Academia's introverts

The push now moves STEM curricula forward, shoving aside the liberal arts and all those impecunious pursuits unable to be justified by the tens of thousands parents and students accrue in debt. The government wants to cut programs that don't show results in terms of quantifiable job placements and incomes able to sustain a graduate. The corporations want to use academia as the minor leagues for workers and the batter's cage for lucrative grants in turn funding yet another war machine.

Nothing new. But my friend, who teaches in Liverpool, shared this post by a former student of his. As a relevant aside, searching for an image to grace this piece, I see that a colleague of my friend is at the same university. Joe Moran speaks up at Times Higher Education for the "shy academic" and figures he's at home in its groves. Solitary reflection for this historian infuses then the exchanges he benefits from. Inside Higher Education presents Ellie Bothwell's summation that cultural differences also contribute to the problem. African and Middle Eastern scholars may publish less and hunker down. For America, like England, however, our supervisors step up our speed, for their profits. Qualitative goals, for even reticent humanists, loom.

Keene Short's blog entry (at his Pens and Pencils site today appearing as "Soft-Spoken in Academia") articulates predicaments common to those of us less beholden to this leviathan and more concerned about the little guys and gals, ourselves included, who must bow lest we're crushed by the juggernaut. I contemplate this as the federal budget demands $1.1 trillion for "defense," tellingly,

Keene Short (aka JK) faces, as he starts grad school, the same situation I did back in the Orwellian year at UCLA. As part of the arrangement for doctoral candidates, you contributed your labor to teaching the lower-end courses that the tenured shunned. For what was then about $9k a school year. For the next six, I taught for the whole span permitted for a TA, while pursuing my "terminal degree."

Twenty-three, fresh with a Master's, I was given my first freshman (can I still say that?) composition course. These measured around twenty-five on the roster, a fact I recall with sadness as I will have forty enrolled in my upcoming online course (we must teach at least one annually as a way to boost the institutional profile with more doctorate-level instructors, as the quality lagged overall online. The bloom is off that rose.) One administrator a while back assured us faculty that there was "no evidence" to account for smaller class sizes resulting in improved educational results. I'd have liked to see those data. My tendonitis flares up whenever I carry out the myriad tasks accompanying an online deluge of paperwork, and we're required to be online practically daily. If I take time off, the amount of written assignments small (which can exceed now 250 a week as threaded discussion posts) and big as essays and exams requiring scrutiny (rather than as multiple-choice tests or quizzes textbook-prefabricated and happily used (and abused as answers proliferate online, as I warned them) exponentially soars. I digress to show how technology has heightened rather than eased workloads.

Back to my recent fellow-toiler, he observes how the soft-spoken among us in academic circles fare. JK labels it the "competitive fast-paced aggressively limited-time-offer college-industrial complex."

Portraying his introductory rhetoric course's demands, he finds students want to win arguments. Reporting on his pedagogy course's expectations, he tells how production is pushed upon the ranks of grad students earlier than ever. "Paths" and "timelines" turn students of all levels into hurried output. I teach at a business and tech-oriented institution, where the humanities are on the side, with no majors and no tenure. I'm expected to "turnaround" grades quickly. I am judged on this by both students and whomever mans the Panopticon as we all scurry about online under the pressure to meet "outcomes."

Rather than "patience" or "scruples," JK sees that this system's fueled by "the production of ideas, the teeming blue schools of links clicked on a given day, the riptides of steady marketable publications."

He concludes with sentiments I second. "But there is not a place in the current scheme of things for the soft-spoken, for people who are here to learn regardless of what degrees I may or may not get out of it. I don’t fit in. Maybe that’s a good thing." As for me, yes, I produce. Partly because my predilections, my training, and my interests direct me from within. Partly because a small percentage (reduced now to 15% along with nebulous "professional activity"; cf. the shift from 60% to 45% not of course loads but weight given teaching as opposed to the new 25% for "university and program service" on committees galore) still counts towards a "performance review." And I was born curious.

One final perspective I'll add: we all play parts. I am more aloof and shy on my own as away from the classroom. My third of a century this year in that role requires some aspect of a dynamic "sage on the stage" to thrive and survive for so long teaching. While the "guide on the side" of androgogy is touted as the latest trend, to "spin" the energy back to the students, rousing them from endemic passivity, I'd aver, coming home after one more night of thousands now in my avocation and my career, that we teachers remain the energizers of everyone else in the florescent, screen-proliferating realm we inhabit. To coax our charges out of their smartphone and PC burrows, we have to act as if coaches. This requires a role model that transforms even a shy guy or gal, on both sides of the storied podium.

Unshackling the liberal arts

Chelsea Manning urges: "Read everything. Absorb everything that is out there and act as your own filter. Hunt down your own answers to questions. This is the only advice that is actually worth anything. If you don't read these things yourself, then you can't say that you truly understand what humanity has done, and where we are going. We can't spend our lives getting spoon-fed all of our information every day and then expect to understand our world. Only then will you understand that people are still hurting and dying in the world around us." In this Paper interview, I suspect his fervent embrace of transhuman cyber-utopia, urged on by "Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst; design duo Metahaven, aka Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk; and Web-activist Jacob Appelbaum." As the introduction explains: "Together, they weigh the strictures and possibilities not just of government, but of technology, culture and gender." No surprise, given Manning's transition from Bradley. I am not as confident as these enthusiasts that more tech equals more following one's bliss. Manning and confreres eagerly anticipate that tech will unshackle us all. Like her, I've seen a lot.

When I started teaching "Technology, Culture, and Society" to my students, all tech and business majors, in 1997, we used a textbook. Microsoft had barely moved from 3.1 to Windows 97, long since a relic. I relied on written notes, an overhead after I typed them, a whiteboard to highlight them, and my own exams to test my students' comprehension. We chose, locally, our text. Later, as colleagues joined me to teach this course, I lobbied successfully for an option for each of us to use our own current events materials and historical documents, to keep ever-changing content relevant.

Those teaching this course thrived. My colleagues enjoyed tailoring materials to their own expertise and the interests of their students. As tech changed and events flowed, so the curriculum for this course changed. Each term, I'd revise my readings into a packet, and tinkering with syllabi was a joy. 

As with Manning, I resist being spoon-fed.. Like processed food, some packaged contents seem appealing, but repeated reliance on lesson plans weakens the recipient and infantilizes the dispenser. I relished, when I chose to teach college and so to earn my Ph.D. first, a career that rewarded liberty.

About a decade ago, that freedom ended. A top-down administration took over. Our campus lost any autonomy. We were told all campuses had to use the same books, follow the same lectures, and conduct the same exams. That way, somehow it was reasoned, students could move between campuses, and then the emerging online mode, seamlessly. Also, we were all monitored as in turn we monitored our students, via a proprietary course platform. Designed by a major academic publisher, it guaranteed we selected its titles first, and those we liked more, even if we could not choose them anymore, were abandoned. Faculty had little input; we were told if we wanted to have a say, we ourselves should design the courses. But what worked for me onsite, a term now that along with landline entered the language to differentiate old from new "modalities" of communication and data transfer, did not work even for my colleague teaching the same course. I valued most our autonomy.

A year ago, we hosted a Career Day for students. I attended and took the same quiz as they did. After narrowing down the options from dozens I found the one that matched me best as #1: autonomy.  As the outlier at an institution where everyone teaches and majors in fields not liberal arts, I may have self-selected myself out of the herd. Apparently, engineers, accountants, and managers follow orders.

I now try to adjust to the new system. Systems are in place that track all of us, when and where we log in and out. A Panopticon. Still, I alternate my own materials, showing videos and generating discussion in-class that then follows through to that mandated online. This is a "capstone" course building on past humanities and social science courses, but these dwindle. "My" literature course, the only one left after the film and science fiction electives were oddly cut--given what I have found the natural interests of visual learners and techies--keeps getting cancelled for lack of interest, tellingly.

The technology text may enchant some, but I generate lessons out of venerable vignettes or late-breaking news. I share them and I elicit them. Gradually, some try to speak up for themselves. Students start to learn from each other, rather than only my lectures. I teach fewer hours in front of a class but many more online. I divide my time between two sites now, and also I must teach online. Those courses enroll double or triple my onsite ones, and the workload is exponentially far higher. I lack the limited modification permitted me onsite, and the syllabi and rapid online pace are daunting.

I reflect on this as again I prepare to teach, the most taught of all my courses, once again. I estimate thousands by now perhaps went through it, and after nearly twenty years surely as many students have taken this than even my composition courses? I used to teach it every session, and sometimes twice. Schedules enabling online enrollment decrease its frequency, but I do like hunting for new videos and I often glean from Facebook and the L.A. and N.Y. Times tech articles and lively links.

One of the supervisors from the top visited us recently. I told her of my experiences after a decade of imposed standardization. I concluded by urging that she and her cohort "trust us enough to teach."

How my plea was received I am unsure. I used to hear from my directors that "they would keep such-and-such in mind" before getting back to me. When they rarely did, I wondered how they forgot. Now into my third decade of college teaching, I come to understand what has been left unsaid.

It can be a grind teaching the same courses over and over, now in only eight weeks, sometimes with no pause between terms. My estimation of self-motivated and grassroots design become all the more embedded as I age, and as I keep at it. In every creative way I can, I long to make my courses personal, and designed not to trap students or myself in a mold, but to liberate us for the humanities.
(Photo credit: search for "autonomy" found this ironic image and slogan c/o HP's latest acquisition.)
(P.S. Thanks to Anthony McIntyre at The Pensive Quill for sharing this on his fine site, 9-14-15.)

Surplus Labor + me

Judy Cox, explaining Marx's theory in International Socialism (Summer 1998), a SWP magazine, concludes "As alienation is rooted in capitalist society, only the collective struggle against that society carries the potential to eradicate alienation, to bring our vast, developing powers under our conscious control and reinstitute work as the central aspect of life." I write this on Labor Day.

I don't want waged work to be my life's core. Anarchists encourage us to rethink this learned dependence. Mutual aid, voluntary organization, no demands to serve supervisors for corporate gain certainly appeal to my instinct. I want to produce creative work that I could exchange for others' goods and services, rather than a capitalist regime. But few of us "mature" folks have the stomach for dumpster diving or the gumption for petty theft. As I spend so much time and effort at my monitored posts, online and onsite, I reflect on how my occupation incorporates surveillance and management techniques that, in Marx's era, were the domain of the factory (or the prison as Foucault reminded us) rather than higher education. I am not idealizing the dispiriting system that started with Gradgrind, the dissertation and the professoriate. Still, earlier decades last century afforded some space for liberal arts, not all STEM. With digital data, a lurch has accelerated since Cox wrote this. The union where I work was "made redundant" before I was hired. This was a topic nobody confided in to me; I sensed, sub rosa, PTSD.

Lukacs proved as prescient about this loss of limited liberty as higher levels of the workplace became more standardized. In History and Class Consciousness, he pinned down the metamorphosis: "In consequence of the rationalisation of the work-process the human qualities and idiosyncrasies of the worker appear increasingly as mere sources of error when contrasted with these abstract special laws functioning according to rational predictions. Neither objectively nor in his relation to his work does man appear as the authentic master of this process; on the contrary, he is a mechanical part incorporated into a mechanical system. He finds it already pre-existing and self-sufficient, it functions independently of him and he has to conform to its laws whether he likes it or not.^34"

Cox cites Harry Braverman's 1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital to document this deskilling of white collar jobs and to a situation where managers have a monopoly of control over the production process: 'The unity of thought and action, conception and execution, hand and mind, which capitalism threatened from it beginnings, is now attacked by a systematic dissolution employing all the resources of science and the various engineering disciplines based upon it'.³² Conditions of work, from the length of the working day to the space we occupy, are predetermined: 'The entire work operation, down to its smallest motion, is conceptualised by the management and engineering staff, laid out, measured, fitted with training and performance standards - all entirely in advance'.^33"

This control increases, as Edward Snowden warns. “I don’t want to live in a world where everything that I say, everything I do, everyone I talk to, every expression of creativity or love or friendship is recorded.” — “Edward Snowden: ‘The US government will say I aided our enemies,’” July 8, 2013

“A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters; privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be.” “Snowden Sends Christmas Message To USA,” Dec. 25, 2013. (More quotes here.)

Certainly this (de-)evolution has long been charted. Reading Marxist analyses of how my workplace has altered over the past generation, their reports dovetail with Peter Fleming's 2015 study. This London-based professor of business and society plots in The Mythology of Work, in his apt subtitle, "How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself." But where Fleming seems to depart from the Marxian critique may be in his updated critique of neo-liberal economics and management. Diverging from such as Cox who wishes to restore work as the ground for our purpose, only under our control, Fleming cautions us against embracing those who make work's "impudent needlessness" rather our "basilar necessity" out of "moral rectitude." (22) He also reminds us that "anti-work" arguments based on how the work day is stretched out to eight hours when we can do our task, earn enough for our needs, and go home in a fraction of that day will not satisfy today's capitalists. They don't present us with "finite tasks" to be checked off at our own pace. They offer jobs with "forever multiplying demands." (8) Not for only productivity and profit but one's "display" of "protracted submission" to work's ritual results. Surplus toil increases when the phone and P.C. may call us in at any moment. We are human capital, so managerial emphasis weighs accordingly on not the adjective but the noun. Fleming accounts for why meetings proliferate and bosses summon us to be seen, power plus profit.

Unfortunately, as my review elaborates, Fleming offers solutions as distant as those of some in my current reading of left-libertarians. That is, I agree with and I aspire to many of them, but as my duty is to pay bills, to keep my family fed, sheltered, and schooled, escaping tonight to fulfill my bliss is not an exit option. I also agree, that we start towards our dreams by re-constructing daily reality.

Bryce Colvert writes in The Nation, after revelations of the driven culture of Amazon staff, how we are trapped in this rapid pace of production. "It speaks to an inability to say no. And in the face of that disempowerment, we may be telling ourselves extreme demands are in fact voluntary choices. After all, it feels better to think of time spent in front of a computer well into the night as something done in the service of passion than in the service of someone else’s bottom line." More stress, longer hours, no increase in pay, stagnant wages for decades, work-life broken boundaries: we are the 99%.

Emotional rescue

My last post covered a Connecticut high school teacher's forced resignation after a student complaint over an explicit Allen Ginsberg poem chosen by a classmate for in-class discussion. Is the situation any different when college courses come under the same scrutiny? When I raised this on Facebook, some asserted that those in their late teens were in AP English, still under the choices the teacher made for them, and despite the aegis of UConn over that material for credit, they were a captive audience. So, consider Edward Schlosser's cri de coeur after nine years at a "midsized state school."

In Vox, he titles his essay "I'm a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me." (Thanks to an Lisa Flowers for this notice). He starts by noting a shift since 2009. Back then, someone objected to what was perceived as the professor's liberal bias. His supervisor heard him out, and the matter was filed away, and no repercussions reverberated. But now, identity politics reigns. "The student-teacher dynamic has been reenvisioned along a line that's simultaneously consumerist and hyper-protective, giving each and every student the ability to claim Grievous Harm in nearly any circumstance, after any affront, and a teacher's formal ability to respond to these claims is limited at best."

Schlosser tells us that recently, "I have intentionally adjusted my teaching materials as the political winds have shifted. (I also make sure all my remotely offensive or challenging opinions, such as this article, are expressed either anonymously or pseudonymously). Most of my colleagues who still have jobs have done the same. We've seen bad things happen to too many good teachers — adjuncts getting axed because their evaluations dipped below a 3.0, grad students being removed from classes after a single student complaint, and so on." If Edward Said or Mark Twain or Upton Sinclair offend the reader or hearer, they are expunged, lest complaints result in the firing or non-rehiring of what, after all, has grown to 3/4 of American faculty, those lacking protection of or promotion to tenure.

The climate has changed. Racism or ideological factors, rightness and wrongness of ideas in the curricula, dominated earlier complaints. Now, the sensitivity of the student's emotional state matters.

The author locates this transition not so much in the manufactured "outrage" (as I put it) dominating press coverage of incidents as to hyper-sensitive, paranoid students and campus "conduct codes."
He credits the conflation of cultural studies and popular media writers in the media. They desire to "democratize complex fields of study by making them as digestible as a TGIF sitcom." They peddle a facile "adoption of a totalizing, simplistic, unworkable, and ultimately stifling conception of social justice. The simplicity and absolutism of this conception has combined with the precarity of academic jobs to create higher ed's current climate of fear, a heavily policed discourse of semantic sensitivity in which safety and comfort have become the ends and the means of the college experience."

After citing some experts, he notes how exaggerated attention to passing trifles becomes. (Consider how much the purported gender roles of the latest Avengers flick are dissected, or I'd add if he does not, today's breathless headlines of Bruce-to-Caitlyn Jenner's "courage" or a Duggar's disgrace vs., say, the challenges ahead re: global warming given recent, depressing data, or the enduring collusion between bankers and politicians.) "Personal experience and feelings aren't just a salient touchstone of contemporary identity politics; they are the entirety of these politics. In such an environment, it's no wonder that students are so prone to elevate minor slights to protestable offenses." As attacks on philosophy or physics by those claiming concepts invented by tired old men express only Eurocentric shortcomings, we cower.  "All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis —from due process to scientific method — are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away."

See the article for evidence of this, albeit via Twitter, that Schlosser shares (or he did until the woman complained of threats--that proof has since been removed, although it helped his thesis). This reductive regression reminds me a bit of Alan Sokol's send-up two decades ago in his po-mo hoax to Social Theory. Schlosser reveals his bonafides: "We can't overcome prejudice by pretending it doesn't exist. Focusing on identity allows us to interrogate the process through which white males have their opinions taken at face value, while women, people of color, and non-normatively gendered people struggle to have their voices heard." Yet he admits, logically, how "we also destroy ourselves when identity becomes our sole focus." Conservative Catholic critic Anthony Esolen agrees when he states that we cannot equate the ethnic or racial makeup of a person with who he or she is, beyond labels.

I doubt if Schlosser and Esolen would find a lot in common, but if Schlosser as he claims does try to balance liberal with conservative voices in his assignments, I'd hope they could find common ground.
"If we are to know that human being, we should not begin with race or class or “gender,” that category invented by social critics who avert their eyes, prim and prying at once, from the frank and plain reality of sex. We certainly cannot end there. If I say, 'Who is John?' you cannot answer me correctly by saying that he is six feet tall, 150 pounds, with Italian and Irish ancestry on his mother’s side and African American and Latino ancestry on his father’s side, with a family income of such and such a year, voting in such a pattern, living on Maple Street and selling insurance. These are all things about John, but they are not John, the man. It does violence to the man to reduce him to such categories. It is an act of contempt for his humanity. It reduces him, not so that we may get to know him, but so that we can manipulate facts about him while not getting to know him at all. It is a study in subhumanity." So Esolen challenges, in his riposte to the race, gender, class theory overtaking all.

Schlosser tacks firmly to the left. But he accepts that attacking the right, or those who have preceded us and who live among us as the establishment, still have their own place at the discussion. Why push them away, to distance them further, in the spurious pursuit of illogical presumption? In conclusion, he admits: "Debate and discussion would ideally temper this identity-based discourse, make it more usable and less scary to outsiders. Teachers and academics are the best candidates to foster this discussion, but most of us are too scared and economically disempowered to say anything." I have written about this issue before and continue to because it weighs more heavily against those of us committed to the liberal arts, those who pass on the humanities in a career-driven, bottom-line world.

We are threatened from above by STEM-propelled reforms that seek often, if unintentionally, to shunt aside the "soft" subjects. We are weakened around us by theory-obsessed pedagogues who replace book-learning and critical thinking from close readings and informed discussions with cant and slant. We are faced by those enrolling with us who often have trouble decrypting the clouded messages of what canonical as well as radical texts and sources convey from thousands of years of human thought. Against this, and growing semi-literacy when it comes to print and visual media, we strive to focus on big questions and tough issues, evading easy solutions or prescribed "PC-correct" content.

"Reading Allen Ginsberg, Talking Civil Rights"

Award-Winning Teacher Fired for Reading an Allen Ginsberg Poem: so writes David Freedlander in the Daily Beast. As I have taught Ginsberg to a diverse cohort  in college and met with varying reactions of disgust, resignation, and acceptance, I wanted to share this article about this memorable lesson. "The poem the student discovered and brought in was 'Please Master,' an extremely graphic account of a homosexual encounter published by Allen Ginsberg in 1968 that begins: 'Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants.'"As Freedlander places this in context of Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey, he also wonders if part of the crackdown is due to discomfort with the gay message, rather than the act itself.

The district ruled that David Olio, a nineteen-year veteran of the South Windsor CT system, showed “egregiously poor professional judgment,” by reading the poem aloud in the AP English class. Many of the students were 17 and 18 years old, some taking this course in conjunction with UConn for college credit. While this, as friends on FB have countered, does not excuse the fact that students had no choice but to listen to the poem, I wondered if the AP context mattered--I got the reply that it did not, and that this showed unwise judgment on Olio's behalf. What would you have done? Hurriedly suggest another poem might be discussed instead? Asked the class for feedback? Refused to talk about it? Those reactions in turn, given our tremulous times, ironically might have singled out Olio as intolerant. Well, one student had complained that he or she could not focus on a test in a another class the day after this poem had been discussed in the AP course. Three weeks later, Olio had to resign.

Freedlander avers: "to call Olio’s reading of the poem a mistake—a poem a student brought to class and asked to be read—is to say the reading of a work by one of the towering figures of 20th-century American poetry is out of bounds. 'Please Master' was written in 1968, just before the Democratic convention in Chicago would erupt in riots. Ginsberg had already been put on trial for obscenity in 1957 for his poem 'Howl,' which with its casual depiction of gay sex and drug use, and lines like 'The asshole is holy,' was considered far outside the bounds of what was considered good taste. A judge, however, ruled that the poem had 'redeeming social importance' and was unlikely to 'deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.' I doubt, having taught "Howl," having shown the innovative (if widely panned) film adaptation, that Allen seduces anyone--at least on the page. His portrayal by James Franco may, but many of my students cringed.

Helen Vendler, one of the nation's leading poetry critics, wrote on Olio's behalf: “Given what students are already exposed to via TV and film, Ginsberg’s poem, which concerns a well-known form of abjection (whether heterosexual or homosexual) reveals nothing new.” Courtney King, a former student and now a planning commissioner, puts it more bluntly. "I mean, if there are parents in town who think their teenagers don’t know what a blow job is, they are sorely mistaken.” She sums it up: “In defense of this whole imbroglio, at least it got people in this town reading Ginsberg.”

My blog title comes from a lyrical fragment I heard back in high school. It was sung by a musician who had an early song banned by the BBC in the late 60's for the f-verb. Al Stewart's "Post WWII Blues" in appropriately Dylanesque homage, from his 1974 song-cycle Past, Present and Future, first exposed me to Christine Keeler, Nostradamus, Lord Grey's phrase about the lights going out in Europe as WWI rose, Warren Harding's middle name, and the Soviet tank battles on the steppes. It's much better than his hits that dominated easy-listening AOR in that decade, be assured. The image caption, expanded, cites Ginsberg: "To gain your own voice, you have to forget about having it heard. Become a saint of your own province, your own consciousness." But not too provincial, Connecticut.

"Worse than the pagans"

Cardinal Raymond Burke may not have used the exact phrase "worse than the pagans," yet that is how the media have headlined their reporting on his disappointment with most Irish voters. As a child, my sympathies lay with the pagans, for I felt the zeal of Patrick and his followers destroyed much that was good in ancient Ireland. I may be accused of romanticizing the serfs and slaves who more likely than kings and lords are my ancestors, but I hated to see Druidry damned.

The Tablet reports on May 28, in the week after Ireland's 62% yes vote. Katherine Backler and Liz Dodd explain, in an article I reproduce here to capture Burke's address and anguish best:

Ireland has gone further than paganism and “defied God” by legalising gay marriage, one of the Church’s most senior cardinals has said.

Cardinal Raymond Burke, who was recently moved from a senior role in the Vatican to be patron of the Order of Malta, told the Newman Society, Oxford University’s Catholic Society, last night that he struggled to understand “any nation redefining marriage”.

Visibly moved, he went on: “I mean, this is a defiance of God. It’s just incredible. Pagans may have tolerated homosexual behaviours, they never dared to say this was marriage.”
 
A total of 1.2 million people voted in favour of amending the constitution to allow same-sex couples to marry, with 734,300 against the proposal, making Ireland the first country to introduce gay marriage by popular vote.

The Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, told RTE afterwards that “the Church needs a reality check right across the board [and to ask] have we drifted away completely from young people?”
Cardinal Burke, who speaking on the intellectual heritage of Pope Benedict XVI, went on to say “liturgical abuses” had taken place after the Second Vatican Council, after which he said there had been “a radical, even violent approach to liturgical reform”. Quoting Pope Benedict, he said that the desire among some of the faithful for the old form of the liturgy arose because the new missal was “actually understood as authorising, or even requiring, creativity, which frequently led to deformations of the liturgy which were hard to bear.”

On Tuesday Cardinal Burke presided over Mass at the Oxford Oratory, and on Wednesday he led Vespers and Benediction for the intentions of the Order of Malta.

Speaking at the lecture afterwards Cardinal Burke stressed the continuity between liturgical forms before and after the council. “The life of the Church is organic; it is a living tradition handed down in an unbroken line from the apostles,” he said. “It does not admit of discontinuity, of revolutions.”

Paraphrasing Pope Benedict, Cardinal Burke said that after the council, there had been a battle between a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture, and the hermeneutic of reform. This was because the nature and authority of the council had been “basically misunderstood.” Apparently departing from his script, the Cardinal voiced his own concern about similar misunderstandings around the upcoming Synod. “There seems to be a certain element who think that the Synod has the capacity to create some totally new teaching in the Church, which is simply false.” He went on to speak of the damage caused by “an antinomianism which is inherent in the hermeneutic of discontinuity.”

Though the talk consisted primarily in an overview of Pope Benedict XVI's chiefest intellectual contributions, Cardinal Burke adopted a more personal note in his answers to questions at the end. Responding to a question about the marginalisation of faith in the public sphere, he stressed the primary importance of fortifying the family in its understanding of how faith “illumines daily living”. ‘The culture is thoroughly corrupted, if I may say so, and the children are being exposed to this, especially through the internet.’
 
He told the audience that he was “constantly” telling his nieces and nephews to keep their family computers in public areas of the house so that their children would not “imbibe this poison that’s out there.”

Irish Central expands the way such influences affect Catholics. I cite this verbatim for its catechetical language and chastising tone. Dara Kelly on May 30 reports in her lead that: "a prominent American canon lawyer has branded all Yes voters in the recent marriage referendum potential 'heretics.'

Dr. Edward Peters, who was appointed a Referendary of the Apostolic Signatura by Pope Benedict in 2010, has described the outcome of the constitutional referendum on marriage in Ireland as 'a disaster.'

'Any Catholic who directly helped to bring about Ireland’s decision to treat as marriage unions of two persons of the same sex has, at a minimum, arrayed himself against the infallible doctrine of the Church and, quite possibly, has committed an act of heresy,' Dr Peters wrote on his Canon Law Blog this week.

The technical term for voting to allow same sex marriage is 'sin', wrote Dr. Peters, 'and the consequences of sin are always spiritual and sometimes canonical; and the solution for sin is repentance and Confession.'

Dr. Peter's [sic] counsels his readers not to pursue potential excommunications for the political leaders who led the nation toward the referendum, instead he suggests they focus their efforts on 'righting' the result 'as soon as possible.'"

The image I chose for me captures the Church's predicament, Looking at the tired faces of the feeble nuns, you can see that the traditions of Irish fidelity to the Magisterium may remain, but among fewer, and likely many elderly, congregants and clergy. My relationship to how I was raised is nuanced, as I lack the feral hatred a lot of my peers have for Catholicism. I teach comparative religion and meditate over two comments I have from online students about my critical approach. "They should hire a Christian so the course is not biased." "He compared consulting the Bible to a Ouija board." The truth might be more subtle, after all. Many resist any challenge to long-held belief.

I hold respect for certain elements of the Church, for I do counter that it did lead many people to care more about the needs of the less fortunate more than their own wants and desires. It reminded people of their limits within a short and difficult life. It encouraged a degree of intellectual exploration, and it curbed the excesses some of us had, in many directions, which led to the harm of ourselves and others. Many clergy as well as laity gave up careers and success in the secular world to give us a solid schooling, and in dark times, priests and those under their guidance assisted me. I doubt if a working-class kid could have received for so little money such a preparation for the life of the mind. 

My parents and family were devoted, and made sacrifices for me to attend such institutions. But I don't miss the shame, repression, and guilt that still haunt me in middle age, after such a traditional upbringing, even in the decade after Vatican II, a confused time for many Catholics. The future, as I blogged last week, seems to be with those who, rejecting the "reality check" called for by Archbishop Martin, find its dogma and doctrine wanting. This recalls Dan Savage, sex columnist, ex-Catholic, and gay rights advocate, back in 2013 as he reviewed Jeff Chu's "Does Jesus Really Love Me?":

"Chu worries that gay people like Mr. Byers have been ;pushed out of the church.' That’s not true for all of us. My father was a Catholic deacon, my mother was a lay minister and I thought about becoming a priest. I was in church every Sunday for the first 15 years of my life. Now I spend my Sundays on my bike, on my snowboard or on my husband. I haven’t spent my post-Catholic decades in a sulk, wishing the church would come around on the issue of homosexuality so that I could start attending Mass again. I didn’t abandon my faith. I saw through it. The conflict between my faith and my sexuality set that process in motion, but the conclusions I reached at the end of that process — there are no gods, religion is man-made, faith can be a force for good or evil — improved my life. I’m grateful that my sexuality prompted me to think critically about faith. Pushed out? No. I walked out." My own nation has now 13% ex-Catholics. For every convert, six others leave. The U.S. since 2007 has 8% fewer Christians. Change may be rapid for other nations too, like a thief in the night. 

Photo caption: Carmelite sisters leave a polling station in Malahide, County Dublin, Ireland, Friday, May 22, 2015

Hades and Proserpina

Six weeks ago, I commented in "Free Speech Can Be Scary" about "safe spaces" and the growing inability of certain college students to handle challenges to their worldview, identity, and psyche. Today, I found in my FB feed from an Irish colleague this. She shares my caution that particular elements may well set off sensitive responses, but that education for adults demands they take risks. Apparently, some at Columbia fear, again, the invasion of a student's mindset, based on tolerance and sensitivity.

An op-ed in the student paper summed up a young woman's reaction to scenes of rape in her assigned reading. These upset her, as "a survivor of sexual assault." The article explained how "Ovid’s 'Metamorphoses' is a fixture of Lit Hum, but like so many texts in the Western canon, it contains triggering and offensive material that marginalizes student identities in the classroom. These texts, wrought with histories and narratives of exclusion and oppression, can be difficult to read and discuss as a survivor, a person of color, or a student from a low-income background." Hades' rape of Proserpina, like many episodes in Ovid, is violent, but surely, many passages of beauty also linger.

I share the image of Bernini. If the mythological context is known by the viewer, violence may arise. If not, this might be taken as erotic bliss, foreplay and seduction captured in unforgettable marble. This tension, for me, might better enliven and enrich a classroom discussion or writing prompt, than a fearful rush to eliminate any depiction of nudity or sexuality from my syllabus or a student's view. As Scott Timberg sums this up in Salon: "Why start protecting students from Ovid in a TMZ world?"

To me, "like so many texts in the Western canon" is its own touchy trigger. How much of the humanities and social sciences can be taught and examined if we fear the content? Do we bowdlerize the readings, so as to censor offending passages? Twice when I showed one of many, I recall, "R-rated" features in my Literature and Film course, some Christian students asked to be excused. I was told by my supervisors that I had to grant them this, and I had to come up with an alternate assignment to meet their needs. Further, as another professor I knew had to do, disruptive content itself might be removed, unless the material had no substitute, or there was a way the course guidelines could be met without the specific example. Say, Huck Finn was assigned, but one might, say, replace it with a slave narrative, or an historical account that lacked the n-word trigger event.

Once I taught that novel to a predominantly black enrollment, at another college. As the Net was barely up, and as shortcuts were lacking for hard work, to their credit, they read it but lacked much enthusiasm. One woman loved the Grangerford episode, but for the sappy eulogies that Twain parodied. My gentle efforts to convince her that these were satire failed utterly. I am not sure if it was me, the content in American Literature (which I made very multicultural while also integrating the canon), or the fact they attended one course after another in a group, after work at Bell. Maybe they were tired of each other after so long. Perhaps I seemed elitist, even if I'm from a low-enough "income background" to have received Pell Grants. Among those "of color" of any tinge, the humanities, whittled from a Norton Anthology, must daunt many business and management majors.

That connects with my other posts about a decline of liberal arts. In a Twitter age, we lack attention for stamina. I was told by a dean that the average attention span of a student is 7 minutes, and that at least every 15-20 minutes, we need in the classroom to shuffle it and them about. Like kindergarten?
(Image: Hades and Proserpina, Bernini.)

What's a Professor to Do?

A former doctoral classmate, a few years ahead of me at our alma mater, now teaches at Emory. He was one of the stars of the English Ph.D. program then, and it's no wonder he has continued as a commentator as well as critic of the system that has shifted, as younger generations seek cash back rather than wisdom accrued. His essay in Sunday's New York Times ranks #1 for "most e-mailed." He looks back to when students emulated professors, and they held them in awe. He was one of them, as was I. He reflects: "I saw the same thing in my time at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the early 1980s, when you couldn’t walk down the row of faculty offices without stepping over the outstretched legs of English majors lining up for consultations. First-year classes could be as large as 400, but by junior year you settled into a field and got to know a few professors well enough to chat with them regularly, and at length. We knew, and they knew, that these moments were the heart of liberal education."

His op-ed piece asks: "What's the Point of Being a Professor?" As face-time shrinks, the utilitarian function of professors grows. That's all we're good for, and in an era where not 18% as in 1960 but 43% of students earn an "A," why complain? Only 8% of students frequently hear “negative feedback about their academic work;" 61% report in a national survey he cites that their profs treat them as colleagues or as peers. I think of my older son's new alma mater, where all are on first-name basis.

I find it odd that the writer does not mention the related shift away from the four courses, two in Shakespeare, one Milton, one Chaucer, that distinguished English majors there until recently. In the Wall Street Journal, Heather Mac Donald asked if UCLA's humanities had forgotten their humanity. My former classmate at my M.A. program in Claremont told me that only four out of 52 colleges surveyed now require Shakespeare, which at my undergrad program was required for all in English. What replaced them at UCLA are courses in gender, race, and theory. I have no objection to these. But they fail to ground undergrads in literary tradition, which they can then challenge all they like.

He continues: "I returned to U.C.L.A. on a mild afternoon in February and found the hallways quiet and dim. Dozens of 20-year-olds strolled and chattered on the quad outside, but in the English department, only one in eight doors was open, and barely a half dozen of the department’s 1,400 majors waited for a chance to speak." When I was in Rolfe Hall, I don't recall the hordes my colleague did, but I did wait slumped on the linoleum outside an office, waiting my turn, in a time when we all carried enormous backpacks full of texts and notebooks, and kept slumped, reading on. I never developed a close relationship with any of my professors, keeping them at a distance in college and since, but I did get to house-sit a week for one of my diss. advisers when he went on vacation. I never addressed him or others on my committee as other than "Professor"-X, out of respect and habit.

I assume at my both my sons' colleges, that has changed. Perhaps as when children call parents of their friends by their first names, a lurch into informality that missed me, as discipline gave way to permissiveness outside my own circle. Now, in a career-driven mindset, the liberal arts, for the few still taking it. UCLA continues to have a very large English department compared to many of its sister institutions, as a proud "public Ivy." My fellow graduate avers: "When college is more about career than ideas, when paycheck matters more than wisdom, the role of professors changes. We may be 50-year-olds at the front of the room with decades of reading, writing, travel, archives or labs under our belts, with 80 courses taught, but students don’t lie in bed mulling over what we said. They have no urge to become disciples." I assume he's closer to 60 than 50 by now, but the truth holds here.

With a bit of an emendation. I don't lord my august presence over my charges. Unlike those at elite institutions such as UCLA and Emory, my students are often vets, single moms, middle-aged folks downsized or out of a job, immigrants and first-generation strivers not attending college on the largess of well-off relatives or families abroad. I work with them, and I struggle--teaching a snippet of Greek culture or Impressionist art in one course, the Industrial Revolution and Neolithic progress in another. They sit, at night, tired out from days that may begin before dawn. I try my best, again. 

Often in this blog I remark if in somewhat occluded fashion about my own career. I've taught, thanks to adjunct and grad school work, far more than 80 courses. My full-time gig of nearly twenty years went from three 15-week terms of five courses each to eight-week terms averaging three courses, so I quail at doing the math. All I know is I've had some courses dozens and dozens of times by now. But I tinker with them, they get updated, and I update. One on technological culture from a humanities perspective has warped and woofed myriad ways since I started it in '97, while I teach Shakespeare somehow in less dramatic changes as I sneak a bit of the Bard into two weeks of an intro to lit class. 

My students are different from those my near-peer teaches. They can enter with a GED. They enroll for practical reasons rather than philosophical ones. A new marketing campaign addresses those who aren't trying to "find" themselves, but who already know what they want and how to get it is a degree. Still, last term, on a printout for submission online of a student's teaching evaluation, by whose scores we are rated in turn by deans, I did see "Best Proffesor Ever!" in ballpoint on a verification form.

Fast-food education

My good friend Bob, at an adult educators' conference in Universal City ( the Sheraton's full of Buddha and Schwarzenegger icons, a magnificently tacky monstrosity that sums up L.A.'s facade, he avers) stopped by for dinner last night. As he mentioned unionization and the SEIU last night, I was intrigued to find in my FB feed today this compatible article. Paul Rosenberg at Salon--a publication I often dismiss as either full of sex-teasing fluff or outrage over "privilege"-- does post educational coverage.

It's often the same message I repeat. "They Turned College into McDonalds" addresses what bugged me about this month's cover story in the Atlantic. Amanda Ripley reports at prolific length on Starbucks' underwriting of its workforce to earn online degrees from Arizona State University, but "The Upwardly Mobile Barista" never asks the following. 1) How does ASU handle 13,000 new students? 2) Who teaches them, and how are such instructors paid?  3)  Are these professors given cookie-cutter course platforms to "facilitate"? 4) What is the quality, if as acclaimed, one of the baristas can do most of her coursework via her iPhone? 5) Is this the kind of graduate we want?

Rakesh Kurana, dean of Harvard, contrasted a transformative from a transactional education to incoming freshmen last fall. How can the type of education marketed now to those far from the elite aim at the more traditional, idealistic, soul-giving accomplishment? I know my students seek a get-it-done, get-it-quick practical training with as few liberal arts courses as minimally required. However, in the inevitable caveat or qualifier, I do strive for fairer conditions for my students, who pay tuition not that different than for Ivy League schools, but who receive a degree by "blended" or online modes that relies on non-tenured faculty, many earning very little money to teach them.

Rosenberg does the math. He cites a lecturer at my undergrad alma mater in deep debt from grad school, who then was let go from his "contingent" position as "visiting faculty" two years on so he could not claim rights to sue for tenure-track. Many of us teach full-time without tenure, and most covering the rise to 3/4 of all professors as off-tenure seem to think it's merely part-timers effected.

Consider the profit earned here. The author quotes an instructor who "works for an online for-profit university," who then "provided more detail on the mismatch between student costs and teacher pay:

Considering that students pay $565 per course, and that there are approximately 20 students per class, adjuncts are paid approximately 4% of what the university takes in even though we execute the core requirements of the university. As an open enrollment university with 86% Title IV students, dedicated adjuncts must provide extensive, time-consuming feedback frequently up to 20 hours per week, which averages a wage of less than $10 per hour."

A colleague of mine did similar calculations. Ads and recruitment at a for-profit total far more (sometimes twice) the budget for instructional pay. I reckon it takes very few students to "pay off" the salary of the instructor (full-time or part-time), and the disparity works greatly in the institution's favor. Especially if online courses enroll three-dozen students, and charge the same fees as onsite. Having only twenty students, I and my colleagues would agree, would be a welcome change for us.

Some of you reading this may scoff. You may dismiss this as whining by the privileged. But many of us with Ph.D.'s have earned them slowly, working as we progressed, for in the U.S. humanities model rather than overseas, grants are few, and coursework supported by T.A.-ships stops around the same time that the dissertation stage arrives, so it is common to take a decade to complete one's doctorate.

During that time, rents must be paid, fees kept up for the advisory process, and you've got to eat and commute too. Debts accumulate and now, with the cuts in governmental aid for non-STEM degrees, the situation is dire. I know we knew what we were getting into, and this is one slight annoyance I have with some interviewed who act as if colleges owed them the cushy appointments once secured.

Still, this points to a dire downturn. If rates can always go up for students, and down for teachers, that portends a cruel reckoning for many in once-coveted positions. Many of us sought to leave humble backgrounds behind and achieve a grasp on the ladder to pull us up into the academic world. Now, we hold on to a lower rung. We find ourselves stuck, on a "contingent" perch due to our aspiration and our debt, unable to climb up. Those tenure-bound step on us, determined to never back down.

This may be a straitened predicament more find themselves locked into. Rosenberg again: "Covering the strike for Salon, Josh Eidelson made a number of key points. First, that far from being peripheral, fast food jobs represent a de facto employment paradigm for today’s America:

Fast food is becoming an ever-larger and more representative sector of the U.S. economy. “We should think of these jobs as the norm,” said Columbia University political scientist Dorian Warren, “because even when you look at the high-skilled, high-paying jobs, they’re even adopting the low-wage model” of management. That means erratic schedules, paltry benefits, and – so far – almost no unions. “These are the quintessential example of the kinds of jobs that we have now,” said Warren, “and of the kind of job that we can expect in the future for the next few decades.”

I wonder as we endure another presidential campaign who will champion workers against bosses? Robert Reich warns, in this economic nightmare we endure: "Under these circumstances, education is no panacea. Reversing the scourge of widening inequality requires reversing the upward distributions within the rules of the market, and giving workers the bargaining leverage they need to get a larger share of the gains from growth." Keep in mind as millionaires ask for your vote. May Day has passed, Haymarket is barely remembered, as labor shifts into cubicles and contingency. Those who dominate more of our nation's workforce may toil long beyond 9-5. Teachers as well as students might be tapping away at Starbucks, while their "associates" or "colleagues" sign on for their degrees.

Social Justice Bullies

My son and I were discussing a professor at his experimental liberal arts alma mater. She taught a feminist comedy course. She admitted she was open to any humor, but then she denied that rape could ever be funny. For her and her students, she insisted no humor could be found in that action.

Then my son and I joined my wife, and his classmates and me, to watch an Amy Schumer episode that my wife, who'd seen her onstage recently with her female friends, liked. It has gotten a lot of attention for the "last f-able day" actresses (hey, I like that word) commemorate their transition in one skit. But the one preceding it, parodying Friday Night Lights, is funnier: "Football Town Nights."

Even that po-faced and cynically PC-"outrage" clickbait-generating site Salon liked this skit. So that may be progress. The point is, my family and my son's friends from said college, male and female, gathered to watch what their professor judged as the one topic that was forbidden to any comic's repertoire. Not to belabor the point, but Schumer's specialty is the queasy and unspoken, made sexual. She confronts her mostly female audiences with this honesty--and she finds laughs in it.

Aristotolis Orginos the past April 8th at Medium speaks for the generation closer to my sons and their classmates. I am not sure how many of them find laughs in Amy Schumer, but they have been schooled, at least at colleges were Orginos or my sons went, in meticulously parsing any utterance according to strictures which call out any supposed or real, conscious or accidental, "privilege"-claim.

He examines claims of a campus "rape culture," he analyzes the factoid promoted that insists 1:5 women will be sexually assaulted during their university studies, and he reminds us of Orwell's Newspeak as promoted by the media (even if he leaves out Salon). He concludes: "Those who need to hear this message will probably respond that I am 1. too privileged to understand 2. tone-policing the oppressed (and that I shouldn’t tell the oppressed how to treat their oppressors) and 3. really just a closet racist/sexist in a liberal’s clothing." After four years at NYU, he's heard it all before. But, he moves forward to call on his audience to be less timid in speaking up about another type of abuse.

"The version of millennial social justice advocacy that I have spoken about — one that uses Identity Politics to balkanize groups of people, engenders hatred between groups, willingly lies to push agendas, manipulates language to provide immunity from criticism, and that publicly shames anyone who remotely speaks some sort of dissent from the overarching narrative of the orthodoxy — is not admirable." This form of ad hominem attack, Orginos emphasizes, spreads intellectual dishonesty.

He wraps it up by comparing "separate but equal" to the Left's call for "safe spaces." "But the fact of the matter is — anyone unwilling to engage in productive, open, mutually critical conversations with people they disagree with under the moral protection of liberalism and social justice are not liberals, are not social justice advocates, and are not social justice warriors; they are social justice bullies."

Greg Lukianoff on April 16th at the Huffington Post criticizes Garry Trudeau. Doonesbury's creator, speaking of privilege, carries a lot himself. Descended from the Dutch founders of New York, prep-school and Yale '70, he emerged from this background to satirize the conservatives, as not one of them, the voice of the hippies as they moved like him into the Me Decade and beyond. Trudeau's comic always struck me, like much of Jon Stewart's on Comedy Central, or shows like MASH, as smug. (However, to its credit, Inside Amy Schumer is also on that network. Just as Fox Network can be edgy too!) Even if Stewart is but a year younger than me, most who champion this orthodoxy that Orginos challenges seem either quite a bit older--as with Trudeau and his hippies, or as with the millennials, quite a bit younger than me.  I guess Schumer's right in the middle, more than a decade older than my sons, two decades younger than me. Although I'm five weeks separated in birth from Obama, I ally with another voice, closer still. Ricky Gervais and I share the same birth date/year.

Gervais also takes on those who claim to act one way and secretly get away with being another. This two-faced nature enlivens his own characters, but it reminds me too of those in power from my generation, if Obama counts, and those from Trudeau's, such as the Clintons. A frequent dissenter to these political powers (and their court jesters Trudeau once, Stewart now) is the conservative columnist at the New York Times, Ross Douthat. His April 17th column, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege," cites Trudeau's defense of Islam against those who dared to mock it. For they were “punching downward ... attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.

Misattributed to Voltaire, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize" still seems good advice. (Even if a variant of this as documented there comes from a source that I doubt few who cite this phrase on the Net would, thus informed, and chastened, affirm.) What Christopher Hitchens predicted when the "Danish cartoons" incited violence has come to pass: any one speaking out against Islamism, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has from first-hand experience, is ostracized.

Demonstrating this reaction, and blaming the victim who blamed others' victimization, six writers declined to attend a recent PEN award for Charlie Hebdo. After quoting various dissenters among the prominent authors, a NYT piece concluded with a particularly credible source. “If PEN as a free speech organization can’t defend and celebrate people who have been murdered for drawing pictures, then frankly the organization is not worth the name,” [Salman] Rushdie said. “What I would say to both Peter [Carey] and Michael [Ondaatje] and the others is, I hope nobody ever comes after them.”

How "powerless" or "disenfranchised" can a significant portion, say 12%? of Muslims, be? That totals hundreds of millions out of 1.2 billion worldwide, plus non-Muslim sympathizers. If they're a "minority," so are Catholics like Douthat, a declining billion out of seven billion, by the way. As no religion worldwide comprises a solid majority in this tallying, what's to claim? Douthat continues: "Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” For: "That phrase, and the critique it implies of 'Je Suis Charlie' solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first 'identify the bearer of privilege,' then 'hold the privilege-bearer responsible.'”

This circles back not only to Origis, but to Schumer. She deflates the force of the rape joke by her parody, as it's repeated in such doggedly stupid terms by such simpletons it loses its hurt. Similar perhaps to how the n-word has deflected racism by those allowed to use it or reclaim it from within their community, or the use of "queer" from within that community (or "Jesuit" for that matter way back!) the subversion and deployment of coded humor by its victims made standard-bearers changes the way the larger community--even if they aren't supposed to be in on the joke or twist--responds. 

Professor or instructor?

Praising her college education, inspired by a professor whom she never knew was an adjunct, Carmen Maria Machado in a recent New Yorker essay tells how little those enrolled in many courses know about the status or the pay (averaging $2800) of what a non-tenure track professor--or is it, I ask, an instructor-- earns. Of course, as we all agree who do this, "it’s true that there are profound pleasures in teaching: seeing your students figuring things out, and flourishing, is like nothing else I’ve experienced." But doubt may creep in.

Machado narrates how she wrote "Prof." in front of name the first day of class, then erased it, leaving a smudge. Students call her by her first name, anyway. She explains a familiar feeling to me, as I tend to refer to myself as someone who "teaches college humanities" as my institution relies on this model of employment for all, full-time "professors" or part-time "visiting faculty" as "at-will"; this to me goes against the assumptions Machado and I agree are part of the way we regard tenure and faculty.

She admits: "I’m not a professor. If I disappeared at the end of the semester, the school would replace me without much trouble, having invested nothing at all in my career. This sensation—a great responsibility, precariously held—is also like nothing else I’ve experienced." Do we merit the title?

I can connect to Machado's unease as a graduate of a "public Ivy" with a top-ten Ph.D. program in my field. Due to the job market where hundreds of us compete for any secure position, we languish while wishing we had security. Meanwhile, we all perpetuate and worsen the situation of contingent labor.

"I don’t want to give away my expertise for so little. But I don’t want to stop teaching, and I don’t want my students to be afraid to reach out to me after we part, either—I don’t want them to do what I would have done. I thrive on their news: they’re heading to graduate school, or they’re submitting work to be published, or are publishing, or have a new project. I don’t only want to teach; I want teaching to be a career, something that I can afford to keep doing." My students do not go into schools, or higher education very often unless an MBA, but as an executive boasted recently at my employer, a BS grad landed a job. It paid more than I make after nearly twenty years full-time there.

Yes, we never go into this for the money.  Machado concludes: "The irony of this setup has not escaped me: the adjuncts who teach well despite the low pay and the lack of professional support may inspire in their students a similar passion—prompting them to be financially taken advantage of in turn. It strikes me as a grim perversion of the power of teaching. A key lesson in higher education is that few things matter more than good questions—and, if we don’t speak up, students will never know what to ask."  They think faculty everywhere get year-long sabbaticals often, have lots of non-teaching time, low enrollments, light course loads, and perks galore. Machado claims 40% of faculty now are non-tenured, but counting grad students, adjuncts, and full-time non-tenured (the last category often overlooked), it's between 70% and 75% of those teaching U.S. higher education now.

Today my older son presents himself as graduate material, to his classmates and the faculty at the experimental, community-based, liberal-arts college he has had the privilege to attend. My wife's alma mater, and one with which I am proud to have been affiliated if only as a fellow-traveler at two alumni seminars the past two summers, it represents, true, a place with some adjuncts too, and its own financial worries, but it continues to support the intimate ideal of highly qualified, tenured faculty who live and learn among their students daily, a method I wish many more of us could share.

The war on the humanities

 
The war on the humanities, as I have had cause to observe during my career in the trenches or tranches as a student with a Ph.D. in English and thirty-plus years teaching at every level from basic ESL to upper-level college, continues. Alex Preston, in the Guardian, documents the situation in Britain. Margaret Thatcher's regime implemented a relentless march towards imposition of practical rather than philosophical (in the root sense of the term) programs. These push STEM rather than liberal arts coursework, and force the remaining majors outside the vocational strata into a systematically applied set of standards demanding accountability and measurable results. In the U.S, as I can testify from my campus experience, it's not "downsizing" when administrators get the word out to the masses during a "downturn," but timely "right-sizing" given market demands for careerism.

"Currently fixed in the crosshairs are the disciplines of the humanities – arts, languages and social sciences – which have suffered swingeing funding cuts and been ignored by a government bent on promoting the modish, revenue-generating Stem (science, technology, engineering, maths) subjects. The liberal education which seeks to provide students with more than mere professional qualifications appears to be dying a slow and painful death, overseen by a whole cadre of what cultural anthropologist David Graeber calls 'bullshit jobs': bureaucrats hired to manage the transformation of universities from centres of learning to profit centres. As one academic put it to me: 'Every dean needs his vice-dean and sub-dean and each of them needs a management team, secretaries, admin staff; all of them only there to make it harder for us to teach, to research, to carry out the most basic functions of our jobs.' The humanities, whose products are necessarily less tangible and effable than their science and engineering peers (and less readily yoked to the needs of the corporate world) have been an easy target for this sprawling new management class."

Marina Warner is cited by Preston, from her time at the U. of Essex, which when I contemplated (alas I could not afford this, as it was the height of Thatcherism, a year before the miner's strike) attending graduate school there. I also was told by a British professor about East Anglia, and Birmingham. All three were a bastion of freethinking, interdisciplinary education. Now, administrators crack down, and demand profit. Austerity rules and restricts. Dame Warner laments. For me, it's as if time travel back for me thirty-plus years happened: "the management structures being imposed on universities are nothing like one would see in a real business in the current economic environment, but one from 30 years ago. 'It’s so 80s. It’s Reaganomics.”'

As Graeber elaborates in "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs": "A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place. It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish. (Many suspect it might markedly improve.) Yet apart from a handful of well-touted exceptions (doctors), the rule holds surprisingly well." His work strives to advance anarchism that challenges the corporate stranglehold.

If as we in the West are told, we need to be more like China, what avails us?  Preston warns: "Only 10% of Chinese college graduates are deemed employable by multinational businesses, according to research cited by Yong in his book. The main complaint? They are too regimented, predictable and lack the creative spark."

At East Anglia, Sarah Churchwell weighs in as Preston quotes her at length: 'What has changed radically in the last 10 years is that they’re trying to turn everything into a for-profit business,' said Churchwell. And that’s bullshit. Universities are not for profit. We are charitable institutions. What they’re now doing is saying to academics: ‘You have to be the fundraisers, the managers, the producers, you have to generate the incomes that will keep your institutions afloat.’ Is that really what society wants – for everything to become a marketplace, for everything to become a commodity? Maybe I’m just out of step with the world, but what some of us are fighting for is the principle that not everything that is valuable can or should be monetised. That universities are one of the custodians of centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration. That education is not a commodity, it’s a qualitative transformation. You can’t sell it. You can’t simply transfer it.”

Where I teach, a different model rules vs. that where my sons attend. They revel in small classes led by professors, many of Ivy League training and at one institution, some of the leading writers and thinkers that the proximity of New York City to the Hudson Valley can entice under a nationally-known president and an innovative approach. And the other model is student-driven, community-based, and radically collaborative. While they like their parents will graduate into the kind of employment prospects that may in Graeber's estimation make our world more than a "lesser place," I hope they sustain the legacy in which I have been prepared and which I try to transmit to STEM and accounting students, a glimpse at least of "centuries of knowledge, curiosity, inspiration" which I believe all students, no matter their major or career, can learn from.

Corporate as avant-garde?

 

While I figured Tom McCarthy's new novel, Satin Island (reviewed in the L.A. Times) might be too much to take on given my busy life and backlog of other books to read for now, I found, thanks to FB friend, the author's Guardian article insightful. It elaborates the anthropological applications that the LAT review and the novel itself document. "The death of writing--if James Joyce were alive today, he'd be working for Google" features this insight among many, near its conclusion:

As for the world of anthropology, so for the world of literature. It is not just that people with degrees in English generally go to work for corporations (which of course they do); the point is that the company, in its most cutting-edge incarnation, has become the arena in which narratives and fictions, metaphors and metonymies and symbol networks at their most dynamic and incisive are being generated, worked through and transformed.

His final words remind me of a fact that has intrigued me. Many of my students are computer majors and even more are gamers. But they will work in cubicles, they tap away on laptops, they stare at a screen enchanted for far longer than a book may entice most of them. I doubt they'll fall for "metaphors and metonymies" in pagebound fashion. Music fades, films recede unless tied into a reliable superhero or graphic novel franchise, and culture revolves around gadgets.

 While “official” fiction has retreated into comforting nostalgia about kings and queens, or supposed tales of the contemporary rendered in an equally nostalgic mode of unexamined realism, it is funky architecture firms, digital media companies and brand consultancies that have assumed the mantle of the cultural avant garde. It is they who, now, seem to be performing writers’ essential task of working through the fragmentations of old orders of experience and representation, and coming up with radical new forms to chart and manage new, emergent ones. If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.

I live among this. I study languages, I pore over medieval lore and obscure writers, I dream of the past even if my place within it would likely have been a nearly blind boy, falling off a dark cliff not too long into his appointed span of years, one moonless night, hopelessly myopic and too thin to live. I like how Game of Thrones fascinates many. My older son shared this ingenious attempt at HuffPo to reason its fantasy world's workings into the increasingly complex series about to unveil season five.

Contrary to McCarthy, I'd mention from my vantage point among those who seek corporate jobs that this world of work cannot enchant as many. I read Joshua Ferris' Then We Came to the End one vacation while my workplace underwent a series of "reductions in force" that are still ongoing. I liked it but I was downcast at the same time. Ed Park's Personal Days tried to tie the keyboard-driven class to a rather post-modern conceit, and the unfinished The Pale King by David Foster Wallace to my surprise drew me into its accountant's vision, working for the IRS at a Midwestern "office park," of the connection between the government's attempts to change the tax code and corporate hegemony.

All these do sound bleak. Few movies take place mostly at work, and few want to escape this setting by finding entertainment about it. Parks + Recreation or the two versions of The Office, of course, can be cited to the contrary, but compared to the vast subject matter audiences prefer, they're rare.

Meanwhile, I integrate the satirical series Silicon Valley into my Technology, Society and Culture course, and my students sit up. They may even put down their phones. For, they see their ambition.

Lewis Buzbee's "Blackboard": Book Review

A product of the golden age when California's postwar public schools were ranked first in the nation, now a writer of children's books, Lewis Buzbee returns to where he started, nearly a half-century ago. From kindergarten, he moves through his elementary, junior high and high schools, before summing up his stint at three institutions of higher learning, and then his career teaching writing to extension students. Throughout, he briefly explains how education has developed, and he blends light analysis with his own quest as a student.

In the Santa Clara, pre-Silicon, Valley, he began in 1962 at Bagby Elementary, one of many sprawling, open-aired, low-slung, baby-boom, suburban schools, this one built a year before he was born. He finds much the same expanse today, and he juxtaposes his younger self as he stands in the same classrooms. The poet and creative writing instructor that he is now surfaces, as in this passage: "Mrs. Babb would be grading papers at her desk, and I would be standing just outside the classroom door, thwocking the erasers together, teacher and student working in concert somehow, me watching the words and numbers and ideas from the previous week as they drifted across the playground." While whiteboards and dry-erase markers replace the chalk-dusted, eraser-powdered, durable black or green boards, those lasted two decades, he tells us, while today's stolid computers may be turned over every two or three years now.

He shows how kindergarten, as a garden to cultivate the minds and bodies of children, grew from German reformer Friedrich Froebel in 1837; the roots of "school" burrow back to the ancient Greeks, who used the word for learning together as derived from the one for "leisure time", denoting what for millions of children elsewhere in the world may still be an unachievable dream, the freedom to learn.

This opportunity, when Mrs. Babb called upon young Lewis to show his work at the black or white board, comes with struggle. "School can, in its best form, allow us to move beyond our terror."  Buzbee relates his own fear of "showing" math problems, and he reminds us how school, with supportive teachers (one can never fully account for the same patience in one's classmates), can overcome our uncertainties. He reveals how not only at Ida Price Middle School but in his bass guitar lessons on the side, being a successful learner demands one take risks. He mastered skills by memorizing times tables, musical scales, or French conjugations. These mental exercises, as with a guitarist figuring out riffs, cut grooves into the mind by repetition. These years of drill and discipline, as he recounts from lessons in junior high and at Branham High in San Jose, turned him away from a working-class household, where he struggled with doubt, into a confident, college-bound student.

Part Two tells of his shift from orientation to matriculation. While the transformation as a young adult in the mid-1970s was less swift than the two years of junior high, where he entered liking Bobby Sherman's sappy "Honey" and left humming the Beatles' menacing "Helter Skelter", Buzbee kept testing himself. After a year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, he returned to the Bay Area to be near a girlfriend while attending the local junior college. He praises evenly the highlights of both places, followed by the completion of his degree as an English major at nearby Santa Clara.

After that, he rejected a career as a high school English teacher for one as a writer. Successful enough to live in San Francisco, he returned to the classroom to teach creative writing, first at Berkeley and then the University of San Francisco in extension programs. He adds his own continuing education as a student, this time learning how to draw. Meanwhile, he compares the progression of his daughter, Maddy, with his earlier journey through California's public schools. They have changed, certainly.

Educated at a Montessori kindergarten, a French immersion grade school, and a Friends junior high, Maddy represents a generation raised by parents unwilling to commit their children to decaying city schools even as they wish they could improve. As my wife and I are the product of Californian public schools in that golden age (and former teachers in the Los Angeles schools ourselves in a far more tarnished era full of cutbacks, unrest, population growth, and declining standards among both faculty and students), we had sought alternatives, however rickety or utopian, for our children, educated within our city's similarly declining system. So, I understand Buzbee's dilemma. He may sidle past certain problems; he tries to solve others. He concludes with seven strong recommendations.

First, he would halve K-12 class sizes. Doubling salaries, while tripling those in junior high, he would have new teachers mentored, giving sabbaticals every fifth year. He'd happily, showing his NoCal leanings, tax away to pay for this, as well as classrooms reliably hot in winter and cool in summer, stocked with supplies, and surrounded by open space. (One casualty of urban overcrowding on many Californian campuses is the loss of fields and P.E. for overstuffed two-story, rather than open-plan, classroom structures resembling motels, by the by. He does admit that desks have increased in size, to account for the spike in childhood obesity.) Finally, Buzbee would enable daily time to stare out the window. He'd also abolish bake sales to raise funds for strapped schools.

This ambitious plan, with a touch of Swift's "Modest Proposal". pivots around the simple fact that schools are not factories, and mechanization is not the answer to what human enterprise can do. As a father of a private high school student, Buzbee assures us he will be happy to pay higher taxes so that the rest of the public school youngsters in California (and the nation) can enjoy the golden age of education which he, myself, and millions once did. If only my sons, his daughter, and millions of our neighbors' children (and adults) could do so now. (Author's website; PopMatters 8-5-14/ Amazon US)

Keith Hoeller's "Equality for Contingent Faculty": Book Review

Opening this, I wondered how my cohort might "overcome" the two-tier system where, by now, only about 25% of professors earned or are on the track to tenure, whereas part-time, contracted, and/or full-time lecturers or instructors (the last category is often overlooked) replaced the former model where most professors taking on a few classes worked by day in their professions, leaving full-time teaching until around the 1970s mostly taught by the tenured. As a relevant aside, I've taught about thirty years, first as a T.A. at a "public Ivy" research university and then in adult academic and college programs. After I earned my Ph.D. at that campus, in an extremely competitive job market, I have taught both part-time and full-time nearly two decades in higher education settings where no tenure is offered.

Equality for Contingent Faculty, edited by Keith Hoeller, collects various articles from those who have taught and who have lobbied, often on behalf of unions or in one case outside of them, to include contingent (the new term replacing "part-time" or non-permanent positions, reflecting too the growing numbers of full-time instructors lacking lifelong stability as jobs are contracted out to increasingly demoralized faculty trying to use these jobs as a way into the few tenure-track lines still left) faculty on parallel lines. The idea is that after a period of observation, peer and administrative review, and evaluation, these contingent candidates could qualify for the same long-term protection as their research-oriented tenure-track colleagues. Most contributors argue that this is feasible. The problem is that it's cheaper to relegate the teaching of larger introductory courses, the heavy teaching loads and duties in writing and math courses (which by the way tend to be remedial and less desirable than ever to those aiming for tenure), and the "factory model" massively enrolled standard courses to those eager as ever to teach, no matter what.

Many articles are factual, if packed with statistics. Others enliven the anthology with personal testimony. Most mix these two themes, addressing fellow faculty desperate for any change.

The advice is given by one professor to forget it unless one can come into teaching with a steady income elsewhere provided the teacher or his or her household. The "freeway flyer" cobbling together five courses at three campuses weekly is not a fictional conceit. The debt incurred from graduate school, the pressure to grade constantly and not find time for research, and the lack of benefits or insurance afforded many instructors provides a sober reality far from outdated images of part-time professors drawn from occupations who supplemented their professional life with a class now and then. The past forty-odd years, the contributors stress, have eroded these positions as cost-cutting and a lurch to more business-driven dynamics create both traditional and for-profit institutions bent on maximizing profits.

An added aspect, meriting more focus (as many of those writing here teach at community colleges, often in the Western urban areas which still tend towards in-class rather than online or blended/hybrid models), is that the shift to online course delivery to supplement or replace in-class teaching will mean higher enrollments, centralized curricula, and a top-down system that will further erode classroom conditions as the electronic method of teaching seems to cut costs much more for institutions, who can hire faculty who will earn very little compensation.

I welcome the treatment of this timely topic. Success as reported by contributors who have made a breakthrough in Western American or Canadian institutions does qualify some of the above paragraph, and the unionization of faculty in a few colleges points to one way that reform can please faculty who have been exploited by a hiring that evolved from filling part-time needs on the side to one that dominates non-elite higher education facilities in the US and Canada today. The lack of support for their contingent colleagues by many tenured, some of whom regard those relegated to the non-tenured ranks as failures, is disheartening. As authors remind us, there are two or three times the number of qualified faculty produced at the Ph.D. level for tenure-track positions open, which now attract hundreds of applicants.

Therefore, I am uncertain that reform will occur on a widespread scale, given current economic realities for universities and colleges as they keep raising tuition and fees far in excess of the cost of living. Financial aid shortages and the dependence on student loans and the debt incurred drag down prospects for both students and those who want to teach. Unionization is one way forward, but promoting this inequality--which may in turn discourage those getting Ph.D.'s in many fields as majors move away from the liberal arts to business--in turn solidifies both the frustration felt by the non-tenured and the bottom-line, corporate-driven direction taken by higher education, as it streamlines initiative in the name of profit.

So, this book may have the side effect of highlighting dire conditions and decreasing grad school applications; it reminds us that there's far more underpaid and overworked faculty than the public or parents or taxpayers may assume teach today's students. Contrary to the ideal of a few courses a year, a few students, and lots of time to research and read and publish, the reality for most North American faculty, this book emphasizes, is less romantic. May it invigorate not only awareness but policies to fix a faulty system now firmly entrenched. (Amazon US 2-17-14; for more, see Noam Chomsky, Henry A. Giroux via Truthout, Tarak Barkawi at New School, Jennifer F. Morton at CCNY.)