-TGR

PS: Check out the new single by Juvenile (yes, him), “Drop That Azz.”  You can probably guess what it’s about.  The synths sound like LCD Soundsystem, the beat is bananas, and Juv is hilarious.

PPS: And T.I. has a new LP coming soon!  And so does Young Dro!  Oh the abundance!

The Trouble with Universities

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

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

Breaking News: Lame Magazine has Lame Cover

Posted on by under American Masculinity, Authors, Visual

Please, please tell me this is a parody.  I’m all for humor, but I can’t take this.  Not just the tatted bro with his fixie, but the stuff about how agents are actually nice/necessary and the bromide about how small presses are the best ever, too.  Please tell me there aren’t earnest editors behind this.

Now, I can’t speak to this guy’s literary chops, because I haven’t read him; for all I know he’s the next Hazlitt.  But he let someone take that photograph and then put it on the cover of a national magazine.  Even though P&W is pretty useless (writers don’t need trade rags), this is embarrassing.  Here’s hoping Mr. Kaelan keeps his shirt on next time and lets his writing do the talking.

-TGR

Dull hatchet job

Posted on by under Authors

This morning my friend Ariel sent me a link to this article from the London Telegraph, which briefly discusses Martin Amis’ purported recent turn to feminism.  I don’t entirely agree with how it presents his views on gender.  Granting that Amis has become more strident in his public support for global women’s rights since 9/11 (an attack grounded in an medieval ideology which he and others have correctly described as psychotically violent toward women), and acknowledging that the main characters in his novels are usually men, it is not the case that Amis has “become” a feminist, which seems to be the standard journalistic line on him at the moment.  He’s always been one!  It’s difficult to read any Amis novel, even one of his early “laddish” efforts like Success (the best existing account of young-male sexual frustration), without realizing where his sympathies lie.  His work is nothing if not a really fucking funny, sustained critique of traditional Western maleness (and constrictive female roles, too). Most Amis characters are doomed narcissists.  He’s a black comic.  But it’s his men who turn the cruelty up to 11.  Take London Fields: Nicola Six is a corrupt self-obsessive, but Keith Talent is the genuine monster.  Amis writes about men like Stalin and Mohamed Atta as men for a reason.

Then a few hours later I was browsing the web and came across a Jezebel post that links to the same article with the tagline “The accused misogynist clarifies his feminist hopes and dreams.”  They also included a particularly bad photo of Amis.  I threw up in my mouth a little, and not because I’m an Amis fanboy having a knee-jerk defensive response.

Forget how lame it is to be snide without explaining why you are being snide (simply assuming your reader already agrees with you about Amis or anything else is intellectually weak).  Try to ignore the sputtering in the “Comments” section.  And think about this instead: what’s with the adjective “accused“?  What the fuck does that mean?  President Obama has been “accused” of being a secret jihadist, but that doesn’t make him one.  One lazy word underscores the whole problem: you cannot make sweeping claims about an artist or any other serious human being or event without at least trying to offer some evidence for why you’re right.  Jezebel is fine when it reposts material from better Gawker Media sites or discusses Jon Hamm or whatever; going in for vague ad hominem mini-criticism, though, was a bad move.  Unless they were trying to appear dumb, in which case they did well.  Relax. Amis is on the team.

-TGR

Un-Cool, UC

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

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.

Reason Not the Need

Posted on by under American Masculinity, in the news, sports

You may have heard that last week Lebron James made a hugely public decision about where to play basketball for the next half-decade.  Like a lot of sports fans, I was initially repulsed by how James handled his free-agency meditations.  One would think somebody so adept at navigating the media would have realized that buying up an hour of primetime on the largest sports network in North America makes you look like a dick.  (And during the World Cup!  And there were kids ranged behind him!)  Then, during the proclamation itself, I felt more sympathetic: Bron-bron looked worried and exhausted as he announced he’s going to play for the Miami Heat, and while the sentimentalist in me would have liked to have heard a bit more treacle about how “the fans in Cleveland are great and stuff, etc.” (Dan Gilbert, the Cavs’ owner, went hilariously bonkers over James’ apparent indifference), the guy was clearly agonized about something.

The sports commentariat has been yelling about The Decision for a week now.  As you might suspect, the debate is suffused with plenty of sentiment and practiced, pious outrage; a Google search and some reading will remind you that most sportswriters are sanctimonious wangs.  But there have been some good off-the-cuff pieces on James.  This one, published by Deadspin, argues that The King is not, in fact, a selfish vampire, that for all his obnoxious celebrations of himself (including that stupid nickname) he still gave seven years of marvelous on-court work to a consistently mundane team based in a cold, depressing Rust-Belt city before deciding he’d rather make less money and live in Miami and win a championship than spend the rest of his prime in the same shitty area he grew up in.  Imagine being yoked to whatever dull, corny town you were raised in . . . . Centered on James—a grown-ass man who can make his own decisions—the article is nonetheless primarily about how most of us have learned to evaluate public figures based on how they market themselves rather than on whatever real merits or skills they possess, even when we are evaluating someone as obviously, amazingly gifted as Lebron James.

Look to Bill Simmons (nom de plume The Sports Guy) for a more critical—and also typically sententious—reaction to James’ tactics.  Before turning things over to the otiose comments of his boring readers (it’s one of his lame “mailbag” posts), TSG asserts that James doesn’t have the necessary competitive psychopathology to win a championship like Jordan, et al. did.  We’ll see.  King is only 25.

After that you’ll probably want to wash up with some Charles Pierce, the splendid Boston-based writer who is always articulate and sane about sports even though he’s passionate about most of them, and who has the touch for acid skepticism that never becomes cynicism.  Scroll down through his blog and catch the thoughts on Lebron.  Really, you should be reading this guy every morning.  You’ll feel better.

-TGR