higher education in crisisJean-François Lyotard is in my pants!(as we used to say in college)

Every day I read news of reductions in classes, students, faculty, and funding of some institution of public higher education. I mean every single goddamn day. This has to mean something.

The easy answer, which I propose is dead wrong, is that states have run dry, and higher education is a place where cuts can be made. One reason I think that's dead wrong is that budgets for those institutions have been cut even when the economy wasn't in recession.

I've got something else cooking, too, and it's more complex. There is an obvious crude economic argument for funding public higher education: it repays. Every dollar spent on the CSU comes back to the state five-fold. What does it mean when the state chooses not to fund public higher ed, even though the investment provides a 500% dividend?

It could mean that those who choose not to fund public higher education have simply decided to steal that return from the labor of people, by privatizing public universities and colleges and demanding increased tuition payments by students. The more students pay, and the less state revenues have to be invested, the more profitable to the state public higher education is.

(Note that this rationale is not only cynical and condoning kleptocracy, but also non sequitir, since it uses profitability as a criterion for decision-making about a non-profit, public good. I digress.)

There may be something to that interpretation, but during the last couple of years, I've become convinced that something weirder is happening, which I'm going to try to pursue. I think what's happening is a crisis in the legitimating narratives of higher education in general. That is, what's happening in public higher education is not only a reaction to recession (and, in fact, fundamentally isn't), and not only a form of class welfare (in fact, it is a form of class warfare, of the kleptocratic class against the working poor), but reflects a crisis in the legitimating protocols of education in general, and higher education in particular.

In short, my preferred hypothesis (I sound more like Baudrillard than Lyotard at this point, but either way, pants) is that our society has reached a stage in the postmodern condition in which we* no longer can or do sincerely believe in the metanarratives that legitimate education. We have an apparatus, an economic-political-cultural institution of higher education, but nobody* seriously believes it serves any grand purpose.

If I were to follow Lyotard, I would say that the legitimation of higher education is no longer on the basis of some notion of human progress or liberation, or of the good of the nation or state. Instead, the only legitimating narratives are the petit narratives of performativity and paralogy - "What have you done for me lately?" and "Are you following your own rules?"

But I think it may have gone further, because the crude economic justification for higher education would seem performative, and the self-legitimation of peer review would seem paralogical. (I'll probably talk this through at some point, so not to worry if they're unfamiliar terms.) I believe it goes further than public higher ed, too - it's education in general that has lost legitimacy.

Please keep reading! I promise I'll stop name-dropping and get to brass tacks!
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* By "we" and "nobody" above, I mean to refer to a convenient, fictional social actor who represents a generalized ideological subjectivity. I think it's interesting that, while Lyotard's analysis of the postmodern condition is certainly brilliant, he puts the "incredulity toward metanarratives" in the passive voice, such that the notion that there have to be people whose consciousness involves this incredulity is totally elided. Lyotard was a clever dick.

new homeland security alert system

The Department of Homeland Security (Abteilung der Heimatsicherheit in the original German) has adopted a new advisory system to replace the color codes. I'm not entirely thrilled, because the infantilization of US citizens implicit in the old system was its main appeal to me. That, and you could describe your day's outfit as "Elevated," which was fun.

I have a good idea for a replacement advisory system, but they haven't been returning my calls for some reason. (Though they did say my name would be added to a list they keep of special people!)

Here's the system I proposed:

Threat Level:



Oprah. Routine precautions. No travel restrictions.



Cher. Elevated precautions. Restricted travel for listed individuals; all air travelers subject to random searches. Ongoing patrols of major transportation infrastructure: bridges, tunnels, airports and railway stations.

Gaga. Severe. Known threat of imminent attack. Most air travel grounded. Restrictions on rail travel.

Busey. Attack currently in progress. Take extreme measures for security and safety: marshal law, total grounding of all foreign and domestic flights, transportation lockdown on all federal highways.



Sheen. No safe place anywhere. Kiss your kids goodbye.

album of the day: Dmitri Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5

It's always precarious to write about music as expressing ideas. Especially in the case of a symphony, which is really just a series of notes, and especially in the case of Shostakovich's Fifth, which is not only just a series of notes, but a series of notes he wrote in an attempt to continue his composing career and not, you know, get executed by Stalin.

I forget exactly how I got hooked on Shostakovich. I suspect my friend Bob is to blame. The Fifth Symphony is the first piece I knew, and it was so compelling, I immediately went after all the Shostakovich I could.

I won't go into the details of the history of his composing it here. There's a good piece on it on Wikipedia.

This afternoon, I listened to the first two movements the symphony on the way home from campus, and could barely contain myself. I've continued it since then. I can't provide a perfectly rational basis for this claim, but I'm happy with it: this symphony is about the horror of power. The first movement, for instance, expresses the terrifying potential of power - political power, most of all - to make things happen, to cause things to occur. If I have to explain to you why this is a horrible power, you may already not be a good audience for the symphony. But if you have an inkling, give Shostakovich a listen, so he can explain to you just how horrible power can be.

After being terrified nearly to tears by the first movement (walking down Andre in Turlock, and passing a few fellow pedestrians who gave me very concerned looks), I hit the tragedy of the second movement. Officially, the second movement was a bit of fun, a comic interlude in an otherwise extraordinarily bleak symphony. Bullshit. The second movement takes a Russian folk theme, played in quiet, meek tones on woodwinds and pizzicato violins, and then refracts that theme as an appropriated melody blasted back at the folk by a militaristic march. Their theme expressing life and its sanctity and fragility is twisted into a monstrous anthem, presented back to them as though the people were expected to accept this as the authentic representation of their culture and lives. There's nothing silly or relieving about the comedy of it: it's the harshest satire. My boy Shostie could write some friggin satire.

There follows the third movement, quoting a suppressed - no, an overtly banned - traditional funeral dirge, and which apparently made the premiere audience weep. Nuff said. The fourth movement, in my opinion, expresses the triumph of power, the final obliteration of the life of the folk, as all the themes ultimately contribute to what I am sure in my soul is a mock-heroic climax. The tension Shostakovich achieves in the last phrases of the fourth movement, the clashing cymbals and blaring horns over the straining strings - that's the sound it might make when hope dies.

I mean, imagine you're a creative artist with a quirky sense of humor and a spirit of adventure, and that the work you are compelled to create is making people want to kill you and your friends. Imagine that after your last premiere, people started publishing reviews that said, basically, "yep, time to kill this motherfucker," and that at the same moment, your friends started disappearing. Then they come to you and say, "when's your next piece coming out? We're really interested!"

The awful genius of Shostakovich, in this symphony, was to give those people something they had to accept, even laud, and at the same time, express himself genuinely, and say something about, to, and for the people under this tyranny. Jesus, no wonder they wept!

In Mstislav Rostropovich's direction, this London Symphony recording does some amazing things, I should say. I am most familiar with an old Allegro classical cassette I bought in 1984, for fuck's sake, and that's my basic frame of reference for any other performance - as these things always go. Rostropovich's first movement is way goddamn scarier, and in fact one of scariest performances of classical music I've heard. (You may need to be in the mood, and may need to be familiar with the Fifth, to get this.) But it was the second movement that nailed me. Rostropovich leads the London gang to such a tender expression of the initial themes, and through such a miserable plundering of the same themes, that the connection between them is devastating.

I bought this on iTunes, and because of that, hadn't really regarded the cover art. Nice summation.

still temporary after all these years

I was informed on Friday that I am not a finalist for the tenure-track position in my department. I have heard that I "deserve" a tenure-track position, as well. Just, you know, apparently not here.

This is very strange, given my 13 years of contributions to the department, the university, and my active records of scholarly achievement in academic philosophy. I am not a great scholar of the era by any means, and would never claim I was, nor that I aspire to be, but I also think that I'm impeccably qualified for tenure at Cow State Santa Claus.

Anyway, this is not a disappointment to me, because I had no expectation of being a finalist for the position, and certainly no expectation that I would get it. That's why my application's soundtrack included Cee Lo Green. (There's a history, a history which apparently became more common knowledge during the review of my application.)

Many folks know I'm a big Marxist. One of my favorite Groucho quips is that he would never join an organization that would have someone like him as a member. Being a member of the non-tenured majority is very much like that, and on the whole, it's the untenured majority I'd rather join.

family budget the California way!

Since 90% of folks in the US live on a median income of $31,000, we all try to economize and live on a budget, but especially in these difficult economic times, it's critical. Perhaps, then, you'd like to follow these handy tips to family budgeting, based on the best practices in California.

1. Reduce household income

If two people in the household both work full-time, your wages may be so high as to create certain pressures to spend them. A simple solution we've used for years in California is to reduce revenues. One of the two of you should go part-time, or, better yet, quit, and don't look for work. If there is only one wage-earner in your household, an alternative would be to ask for a reduction in salary. Many bosses are happy to accommodate such requests.

2. Have lots of loud arguments in public about your finances

A lot of families already do this, and it's good that they do, because, like in the California legislature, those shouting matches demonstrate your commitment to principle. Nah, I'm kidding. They're really just spectacles of public humiliation used as part of a strategy to undermine your opponents. But the appalling display of illegitimacy and unfitness for decision-making create terrible uncertainty and anxiety, and that's sure to make people frightened about what decisions you will, eventually, make. In other words, it can be useful to make your kids shut up.

3. Max out your credit cards

Buying on credit is a great state tradition. In fact, California routinely takes out emergency loans when our annual budget squabble threatens to shut down the entire state government and a large portion of the state's economy in general. Using every bit of your line of credit is a great way to show your credit card company that you're serious about consuming, and need and want even more debt.

4. Base your budget on as much financial information as you can find

Budgetary decisions that are pragmatic and realistic depend on the quality of the information used in making them. California bases its state agencies' budgets on assumptions about what state revenues will be, and what the agencies need to perform their services. Then we tear that up and write random numbers down on sticky notes, then sticking them on an organizational chart of state agencies.

You could do the same! Here are some numbers you can use: $13, $490, $3.98, $12,872, $i. Now, here are some budget categories you can use: turkey feed, boxes of rocks, cable tv, alimony, booze.

To demonstrate how this works, I've just gone through the California budgeting process using the above information - the best available to us as of this writing. For next year, my plan is as follows:

Expense category	Amount
turkey feed	$12,872
boxes of rocks	$3.98
cable tv	$i
alimony	$13
booze	$490

Now that my spending plan is in place, all I have to do is go have a screaming match with my mate, use my Visa to buy $6000 worth of plastic forks, and quit my job, and I'll be ready for the next fiscal year.

happy happy

Now that the official deadline has passed for the state to hold a special election to keep some taxes in place, and the state senate has started holding hearings on a cuts-only deficit reduction that would lead to massive layoffs of faculty and staff and huge increases in tuition for students, I'm headed to the CFA Assembly this weekend. Good timing.

I decided last night that I would practice Strategic Happy-Making™. This is a series of actions one takes in order to attempt to impose a cheerier mood. Counter-insurgency against doom, you might say. Attitude regime change. Whistling in the dark.

In any event, since the Assembly is in San Francisco, John Phillips' "San Francisco" was going through my mind. And although I may not wear some flowers in my hair (though I've been known to), I will definitely be wearing flowers on my shirt. I'm going to be decked out in bright yellow, green, and blue for the Assembly, the Faculty Rights workshop, and the Lecturer Council meeting. Perhaps someone will ask.

I should consider wearing flowers in my hair very seriously for the election, because I'm running again to be on the Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies Committee, and I figure the flowers would encourage people to vote for me.

Sometimes this kind of dopey effort works for me. Some fair percentage of being happy is convincing yourself to be happy.

on meaning

Over the last couple of weeks, a series of questions have been on my mind. In fact, I keep waking up thinking about them, as though I had been wondering about them in my sleep. I think these are really fundamental philosophical questions, and the way I'm thinking about them strikes me as odd.

Let me say what I think is obvious about meaning. Our brains have evolved in a way that makes our conscious lives lives of meaning rather than non-meaning. I don't know if only human brains have evolved this way; I speculate that we're not alone in having meaningful worlds. Meaning is at least correlative to an evolved trait that has not caused us to die out yet. Perhaps meaning does something for us that is advantageous - this seems overwhelmingly likely, in fact.

There are neurological, psychological, biological, and anthropological ways to ask about meaning. The philosophical way to ask is to consider the meaning of meaning, which is what I think Merleau-Ponty was doing in The Visible and the Invisible, to name one.

So, here goes a first attempt to get at it.

Why and how is there meaning? By meaning, I mean (provisionally) a phenomenon of consciousness whereby experiences and the world are intended as such. Meaning takes place when a consciousness intends something. There's a wide range of different ways that happens - I'd guess an indefinitely large range of ways. I don't want to get into that right now, but I'll give a couple examples to try to clarify what I mean by meaning. (There'll be a certain degree of re-hashing of Husserlian phenomenology here.)

Meaning:

(1) I'm looking at a used-up AA battery lying on my work table. In looking at it, its presence there and what it is are evident and actual contents, we might say, of my conscious awareness. My looking at it, and my describing it, or considering it actively, are the forms of meaning taking place. That is to say, if my eyes were to glance over and past it with only the barest recognition - "black and copper short tubular object" - then that would be the meaning of the experience, or what my consciousness intended at the moment. As it happens, I did not merely glance over it, but noticed it was a AA, remembered it to be a dead battery, and so forth - and so those attributes were part of the meaning of my looking and intending.

(2) Having looked at and described the battery, I'm now thinking about what the battery does. That is, what I mean in intending the battery has shifted from a more perceptual to a more pragmatic dimension. A battery provides electric power to some device, most often electronic. This may have been used in a guitar pickup or a remote control. The potential of a still-good battery, and the lack of potential of a dead one, to provide power, is partly what I intend when I intend battery.

(3) Now I'm shifting my attention to a symbolic dimension. Dead batteries make me feel slightly sad and guilty, because I see electric generation and use, especially in the form of the typical chemical disposable battery, as a bad business, environmentally speaking. The dead battery represents our unsustainable lives of excess, so even though I probably enjoyed using the device the battery had been powering, now I wonder if it was worth it.

I take examples to show that meaning really does take place, and if you understand what I meant - what battery meant in each of the three ways I described it - then meaning is something that is shared. Other people experience meaning, and we can communicate meaning to one another. (Not perfectly, which would after all be very boring, but nonetheless with tremendous acuity.)

Now, why and how does any of that happen? (A corollary question I want to get to is: does it only happen for human beings?) Why is there meaning, as distinct from just behaving? "Just behaving" would mean perceiving and responding to things without intending them as such. We do that too: yanking my hand away from scalding water happens faster than meaning, and even if I go back, as it were, and intend hot water, my initial movement is more like behaving than meaning.

A few related questions have been popping up for me recently. How are meaning, perception, expression, ideation, and imagination related? What does meaning do for us? What's the relationship between meaning and truth, or between meaning and belief? Do cats have meaningful worlds? Do cats have truths or beliefs?

album of the day: Pictures at an Exhibition

People used to make records
As in a record of an event
The event of people playing music in a room

- Ani Difranco, "Fuel"

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time riding my bike out to a shopping center in Greensboro that had a really good book store and a decent record store where I spent a lot of the money I made on my paper route. Among the great finds was a cassette tape of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. I didn't know anything about classical music then, and still know next to nothing, but I could tell from the start that this 1958 concert recording by Sviatoslav Richter was a monumental piece of work.

I played that tape to death, always only playing the side containing Richter's performance and ignoring the orchestrated version by Maurice Ravel on the other. I bought a CD of somebody else playing the solo piano original by Mussorgsky, but it had none of the appeal of Richter's. When my old tape-deck crapped out several years ago, I tried to find a CD of the Sofia concert, and for years, it just wasn't available. Thanks be to iTunes. And thanks be to whoever decided not to tamper with the original engineering, despite its many faults.

In comparison with present-day recording technique and production values, this is a disaster. Seemingly every cough of every audience member is faithfully preserved on the scratchy, flattish monaural recording. My guess would be that, aware of Richter's attacking style, the recording engineer placed the microphone (I expect just one) several feet away from the piano, to avoid red-lining too much.

But Richter is impossible to describe adequately. In his hands, Mussorgsky's sorta tone-poem, sorta programmatic suite is a weird tragicomic passion play. No other performance I've heard has 1/10 the humor, gravity, energy, or meaning. Maybe Richter was just making it all up, and those staid, smoothed-over renderings (I'm looking at you, Ravel) are more genuine. I don't care.

Richter came into the concert hall, sat at the piano, twinkled around with the introduction of the recurrent theme, thence through the Gnomus, the Tuileries, the Ballet of the Chickens in their Shells - all the silly stuff, played with terrific dynamic variation (the Chickens seem to dance in stop-motion animation, very cartoon-like), and then beat the living hell out of the rest of the piece, stomping out a terrifying Catacombs in particular.

I don't know anything about Sviatoslav Richter, really, but in my opinion he was a pretty scary dude. The Wikipedia article about him quotes him as saying he believed performers should simply express the composer's intentions, but if that's so, I can't understand why his performance of Mussorgsky is so different from others I've heard.

I also can't seem to find any information on the circumstances of the 1958 Sofia recital, other than that it was recorded and well-regarded - which is incredibly feint praise for it.

a delicate matter about a crappy book

I'm working on a book review for an academic journal. I won't say what journal or what the book is, because, to be blunt, the book is really bad (so far - I'm about halfway through it). In fact, it's so bad, it's making me angry.

Back in grad school, I wrote a satire called The 12-Step Program For Academic Success, spoofing the career-building behavior of some of the academics I knew. One of the steps was putting together an academic book or "volume" (because in the 90s, nobody called them books - they were all "volumes" or "works"). Part of the gag was that academic books are, generally, horribly written, and patched together from articles that the author previously published.

I didn't know then to call this behavior "duplicate publication" or "self-plagiarism," but it didn't set well, and still doesn't. Maybe a series of articles is worth binding together, and maybe that series presents a coherent line of thought, but in my opinion, the vast majority of academic books put together thus is neither.

The present instance is not only incoherent chapter-to-chapter, but within each chapter there are gaps or clashing themes that the author has made no real pretense of making coherent. Readers are apparently supposed to assume that it flows and makes sense.

Part of me is angry because this has been published, and I don't have a book published. (That's pretty stupid, since I haven't written a book. But envy isn't always rational.) A larger part of me is angry because I have to read it to write the review - allegedly - and I promised, and have already written nasty notes in the margin, so I can't really back out of it or follow my whim to throw the book as far away as I can. A still larger part of me is righteously angry because it's so crappy, so clear an example of crappy academic behavior, and because I can see a much better way to approach the topic and to form the arguments than this hack did.

Sheesh!

Now, the delicate matter. If I write the review I feel the book richly deserves - a right thrashing - what happens then? What if I meet this guy sometime? What if his friend shows up at a conference where I'm presenting a paper?

I've written a couple very negative reviews of books before, but they were for the journal of the American Hegel Society, The Owl of Minerva, back in the anarchic days of the Hegel Society, when scathing, terribly nasty disputes via email discussion thread typified the prevailing ethos. (Hot damn, it was fun!) Most academic discussion, in print at least, is much more polite, and a lot of academics are thin-skinned, and some are vicious.

The topic, too, is one that attracts a lot of academics who believe themselves to be good-intentioned, but who are easily provoked. Could be some nastiness coming my way in return.

random hockey post

I rarely write anything about hockey. There are 28,309,146 hockey blogs out there, and around 98.3% of what anybody writes about hockey is blather - like all other sports.

Anyway, in addition to being a lifelong hockey fan, I'm a Pittsburgh Penguins fan. Lately, that's been great, because of players like Sidney Crosby, Kris Letang, Marc-André Fleury, and so on. Crosby has been the best player in hockey since he started in the NHL in 2005, and this season was looking to be his most productive as a scorer. In January, Crosby was hit in the head in two successive games, and has been unable to play since because of concussion. The first hit was not called a penalty, but was in my opinion a deliberate action in attempt to injure. The second was called a penalty, and did result in Sid's head striking the edge of the wall around the ice, but I don't think it was an attempt to injure, just a dumb play.

Controversy over head shots has heated up ever since. Two games ago, Penguins forward Matt Cooke, who has a long history of doing stupid and deliberately injurious things during games, elbowed a New York Rangers player in the head, and received a game penalty and a suspension through the end of the regular season and the first round of the playoffs.

Hockey fandom and media are basically unanimous in praise of the suspension, because, they repeat, the NHL finally got the discipline right.

Wrong.

Unfortunately for all hockey fans, what the NHL did was on the basis of this player's reputation and history, and the current controversy. I am not saying that Matt Cooke should be allowed to deliberately target opponents' heads with his elbows. I am saying that the punishment befit the criminal, not the crime. It wasn't justice; it wasn't even discipline. They made an example of him. Cooke's suspension is a spectacle, or a PR campaign (especially after Penguins owner Mario Lemieux made such a big deal about head hits), to show the NHL is Really Taking Player Safety Very Seriously Indeed.

I believe all the blather about head shots and attempt-to-injure penalties lately really misses a main factor: the salary cap. (If any hockey fans happen by, I do mean that seriously, but you may have noticed this really isn't a hockey-related blog, so I'm not going to pursue it.)

Anyway, enough about this.

academic freedom, freedom of speech

In two of my classes this semester, we've been spending an inordinate amount of time on an article about academic freedom, its distinction from freedom of speech, and the way economic pressures threaten academic freedom. The article defines academic freedom as the right to teach and to research as an academic sees fit, without undue pressure to conform to some extrinsic production measure.

I woke up this morning wondering about the meaning of academic freedom in my life and in the economic and political environment of contemporary academia. Some basic truths, of a sort, came to mind.

No one actually cares what I say or do in my classes, as long as it doesn't subject the university to liability or otherwise damage the university's public image. Almost nothing I might say about my actual field makes any difference to the university from this standpoint. Nobody much cares if I teach a bunch of crazy radical stuff in my classes, unless and until a student complains about it. In my own experience, what students are likely to complain about is personal conflict, not course content. Students complain about course content tactically, in order to attack faculty.

No one actually cares what I say or argue for in anything I publish, as long as it doesn't similarly endanger the university's currency interests. Administrators aren't going to read what I present at conferences or publish in journals or books. Most of what most faculty publish is in technical jargon that administrators wouldn't grasp, of course, but the main reason they don't read it is that they have absolutely no concern about what's in it - only how much of it there is, and whether it's peer-reviewed.

Which means that the university isn't particularly interested in curtailing the content of my exercise of academic freedom. The content of my speech concerns them much more when I speak as a private citizen, because as a private citizen I might freely criticize the university in a way that could endanger the university's currency interests. That is, the university has a fairly strong interest in curtailing my freedom of speech.

This is how it looks from my perspective, as a non-tenure-eligible faculty member who has a contractually guaranteed position until I either grossly violate university rules or a layoff is declared. It would likely look very different, ironically enough, if I had tenure at risk.

After all, there are tenure-track but not-yet-tenured faculty who are scared shitless to write anything as benign as this blog and post it somewhere. (I guess I mean this particular post.)

Academics argue for tenure on the basis of the claim that it and it alone can protect academic freedom. I wonder if what they mean to protect is freedom of speech, instead.

need a break

Well, ladies and gentlemen, Doc Nagel is in a bad way. I blame a large part of this on the confluence of recent events - the department tenure-track search, looming budget cuts to the CSU (yet again), daily news of the unconscionable exercise of power. I blame another large part on the unrelenting propaganda demonizing organized labor, in particular in public higher education. It feels lately as if everything I care about is threatened or under attack. No exaggeration: the ideal of education, my own job, my loveliest, the cat, my favorite hockey team...

On the other hand, obviously the largest part of my terrible, doomed mood is sui generis. Everything I care about seems to be under attack because I feel truly terrible about myself these days. A few people who regularly read this have known me long enough to know that that had been a constant until Lauren came into my life. And although it is very hard to feel terrible about myself with her around, somehow I'm managing it.

For me, this often takes the form of a sort of voice constantly telling me the same thing, no matter what happens: "You're a terrible person." I've checked a book out of the university library, but it's been sitting on my shelf unread. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went poorly. "That's because you're a terrible person." A class session went well. "That doesn't change the fact that you're a terrible person." I committed a typo in an email I sent. "That's because you're a terrible person."

It gets old after a while.

But hey, do you wanna know why I get depressed, and why I feel this way despite how wonderful Lauren is, and how basically good life is right now? I'll give you a hint: It's because I'm a terrible person. That's what I've heard, anyway.

Taking a break from this is kind of a weird task, because this delightful partner in dialogue is, of course, me. (Hey, wanna know why I'm so cruel to myself? I'll give you a hint...)

what education is for

I'm in two faculty reading groups this semester. One is reading a history of the CSU, written by a long-time administrator and CSU president, and has precisely the kind of perspective you'd expect. When that group gets together, we're awfully cranky about the book, the author, and CSU administrators.

The other group will be meeting for the first time Wednesday to begin to discuss a book by Louis Menand on colleges and the need for reform of higher education. So far, it lacks the conceit of "evidence" of that wretched screed I was reading earlier, but it also just seems to lack any solid reasoning. So, I'm getting cranky with Louis Menand now. It appears I can't read anything about higher education at all without getting cranky.

Menand's first chapter deals with general education, which he thinks is higher education's bastard. He compares Harvard's various attempts at a core curriculum, with Columbia's early general ed program, with various others at small, elite cross-section of US colleges. (It's nice that he's not pretending to be making a general survey of the whole field, but that's about the nicest thing I can say about it so far.)

He makes one point, in the rather offhand, vaguely insinuating way he has, that I do think is worth pondering further: What, really, is the purpose of general education? And that question, I agree with him, is really about what we think a college-educated person should look like.

In my freshman year, I took a course in the honors program called "The Culture of Education." It had 8 students in it, was team-taught, and one of the faculty had a TA for the course. (In a large bureaucracy, such mistakes in resource-allocation decisions are bound to occur.) We read some Plato, some Rousseau, we read a bunch of illegally photocopied articles, and we read Allen Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, the 1985 book that is, I believe, the granddaddy of stuff like Menand's book.

This morning, I couldn't help recalling a conversation in that class about the purpose of education. Bloom, thinking that he was following the true cultural heritage of the West that started with Plato, argued that education is for the development of moral, political, and aesthetic values. At 18, I resented him telling me which values, and as a clever 18 year old, I suspected his argument of a whole bunch of special pleading. We started getting into it: Who the hell is Bloom to say this is the purpose of education? But then, what else could it be for?

One of the students in the class was an Education major - that is, a future grade-school teacher. She offered the common-sensical view that, for her, education was preparation for her future career. I saw this as begging the question. Maybe the purpose of education for her, and according to her view of things, was career preparation, but what was the purpose of her career? Well, she said, to educate children. To what end? So that they could go on to college.

I didn't like Bloom's strategy, which prescribed a specific political end of education. I didn't like her reasoning, which seemed obviously circular. Plus, I was already referring to the university experience as "higher indoctrination." This is a basic hazard of being a college student by default, and having no life or career plans. I had a funky kind of disinterest - maybe disaffection is a more accurate term - that made me hyper-critical of anything anybody said was a purpose for education, or even a goal for education. (Now that I'm telling this story, I have to admit that I was way more cranky back then.)

It was also hypo-critical of me, since there I was taking up space and haunting the nastier parts of the library. And now, I think that what a college-educated person should look like is approximately either me (college philosophy instructor and rabble-rouser), or my loveliest (semi-gainfully-employed amateur polymath and bricolageuse), or maybe my friend Imj (aka Bobo the Wandering Pall-bearer; intentionally-unemployed amateur poet and casual roller-derby official).

temporal anomaly

Late last night, as it started to drizzle, I stood looking out and down on the townhouses that form our complex. Newly wet, in the orange-yellow haze of the dim streetlights, they looked very little but enough like the condos my friend Doug lived in in Northern Virginia almost 20 years ago. The feeling of looking down through the rain was not significantly but sufficiently like my Card Lane, Pittsburgh pastime, peeking out the big front windows of our second-story apartment. I felt very strangely as though all this time hadn't passed, and this wasn't Turlock, California, or 2011.

I've gone through a hell of a lot since leaving Pittsburgh in 1998 - several career crises, three major depressive episodes, an ugly divorce, involuntary home-ownership, an unpleasant number of feline deaths, the entire freaking Presidency of G.W. Bush. How can it feel as if nothing has happened, as if I'm still back there, back then?

The feeling was so strong, it was very hard to accept that I actually am here, or that any of that time really has passed, or even that I was around for its passing. My sweetest tried to help me shake it off, looking straight at me, touring me around the apartment to show me the guitars, the kitchen, the rooms we sometimes call the Room of Requirement and the Chamber of Secrets, finally pointing out that Alexander and Arthur, die Überkätschen, the Flying Kittois Brothers, 35 pounds of compressed silliness, have only been here three years.

So I guess the date on the calendar means that it really isn't 1998 anymore, nor 1992. Where the hell have I been?

moral offense and moral response

I have two classes this semester that are focusing on justice, morality, and freedom of speech. We're looking at the First Amendment, exceptions to it, and the difference between the legal right to free expression, and the moral question of what one should or should not say. Later, we're reading the Republic.

But for now, I'm presenting them some material on obscenity. In addition to being a big fan of obscenity, I've also done a little stuff on the legal and moral issues, in particular about pornography. Although I don't plan to present them any porn, I am going to play them George Carlin's "Dirty Words" routine, and a couple snippets of a Lenny Bruce bit that got him arrested for obscenity.

My take on it is that there's a difference between obscenity and offensive speech, both legally and morally, and it's important to sort out what's what to that extent. Obscenity, we restrict. Offensiveness, we can't. By which I mean, in my view, it's not terribly compelling to claim a right not to be offended, and one key reason it's not compelling is that offense is subjective.

I had the classes read an article by a guy named Robin Barrow on what he calls the duty not to take offense. He attempts (and, my class yesterday and I believe, fails miserably) to distinguish what merely feels offensive to someone in particular from what is quintessentially offensive, and hence morally wrong. His example of such a quintessentially offensive display is, very unhelpfully, public beheading of a non-combatant. His initial example of what merely feels offensive is, also unhelpfully, his calling a colleague a "stupid bitch."

In class, I suggested we could write him a letter. "Dear Professor Asshole," I said we could begin.

Anyway, he does make one provocative point that has made me wonder further. He claims that we have a moral duty not to take offense, which he says is based on the "true moral principles" of freedom and toleration. Taking offense, he says, in the sense of making some formal action, based on a moral judgment in response to what has offended you, is intolerant. (So, as the class saw pretty clearly emerging from the paper, he wasn't wrong to call his colleague a "stupid bitch," or at least, not as wrong as she was for filing a formal complaint about it. Because, see, he apparently has the right to call her a "stupid bitch" and she hasn't the right to take offense at it. Um, yeah. Whatever. This, obviously enough, isn't the part that provoked me to think further.)

For instance, when we take offense in the context of someone joking, we are being humorless and overly "self-regarding." The context is the crucial thing here, and is the reason why nothing someone says can be "quintessentially offensive" in the way he points to. The class came up with a number of examples: "nigga," "faggot," "fat cow," etc.

The fact of the matter is, we get offended, and sometimes we are right to be offended, even if our taking offense is also self-regarding (is it always wrong to be self-regarding? Egyptians in the streets have clearly lost their sense of humor about Hosni Mubarak, but I would not want to say they are wrong to take offense...). It's a question that I come back to every so often about moral judgment: What is the right thing to do in response to what we find to be morally objectionable? If we have the right to make moral judgments of other people, what is the moral thing to do about it?

I think that most of the people I make moral judgments against are people I don't have a lot of respect for in the first place, and so, sorry to say, I don't worry very much about how I treat them, or what I say about them: "That guy is an asshole." "That chick is shit-crazy." "He's a deranged sociopathic monster incapable of seriously holding any belief or telling the truth." Because I'm not too concerned to be good or well-intentioned toward the deranged sociopathic monster, I don't worry about whether I'm doing something morally right or wrong when I treat him contemptuously or disdainfully.

In my cooler moments, I admit to myself that this is probably wrong of me. I should be better than that, I guess. But suppose that he really is a deranged sociopathic monster (and oh, he is!). Does my moral judgment against his behavior lead to any appropriate response?

And here, I mean something beyond protecting myself or others against him, I mean something directly responding to his morally condemnable behavior, something that is corresponding or seeks some kind of moral equilibrium. Kant, for instance, seems to believe that certain violations of the moral law can be met with reciprocal responses: hence, capital punishment for murder.

In the case in question, I try to let everyone I care about know what he's up to. Is that enough? Is that even a moral way for me to behave?

analytically adrift

This will likely be my second and last post on Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa's recently heralded critique of higher education in the US, Academically Adrift. I've about had it.

Psychologists used to employ the term idée fixe to name a certain mania for constantly repeating or returning to the same word or concept, regardless of its relevance to the situation. It's a kind of mental illness, a psychopathy, if you will, that people like Freud would have ascribed to childhood psychosexual traumas.

So much the worse for Arum and Roksa, who monomaniacally return to the same themes throughout this badly-argued book. Through the first 60 pages or so, I had thought that I was seeing just another politically-motivated screed against the academic establishment, or tenured faculty, or both, buoyed by cherry-picked empirical evidence. Would that it were so, at least for their sake. Instead, what I'm finding are lengthy red herring tangents of absolutely no probative value, subjected to analysis and critical reasoning that, ironically enough, would earn you a very poor grade in my critical reasoning class.

One example, of many, lest I be considered cruel: After dismissing the value of student-faculty contact outside of classrooms as having limited academic value, they spend several pages documenting that of the 9% of sophomore students in their sample who never talked with a faculty member outside of class, there were great over-representations of certain under-advantaged socioeconomic and cultural groups. Their conclusion: those students (9%) are losing out.

Okay, okay, one more. (I insist this is for demonstrative purposes only.) After beating to freaking death the evidence that many students, especially in non-selective institutions like community colleges, don't write a 20-page paper or read 40+ pages per week in any class as freshmen, they conclude, without a shred of argumentative support, that therefore these students lose out on development of critical reasoning skills. I don't mean to claim that reading and writing are irrelevant to developing those skills, but they haven't shown why 20 pages or 40 pages are relevant measures, at all. Not. One. Whit. Of. Argument.

Lauren's take: these are two people who were forced to write 20-page papers as freshmen, and are pissed off that they were, while their own kids now out-argue them, despite going to a mere CSU for a year.

That's nice to think, but I've read ahead to the exciting conclusion, where they say what their "mandate" for reform includes (and with that, I won't even bother), and repeat, for the bajillionth time in the book, the initial claim that they promise they will justify and never do: that There Is Something Rotten In The State Of Academia, and they know this because so few students report having been required to write a 20-page paper or read 40+ pages per week in a freshman college class.

It's a classic case. I'm thinking lack of breastfeeding, aren't you?

iphone, apple, evil, etc.

I'm getting flak for buying an iPhone. Some of it is because it's an Apple product, and Apple is considered a purveyor of evil in some circles - of which more anon. Some of it is because the two networks you can use with iPhone are both supporters of neo-conservative political groups. AT&T infamously gives money to the Tea Party, for instance. The rest of it is just because of the in-crowd, poseur, pod-people kind of behavior ascribed to Apple users, especially iPhone users.

As for money going to the Tea Party, from a progressive standpoint, the power of the Tea Party among the GOP isn't entirely bad news, if you think about it. If Michele Bachmann runs for President in 2012, it's going to be very obvious to many more people just how insane she and her political ideas are.

The reason I went for the Apple smart phone is because I'm an Apple user and wanted the greatest possible integration of the various gizmos in my life. There is also a particular kind of user experience that Apple products provide, that I'm comfortable with and used to.

Here's the thing: the iPhone is what we got instead of flying jet cars. Of the futurist notions of technological changes in how we travel, communicate, and so on, the one that's actually come true is right there in that little bitty shiny black device.

And Apple is, indeed, evil. They have a market strategy that can only be the result of dealing with Satan. Their target is, approximately, me. Yesterday I was on customer support several times, trying to work out an upgrade to Leopard for my old iBook G4. Every time I was on hold, I mean every time, the music was exactly pitched to flatter how hip I still manage to be, despite being of a certain age when hips become more a concern than hipness.

The machines are cool. The store is cool. They go out of their damned way, with regard to every aspect of everything they do, to make it just that bit more cool: layout of the sales floor, down to the spacing of the units apart from each other, how staff approach you, that whole Genius Bar silliness. It's strangely exhausting. (We went through a phenomenological and ideological analysis of the store Friday night and unpacked this whole shebang, but I neglected to take notes. Maybe I'll recap it some time.)

So, yep, evil.

academically adrift

I've begun this widely-discussed book which claims that colleges don't educate and college students don't learn. I'm deeply suspicious.

For instance, the second chapter begins by noting that in the last 30 years or so, access to higher education has been extended (the data they cite include the number of people with plans to attend college). They turn to discussion of data about high school students' efforts, aspirations, and their understanding of the link between their future career plans (if any) and their educational needs for reaching them. They say that almost half of high school students believe that they can reach their life goals even if they don't put a lot of effort into high school, and that many incoming college students are not planning for their lives.

It is this unique point in time - when access to college is widespread, concerns about inadequate academic preparation are prevalent, and drifting through college without a clear sense of purpose is readily apparent - that serves as the historic context for our observations of the lives of students as they unfold at twenty-four four-year institutions. (p. 34)

First, anecdotally, I would have told anyone who asked me, at age 17, that I didn't make much effort at all in high school, and that even less was required of me. I also had no life plans, let alone college plans. I didn't plan to go to college at all, and only ended up starting that fall at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte because my dad brought home an application one June day and told me I was going to fill it out and go to college.

I don't think being "adrift" in that way is necessarily a bad thing. Most of my friends in college spent some time adrift - changing majors, changing career goals, taking classes that ended up not being related to either, etc. From a certain perspective on the purpose and value of higher education - one I would think is far more narrowly and crudely utilitarian than my own - I suppose that might support the view that such people and experiences are not fulfilling the purpose of education. Among the purposes I believe drifting does serve are exploration, self-reflection, and the critical capacity to distinguish between different visions of self and future. (I anticipate, based on the first chapter, that the authors will, instead, connect such drifting to a "collegiate culture" of partying and recreation.)

Secondly, what they've demonstrated is not that anyone is and remains adrift "through college," only that they begin without certainty of what they plan to do.

That kind of slipperiness between premises and conclusion is found throughout the first chapter as well. It's crafted very carefully to make the slippage difficult to see and to work out through logical analysis.

But, as someone told me, the main problem is that everyone's talking about it but no one's read it. (I disagree slightly. Every article I've read about the book cites two factual assertions, from pages 4 and 18, so I conclude that the media heads writing about it have read those two pages, at least.)

faculty ethical responsibility, bureaucracy, and curriculuma local example

Today I reminded myself that I need to get more done on the paper on faculty ethical and social responsibilities in heavily bureaucratized institutions. It occurred to me that a recent academic senate discussion on our campus gave me a pretty interesting example of one of my key claims in the paper: At a certain point, bureaucratic division of labor responsibilities makes it so difficult for faculty to know the full implications of what they do, that it becomes impossible for them to take responsibility for what they do. (I borrow this idea from ethicist Michael Davis.)

The example concerns an ongoing issue on campus. Before I get into this, I want to preface by saying I am interested in this as an example, and I don’t mean to make any judgments of the people involved or the specific proposal they’re making (in fact, I like all the people involved that I've met, and the proposal looks kinda cool to me). I’m not at all trying to make sport of the frustration they might be feeling about the senate discussion. On the contrary, I think it’s totally understandable. All I’m wanting to do is think through the ethical issues, as related to the paper I’m going to be presenting at the AAUP conference this summer.

The faculty and administration in the College of Natural Sciences proposed a pre-medical professions certificate program for post-baccalaureates. The program would provide science education to satisfy prerequisites for qualification to apply to various advanced medical education programs – medical school, dental school, etc. The program would be conducted through university extended education (UEE), taught by faculty identified by academic departments in CNS, and the courses would correspond with regular-session courses taught by those departments. The departments and college would share any surplus revenue with UEE.

This program, on the surface, more or less appears to meet the specifications of the relevant CSU Chancellor’s Office Executive Order governing extended education, as a “special session” that is permitted outside the normal state-supported curriculum. Even though the courses correspond exactly with regular curriculum courses, the “special session” designation seems justified by the circumstances of the students (returning post-baccalaureates).

In academic senate discussion of the proposed program, three areas of concern came up. One was the implication of the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the college and UEE, which, it was said, could set a precedent for similar MOUs on campus that would be disadvantageous for faculty and for departments. Second was that faculty paid on the UEE salary schedule would be substantially underpaid compared to their regular salaries (the lack of qualification of UEE work for retirement or healthcare benefits was not discussed). Finally, it was suggested that although the program appeared to meet the letter of the Executive Order’s requirements for a special session, the students in the program would qualify for post-bacc admission into the regular curriculum – there still is a post-bacc program, after all – and so the justification that these classes could not be offered without a special program was not based on program or curriulum needs, but in fact the lack of funding to the state support regular curriculum. (The lack of funding from the state is not sufficient under the EO to justify a special session.)

These are complicated issues, and moreover, from the standpoint of the faculty and administration of the CNS, abstract, distant, and relatively nebulous. If the faculty in CNS agree to teach under these terms, it was suggested, then it is their choice to do so – and, by implication, other colleges and faculty would be free to strike their own bargains with UEE. As to the salaries question, an additional stipend was arranged to bring the faculty salaries for teaching in the program closer to parity with the regular faculty salary (again, the issue of benefits was not discussed). As for whether the special session was warranted by the post-bacc status of the students, two replies were made. First was that it is very difficult for post-bacc students to get into the regular session classes because they have the lowest priority registration status. Second was that the Executive Order stipulates that a career retraining program would qualify as a special session.

The objections raised must strike the CNS faculty who support this program as a lot of meddling over something not relevant to their attempt to serve more students and be entrepreneurial. It is certainly easy to understand why faculty supporters of the program would tend to regard it as nobody else’s business. Furthermore, I see nothing amiss in their interest in starting the program, and no reason to think they have anything but the best intentions. Yet the issues raised are worth consideration, because what one college does in the university does have an effect on the others, and because faculty have a common situation and standing with respect to the university. But as I said, these are difficult issues even to see.

There are broader and still more abstract and general issues that I believe are driving these concerns. One is the integrity of faculty work and of the collective bargaining agreement, as well as of the union that bargains that agreement as the exclusive agent for the faculty. Another, still more abstract, is concerns about the privatization of public higher education. Shifting programs to UEE under the rationale that the regular program can’t accommodate their needs begs the question: Why doesn’t the regular program meet this need for educating the public? Any serious reply to that question should at least consider the long-term funding trends of public higher education as driving factors in the need for the program in the first place.

That said, doesn’t it seem too great a burden for the CNS and its faculty to bear to have to answer these questions? There is an ethical aspect and a cognitive one here. Cognitively, I mean to suggest the following. It is extremely difficult for those of us who care very much to do so, to work out in any detail how the defunding of public higher education has affected access to and quality of public higher education. Asking CNS and its faculty to understand and take responsibility for how their program fits into that overall picture is asking something nearly impossible. I submit that they couldn’t reasonably do it if they wanted to.

If the abstractness and complexity of the situation, and the bureaucratic division of labor reaches a point that they cannot be expected to see, foresee, or comprehend the broader implications of their program proposal in relation to these issues, how can they possibly take responsibility for them.

A further question is whether the CNS faculty and administration are ethically blameworthy for this failure to comprehend or take responsibility. (I’m assuming here that the concerns are legitimate. I think they are. I'm also assuming that they're not responsible for the defunding of public higher education or for bureaucratizaion. I think I'm on safe ground there.) I have two intuitions about this. One is, to the extent that I’m right, and it really is unrealistic or impossible for them to know the implications or effects of what they’re doing, then no, it’s not an ethical failure. But, second, to the extent that they may choose to ignore or brush aside the issues, then yes. But this could mean nothing more than that they are ethically accountable for admitting that they are very nearly precluded from taking that responsibility.

first day blues

Typical pre-semester anxieties last night woke me at 4 AM, from a bizarre dream in which the Chancellor of the CSU had imposed a policy on remediation involving providing milk to students. (This is a highly expurgated account of the dream. I don't want to go into more detail. Please don't ask. Imagine the weirdest possible ramifications of this. Now make it weirder, and ultimately cruel. There you go.)

I met my first class this morning. I forgot my "JOKE" sign. Note to self: remember that tomorrow morning. Bioethics requires its use.

Now I'm Pandora-ing through my office hour, and starting The Federalist Papers. Check this out:

Ambition, avarice, personal animosity, party opposition, and many other motives not more laudable than these, are apt to operate as well upon those who support as those who oppose the right side of a question. Were there not even these inducements to moderation, nothing could be more ill-judged than that intolerant spirit which has, at all times, characterized political parties. For in politics, as in religion, it is equally absurd to aim at making proselytes by fire and sword. Heresies in either can rarely be cured by persecution.

And yet, however just these sentiments will be allowed to be, we have already sufficient indications that it will happen in this as in all former cases of great national discussion. A torrent of angry and malignant passions will be let loose. To judge from the conduct of the opposite parties, we shall be led to conclude that they will mutually hope to evince the justness of their opinions, and to increase the number of their converts by the loudness of their declamations and the bitterness of their invectives.

That's Hamilton in 1787.