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photo credit: morgan childers

A professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  You can read the full exchange here, but I wanted to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice:

“Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted  to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, mainly centered on Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was a reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

On the other hand, is it right to draw larger conclusions about a student’s chances of future success from one embarrassing incident?  Further, is it even within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out such “advice” at all?  How can we effectively steer our students toward more appropriate and “successful” behavior without being too harsh or judgmental?

The above video has been making the rounds of progressive blogs recently.  It features Jay Smooth, a popular New York hip-hop radio host, giving a brief lesson on how best to approach a racially-charged conversation.  In a quick three minutes,  Smooth gives several witty examples of conversational traps to avoid, effectively presenting the difference between the two broad categories of racial discussion:  the “what they did” conversation versus the “what they are” conversation.   The video demonstrates the best way to “call out” racist behavior without leading the conversation into name-calling, by focusing on specific words and actions (“what they did”) rather than drawing broad conclusions (“what they are”).

While Smooth’s clever lecture/sermon focuses on racial issues, it also functions essentially as a primer on how to engage difficult issues with critical intelligence, and as such it has captured the attention of communication-intensive educators (that’s us). According to this interview on NPR, the video has become a hit among college professors, who use Smooth’s rant to help introduce ideas about effective oral communication.  Because the video is hip, funny, and easily understandable, it seems like a decent way to get students talking about talking.

As I’ve noticed in my own classes,  difficulties with in-class discussions are not always related to shy, silent students. Oftentimes, I’ve had boisterous groups that have LOTS to say, but don’t often have the most effective tools for oral communication at their disposal, and the result can be an awkward, pointless (and, at worst, offensive) discussion.  After all, there are many ways to talk about any given issue, but our job is to promote a very specific kind of academic discussion that is most likely very different from the average student’s everyday mode of communication.

Smooth’s video is certainly a great starting point for a classroom discussion about arguments, evidence, and rhetorical strategy, but I think it also provides an opportunity for us, as educators, to begin thinking about our own role in teaching students how to effectively “speak up” in class.  What other tools can we use to help students create meaningful, civil in-class discussions?  How can we get students not just to talk, but to talk with confidence and authority, avoiding the “rhetorical Bermuda Triangle” described in the video?  And finally, is Smooth available for guest lectures?

At BLSCI we are currently conducting research into how the use of Flip Cameras could be used in communication pedagogy.

I was able to interview several experts in the field and the following is a selection of several theories on communication and personal belongings…

In my teaching I have found that students can sometimes be surprisingly credulous about what is being communicated to them by images, whether it’s conveyed by a doctored photo or in the nonverbal message sent by a carefully selected image accompanying a story.   Even my friends who should know better do not always think as critically about images as they might about text.

Here’s an example.  As soon as Sarah Palin got selected as McCain’s running mate, I started getting emails circulating this photo of her:

My first thought was, “how can a middle-aged woman who’s borne several children look that good in a bikini?!”  The people who forwarded this were trustworthy enough, but I knew you can’t always believe what you see, when it comes to online images.  So, I did a little digging and came up with this original, on the blog ‘Urban Legends‘:

The blog author notes that “the resulting montage was obviously intended to satirize Sarah Palin’s image as a ‘gun-toting beauty queen.’” It was an early entry in the contest to come up with the funniest sendup of this suddenly buzz-worthy candidate, though it was soon trumped by the Tina Fey imitations, which used video to even greater effect.

I have used this type of Photoshopped image to help students recognize that they should be cautious about the source and substance of material they find online, including images, and just because they agree with the politics of the sender does not absolve them of the need to think critically.  The not-too-difficult search for the origin of the image also makes a useful, topical lesson for students in how we can use the vast amount of chat, data, news, and info online to check facts against many reliable sources until we come up with something close to ‘the truth.’

Now I have to sign off and go catch up on the news, from my favorite hard news source, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart!

If Barack Obama is elected President on November 4th, it will be in large part because of the sophisticated way his campaign has communicated with the American public.

I was in Michigan this past weekend, and drove past the “North Oakland County Victory Office” of the McCain Campaign, just west of Pontiac, twenty miles north of Detroit. A placard near the street read “Get your McCain-Palin lawn signs here!” The building looked like a small bait shop, set back from the road, in the middle of a big parking lot with few cars. No one seemed to be there. On a Saturday afternoon. A month before the election.

This could have been a reaction against the McCain campaign deciding to give up on Michigan late last week. But when compared to what I’m reading about Obama’s organization, the two campaigns are running entirely different ground games. A few examples of what Obama’s been doing:

Here’s an ad that the bluegrass legend Ralph Stanley made in support of Obama. It’s in heavy radio rotation in Virginia:

Here’s a report from the Fulton (MO.) Sun, about the Obama campaign’s use of TTY devices to call hard-of-hearing voters.

Here’s a link to the iPhone Obama Application (pictured at right), which sorts contacts by state (putting battlegrounds at the top), and makes it easy for individuals to find their way to campaign events, make calls on behalf of Obama, or get details on the candidate’s take on particular issues.

The Obama campaign bought a tv channel on the Dish Network. Channel 73 will be playing all-Obama programming through the election.

Here’s some reporting on the campaigns from fivethirtyeight.com; a couple of bloggers have visited both campaigns’ offices throughout Colorado and Missouri. Key section:

Let’s be clear. We’ve observed no comparison between these ground campaigns. To begin with, there’s a 4-1 ratio of offices in most states. We walk into McCain offices to find them closed, empty, one person, two people, sometimes three people making calls. Many times one person is calling while the other small clutch of volunteers are chatting amongst themselves. In one state, McCain’s state field director sat in one of these offices and, sotto voce, complained to us that only one man was making calls while the others were talking to each other about how much they didn’t like Obama, which was true. But the field director made no effort to change this. This was the state field director.

The McCain offices are also calm, sedate. Little movement. No hustle. In the Obama offices, it’s a whirlwind. People move. It’s a dynamic bustle. You can feel it in our photos.

Finally, for those who think Obama’s been too reticent to hit McCain hard: think again. Much of the more aggressive and negative stuff is happening on a subterranean level (although that’s about to change with a national ad on McCain and the Keating Five). Spanish language commercials (radio and tv) are running in New Mexico, Colorado, and Nevada tying McCain to Rush Limbaugh, saying he has “dos caras,” or “two faces.” This morning I heard a report featuring a call from a Virginia Obama-supporter to an undecided voter. It began with a reminder that John McCain would be the oldest President ever elected. The caller then brought up the specter of McCain’s death, talked about Sarah Palin’s embarrassing interview with Katie Couric, and then asked the person on the other line if they really want her as their President. In national tv appearances and the debates thus far, in recognition of Obama’s campaign against “politics as usual,” the candidate and his running mate have avoided a negative or derisive tone or even challenging Palin. I think Biden probably could have field dressed Palin last week had he wanted to. Instead, he treated her and her substanceless winking — to paraphrase Garry Shandling-- like how “Johnny Carson treated Charo.” (It’s only fair when acknowledging Palin’s winking to also note Biden’s botox. He did, however, answer a few of the questions). At the local level, the Obama campaign has a bit tougher.

There’s a direct correlation between the sophistication of the Obama ground game and the Democratic gains in affiliated voters. In Pennsylvania, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans by 486,000 in 2000 and 580,000 in 2004. Now? 1.15 million. In Nevada, four years ago Dems trailed by nearly 5000 registrants. They currently hold an 80,000 voter edge. In Florida, the Democrats have added 130,000 more voters than the Republicans over the past four years. If you’re an Obama supporter, those numbers are very encouraging.

Other factors explain this swing, including the unpopularity of the current administration and the downturn in the economy. But it would be foolish to discount the effectiveness of the Obama machine in organizing its base, supporting voter registration (especially among the young), employing technology, and effectively tailoring its message to particular constituencies. Obama and Biden know who their audiences are, and how to speak to them.

Admittedly, I haven’t been following the McCain campaign as closely as Obama’s, but I’ve seen no evidence that there’s much innovation or energy at its core. Yes, Palin has fired up the Republican base. But has that led to more organizing or a flock of volunteers in key locations? Aside from McCain’s increasingly negative ads and his hope that the economy becomes less central to the campaign, a few yard signs are all I’ve really seen.

* Late update: Ben Smith has a piece in Politico on Obama’s “quiet efforts” to target black voters… subterranean for real.

Among the many things were interested in, here at cac.ophony, are the roles of context, genre and different types of media in shaping communication. (The medium is the message, after all.) Given this, and iIn anticipation of the soon to be televised presidential debates, we give you a provocative tidbit to chew on. Here, via if:book, is a remarkable interview with Marshall McLuhan from the Today show in 1976, in which the famed theorist of media analyzes the televised presidential debates of that year and argues that the tried and true genre of the presidential debate is “completely the wrong form for the medium of television.” Bob Stein of if:book notes that

it’s hard to imagine an interview like this on the Today show of 2008. It goes on for ten uninterrupted minutes; there are no cut-aways to video footage or text crawls at the bottom of the screen; and most significantly McLuhan speaks his mind, critical of the mechanisms of political discourse to an extent unimaginable in today’s sanitized mass media landscape.

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