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Tag: "academia"

I’m a fraud!

[ 172 ] August 13, 2013 |

I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder or appear to be piling on, but one aspect of Hugo Schyzer’s “confession” strikes me as especially problematic, especially at a time in which the humanities are under assault from well-funded conservative forces: his claim of academic fraudulence.

He’s clearly not a fraud in the traditional sense, i.e. he didn’t falsify his credentials or publish papers on data he knew to be cooked. He claims that when he was in graduate school, “there was no such thing as porn studies,” so he lacked the credentials to teach it. Which, I suppose, is technically true. But he also claims to have “do[ne] the reading,” which in practice is all that’s required of scholars who work in a field that didn’t exist when they earned their doctorates.

The other “fraud” he believes he committed is that he spoke about feminism but “never published in any serious academic journal [because he] wanted to write for a popular audience.” Anyone familiar with the current state of academic journals knows about the incestuous nature of “blind” review: your name’s not on your submission, but if you’ve spoken at a conference or to another scholar in the field, you’re a known quantity. Your work whispers your name to the person who reviews it and that, as much as any independent factors, determines whether it’ll be published. (Why yes, I am that cynical.) But I haven’t come here to bury humanities journals—their “style” secures them a place in the deepest recesses of empty libraries—only to note that failure to publish in a discipline or subdiscipline doesn’t disqualify a person from teaching in it if they’ve done the reading. That’s all that’s required. If Schwyzer convinced his colleagues that he’d done the reading, he was qualified to teach a course in whatever it was he’d read.

Does this system require trust and lend itself to abuse? I suppose. But as someone who spent 13 years teaching at one of the best universities in the country, I can assure you that when you stand in front of a classroom of bright, motivated students you always feel like a fraud. You’ve never read enough, and you never will have. Your shelves will always be lined with books you should’ve already read. You feel like a fraud because you’ve only read thirty books on X, but your students consider you an authority for the very same reason.

Was I a hypocrite when I taught a literary journalism course after only having casually read Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and John McPhee? What if I told you I’d also had a subscription to The New Yorker for a decade? How much literary journalism did I need to read to be able to teach it? How familiar with its style and conventions did I need to be? I can’t answer those questions, so instead I’ll say what every teacher knows to be true: I wasn’t qualified to teach the material until I’d already taught it a few times.

That doesn’t make me a fraud—it makes me a teacher.

Here’s a hypothetical: an academic writes a dissertation about, say, evolutionary theory in fin de siècle American popular culture, but later starts reading and writing about a subject in which he’d received absolutely no graduate level training. I don’t know, like film theory. He reads the seminal texts, then writes about it online, for a popular audience instead of an academic one, for the better part of six years. Would this academic be qualified to open an “Internet Film School” at the Onion A.V. Club? Would he be a fraud if he did?

Embargoing Dissertations

[ 55 ] July 23, 2013 |

Academics face increasing problems in dealing with academic publishing. This is especially true in the book-driven fields of history and anthropology, where because dissertations are now archived online, publishers don’t want to publish them. This leads to a real problem for young academics who need tenure. For me, this is not a big problem because I have completely reworked my project anyway and have condensed the entire dissertation down to the first two chapters of my book manuscript. But for others, who complete a dissertation that really is quite ready or close to ready to publish as a book, this provides a true dilemma.

Unfortunately, the American Historical Association’s response, to call for the embargoing of dissertations so that young scholars can publish them, is not particularly helpful. Rob has talked about the many problems of academic publishing. It’s almost impossible to have a serious, scholarly, and timely conversation based upon your research in an academic setting. I’m currently writing a very long book review for an important journal in the field of labor history covering multiple books. It’s around the theme of what should labor do to stem its crisis. I’ll finish writing that review in the next month. It probably won’t be published until the fall of 2014 or so. By then, who knows how relevant it will be for anything?

So retracting knowledge is not a good answer for a discipline that needs to remain relevant. What needs to happen instead is a revision of tenure requirements that consider a cluster of factors rather than simply a book to determine whether a person’s scholarship has value. This could be citations of your dissertation (problematic in its own right I think but it has some value), more of an emphasis on articles rather than books, a path toward new research, the dissemination of research in non-traditional ways (through the internet or other new media for instance), etc. But of course departments and especially universities don’t want to do any of that. Rather, the increased difficulty of publishing combined with the retraction of jobs has created a labor surplus. So the universities can see tenure denial as a money-saving exercise and can effectively demand whatever they want from assistant professors (that faculty who got their jobs in the 1970s and never published a single word seem to be routinely the most strident in upholding publication standards for young scholars has amused me for at least a decade now).

In any case, I don’t see anyone taking the AHA statement seriously. It’s really not an acceptable response.

The Core Reason for the Humanities Crisis

[ 207 ] May 28, 2013 |

Leon Wieseltier asks the right question in his graduation speech at Brandeis: “Has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were cherished less, and has there ever been a moment in American life when the humanities were needed more?”

Unfortunately, his answer is totally wrong.

So there is no task more urgent in American intellectual life at this hour than to offer some resistance to the twin imperialisms of science and technology, and to recover the old distinction — once bitterly contested, then generally accepted, now almost completely forgotten – between the study of nature and the study of man. As Bernard Williams once remarked, “’humanity’ is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.” You who have elected to devote yourselves to the study of literature and languages and art and music and philosophy and religion and history — you are the stewards of that quality. You are the resistance. You have had the effrontery to choose interpretation over calculation, and to recognize that calculation cannot provide an accurate picture, or a profound picture, or a whole picture, of self-interpreting beings such as ourselves; and I commend you for it.

The problem is not science and technology. For one, science, technology, and the humanities can be blended in very interesting ways. Second, science and technology are not the enemy.

The enemy of the humanities is corporate capitalism and their bought political cronies. We are indeed living through the greatest crisis in the humanities in American history. That’s because corporations control educational policy, corporate heads sit on the board of trustees of universities, and the right-wing correctly sees higher education as the last place in the United States where one can hear open critiques of capitalism. The attack on the humanities happens in higher education policy–through telling students they can’t get jobs with a liberal arts degree, through paying professors in Business and Physics departments vastly more than in History and English, through “running universities like a business,” which of course means isolating any field of study that doesn’t bring in outside monies. At the base of all of this is a capitalist war against its critics. And it’s hardly surprising that Wieseltier would miss this. Criticizing capitalism makes people uncomfortable. Criticizing technology is easy. But in this case, it’s wrong.

ISA! ISA!

[ 23 ] April 4, 2013 |

Blogging at you today from the 2013 International Studies Association Conference in San Francisco, California. If you’re currently enjoying ISA, please consider stopping by the International Studies Blogging Reception, which should include blogger types from Monkey Cage, Duck of Minerva, and LGM.  A few random links of note:

The Commercialization of Academia: A Case Study

[ 226 ] March 28, 2013 |

I’ve been sitting on this post for over 20 months; writing it, editing it, deleting it, writing it again. It was initially inspired by a book review written by Stanley Fish in the New York Times, which generated some online discussion, then the University of Virginia firing and subsequent unfiring of Teresa Sullivan last summer. Finally, we there is the effect that Coursera specifically and MOOCs in general will have on our understanding of the role of higher education. Higher education in the United States is facing a series of challenges, from the erosion of legislative support for state universities and colleges, the emergence of Coursera and its ilk, to a whole scale reassessment of the role of higher ed. In America, the concern is that the sector is being pushed towards a mission dedicated solely to the production of vocationally-equipped graduates with skill sets easily measured, all administered in a commercial framework driven by ever changing business models glossily packaged in the buzzwords fashionable to the day .

We’re already there in Britain.

In immediate response to the firing of Sullivan at Virginia, Siva Vaidhyanathan wrote an excellent piece at Slate. The following two passages are pertinent to this post:

The biggest challenge facing higher education is market-based myopia. Wealthy board members, echoing the politicians who appointed them (after massive campaign donations) too often believe that universities should be run like businesses, despite the poor record of most actual businesses in human history.

Universities do not have “business models.” They have complementary missions of teaching, research, and public service. Yet such leaders think of universities as a collection of market transactions, instead of a dynamic (I said it) tapestry of creativity, experimentation, rigorous thought, preservation, recreation, vision, critical debate, contemplative spaces, powerful information sources, invention, and immeasurable human capital.

Read more…

Michigan Republican Hypocrisy

[ 50 ] March 20, 2013 |

Michigan Republicans are very special. After passing right to work legislation in at best a marginally legal manner, they are seeking to punish universities who are negotiating new contracts with faculty that would delay the legislation until the end of the contract. Specifically, they are seeking to reduce appropriations to the University of Michigan and Wayne State University, that great bastion of unionism, by 15% as a punitive action for not kowtowing to their extremist anti-labor agenda.

The Academic Future

[ 86 ] March 16, 2013 |

With MOOCs, the future is clearly what happened to the French Department at Southeastern Louisiana University. Fire all the tenure track professors, replace them with adjuncts, and continue offering the minor (or major as the case may be). Dare the professors to do something about it.

Of course SELU did this without MOOCs, but technology just facilitates the elimination of faculty.

The UVA Aftermath

[ 74 ] March 14, 2013 |

As you may remember, last summer, the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia attempted to push out UVA President Teresa Sullivan, basically because the corporate hacks on the Board didn’t think Sullivan was committed enough to leveraging synergies and proactive leaderocracy and such. It was a gigantic disaster that was beaten back because of widespread protests. The American Association of University Professors (my union which provided me with outstanding representation when URI attempted to disown me last fall. Let me tell you people, there is nothing as great as union representation. Which is why employers want to destroy unions) has issued a report after an investigation. The report doesn’t present a lot that’s new exactly, not surprising since the Board was so blatant and open about why they wanted Sullivan gone. But it does get at what it portends:

The breakdown in governance at the University of Virginia documented here was only partly a result of structural failure; indeed, the board ignored its own recently adopted guidelines on presidential evaluation. In much greater measure it was a failure by those charged with institutional oversight to understand the institution over which they presided and to engage with the administration and the faculty in an effort to be well informed. It was a failure of judgment and, alas, of common sense.

You should definitely read the whole thing if you are interested in these issues.


This is all part of the corporate strategy to turn universities into corporations, with all the meaningless lingo, profit-hoarding at the top, and lack of respect for employees that entails. Boards don’t just not understand what universities do and how they are run, they don’t want to know. They are attempting to transform them into the same institutions that brought you The Great Recession, The Housing Bubble, Unsustainable Debt, and all your other favorite economic entertainments.

I have no illusion that I will retire as a professor. Not because I am going to leave voluntarily. And not because I won’t get tenure. Because the job won’t exist. Just yesterday we were talking about MOOCs and how corporations and states are applying the shock doctrine to higher education. This is the end of academic employment, with no benefits to anyone but highly-paid administrators and corporate investors. When Sullivan was reinstated, that was a small victory is a longer battle that we are losing–the battle to retain the world’s greatest higher education system. In the 9 months since the UVA debacle, I’ve seen no evidence that suggests I’m wrong.

Letters

[ 105 ] March 1, 2013 |

We have a small M.A. program in history at URI. I sit on the graduate committee. Some of the letters of recommendation I have read are truly appalling in their sloppiness, misspellings, etc. When I write a letter of recommendation for someone, I take that duty very seriously. Someone’s future is in your hands. How professors can write such awful letters is beyond me. I actually find it rather offensive so I’m glad the Chronicle took this on.

Almost Verbatim Emory University President James Wagner: “The 3/5 Compromise is a Model to Which We Should Aspire. Also, the Liberal Arts are Like Slaves and Should Be Treated As Such”

[ 89 ] February 16, 2013 |

The president of Emory University evidently lacks people to make sure he doesn’t say insane, horrible things.

During a Homecoming program in September, a panel of eminent law school alumni discussed the challenges of governing in a time of political polarization—a time, in other words, like our own. The panel included a former US senator, former and current congressmen, and the attorney general for Georgia.

One of these distinguished public servants observed that candidates for Congress sometimes make what they declare to be two unshakable commitments—a commitment to be guided only by the language of the US Constitution, and a commitment never, ever to compromise their ideals. Yet, as our alumnus pointed out, the language of the Constitution is itself the product of carefully negotiated compromise.

One instance of constitutional compromise was the agreement to count three-fifths of the slave population for purposes of state representation in Congress. Southern delegates wanted to count the whole slave population, which would have given the South greater influence over national policy. Northern delegates argued that slaves should not be counted at all, because they had no vote. As the price for achieving the ultimate aim of the Constitution—“to form a more perfect union”—the two sides compromised on this immediate issue of how to count slaves in the new nation. Pragmatic half-victories kept in view the higher aspiration of drawing the country more closely together.

Uh.

What?

Wow.

I think we can all be impressed by a bunch of elite southern white men discussing politics and coming to the Three-Fifths Compromise as ideal legislation. That one would say this publicly is even more bizarre–does he not have people to make sure he doesn’t actually articulate the incredibly offensive things he believes? Or, good lord could this be, is this the compromise editorial? If so, I don’t want to see the first draft.

But wait, there’s more. Because see where this ends!!!

Part of the messy inefficiency of university life arises from the intention to include as many points of view as possible, and to be open to the expectation that new ideas will emerge. The important thing to keep in view is that this process works so long as every new idea points the way toward a higher shared ideal, namely truth.

At Emory of late we have had many discussions about the ideal—and the reality—of the liberal arts within a research university. All of us who love Emory share a determination that the university will continue trailblazing the best way for research universities to contribute to human well-being and stewardship of the earth in the twenty-first century. This is a high and worthy aspiration. It is tempered by the hard reality that the resources to achieve this aspiration are not boundless; our university cannot do everything we might wish to do, or everything that other universities do. Different visions of what we should be doing inevitably will compete. But in the end, we must set our sights on that higher goal—the flourishing liberal arts research university in service to our twenty-first-century society.

I am grateful that we have at our disposal the rich tools of compromise that can help us achieve our most noble goals.

As a historian, where does this lead me? I mean, I already know that we liberal arts people probably do in fact count as 3/5 of a person when it comes to university decision making, but if university presidents are going to openly compare us to slaves, well I just can’t wait for the future. Why even pay us at all? The strike of a whip should force us into line!!!

A Solution in Search of Some Data…

[ 87 ] January 31, 2013 |

This is an odd idea:

Should Colleges Ban Double Majors?

Tucked in a list of suggested reforms issued last week for how U.S. colleges could increase graduation rates is a recommendation that schools “narrow student choice” in order to promote completion. It’s an interesting idea — one that seems to go against the notion of college as a place to explore options and experiment with courses in divergent fields — that is all the more curious since it is included in an open letter from the nation’s six leading higher-education organizations.

“Sometimes we create a culture of dancing for more years than you have to, rather than getting out the door,” said Gordon Gee, president of Ohio State University and chairman of the National Commission on Higher Education Attainment, which issued the Jan. 24 letter. ”I think institutions have a responsibility to reset that balance.”

Do double majors improve a student’s marketability?

Whether a second major actually makes a student more attractive to an employer is unclear — little data exists on the subject.

Do double majors slow degree progress, or prevent graduation?

At the same time, however, Tepper says his research does not suggest that students who double-major are more likely to drop out of college. He also found that having an additional major increases the time it takes to earn a degree only slightly, if at all.

And so…

So why, then, are prominent figures in the higher-education community promoting the idea of narrowing student choice?

“I’m not sure that the word ‘narrow’ is quite the right word, it’s clarity that we’re really trying to achieve,” said Gee after embarking on a media tour to promote the letter. “I believe very strongly in the liberal arts education. We don’t want to take away those options. We want to provide clarity to students for how they can get through the system much faster — that would be the way that I would put it.”

Well, that clears things up. Without data to indicate that double majors actually slow progress, seems to me a touch premature to suggest that they ought to be banned. Also seems that “banned” here effectively means just that a student cannot be granted a credential for taking a sufficient number of courses in a second major. I don’t understand why denying a student a credential (even if it doesn’t seem to add much to job market/grad school attractiveness), should be an institutional priority.

If I had to guess, I’d say one problem is that double majors create messy statistical and accounting issues that administrators find unpleasant.  I’d also guess that administrators are desperate for any means of pushing students through faster, as graduation rate affects ranking, and that they’re willing to try just about any kooky scheme for making that happen.  Student intellectual curiosity is an inconvenience.

Is a Duke Degree Worth the Paper It’s Printed On?

[ 81 ] September 21, 2012 |

It’s hardly surprising that a school full of the douchiest basketball fans in the world like Duke would also lead the nation in grade inflation. I mean, when you have worse grade inflation than Harvard, you are really saying something. Do Duke students just get an 4.0 when they write their tuition checks?

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