As I wrote previously, the idea of the communication course first arose in the mid 1940s when WWII veterans flooded colleges on the GI Bill:

The Communication course sprang out of the demands of the armed services during World War II for faster and more practical instruction in the language arts than was being given by existing sources. Such courses in the language arts, according to the armed services, were unrealistic, ineffective, and too slow. Language, from the armed services’ point of view, should be studied as an instrument for communicating ideas in a social system. (Malmstrom 21)

In other words, college communication courses extended military training in communication even after the war was done. Thomas F. Dunn also makes this argument when he states that “During the Second World War, the term communication came into widespread use, largely from the impetus given by the special needs of war trainees whose preparation for receiving and giving military commands, making reports on activities, and directly operations both orally and in writing were not adequately provided by the traditional college training” (31).

Take a minute to look at this 1944 training video on how women can be most productive when using typewriters for the military. The first minute is hilarious, but then, if you’re really interested, you can skip past the history of typewriters to minute 5 where the instruction in how to sit begins:

Early communication courses both served the practical need for expertise in everyday “reading, writing, speaking, and listening” and the desire to ensure the spread of American democracy, or as Malmstrom puts it, “keeping democracy dominant” (23). They could be in a variety of disciplines, as long as the four modes of communication were the focus and were evaluated as ends unto themselves (Malmstrom 22). However, the idea that there should be a systematic emphasis on communication across the entire college curriculum didn’t really emerge until the 1980s.

By 1959, communication courses had diverged in a number of different directions:  “Some courses [centered] themselves around personal awareness and personality development as a means to better expression, others around the media of mass communication, others around the structure of language, and still others around semantics or general semantics” (Dean 80).

As I mentioned in my last post, articles discussing communication courses thin out in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

However, an interest in communication courses returned in the early and mid 1970s, although the emphases were slightly different, falling on questions about how to teach communication to students of diverse backgrounds (such as in Diana Corley’s “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College”), how to evaluate speeches (such as in Sara Latham Stelzner’s “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation”), and how to communicate in business (such as P.H. Hewing’s “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course”). While the notion of business communication had been around since the early 1940s, articles on that topic really exploded in the second half of the 1970s.

In the early 1980s articles referencing communication courses continued the business communication trend and also highlighted multicultural or intercultural communication (such as in Richard Fiordo’s “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta”). In 1985, an article whose title today seems a bit quaint appeared:  Leon W. Couch and Charles V. Shaffer’s “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.”

Many sources claim that the Writing Across the Curriculum movement rose in the early 1980s (this includes the Purdue OWL website). This is indeed when most articles on WAC were published, but technically, the term was first used in 1965 with the Writing Across the Curriculum Project at the University of London and the earliest articles referencing the movement in America were published in the late 1970s (Steinfatt 461). But, throwing another wrench in the works, in Charles Bazerman, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel’s Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum the movement is traced back through the 1970s and then ever further back to 1931, when Alvin C. Enrich presented the findings of a late 1920s study conducted at the University of Minnesota:

Essays collected from 54 freshmen both before and after completing their freshman composition course at Minnesota were reviewed using one of several popular essay rating scales. The conclusions drawn from Eurich’s scholarly research report were that extended habits of written expression cannot be influenced in such a short time… (13-14)

The idea of more comprehensive writing instruction over a student’s entire time at college was proposed in 1931 but was then pushed off for another four decades.

Based on my research, however, WAC and CAC share a startling common ancestor. Both WAC and CAC in American colleges can be traced to a 1969-1970 Writing Across the Curriculum faculty seminar “led by Barbara Walvoord” at Central College (Bazerman, Little, and Bethel 26). This was the earliest WAC seminar in the US, and the philosophy of CAC grew alongside Central’s WAC program as it evolved in the 1970s. As far as I can tell, the seminal paper which discusses communication across the curriculum is Charles V. Roberts’ “Communication Education Throughout the University:  An Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach,” which was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Communication Association in April of 1983. Roberts, who is from Central College, lays the groundwork of a CAC philosophy and discusses how it emerged alongside Central’s WAC program. He claims that one or two communication courses are not enough to make students into expert communicators (3-4); rather than forcing students to take more communication courses, the “responsibility for helping students speak, listen, write, and read more effectively” should be “diffused across the academic community” (4). He then claims that Central College is the first to systematically require a communication emphasis across multiple disciplines rather than simply within the Communication Department; he discusses how this developed at Central over the 1970s, beginning with a writing “laboratory” in 1972 and evolving into faculty training in communication evaluation in 1979 (4-5).

Steinfatt mentions two reasons for the growing emphasis in the late 1970s and early 1980s for robust instruction in communication skills:  the first is the National Endowment for the Arts‘ 1983 report entitled “A Nation at Risk” which proclaims that the nation is facing an erosion of educational standards (460). WAC also arose largely in response to this report. The second reason is “the opinion of many corporate executives, expressed in university surveys, in casual conversation with university faculty and administrators, and in grants and bequests, that the number one problem of college students entering the work force, both for the organization and for students’ chances of advancement, is that college graduates ‘can’t communicate’” (460).

In summary, the ways in which communication courses were discussed and theorized shifted with the pedagogical concerns of each decade. In the late 1970s and early 1980s there was an increased interest in communication for business. Both WAC and CAC in America were born in Central College. WAC evolved first, beginning in 1969, and CAC was added on during the 1970s.

Works Cited

Bazerman, Charles, Joseph Little, and Lisa Bethel. Reference Guide to Writing Across the Curriculum. West Lafeyette, IN:  2005. Web. 10 November 2011.

Corley, Diana. “An Interracial Communication Course for the Community College.” Communication in Education 24.3 (1975):  237-241.

Couch, Leon W. and Charles V. Shaffer. “Development of a Computer Communications Course Plus Laboratory.” CoED 5.3 (1985):  14-19. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dean, Howard H. “The Communication Course:  A Ten-Year Perspective.” College Composition and Communication 10.2 (1959):  80-85. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Dunn, Thomas F. “The Principles and Practice of the Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 6.1 (1955):  31-38. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Fiordo, Richard. “The Soft-Spoken Way vs. the Outspoken Way:  A Bicultural Approach to Teaching Speech Communication to Native People in Alberta.” Journal of American Indian Education 24.3 (1985):  35-48. Web. 10 November 2011.

Hewing, P.H. “A Practical Plan for Teaching Oral Communication in the Business Communication Course.” Business Communication Quarterly 40.4 (1977):  9-11. SAGE Communication and Media Studies backfile Collection. Web. 10 November 2011.

Malmstrom, Jean. “The Communication Course.” College Composition and Communication 7.1 (1956):  21-24. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Roberts, Charles V. Communication Education Throughout the University: an Alternative to the One-Shot Inoculation Approach. , 1983:  1-16. Web. ERIC Database. 11 November 2011.

Steinfatt, Thomas M. “Communication Across the Curriculum.” Communication Quarterly. 34.4 (1986): 460-70. Print.

Stelzner, Sara Latham. “Selected Approaches to Speech Communication Evaluation.” Speech Teacher 24.2 (1975):  127-23. JSTOR. Web. 10 November 2011.

Shoting star and other dollar origami by Corey Comenitz http://www.corigami.com/Gallery_3.html

I’m following John and David’s posts, both of which I think responded insightfully and eloquently to aspects of Grant McCraken’s presentation that I was too flustered by to take on myself. My immediate thought, following McCraken’s argument that anthropology should be a tool for companies, analyzing culture in order to help companies capture potential consumers, was that the motives of academics and business people are different. The task of academics is to question social structures—like the relationship between culture and the marketplace—in terms of how they affect human flourishing. And, the task of business people is to grow business. Either their job is not to care how their business affects human flourishing (writ large, not just the shareholders and consumers), or to assume that the growth of business is an inherent and general good.

But, is this a fair assumption or a prejudice? As soon as I had articulated this thought to myself, as a possible response to McCraken, I realized it sounded like a prejudice. This led me to think about the tropes that commonly circulate among academics, and to think of the generalizations made on both sides of the business/academic divide.

RSA videos have been circulating recently among my friends (and fellow academics). The first one that circulated among my (academic) friends was Slavoj Zizek’s “First tragedy, then farce.” The next was the David Harvey’s “Crises of Capitalism,” also posted on cac.ophony. One thing that struck me about them both is the catastrophic view of capitalism. Harvey ends his argument by saying that capitalism will only continue to become more extreme, that it is a phenomenon that far exceeds the range of our current political discourse, even our current political framework. Zizek suggests (with tiny caveats, it’s just a suggestion!) that charity merely mitigates the “zero point” of the increase in human suffering inherent to capitalism.

This is an old idea, made glamorous by a celebrity and by technology. Yet Zizek acts, though he cites Oscar Wilde, as if this were an original insight. I do think Marx’s ideas are still very relevant and useful today, but I’m frustrated that Marx still seems like a daring and challenging reference, and an endpoint. When his ideas are re-voiced outside of academic context, they seem to me to be more invoked and applied than built upon.

What I’d like to see turned into an RSA is perhaps Barrington Moore’s Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, in which he studies the oppressions of several different political and economic forms, in different historical periods, and measures them against revolutions and the forms of governance and economics that replaced the old. No clear winners. I’d like to see some of George Yúdice’s ideas in an RSA. For example, he argues in The Expediency of Culture, that capitalism in its current phase is capturing more of human life, turning more and more of culture into a commodity. At the same time, he says, commodification has been cultured. The marketplace is more and more in the hands of more and more people. This takes us to last year’s keynote speaker, Clay Shirkey, who described Amazon as a kind of partial democratization of the marketplace. Or is it the commodification of democracy? Yúdice sees the capacity for the distribution of political agency, for more inclusive and effective solidarities, in this phase of the relationship between capital and culture.

In order to actually be able to turn speeches like McCraken’s into opportunities for mutually constructive criticism and dialogue, I think we might need to agree that we come to the table with a different set of prejudices about terms like the marketplace, capitalism, business, and academia. And would it be possible to have a conversation about who and how business and academia see themselves as serving to advance human flourishing?

In his essay Teaching Ambiguity Robert M. Eisinge, dean of the school of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design, reflects on the importance of ambiguity as a pedagogical teaching tool and sees Liberal Arts as the best discipline in which to learn it. Whereas clarity and actuality are important, Eisinge believes that students are not enough aware of the fluid and ambiguous context they are a part of. Whereas they can learn all the criteria for identifying poverty, they can’t solve it or understand the actual experience of being poor.

This reminded me of an interview of Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef who coined the word barefoot economics in his book Outside Looking In: Experiences in Barefoot Economics. Max-Neef describes how he realized, while studying poverty in Latin America, that his outside Berkeley-grown academic knowledge didn’t give him any insight into the economy of poor people. He decided to spend several months living with the poor in order to understand what it was like, after which he advocated that they have an incredibly rich sense of economic survival that is overlooked by our sophisticated models.

Academic teaching is very often about achieving clear understanding and applying it to a particular problem. It was refreshing to read that Eisinge was advocating ambiguity, sometimes at the expense of clarity, in order to better understand the world that we are in. When the problems we face are growing in complexity, it is not a matter of finding the solutions, but of navigating information that is contradictory. This is an exercise that he sees lacking in the academic world today, too focused on providing specific skills while ignoring the context they are going to be applied to.

Liberal arts have a role to play in that they are by their very nature ambiguous, interpretive, abstract, owing perhaps to the field itself. Literature, art, photography, are all about gray zones that are representative of human experience, which is by its very nature contradictory.  The questions are how to apply that approach to teaching itself and to other fields of knowledge, and how to avoid the perception for example that literature deals mostly with writing, or photography with image. The distinction that Max-Neef raises, between knowledge and understanding, should be part of what liberal arts can contribute to the academic world. Being barefoot is a great metaphor for that.

How Should the University Evolve?, part 1 of 2 from BLSCI on Vimeo.

How Should the University Evolve?, part 2 of 2 from BLSCI on Vimeo.

The idea for this conversation emerged organically, from Anya and Siva themselves with a little help from the Twitterverse. (I tell the story of how the event came to be at the beginning of the first video, but it’s worth a quick mention here as a testament to the way public discussion on the Internet, this case in Twitter, can easily move to meat space and lead to something remarkable that will resonate in many ways for some time to come.)

In his keynote at the Digital University conference at the CUNY Grad Center in April of this year, Siva critiqued Jeff Jarvis’ and Anya’s arguments about what higher ed ought to look like. (The video of the entire keynote is here.) Several of us tweeting at the conference noted Siva’s critique. Anya, who saw that her twitterstream was now chock full of people talking about Siva’s dressing down of her argument, remarked that she wanted to know more and was up for a debate. I suggested having the debate at CUNY and both agreed (SIva publicly and Anya in a DM later).

Given everyone’s ridiculously busy schedules, it took a while to happen, but it finally did. We hope you find Anya and Siva’s conversation as stimulating and provocative as we did. Enjoy. Please feel free to comment.

As if to illustrate this theme, Seldes had a posse of theatrical grande dames with her; seated in the front row were blockbuster stage actresses Angela Lansbury and Joan Copeland. Seldes would occasionally comment on their presence; “Angela, just seeing you there…calms me.”

Fantastic Four: Lansbury, Mason, Copeland, Seldes

After opening with a monologue by playwright John Arden about the blessings of art– “business and politics I leave to the crooks”– Seldes said firmly, “this is what I believe.” With that, she was done with her talk, and announced that she would answer any questions that anyone had– otherwise, she had not much else to say. As expected, the questions flowed from every corner of the audience, allowing Seldes to transfix with stories from her rich career, recollected with ample grace and humor; from her early aspirations as a ballerina, to studying with Sanford Meisner at the Neighborhood Playhouse (“you don’t have to be nice to teach acting, but you have to be demanding”), to her well-known roles in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women and Peter Shaffer’s Equus, to her unfulfilled dream of playing Hecuba.

When asked by an audience member which women of distinction had made an impression on her own life, she recalled the head of Theatre at the Dalton School: “Her name was Mildred Geiger, and she was very important to me,” she said simply, and left it at that. While she was critical of the high prices of theatre tickets today, Seldes shaped a most non-judgmental, gratified, and appreciative theatrical figuration– one who is equally enthusiastic as a performer as well as an audience member. She is never bored at the theatre, she maintained, not even when watching a boring performance– there is always something, or someone, interesting to look at. “I think just watching other human beings is the most interesting thing I’ve ever done.” Soon, the final question was posed, there were flowers to present, and talk of a car waiting outside; time to go.

Later, I reflected on Seldes’s point of linking the individuality of actors to the plays they are in, taking the stance that the original cast is just one of the impossible-to-reproduce, ethereal aspects of the theatre. (When asked if Three Tall Women might be revived, she claimed it wouldn’t work without actress Myra Carter in one of the roles.) This insistence could make any of the younger audience members at yesterday’s talk pine for the opportunity to hop into the time machine and head for the box office circa 1967. I went home, curious for more Marian, and found a bizarre little trailer for a documentary on Seldes that somehow manages to capture just a piece of the intensity she brought to Baruch:

Performing Diasporas is centered around artists-in-residence — in 2010-2011, Maya Lilly; in 2011-2012, Randy Weston; and, both years, Mahayana Landowne — each of whom’s work engages questions of group and individual identity formation. These artists will perform throughout their residencies, and also lead and participate in workshops. Much of the programming, however, will be directed at incoming students. The first year experience for the next two years will revolve in large part around exploration of the project theme: the Freshman Text will be about diasporic identity, the artists-in-residence will perform at August’s Convocation, and significant components of Freshman Seminar and the curricula of selected Learning Communities will be devoted to the theme.

As part of the Steering Committee planning this project, I’m especially excited by a few particulars. Too often the administrative labor of higher education falls into silos whose work is narrowly focused and lacks programmatic coordination with other initiatives at the College. This project is structured to counter that impulse by drawing several partners into a collaborative effort to inject consideration of both the arts and the themes of identity and diaspora into the curriculum. Obviously, this will most directly impact our first year students. But it’s also good for everyone at the College for the various moving administrative parts to find synergies. The project will raise the profile of BPAC, inject the first year experience with a variety of new ideas, and dovetails nicely with Dean Jeff Peck’s Global Studies Initiative.

The project also will also help lead Blogs@Baruch into its next phase. Last Fall, we began supporting Freshman Seminar. 1200 first year students wrote more than 6500 blog posts to 60 weblogs, all of which were aggregated ultimately into a single space. FRO Blogging was a success, if solely because we were able to pull it off with little time to plan. Feedback from last Fall’s students and the Peer Mentors who led the seminars suggested the desire for more creative leeway and fewer required blog posts (students were expected to author at least six reflections on enrichment workshops they attended over the course of the term). The feedback also showed appreciation for the social component of the project; students used their blogging to get to know each other and to form community, something that’s always a challenge at a commuter campus like Baruch.

We’ve redesigned FRO Blogging to incorporate this feedback and to intersect with the goals of Performing Diasporas. There will be three specific components to FRO Blogging in Fall 2010:

• Students will be required to write blog posts at the beginning and end of the semester reflecting on their adjustment to college and, in the middle of the semester, will post monologues about their own backgrounds that they develop with their Peer Mentors (who will receive training). Selected monologues will be shaped and then performed by professional actors at an end-of-the-semester event: “Baruch’s Voices.” In Spring 2011, students who are interested in performing their own monologues will workshop them and then perform at a series of Coffee Houses.
• Each seminar will be asked to develop its blog over the course of the Fall semester. We will push this process along by crafting prompts that are distributed weekly and that encourage students to reflect upon and share their own stories. Peer Mentors will guide the process, with assistance, and students will be nudged, but not required. At the end of the semester, the most fully developed sites will be recognized with an award. This is an experiment in voluntary buy-in, and we realize that student investment of effort will be uneven. Yet, the constraints of a non-credit course make this approach necessary, and the goal is less to have students develop polished public spaces than to get their feet wet thinking critically about how to present artistic and intellectual material on the open web.
• Finally, I’m excited to note that we’ll be rolling out BuddyPress this Fall, which will add a social networking layer to Blogs@Baruch, and afford students additional opportunities to connect with and get to know one another.

Ultimately, what I like most about this project is that it treats our students as creators and makers of knowledge, not merely as consumers. Baruch students are among the most interesting students in the world, and yet few of them seem to realize this (in fact, that’s one of the things that makes them interesting). Performing Diasporas, because it will draw our students inside productive processes and creates multiple opportunities for them to see and share the art in their own lives, is going to be something special to watch.

WPMu continues to provide a flexible platform for our faculty members to structure and explore online communication and composition in their courses. Course blogs this semester have been used to aggregate individual student portfolios in a Do-It-Yourself Publishing course, for students to share and comment upon Shakespeare Scene Studies, to blog about journalism internships (password protected), to write about food and sustainable agriculture, and to show off their multi-media reporting. Students have debated current events on a blog devoted to reading and discussing the New York Times (password protected), blogged about blogging as journalists, and added stories to Writing New York. Some faculty members have been using Blogs@Baruch as their course management system, while others have used it to try to create public writing opportunities for their students.

For a full listing of course blogs, see our “projects” page.

One project in particular embodied the excitement some faculty members and students bring to their work on Blogs@Baruch. Professor Shelly Eversley, in the English Department, had her American Literature students produce pod and vodcasts that analyzed texts they had encountered over the course of the semester. Buoyed by Cogdog’s “The Fifty Tools”, I did an hour in class on free digital story telling tools (including Voice Thread, Yodio, Gabcast, and Podcast People), and also gave some advice on how to construct a story that balanced narrative, analysis, and style. The students produced amazing work, which they collected here in advance of their voting for the initial American Literature Podcast Awards (the ALPs). They ended the semester with an awards ceremony, and have continued to post their thoughts about the class to the blog in the week since.

Here’s two of my favorite videos from the class:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcU6_WH6mVI[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVXa_MM19-w[/youtube]

Prof. Eversley’s project exemplifies the useful energy that multimedia tools can help students invest in their coursework. These projects are not substitutes for the critical engagement with a text or a canon that some might argue can only be attained through writing an essay; rather, they are additional paths towards that engagement. These students were excited about showing off their work, used the city as a laboratory and an archive, helped each other master the technology, and showed deep engagement with their chosen texts. This is good teaching and learning, and we’re happy to support any faculty member who challenges herself and her students to use a variety of tools and literacies in their effort to produce knowledge.

Kudos to all of our intrepid faculty and their students for providing us with yet more examples of innovative pedagogy on Blogs@Baruch. We look forward to Spring 2010, and in particular two film courses that will be taught on the system. Blogfessors, come on down!

I myself read Kindle editions on my iPhone (if only I could afford a Kindle DX!), but I also like those on the eReader platform I had first used on my old Palm Pilot. That one works not only on my iPhone but also on any computer, and allows me to customize the view on my Mac or PC in a way that makes the book very readable. I like being able to read the book either at my desk on my computer or on the move on my iPhone. But the Kindle app has a lot more books (and a more up-to-date selection), so I am plowing through novels on the subway in the Kindle format, too. Both platforms, Kindle and eReader, have a problem that Lloyd didn’t mention: in the rush to get books out, they’re missing some really basic copyediting steps. I’ve bought several books that had major typos and formatting errors, from blocks of text out of place or repeated, to text being spread across the page like an e.e. cummings poem. An author friend notified me that his backlist was now available on Kindle, so I happily bought some of them. I was embarrassed to tell him that they were full of typos, so I hashed it out with Amazon instead.

The Frankfurt speech ended with the following admonition against complacency in the industry (in any industry?):

Lloyd closed with the following quote from Seth Godin, which stands as both cautionary and a call-to-action: “Things you can learn from the music business (as it falls apart): The first rule is so important, it’s rule 0: 0. The new thing is never as good as the old thing, at least right now. Soon, the new thing will be better than the old thing will be. But if you wait until then, it’s going to be too late. Feel free to wax nostalgic about the old thing, but don’t fool yourself into believing it’s going to be here forever. It won’t.”
from PW

The editorial, “End the University as We Know It” by Mark C. Taylor, did not actually mention Sarah Lawrence College at all. The article does call for the end of the tenure system, of doctoral dissertations, and of the system of academic departments based on traditional disciplines such as Psychology, English, Philosophy, etcetera.

It is this last detail that must have reminded my friend of our alma mater.  That is, the curriculum at Sarah Lawrence is arranged around “problem-focused” topics (to borrow a phrase from Taylor’s editorial). Students can take courses such as “Surgically and Pharmacologically Shaping Selves” or “Contemporary American Politics: the 2008 Election in Context,” (two offerings from the 08/09 Course Catalogue) without being a Political-Science major or first taking introductory courses in medical anthropology. In addition, the way the professors are tenured — without rank — in disciplines rather than in departments allows for the fluid creation of new disciplines to adapt to changing fields of study. Disciplines such as Global Studies, Ethnic and Diasporic Studies, and Science, Technology and Society were created in all likelihood by interested faculty in extant disciplines. The college has no majors or minors. Every undergraduate takes a Bachelor of Liberal Arts degree. Some students choose to prepare for entry into law school or medical school or to design a highly specialized program suiting their own passions. However, the net effect of this curriculum is that the college graduates class after class of knowledgeable generalists.

That is the extent of the similarity between Sarah Lawrence College and Mark C. Taylor’s idea of a “university for the twenty-first century.” Sarah Lawrence does not grant doctoral degrees so his suggestions about how to revise the dissertation hardly apply. Taylor’s suggestion of ending tenure certainly is not exemplified by Sarah Lawrence where all faculty, in theory anyway, are tenured or on the tenure-track.

The idea to end the tenure system, radically distracting as it is from his other ideas, seems to me the only proposal that Professor Taylor puts forth in the article that would actually address the set of problems he starts out with — the failing economy of graduate education. Prior to the recent meltdown in the global economy, the problem of a glut of Ph.D.s for a dearth of tenure-track positions seemed to me a bit of a bugbear.  Daunted by the job market as a doctoral candidate and no stranger to exploitation as an adjunct, I nonetheless had felt curiously optimistic that after several years of grueling applications I could land that sought-after tenure track position somewhere in the United States. This optimism had been based on the impending retirement of the baby-boomers, however, and it shrank along with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the value of all those 401k accounts. Reading this Op-Ed after a season of cancelled jobs and announced hiring freezes, I found myself sympathetic to Taylor’s polemical claim that “graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning” and also found myself for the first time oddly receptive to a proposal to end the tenure system. Certainly, mandatory retirement age seems like a reasonable idea.

For many years, I have been pondering the economics higher education. With the skyrocketing numbers of young people enrolling in college and especially junior college in the United States, there must be another way to increase the access of all these students to higher learning than exploitive adjunct labor.

Professor Taylor’s proposals seem unlikely to implemented any time soon. But maybe his example should be followed. I propose we all go out on a limb and imagine our ideal universities. What ideas do you have? Perhaps the existence of one college that has managed to become an elite institution without playing by the rules (besides having no majors, did I mention — no grades!) should inspire us with the value of the improbable.

This semester we read and discussed the recently released Red Cross report on US treatment of terrorist detainees, treatment which was conclusively shown to be torture. Once we got the basic history stuff out of the way, I asked students to think through whether such treatment can ever be justified — a little dime-store ethical philosophy thrown in to the history classroom. There are usually some who think there’s no justifiable use of such harsh tactics as have been regular lately. Others insist that, if torture could be known to be likely to work, then we have to leave moral absolutism behind for a more utilitarian approach — i.e. it just might be OK to do some pretty rotten stuff to someone if it saves thousands, hundreds or scores of lives. This is always an interesting discussion, but it’s one that also makes clear how much the understanding of the torture question has been framed for my students by popular culture (“24″ (the worst culprit) and the many other movies and shows we all can probably remember).

This year however, in two separate classes, something new arose: Students, on their own started advocating torturing people not to in order get intelligence that would prevent 9/11 Pt. 2, but as punishment. Eye-for-an-eye sort of thinking — you get what you deserve, and there are no real limits to what you might deserve except how egregious your own crime was.

I found this truly unsettling. How did we get here? I think that the way we got here is a good old fashioned slippery slope. On TV, the bad guys get tortured and either give it up or not, die or not, feel terrible physical pain or not — but they’re the bad guys, so in the verbal and visual rhetoric of trashy (and extraordinarily popular) TV, it seems OK to many viewers. Torture becomes a regular adjunct to justice.

In addition, there are movies every year which prominently feature torture of human beings either in the same context or as “horror films” (really sadism films), in which the torturers are bad guys, the enemy. In the second case, torture seems despicable, so in one evening of viewing a person could be treated to a rather schizophrenic overall depiction of the issue – the cruel device of the worst fiends and the necessary tool of the righteous. But also in the second case, the problem is not that torture becomes linked with justice, but rather that it becomes entertainment; it’s a fun way (apparently) to get scared for an hour or two before making out with your girlfriend or checking on the sleeping kids.

What separates us, ideally from the Taliban, among other things, is our idea that justice and vengeance are different things. What renders us humane instead of merely human is, among other things, the idea that there are some acts which are simply morally unacceptable. What separates adults from children, among other things, is that adults see the real social utility as well as the moral truth of the old saw that two wrongs don’t make a right.

As a culture, we’re letting go of these things by the way we accept depictions of torture, as both titilating and just. To have a torture culture is not just to accept depictions of torture without clear disapprobation; it is, as the term “culture” implies, to grow, to nourish torture. And so, I think, when you have a culture rife with torture perhaps you end up seeing the fruits of that tortuculture blossoming in your nice calm classroom one April day.

Everywhere I look, and, it seems, in everything I read, folks are trying to understand, articulate, or make their mark upon these changes. The “change” we’re living through is much deeper than the promises put forth by Barack Obama in the construction of a positive message for his campaign. Packer spoke of a “tectonic shift” that’s impacting every area of American life.

Journalism is transforming before our eyes. Newspaper after newspaper is folding, altering its processes, or drastically reducing its staff and, as a result, the depth and quality of its coverage.  Newsrooms everywhere are being forced by executives and bean counters to do “more with less.”  Yet as David Simon and others have noted, the notion that you can possibly do “more with less” is, for want of a better term, bullshit.  You do “less with less.”

Unused newspaper racks clutter a storage yard in San Francisco, California. From Boston.com; image taken March 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

As stark and clear as that point may seem, some legitimately see opportunity in the restructuring of American newsrooms. “Crowd-sourcing” and “citizen journalism” seek to take advantage of Web 2.0 technologies to tap into existing pools of knowledge to generate and disseminate information. Journalists — those still in the business — break into camps that are either horrified or energized by the prospect of outsourcing society’s news gathering responsibilities. The most serious of them struggle through the implications of such a direction, asking what will be lost, what will be gained, and what professionalization means in an era that empowers the voice of the amateur.

Clay Shirky recently published a much-discussed blog post about the state of newspapers, comparing our moment to the moment when the printing press was invented, and focusing on the chaotic nature of the transition from one world to another.

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen…

Shirky concludes that we don’t know, and won’t know for some time, what the future of journalism is going to look like.  The most important thing is that “we shift our attention from ’save newspapers’ to ’save society’.”  Then, “the imperative changes from ‘preserve the current institutions’ to ‘do whatever works.’”  What we need is lots of spaghetti against the wall, for “any experiment designed to provide new models for journalism is going to be an improvement over hiding from the real, especially in a year when, for many papers, the unthinkable future is already in the past.”  He acknowledges what’s lost by the death of newspapers, allows us space to mourn, but ultimately settles on the point that what matters most is journalism, not the form that it takes.  He also lays the lie to those who, in the name of entrepreneurship, self-servingly claim that they have a crystal ball rather than a handful of wet spaghetti.

Journalism is not the only realm in American life that’s standing upon shifting ground; higher education is also in the midst of a wrenching transition.  In The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue argues that the humanities professor many readers of this blog aspire to become is going the way of the newspaper, swept into the dustbin of history by the market forces and corporatization that increasingly restrict the choices available to well-meaning university administrators. He argues that the humanities aren’t in crisis; this would imply some future return to normalcy. Rather, a liberal arts education as a requisite component in the formation of an informed citizen, and the celebration of the university as the location where that process takes place, with the professor as a central figure, is dead.  A liberal arts education will increasingly become a luxury rather than the norm, replaced by vocational training and the transfer of skills that have only direct and measurable correlations to bottom lines.

Stanley Fish posted a reaction to Donaghue’s book in January, highlighing the rising percentages of undergraduate courses taught by part-time labor and the ascendancy of the “for profit” university, where information delivery is all that matters.  An earlier blog post from Fish glibly dismissed the value of studying the humanities altogether.  Doing so is its own argument, he says, providing or needing no external justification.  If the study of the humanities instilled in one the desire to learn the great moral lessons of the ages, Fish lamely argues, “the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts… as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so.”

Fish finishes his meditation on The Last Professor with the observation that, thank goodness, he was born at the right time.  “Just lucky, I guess.”  Fish’s landing ultimately on his own good fortune contains none of the perspective evident in Shirky’s post. The possibility never dawns upon him that he might actually be in a position, from his lofty perch nestled just off the front page of the New York Times website and his influential provenance at two universities, to highlight or even demand an alternative trajectory in higher education.  He doesn’t seem to want one or think one is necessary.  He accepts the notion that the humanities has little “value added,” and returns to his study, satisfied by his ability to find support for his arguments in the schmuck-like behavior of some of his colleagues.

Does the sea change pinpointed by Packer and Shirky have relevance to the university of the future?  If Donaghue and Fish are correct, that future has been written, and those of us who’ve chosen to make our life studying and helping others study the humanities are just plain out of luck.

There’s ample evidence however that something similar to the revolution in journalism is happening in academia, though perhaps not so publicly and at a pace that’s less compressed.  This week the University of Michigan Press announced that it was going digital, a move that has consequences for the intense and troubled world of academic publishing.  Also, Mark Bauerlein, whose work on “kids these days” I have significant problems with, wrote a provocative paper about the future of higher education in which he argues “the coverage project is complete,” and that graduate schools and P&T committees should be putting more of an emphasis on good teaching.  I disagree with the first argument (admittedly, his statement was about literature and not history, which is my field, and which hasn’t been “covered”); but I concur wholeheartedly with the second.  Donaghue argues something similar when he notes that the culture of the professoriate, to its own detriment, has integrated an emphasis on competitive achievement and productivity that internalizes the values of the very market forces external to the university that find no use for the liberal arts.  Ultimately, Fish’s “I got mine” conclusions are frustrating because this is a moment when humanists should be reasserting the value of their disciplines to the intellectual life of the nation and, like Bauerlein attempts, proposing directions for the university of the future.

Implicit in the distributed community of educational technologists that I’m a part of — some have called us “edupunks,” but I no longer think that term is big or sufficient enough — is the sense that we are all together involved in shaping the best model of the future university.  I’ve long felt that the most compelling aspect of the 1960s — for all the positive and negative legacies that decade has bequeathed us — was the broadly dispersed sense that the future was up for grabs, and that one’s actions could help shape that future.

Each of the above examples is student-centered, yet also allows space for the researcher to grapple with and reflect upon large questions. They benefit from supportive administrations that recognize the importance of giving scholars the opportunity to explore and develop new ways of thinking, learning, teaching, and connecting. They don’t necessarily attack the university of the past, but rather imagine a future where participants break out of restrictive silos of departmental politics and disciplines and the campus as we knew it to explore relationships with the world that are, at their core, humanistic.  These, it seems, must be core components of any vision of the future of the humanities.

Then again, maybe Fish and Donaghue are spot on, and those of us creating new courses, constructing new modes of learning in and across our disciplines, and digging through archives are punchlines in some cosmic joke.  I acknowledge that these examples offer no direct answer to Fish and Donaghue’s argument that the humanities won’t be valued and funded because they don’t contribute in obvious ways to the creation of wealth and, like it or leave it, our society prioritizes that question.  Yet the continued broad exploration of the humanities, like  journalism, is absolutely crucial if our society is going to strive towards a better version of itself.

Shirky’s articulation of our moment as a transitional and perhaps revolutionary one reminds us that the future is yet to be written. We all have a profound stake in working towards our vision.  We all need to pick up some wet spaghetti.

Via Laughing Squid.

[youtube]httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuTNdHadwbk[/youtube]

Tiger Stadium photo credit: hassgocubs

I hadn’t been to a game in Detroit since I left Michigan after college. Since then, the Tigers have changed ballparks, lost 119 games in a season (one short of the record), and dramatically turned things around to win a pennant in 2006. They’re hovering a few games under .500 right now, but have enough firepower and pitching to make a run in the second half of the season.

So I was excited to go to Comerica, which I’d heard was a great place to watch a game. It’s a beautiful structure, framing the skyline of old Detroit in a way that obscures the deep economic and political troubles that plague the city.

Comerica Park photo credit: kw111786

As we settled into our seats along the first base line, I was as giddy as I had been as an 8 year-old. I even called the lifelong buddy who I used to go to games with back then, just to let him know where I was.

Watching the game was a different experience from those trips in the past. I still had a blast, enjoying the company of my siblings-in-law, and appreciating the talent on the field (even as the Tigers lost to the Angels). I was struck, though, by the intensity of the messages flying around the ballpark. If I wasn’t paying attention to the action, an advertisement was unavoidably forced upon my gaze. I’m not sure if I felt more like PIerre Bourdieu or Hunter S. Thompson; either way, I felt like I was captive in Vegas.

Every line of sight offered something different. A giant fountain, sponsored by General Motors, dangled two shiny sedans beyond the outfield. Vendors, hawking $7 beers and $5 pretzels, were easy to spot throughout the stadium, marked by fluorescent yellow shirts. Even bases on balls — of which the Tigers issued too many — were sponsored: as the batter trotted down to first base, an ad blared through the speakers and in the slim screens that lined the upper deck inviting ticket holders to “walk down” to a local establishment for a haircut.

The most astonishing structure in the stadium, more striking even than the ferris wheel in the concourse and the giant tiger statues out front, is the gargantuan Comerica Park scoreboard. Roughly ten stories tall, the scoreboard serves over a dozen distinct advertisements, as well as two giant screens that play commercials when not showing player photos and statistics. In the center of all of this chaos is the actual score and game information, which take up no more than a quarter of the scoreboard’s mass.

Comerica Park Scoreboard photo credit: McPhloyd

One of the beautiful things about baseball is the way that one can read the story of a game through a box score. A young fan develops that particular literacy and carries it forward through life, forever able to regard a score line and imagine the events that led to it. At a ballpark, the scoreboard tells you in familiar code where you are, what’s happened to get you there, and how much space is left for your team to rally or survive. A scoreboard centers the fan within the experience of watching a game.

At Comerica, with competing flashing lights grabbing for my vision, separating out the scores from the messages on the board took dizzying effort. At Tiger Stadium, there had mostly been the game and the camaraderie in the stands, and it was a purer experience: fan meets game. Of course there were hawkers and ads and plenty of consumption; but they were nowhere near as loud or as intrusive as they’ve become.

Yes, there are economics behind all of this, and a straight line from the $7 beer and intense advertising to the giant contract that locked Miguel Cabrera up as a Tiger for the next eight years. If I’m bemoaning anything, then, it’s how the experience of going to a ballgame has changed, and the license that the powers that be feel to barrage the senses of a captive audience with an endless series of pitches. I felt assaulted, and so cheaply. I had to seek ways to tune out the barrage and actively create the experience that I wanted when I bought those $40 box seats.

At the 8th Annual Symposium, many of us discussed how we have been forced by new and more intensive modes of communication to “filter” the information that comes our way. This style of engagement with information requires a certain media literacy that, I believe, needs to be cultivated by colleges in order to better equip our students to navigate the messages, both literal and figurative, that bombard them in public spaces– and, increasingly, in private ones too.

The successful development of that literacy impacts matters large, like being an informed citizen, and small(er), like trying to enjoy a ballgame. New technologies, such as digital video recorders and RSS feeds, empower us to shape and filter the information and messages that come at us. At times, these tools feel like weapons in a battle that’s intensifying, and which increasingly threatens the purity of certain experiences. That’s too bad.

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The problem with bullet points and slide headings, says Atkinson, is that they typically do nothing more than establish dry, lifeless categories of information. What is usually missing is a story, something “juicy, coherent and full of life.” Hence, “some of the world’s largest organizations have adopted the word ‘story’ as their new mantra for corporate communictions.”

Atkinson cites Aristotle in his definition of ”story”: it should include “action, a plot, central characters,” and even “visual effects.” He adds that classical notions of rhetorical persuasion should also play a part in the formulation of presentations. PowerPoint slides should thus articulate a story, an old-fashioned narrative incorporating ancient ideas of how to be persuasive.

Some interesting food for thought, I think, for those of us engaged in both Humanities and Business education in institutions like Baruch.

A (that’s me): “Hi! What are you teaching this semester?”
C (colleague): “Nothing. I finally have some time to work on my own stuff. What are you teaching?”
A: “A business writing course.”
C: “Oh, that’s really great! You don’t have to deal with . . . you know, the ideology.”

The ideology my colleague was referring to is the theoretical framework behind the program’s basic composition and expository writing courses. Instructors teaching these classes have to adopt a fairly prescriptive approach, both in terms of assignment sequencing and instructional methodology. Such requirements are understandable and perhaps inevitable, given the large number of instructors, most of whom are adjuncts. There has to be pedagogical coherence if thousands of students are to be held to the same rigorous standards.

The business writing course, on the other hand, allows instructors a greater degree of autonomy. There certainly is coherence and rigor in the curriculum, yet there is also a refreshing freedom. I suspect that there is more to this than the fact that a smaller pool of instructors (in business writing) requires less directorial oversight. The requirements and standards of the business writing course result from, and represent, goals that are more non-academic in nature. The ideology behind the more traditional writing courses (basic composition and expository writing) is connected to their “background” in the Humanities, while the “idea” behind the business writing course is to prepare students for success in the “real world.”

Yet the Humanities, it seems, cannot serve purely academic interests. In an environment of assessment and academic accountability, the Humanities, struggling to survive in a largely business-driven world, have little room for failure. They must produce results at once satisfactory to the academy and, in some way, relevant to the “outside” world. Administrators of courses like basic composition and expository writing thus have all the greater need for top-down quality control. The relative autonomy of the business writing instructor, in this view, corresponds to the entrepreneurial freedom of the real-life business person, who may create (to an extent, of course) his own means to a purely practical end.

The issues raised by all of this are particularly interesting to me in my work at Baruch, a business school with traditional Humanities requirements. In the upcoming installments I’ll explore how the different institutions I’m associated with are reinventing the traditional liberal arts education, specifically with regard to writing and communication.

I think that we can apply Calvino’s “preliminary condition” in the classroom. It may be easier to think of Calvino’s “preliminary condition” alongside something that Nancy Sommers writes about in “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” She writes that “experienced writers imagine a reader (reading their product) whose existence and whose expectations influence their revision process. They have abstracted the standards of a reader and this reader seems to be partially a reflection of themselves and functions as a critical and productive collaborator–a collaborator who has yet to love their work.” Just as a writer of literature must first invent an “I” who is, according to Calvino, the author of the work, a successful writer, according to Sommers, imagines (or invents) a critical “I” to shape the work into an effective piece of writing.

Students in literature courses will inevitably encounter religious texts and be asked to write on them or do some comparative work. They are often hesitant to engage in this work, so close are they to their personal selves, the personal “I.”

I once had a student in an out-of-class workshop say that she couldn’t write on religious texts; she was afraid that her writing might be deemed offensive, that she might say “the wrong thing.” One student in an in-class workshop said that he hoped he wouldn’t have to do a presentation on a piece of writing as controversial as a 17th-century sermon. His impulses were to blame the sermon for outcomes in history rather than reading the sermon as a piece of literature.

Instead of having our students write unimaginative and often weak theses, I’m wondering if we should instead be trying to help them invent an “I,” a critical collaborator with which to think through and write, an “I” that can help them to author critical essays without the personal “I” impressing itself needlessly into the work. Perhaps the “preliminary condition” of any literature course should be the invention of this “I.”

I recently read Carol Geary Schneider and Debra Humphreys’s article “Putting Liberal Education on the Radar Screen”in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (23 Sept 05). The authors describe a ten-year project by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) called “Liberal Education and America’s Promise: Excellence for Everyone as a Nation Goes to College.” The initiative aims to increase awareness of the importance of liberal arts education to a generation of students (and their parents) who tend to believe a college degree is “just a ticket to be punched on the way to their first job.”

I imagine most college teachers will not be surprised by the findings of the AACU study, which suggest that students today consider “values and ethics, an appreciation of cultural diversity, global awareness, and civic responsibility” to be the least important outcomes of a college education. Indeed, most view college as “a private rather than a public good,” a way to develop professional skills. The data also suggest that “colleges are not conveying the importance of liberal education to their students,” and Schneider and Humphreys argue that this is part of the problem.

As someone who is personally, politically, and professionally invested in the objectives associated with liberal arts education, I found this article disturbing. It also makes me wonder whether or not CAC feeds the fires of the consumerist mentality described in the AACU study. I am a bit embarrassed to admit that I sometimes find myself “selling” CIC objectives to my students, since most of them are non-majors with little interest in the subject: “Two courses in one! More bang for your buck! Learn not only how to talk intelligently about ‘Hamlet’ at cocktail parties, but be scintillating while you do it!” I genuinely believe that communication is intimately connected to critical thinking, cultural awareness, and ethical conduct. But typically, CAC is about skills development, not these other things. Schneider and Humphreys insist that educators and administrators not only need to talk about the value of liberal arts among themselves, but also find ways to articulate their value to students. But will CAC programs, as they expand and proliferate, legitimize students’ tendency to view college as little more than a springboard to a high-paying job? How can CAC teachers and administrators strike a balance between the often-competing objectives of higher education: to shape the next generation of leaders and thinkers professionally, ethically, culturally, intellectually?