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Friday, October 20, 2006

ABF Friday:  Now with 40 percent more arbitrariness!

Today, we introduce a new “head-to-head” feature of ABF Friday!  So, without further ado:  which is better?

Passenger-side airbags . . . or the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony?

Charles Mingus’s “Moanin’” (off Blues and Roots) . . . or the episode in the Simpsons’ “Tree House of Horror” in which Homer goes through a mysterious portal into the third dimension?

Wallace Stevens’ “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” . . . or game seven of the Twins-Braves World Series in 1991?

Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion . . . or the Foo Fighters’ “Everlong”?

The French Revolution . . . or DVDs?

Remember to show your work! . . . and have an arbitrary weekend, everyone.

Posted by Michael on 10/20 at 07:56 AM
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Thursday, October 19, 2006

Rhetorical Thursday II

In which we remind everyone, while we keep gradin’ our papers (and writin’ a book review to be named later), that there’s another book out there just chock full of prose like the kind you find on this blog.  For example, in an essay titled “The Elvis Costello Problem,” I take up the arguments of Sanford Pinsker and Roger Kimball, who appeared in a 1999 Chronicle of Higher Education essay to inveigh against the study of popular culture:

Pop-culture studies are “an educational disaster area,” he said, “part of an infamous effort to make education relevant”—something too often accomplished at the expense of rigor.

When asked how long it should take before a work is included in the canon, Pinsker suggested 50 years.  That seemed fair to Mr. Kimball, although he was unconvinced that pop culture deserved any place in the classroom.  “Do we really need classes on Toni Morrison? Our students will read it anyway,” he said.

In my first book, Marginal Forces/ Cultural Centers, I argued that invocations of the “test of time,” when made by journalists, represent (among other things) a form of competition between journalists and professors for the right to speak and write about contemporary literature.  Basically, the argument is that we professors have to keep our hands off literature until the fifty-year expiration date is up—almost as if we’re talking about a form of copyright.  And why?  So that the “test of time” can be conducted.  But exactly who is supposed to conduct the test, and why should academic critics be barred from participating in it for fifty years?  Just who is supposed to benefit from suggestions like this?  Not literary critics, who tend to despise any arrangement that keeps them from doing work they want to do.  Not contemporary writers, most of whom prefer to get their critical attention before they die.  Ah, but journalists would have the field of contemporary literature all to themselves, especially with regard to the job of book reviewing.  Academics would be barred from discussing Gravity’s Rainbow until 2023, Beloved until 2037, and Underworld until 2047, while everyone else could comment and critique just as much as they liked.  In “The Elvis Costello Problem,” I not only make that argument about contemporary literature, but I also revisit the question of the popular and the ephemeral more generally—like so:

During the twentieth century, universities in the United States first created Great Books and Western Civilization courses as part of a larger general-education enterprise, in part to combat the excesses and impermanence of vocationalism and specialization.  Amidst all the 1990s culture-wars fervor over whether Western Civ courses are hegemonic and oppressive or, alternatively, the bedrock of all that we stand for, academic critics (and journalists) largely forgot that “core” courses were proposed at places like Chicago, Columbia, and Harvard partly to insure that undergraduate education would have a kind of cross-generational continuity.  At Harvard, for instance, the landmark committee report of 1945, General Education in a Free Society (known more colloquially as the Red Book), argued that the books that “have most influenced the men who in turn influenced others are those we can least afford to neglect. . . .  It is a safe assumption that a work which has delighted and instructed many generations of ordinary readers and been to them a common possession, enriching and enriched, is to be preferred to a product which is on its way to limbo and will not link together even two school generations” (26).  No doubt the phrasing may strike some readers today as infelicitous:  Are “men” the only readers who count?  Who are those “ordinary readers,” anyway?  And do we really have to keep reading and teaching third-rate drivel like Pilgrim’s Progress just because the emergent British middle classes kept a copy at their bedsides for the better part of three centuries?

But the cogency of the Red Book’s argument will be felt by any teacher who has experienced what I call the Elvis Costello Problem—namely, the difficulty of communicating to students by means of the touchstones of popular culture.  If you’re reading this in 2006, think of it this way:  next year’s entering class of college students was born in 1988, by which point Elvis Costello had long since made the transition from punk/ New Wave wunderkind to Serious Singer/Songwriter; for those students, the cultural impact of Costello’s first three albums—whose remarkable wit and anger helped to puncture the bloated, complacent rock-star scene of the 1970s—is so remote as to be unintelligible.  On my bad days in the classroom, even the man’s name draws blank stares from twenty-year-olds whose memories barely reach back to the reunion of the Eagles in the mid-1990s, let alone to the breakup of the Beatles in 1970.  How many of today’s students can recall the punk class of 1977—the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Ramones—whose music is now ancient enough, though still not tame enough, to be played on an oldies station?  How many students, for that matter, can recall the ephemera of the early years of the previous decade—Londonbeat and Tone-Lōc, Deee-Lite, and Bell Biv DeVoe?  Those ubiquitous cries of yesteryear, “Whoomp! There it is!” and “2 Legit 2 Quit,” have rapidly become as dated as “23-skidoo” and “hubba hubba.” “Who let the dogs out,” in turn, will no doubt be unintelligible by 2010, and it’ll be a good thing, too.

Popular culture is designed, after all, to move products quickly, and that means short shelf lives for the vast majority of cultural artifacts in any genre, from good-quality paperbacks to eight-track tapes.  By the time the pop singer Natalie Imbruglia’s latest single hits the airwaves, the system is betting that you’ve forgotten all about last year’s Warbling Waif, Heather Nova.  And chances are (as Johnny Mathis used to say) that you have forgotten—if, in fact, you ever noticed.

I should point out that I say all this not as an aspiring managing editor of the New Criterion but as a fortysomething teacher of undergraduate seminars on postmodernism, someone who goes out and sees movies like The Matrix (twice! It rocked!) whenever enough students suggest that its references to the French theorist Jean Baudrillard are really worth checking out.  I have no desire to invoke a fifty-year rule for my own courses (it would, of course, eliminate my entire reading list in postmodern fiction), but I can tell you from a lifetime of immersion in the detritus of popular culture that, whereas the subject is often quite worthy of serious study, it’s getting harder for an aging body to keep up with it every year, and . . . well, let me put it this way: I simply have no idea who 50 Cent is, all right?  I yearn for the good old days of Tupac.  (Actually, that’s not true on either count.  But you see my point, I’m sure.)

Yet that’s not all there is, my friends.  As it happens, the terrain of popular culture has lately become even more complicated—and, therefore, has made a pedagogy of the contemporary both more possible and more interesting.  True enough, most of the stuff of the entertainment industry consists of cultural ephemera destined for trivia contests, tent sales, and collectors’ bins.  But over the past decade, popular culture has also begun to institutionalize its own canons—in oldies radio (and its niche-market offshoots, classic rock and “jammin’” oldies soul), cable-television stations devoted to “the classics” (meaning everything from I Love Lucy to Welcome Back, Kotter), motion-picture “revivals” and “remakes” of practically every 1960s sitcom save for Hazel, and the retrospective Where Are They Now? and Behind the Music series on the music-video network VH1.  The cultural-recycling industry even has its own self-parodying devices, like VH1’s Best Week Ever, a nostalgic look back at whatever week has just concluded (a show modeled on VH1’s only slightly less self-parodic features, I Love the 70s / 80s / 90s), such that it is not unusual to hear—in 2005, say—a call for a “revival” of Sisqo’s “Thong Song.” Accelerating and deranging the modernist demand to “make it new,” this aspect of popular culture says, make it neo- and make it snappy.

The irony of that last item is itself postmodern, is it not?  Music video, once thought to be the final final piece of evidence that the decline of Western civilization is complete and irreversible, turns out to be one of the vehicles of cultural memory seeking to combat the Elvis Costello Problem—making, for example, the 1977 divas of disco available to a whole new generation of dancing fools.  Who would have guessed it?  Though there are still some days when students look at me blankly when I speak of Parliament-Funkadelic, popular culture has actually begun to link the generations more broadly than “high” culture ever could.  Thanks to contemporary culture’s ravenous appetite for recycling, fans of music video can not only keep up with This Year’s Model (oops, a dated Elvis Costello reference), but also get acquainted with twenty-first-century versions of 1970s reggae and 1940s swing.  The same economic forces that drive popular culture’s high rate of turnover also drive popular culture’s high rate of revival.  Popular culture creates the Elvis Costello Problem—and affords its partial solution, all at the same time.  Hubba hubba.  Also, show me the money!

Ars longa, VH1 brevis, and all we are is dust in the wind, dude.  I’ll be back tomorrow with a brand new game.

Posted by Michael on 10/19 at 07:31 AM
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Focus on Focus on the Family

In which we revisit our two-week retreat at the headquarters of Focus on the Family, November 2004, when, in the wake of the election, we (briefly) considered repenting.  Here’s the second and final post from my sojourn.

_______

Well, as many of you might have expected, I’ve had enough of the Focus on the Family Ministry Re-Education Camp—though I’m told that if and when these Camps become mandatory for all U.S. citizens, my two weeks’ time will be credited to my account.  I’m heading back to secular life and striking up the blog again.  Thanks for waiting, everyone—I see we’ve left the half-million-visitor mark in the dust while I was away*, but please, let’s keep this in perspective.  A half million visitors in 11 months may be all right for a humble blog, but Focus on the Family gets that many visitors every week.

I’ve heard rumors that some of you don’t believe I went to Colorado Springs at all.  “Didn’t you speak at a symposium at Wayne State and go to a reception with Barrett Watten where you met artists Amy Vogel and Joseph Grigely, and then didn’t you hang out at the Cass Cafe with old friend Mysoon Rizk as well as Charles Stivale and a bunch of other people?” asked one of my friends.  “Yeah,” said another, “and weren’t you hard at work on your book and a mess of other things you were supposed to be doing this fall but couldn’t even think of doing because you were completely consumed by the election?” “Isn’t this just another one of your ruses?” said a third.  “I bet you weren’t even in Madison Square Garden for the Republican National Convention, either.”

What a bunch of doubting Thomases I have for friends!  ("Doubting Thomas” is a brand new expression I learned in Colorado Springs.  See John 20:24-29.) I can tell you from personal experience that the Welcome Center has a three-story corkscrew slide named “A-Bend-A-Go” (see Habbakuk 2:1, “I will stand at the watchpost, and station myself at the three-story corkscrew slide").  And in a way it was good that I was there in November, because November is their “Marriage Theme Month.” Which makes sense, after all, since October was “Homophobia Month.”

But really, enough was enough.  It wasn’t the homophobia so much, or the repeated showings of The Passion of the Christ (not that there’s anything wrong with having an obsessive fixation on Christ’s battered, bleeding, nearly nude body!).  Instead, it was the child-beating.  I’d forgotten about the child-beating.  Which was stupid of me, since before Dr. James Dobson became a major power player in the Republican party (and what’s up with you conservatives trying to claim that liberals are exaggerating about this?  are you all on drugs or something?), he was renowned as a “Christian childrearing expert” who counsels parents to begin striking their children at around the age of fifteen months, preferably with a wooden spoon, preferably on the back of the leg.  In books like Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child:  Birth through Adolescence, Dr. Dobson promoted an entire regime of child torture, starting with the wooden spoons and moving right through neck-pinching, with special tips on how to produce maximal pain on tiny necks while leaving minimal physical signs of abuse.  How could I have forgotten?  So this is why these people didn’t have any problem with Abu Ghraib!

Anyway, Dr. Dobson hasn’t let his child-torture business lie fallow while he’s taken on his larger crusades against gays, lesb***ns, and Arlen Specter.  Focus on the Family Ministries still runs a vibrant child-beating laboratory, informally known as the “Spare the Rod Room,” where spanking implements and techniques are tested night and day.  Wooden spoons of various designs, materials, and swing-weights are rigorously researched for their effects on the tiny, fleshy legs of toddlers and infants, with the parent’s comfort uppermost in mind.  Around here, they say that nothing is worse than developing bursitis or “palm splinters” by using a heavy, unwieldy, or shoddily made wooden spoon when you “dare to discipline” your child!  But the constant thwacking kept me up at night, not to mention the poor little buggers’ piercing screams.  Ah, well, Christ went through far worse, and look where it got Him!

Still, I’m looking forward to a good night’s rest for a change.  And more blogging!

_______

* Back in 2004 we used to get really excited about little things like that.

Posted by Michael on 10/18 at 08:31 AM
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Tuesday, October 17, 2006

PSA day

Occasionally people send me notices of this or that, asking me to announce events or competitions or things on this humble blog.  And ordinarily, I reply, “no way!  my blog is devoted exclusively to educational purposes like . . . uh . . . for example . . . no way!” But today I thought I’d make an exception, while I’m gradin’ those papers.

So if you’re in the Los Angeles area this weekend, stop by the CalArts Downtown Center for Innovative Visual, Performing, and Media Arts and check out this experimental writing conference that features Chris Abani, Sesshu Foster, Renee Gladman, Johnny Golding, Shelley Jackson, Joni Jones, Bhanu Kapil, Lewis MacAdams, K. Silem Mohammad, Ishmael Reed, Emily Roysdon, Sarah Schulman, Mady Schutzman, Edwin Torres, and Anne Waldman.

And if you’re nowhere near Los Angeles, you can do something else for someone you love:  you can nominate him or her for the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award!  Anna Kushner, the coordinator of PEN’s Freedom to Write Program, writes to say:

The PEN American Center is the largest of the 141 centers of International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. Our work here at PEN consists of advancing literature, defending free expression, and fostering international literary fellowship through defending writers in prison or in danger of imprisonment for their work, sponsoring public literary programs and forums on current issues, offering grants and loans to writers facing financial or medical emergencies, and through administering literary and free speech prizes. You may be aware that every year we award the PEN/Newman’s Own First Amendment Award, a $25,000 prize that honors an individual who has fought to protect freedom of expression as it applies to the written word.

We at PEN are writing to ask you if you would be willing to help us in our efforts to find the next recipient of the PEN/Newman’s Own Award. Our ability to recognize the amazing individuals who fight important First Amendment battles is entirely dependent on the nominations we receive. 

So sure, I’ll help!  Readers, if you know of someone worthy of the PEN/Newman’s Own Award, please nominate him or her today.  (The nomination deadline is December 31, 2006.) The PEN website is right here, and when you visit you can check out all their programs and publications.

Of course, I know some of you are desperate to find out what happened to me during my two-week retreat at the headquarters of the Focus on the Family Ministry.  I’ll be back tomorrow with the surprising re-post! 

Posted by Michael on 10/17 at 10:50 AM
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Monday, October 16, 2006

Hiatuses past

If you’ve been reading this blog for two years or so—and if so, my god, why?—then you’ll remember that immediately after the 2004 election, I was so upset that I checked in for a three-week stay at Focus on the Family Ministries in Colorado Springs in order to learn how I could get right with God.  (And if you haven’t been reading this blog for two years, you’re finding this out just now!) The episode actually started on October 31, 2004, when I read an essay about Christian businesses in some liberal-elitist magazine, and responded with this piece of secularist mockery:

_______

God spoke to me this morning, and He said, “Michael, you better not say anything snarky or dismissive about that article in today’s New York Times Magazine about American evangelicals who are establishing Christian businesses, performing faith healings in banks, conducting Bible study in the Centers for Disease Control, praying with real estate clients that they get a good price for their home, and so on.” God also said, “you know, it’s not at all weird that so many people think that I speak directly to them.  In fact, if you read the article carefully, you’ll find that ‘some workplace Bible-study groups . . . feature training in how to distinguish between God’s voice and random thoughts.’ So it’s not as if people are just making stuff up and attributing it to Me.”

I said, “But God, if You’re really God and not some random thoughts in my head, don’t You already know if I’m going to say anything snarky or dismissive about these people?”

He smote me then, and let me tell you, that “smiting” is some serious shit.  It’s way worse than “smacking around” or “walloping,” that’s for sure.

So I’m not going to say anything about these people or their businesses or their beliefs.  I just have an innocent question about the inspirational painting on the office wall of Riverview Community Bank president Duane Kropuenske, which is reproduced on the Magazine‘s front cover.  The painting is titled “Unending Riches” and it’s a portrait of Jesus standing with two businessmen in what is clearly an executive office.  In the background is a generic cityscape, framed in a large window.  The businessman on the right seems to be introducing the businessman on the left to Christ, who’s shaking hands and wearing white robes.

image

OK, so check out what’s on the wall behind the shoulder of the guy on the left.  It’s another inspirational painting of some kind!  Have you ever seen anything like this before?  A piece of inspirational workplace art that includes, in a mise en abyme, another piece of inspirational workplace art?  It’s too weird. And more important, why would this particular office need an inspirational painting in the first place?  I mean, Jesus Christ Himself works for them!! They’ve already got the power of the Almighty right there, standing behind the desk with the laptop—what more do they need?? Are you trying to tell me that even the firm that employs the Son of God has to festoon its office walls with “motivational” posters?

I just think that’s blasphemous.

_______

Well, despite the demurral in the fourth paragraph of that post, that was pretty cheeky of me.  They set me straight at FOF, let me tell you!  And today, I’ll repost my first missive from Colorado Springs, November 13, 2004.  Here’s hoping it shines some heavenly light on your Monday:

_______

Hi folks!  It turns out that the Focus on the Family Ministry has a “weekend furlough” program, so I have a spare moment to check in on the blog from out here in lovely Colorado Springs.  They limit us to half an hour on the Internets, though, because here at Focus on the Family, they like to keep the focus on the family.  Actually, our unofficial motto is “it’s the patriarchy, stupid”—but of course I can’t say that in public!

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that there’s no cause for concern about me or my state of mind, and that my hosts are treating me well.  Not quite as well as my other conservative hosts back in September—let’s just say there’s a lot less single-malt flowing around these parts—but quite well nonetheless.  And before I go back in for Week Two of the program, they’d like me to say a few words to the readers of this most humble blog.

First, you liberals and progressives and leftists and Communists have to stop vilifying “Christians.” It’s counterproductive and wrong.  Christians are not responsible for George Bush’s election.  Christians are not intolerant; Christians are not ignorant.  Christians are actually filled with agape; they work among the poor and the downtrodden, they give up all hope of material gain in this world, they turn the other cheek when they are struck, and they always do unto others as they would have others do unto them.

So you liberals need to distinguish between Christians and CHRISTIANs.  Out here in Colorado Springs, we don’t have much use for most of that garden-variety Christianity stuff.  Who needs a vow of poverty when you’re trying to establish a media network?  Who needs agape when you’re counting down to the Apocalypse?  No sir, there aren’t any of those Christians around here.  Instead, we prefer to think of ourselves as

Creationists and
Homophobes for a
Righteous
Inquisition of the
Secular
Terrorists who
Infest
America
Now.

In the future, please get that straight and keep it straight.  Lay off the Christians—they’re completely innocuous people.  When you want to criticize the ascendant religious right, say “CHRISTIANs” or “Creationists and Homophobes” for short. We’ll know who you mean.  And then we’ll come and get you.

Second, liberal-progressive-etc. writers like Rick Perlstein and Frank Rich have to stop claiming that we didn’t swing the 2004 election to the right.  Don’t you people get it? It just doesn’t matter if the religious-conservative vote didn’t change appreciably between 2000 and 2004.  No one wants to hear about your fancy-schmancy “number crunching” and your elitist “regression analyses.” That’s exactly the kind of talk you’d expect from the reality-based community.  But the reality-based community is less relevant to American politics right now than Eugene V. Debs, folks.  Here at FOF, we know that semiotically (though Dr. Dobson doesn’t exactly put it that way), we won, and we won big time.  We are Gonna Get Paid (though Dr. Dobson doesn’t exactly put it that way, either) and all you liberal wonks and all your liberal media can go to H E double hockey sticks.

And that’s why—last but not least!—we’re taking back this country.  First, we’re going to take away one of your favorite liberal words.  Ask your George Lakoff if you don’t believe me!  As soon as the election returns were in, Karl Rove began to speak of creating a “hopeful and decent society,” and William Bennett wrote, in the pages of the National Review:

Having restored decency to the White House, President Bush now has a mandate to affect policy that will promote a more decent society, through both politics and law.

Do you know what that means, people?  That means we mean we’re going to lock you gays and lesb***ns back in the closet or run you right out of town, right alongside the abortionists in their tar-and-feather overcoats.  And don’t give me any grief about Bill B.’s private little vices.  They’re all right with us, because we know he’s saved.

Now, why did we pick the word “decent” for this phase of our crusade, you ask?  Because quite honestly, we’re sick and tired of hearing you people say to us, “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?  Have you left no sense of decency?” I mean, we heard it about Abu Ghraib, we heard it about the Swift Boat Vets, we heard it when Jim DeMint said that gays and lesb***ns should be barred from teaching positions, we heard it every time Dick Cheney opened his mouth.  We heard it every gosh-darn week this past year from you liberal “decency” mavens, always whining about something and always claiming to be “decent people” simply because you have this amoral “liberal” attitude about the sexual practices of consenting adults.  Well, we’re not going to stand for it a moment longer.  Next time you ask us if we have any “decency,” we’re going to say, “darn right we do—that’s why we have an American Decency Association.” And we’re going to make sure—through both politics and law—that we purge this land of degenerates like you.

Oops, my half hour is up.  See you all later!  And don’t forget to repent while you still can!

Posted by Michael on 10/16 at 08:21 AM
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Friday, October 13, 2006

Paper grading post I

The good people at Free Exchange on Campus have given me permission to re-post my interview with them on this humble and harried blog.  Thanks, Free Exchange—for this, and for everything you do!

Free Exchange:  First of all, thanks for taking the time as clearly you have a lot on your plate.  Let me start by asking a question that might seem to have an obvious answer given that the NYT has anointed you David Horowitz’s “most engaged critic” (we defer of course), but what prompted this book? More specifically, why did you think that the focus of this book was important and worth writing at this time?

Me: Well, the funny thing is that this book really isn’t a direct reply to Horowitz.  (And I do hope he’s dismayed at the degree to which the book is not about him.) It’s not even a reply to Horowitz’s designation of me as one of the 101 most dangerous professors in the country; my book doesn’t mention The Professors at all.

I began writing it in 2004; at that point, Congress was considering an amendment to the Higher Education Act that would have created an “advisory board” for all Title VI international studies programs.  The board would have been made up entirely of political appointees, and it would have been empowered to investigate the “activities” (quite a vague term) of all “grant recipients” (i.e., entire programs or individual students and professors).  That amendment had passed the House unanimously in October 2003, and it was motivated by the sense, among some conservatives, that Middle Eastern studies programs were anti-Israel and therefore anti-American.  But I don’t think I need to explain how dangerous such a board could be—or how, for that matter, it might discourage smart graduate students from studying Arabic and aspiring to jobs in the State Department.

Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” was drafted around the same time—the fall of 2003—and Horowitz had sent me the first draft, which actually spoke of audiotaping faculty search committee meetings and providing every academic job applicant with a detailed rejection letter explaining the reasons for his or her rejection—all in the name of combatting “bias” in hiring.  And, of course, although we were still a year away from the ludicrous Ward Churchill Extravaganza of early 2005, numerous other scholars had been vilified and hounded for making statements after (and about) 9/11 that were far, far more innocuous than Churchill’s vile remarks.

A pamphlet released in late 2001 by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, for example, went after Joel Beinin for saying, “if Osama bin Laden is confirmed to be behind the attacks, the United States should bring him before an international tribunal on charges of crimes against humanity.” Apparently anyone not calling for World War III at that time was an enemy of the state, as far as ACTA was concerned.

So even though I was aware that one wing of the culture-war right has been outraged by liberal campuses and liberal-left professors for many years, I believed that some aspects of the post-9/11 political climate had gotten especially toxic for those of us who believe that academic programs should be intellectually independent from the state—and from whatever political party happens to be in power at any moment in history.

Free Exchange:  Well, we certainly would be interested to know what your response to Horowitz was!  However, in the interest of not feeding his ego with more press, let me follow up on your sense of the “climate.” Do you feel the attacks on higher education have changed since you began this project, and if so, how?

Me: I don’t think there’s been any significant change in the climate; the right’s attacks on higher education were pretty frantic in 2001-03, and they’re pretty frantic now.  I do, however, sense two important developments.  The first is that liberals, progressives, moderates, and some conservatives have begun to realize just how radical these attacks are, and how dangerous—I use the word advisedly—it would be to place universities under direct state control, particularly in states where you’ve got a large body of legislators who don’t like this whole “science” thing.

The other, unfortunately, is that the meaning of “academic freedom” has been almost hopelessly confused by these attacks.  “Academic freedom” actually means (according to the American Association of University Professors, whose definition is actually the foundation of the idea) that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research and in the publication of the results, subject to the adequate performance of their other academic duties.” It has to do with teaching and research—not with the right of students to speak up in class, or with “campus climate” in general.  So, for example, when conservative Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein testified to the Georgia legislature (on behalf of the so-called Academic Bill of Rights) that “Academic freedom isn’t the property of the faculty.  It is the responsibility of campus dwellers, yes, but the property of all citizens,” he was precisely wrong—and statements like this, I believe, have the effect of confusing academic freedom with freedom of speech in general.

Free Exchange: Given those developments, do you believe that professors need to, in fact, get more politically active outside of the classroom?  And does this mean anything in terms of how academics talk to state legislators and the public in general about their work?

Me: The short answer is yes.  As I note in the book, professors are an exceptionally weak constituency, politically speaking.  College professors, it seems, are especially disorganized when it comes to political advocacy and political organization.

At the same time, I’m not suggesting that professors should organize simply to protect their own interests—though that would be a decent start, with regard to the virtues of protecting the intellectual independence of college teachers.  Professors also need to learn how to address the legitimate concerns of legislators and the public in general-about everything from academic freedom and civil society to grade inflation and tuition hikes.  Very, very few people understand how public universities are funded, for example, and I think if they understood the relation between state budget cuts and tuition increases at places like Penn State, they’d see the wisdom of the social contract we had in place until quite recently, in which universities were seen as a public good that offers all kinds of intellectual and financial returns on public investment.

Free Exchange:  Let’s turn to the classroom. You spend two substantial chapters of your book discussing what goes on in your classes and your opening chapter discusses your own personal and professional struggle with how to best meet the needs of one of your outspoken students, “John,” as well as the other students in that class.  How common do you believe that struggle is for professors teaching in today’s environment and is one hope that your book helps other liberal arts faculty members think through their own class situations and these issues?

Me: Well, I think every responsible professor struggles to meet the needs of his or her students.  My own standard for this, as I explain in the book, is the standard of “reasonable accommodation”:  every student and every perspective should be accommodated in the classroom, within reason.  Now, that standard is drawn from disability law, so when I first elaborated it, back in 2003, a few opportunistic critics on the right tried to make the bizarre claim that I was suggesting we treat conservative students as if they have mental disabilities.  But, of course, I was arguing that every student should be accommodated.  As I argue in the book, the beautiful thing about the standard of “reasonable accommodation” is that it is a universal imperative that requires one to acknowledge individual idiosyncrasies (because not every “accommodation” will take the same form).

The real challenges come when you find yourself with a student who makes arguments you consider unreasonable.  In my case, it was “John“‘s defense of the WW2 internment camps for Americans of Japanese ancestry.  For other teachers, it might be a student who won’t question the Biblical account of creation, or who insists that homosexuality should be cured so that we can save gay men and lesbians from eternal damnation.  In my book, I mention the case of Ann Marie B. Bahr, who teaches philosophy and religion at South Dakota State University and had a bunch of students walk out of her lectures (though they continued to show up for exams, remarkably enough) because she had assigned readings that were critical of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic group Christian Identity.  I think that for professors whose courses touch on politically volatile matters—from the Middle East to African-American history to gender and sexuality—the question of how best to stimulate and lead productive classroom discussion is absolutely central to their teaching.  But yes, I hope that some aspects of my book encourage all of us, even those of us whose course material is not quite so volatile, to think through our politics and our pedagogy.

Free Exchange:  In your closing paragraph, you eloquently argue that the teaching of the liberal arts strengthens our democracy. In your mind, are our colleges and universities vis-à-vis the liberal arts doing a better or worse job of strengthening our democracy today than say we were 50 years ago-or has it changed?

Me:  Better, I’d say—but not necessarily because of the liberal arts.

Let’s go back 50 years, to 1956.  Though the GI Bill had enabled a new generation of middle- and working-class adults to attend college, most American universities were still racially segregated; the real opening of the gates didn’t happen until the 1960s, when universities witnessed an extraordinary decade of expansion, fueled in part by women and minorities and in part by massive Cold War funding in the wake of Sputnik.  (It is something of a historical irony that so many academic liberals and progressives of the era were supported by the National Defense Education Act.  Ah, those were the good old days.)

I can illustrate what’s at stake by looking back at my own degree-granting institutions:  I was part of the last all-male cohort of Columbia University when I graduated in 1982.  That’s right, Columbia didn’t admit women until 1983.  Even more amazingly, my doctoral institution, the University of Virginia (a public school, though it often likes to imagine itself otherwise), didn’t admit women until 1970.  It’s now one of the so-called “public Ivies”; before 1970, it was known widely as a place where the gentry learned to hold their liquor while cruising through the curriculum with the “Gentlemen’s C.” Fred Barnes and Brit Hume both graduated from Virginia in the 1960s.  Back then, white guys only had to compete with about 44 percent of the population for spots at U.Va.  So think about that the next time a conservative writer tells you that affirmative action has led to a decline in academic standards, or the next time the College Republicans hold one of their charming little “affirmative action bake sales” on campus.

But at the same time, we’ve done a good deal of backsliding over the past twenty years when it comes to making college accessible for poor and working-class families.  For too many Americans, elite universities are out of reach, and millions of students graduate with crushing debt loads.  It’s time we began taking on Adolph Reed, Jr.’s suggestion for Free Higher Ed:  a 50 to 60 billion dollar federal program to subsidize higher education throughout the United States.  Would it break the bank?  Not at all—it’s a pittance compared to the war in Iraq.  And look what happened to Ireland after it decided to subsidize its citizens’ college tuitions:  it’s now the Celtic Tiger, the economic star of the European Union.  Ireland!  Twenty years ago it was almost a third-world nation economically.  Now it’s booming beyond belief.  Celtic Tiger, indeed—it’s almost as weird as seeing the Detroit Tigers make the playoffs.  And it reminds me that the greatest periods of American economic expansion, after the Civil War and after World War II, just happened to coincide with massive investments in American universities.  I think there’s a lesson there for sensible Republicans as well as the entire Democratic party.

Free Exchange:  We at Free Exchange have always admired your writing on your blog and this book has moments of “blog-like” writing.  Does your blog influence your academic work stylistically or substantively?

Me:  Sure—though I’ve always had a more or less colloquial prose style, I think.  But there’s a difference between my blog writing and my more formal writing:  the former tends to be more playful, even silly at times (I get to indulge my love of Monty Python and the Simpsons more often), whereas the latter tends to have a lower snark content.  I simply assume I’m writing for a more diffuse and diverse audience in What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts? than I am on the blog, where I have a regular readership that is usually fairly indulgent about my moments of self-indulgence (or silliness).

While I was writing Liberal Arts, though, I sometimes felt a conflict between the blog and the book.  News stories about conservatives in academe would pop up every now and then, and there was a flurry of such stories right after the 2004 election.  At the time, I wrote something fairly facetious on my blog—a post entitled “Keeping Conservatives Out of Academe” about how I was screening job applications for the codewords that would give away the Republican Ph.D. candidates.  I was kidding, of course; my real point was that conservatives hadn’t (and they still haven’t) provided any evidence for their numbers in the applicant pool.  And I do think that one weird effect of the right’s attacks on liberal professors is that it allows some conservatives to pretend that they are too interested in teaching the arts and humanities and are just being prevented from doing so by nasty liberals.

But at the time, I remember Ralph Luker, a smart conservative historian and prolific blogger, taking exception to this post—I think he considered it cheeky and evasive.  I wanted to say, “no, that’s just the snarky blog version—I promise you I’m working on a more substantial and sustained argument for the book,” but of course I didn’t want to give away that argument ahead of time, either.  So at times during 2004-05 as I was writing the book, I found myself writing in one mode for the blog and quite another for the book.

My education as a blogger, though, has involved my gradual realization that I had developed a readership that would actually stay with me for 2000- or 3000-word posts on politics, literature, literary theory, and disability issues.  And not only that:  this readership would respond with smart and challenging and sometimes hilarious comments day in and day out.  That’s been a truly delightful surprise; I didn’t imagine that blogging could be so substantive or so fun when I started out in early 2004.

Free Exchange:  Lastly, you talk about what you look for in your students’ writing.  You say that you “tend to be especially impressed by papers that ask themselves the simple but profound question, so what?” What do you believe the “so what” question is that your book considers?

Me:  I guess I’d put the “so what” question this way:  Universities are under attack from an ascendant wing of the Republican Party that would like to see them placed more directly under the control of government-so what?  Why should average Americans care about this when they’ve got so much else to worry about, from health care costs to pension-looting scandals to the Bush-Cheney attack on civil liberties and habeas corpus?

And my answer is that the attack on American universities is part and parcel of that ascendant wing’s larger program for American society.  They now control all three branches of government, they’ve got their own Philip K. Dick-like alternative-universe media in Fox News and the vast right-wing noise machine, and they’re striking out at the few areas of American life they don’t dominate—Hollywood, unions, college campuses.  (You know, the real centers of power.) It’s a little hard to believe, at first; if I were a conservative, I’d be quite happy with an arrangement under which my allies control the country and my opponents control the survey courses in American fiction.  But it helps to understand that the ascendant wing we’re talking about is not, strictly speaking, a conservative wing.  We’re talking, instead, about the radical right—some of whom believe in the theory that the President can set aside the Constitution at will, some of whom believe that America went wrong when its founders decided to separate church and state, but all of whom regard with distrust or disdain any and all arenas of intellectual independence and political pluralism in American life.

As I argue in the book’s final chapter, these people don’t simply hate this or that “liberal” social policy, from Social Security to the minimum wage; they hate procedural liberalism itself, the very idea that there should be plural and competing centers of power in a flourishing civil society that has some degree of autonomy from the apparatus of government.  The defense of the intellectual independence of American universities is therefore part of the defense of a democratic, procedural liberalism, and it is a defense that all liberals—and most conservatives, if they are truly conservative—should be willing to undertake. 

Posted by Michael on 10/13 at 08:40 AM
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