rants
One last rant about the academy
09/08/2011 10:18
Why is it so hard to impress on academics that they need to articulate their value-add just like everybody else in the modern world? This is not a function of some nasty new “corporatization” of the sacred groves of academe. This is the way we account for what we TAKE from society, by pointing out what we give. But maybe it IS evidence that we don’t live in the rich, happy, clueless world of high empire, when there’s just so much FAT on the beast that everybody can grab as much as they can carry without giving back.
It’s as if some academics believe they can’t be accountable to the rabble (which in their minds includes administrators) because “they don’t understand the true nature and significance of my very important work.” Well, there are plenty of other fields like medicine and nuclear physics, where the people at work in them can’t necessarily explain what they’re doing on any given day to the people they meet in the grocery store aisles. But you don’t see them running around saying those other people should have no say in the debate over whether society builds another super-collider or research hospital. They realize that at a basic level, they’re involved in society. Why is this so hard for some professors?
The folks in the supermarket expect there’s going to be material that the academic works on, that has no relation to the everyday world. Anyone who does anything (plumbing, blacksmithing, newspaper writing, pickle manufacturing) has specialized knowledge that the rest of us in the grocery aisles aren’t going to care about. What we DO care about is whether at the end of the day those specialized skills and knowledge roll up into an activity that does something that benefits society.
And this may be where the wheels come off the car for some people. It should be possible for a historian to say “my work, even though it’s on a vague and remote topic like Byzantine textiles, contributes to the overall understanding of change and development that has brought about the modern world. And furthermore, I teach the world history survey, and my intimate knowledge of the western Mediterranean in the middle ages and Renaissance adds depth and texture to my students’ experience of the course that they wouldn’t get from someone else.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable justification, especially if the scholar’s passion for the subject finds its way into the survey lectures and discussions. So why can’t we say these things?
Do professors sometimes lose touch with these connections themselves? Is it difficult to juggle scholarship and academic writing with teaching and popular writing? Are these activities happening, for many professors, at different times in their careers? Do some people really prefer one over the other, and find themselves forced by the system to do both, when they’d really like to concentrate on what excites them?
Wait! Here we are again. Do academics really think they should be allowed to concentrate on what excites them? Does that sound too normal? Let’s try it this way: do truck drivers really think they should be allowed to carry freight only to cities they’d like to visit? Now does it sound odd?
This is one aspect of the current debate over the future of higher education. Academics need to think about (and then articulate) the social utility of the work they do. Not its immediate profitability — it’s perfectly fine to argue that there’s a different, nobler possibility for society and this is how I’m contributing to it. It’s not okay to say, shut up and give me my money because I’m a PhD or because I have tenure. Used to be, what you gave back was an issue of conscience. Now that the empire has ended and times are getting tough, it’s an issue for public debate.
The other aspect of the current debate has to do with the foxes guarding the chicken coops. The fact that there’s so much furious blogging underway that completely ignores what’s best for students proves that the interests of some professors are not the same as the interests of students. That’s why we have administrations, and that’s why we need them. Yeah, but we let Wall Street insiders run the SEC and Monsanto run the USDA, you say. So why pick on professors? Well, financial collapse and GMO factory farms seem like good reasons…
It’s as if some academics believe they can’t be accountable to the rabble (which in their minds includes administrators) because “they don’t understand the true nature and significance of my very important work.” Well, there are plenty of other fields like medicine and nuclear physics, where the people at work in them can’t necessarily explain what they’re doing on any given day to the people they meet in the grocery store aisles. But you don’t see them running around saying those other people should have no say in the debate over whether society builds another super-collider or research hospital. They realize that at a basic level, they’re involved in society. Why is this so hard for some professors?
The folks in the supermarket expect there’s going to be material that the academic works on, that has no relation to the everyday world. Anyone who does anything (plumbing, blacksmithing, newspaper writing, pickle manufacturing) has specialized knowledge that the rest of us in the grocery aisles aren’t going to care about. What we DO care about is whether at the end of the day those specialized skills and knowledge roll up into an activity that does something that benefits society.
And this may be where the wheels come off the car for some people. It should be possible for a historian to say “my work, even though it’s on a vague and remote topic like Byzantine textiles, contributes to the overall understanding of change and development that has brought about the modern world. And furthermore, I teach the world history survey, and my intimate knowledge of the western Mediterranean in the middle ages and Renaissance adds depth and texture to my students’ experience of the course that they wouldn’t get from someone else.” That seems like a perfectly reasonable justification, especially if the scholar’s passion for the subject finds its way into the survey lectures and discussions. So why can’t we say these things?
Do professors sometimes lose touch with these connections themselves? Is it difficult to juggle scholarship and academic writing with teaching and popular writing? Are these activities happening, for many professors, at different times in their careers? Do some people really prefer one over the other, and find themselves forced by the system to do both, when they’d really like to concentrate on what excites them?
Wait! Here we are again. Do academics really think they should be allowed to concentrate on what excites them? Does that sound too normal? Let’s try it this way: do truck drivers really think they should be allowed to carry freight only to cities they’d like to visit? Now does it sound odd?
This is one aspect of the current debate over the future of higher education. Academics need to think about (and then articulate) the social utility of the work they do. Not its immediate profitability — it’s perfectly fine to argue that there’s a different, nobler possibility for society and this is how I’m contributing to it. It’s not okay to say, shut up and give me my money because I’m a PhD or because I have tenure. Used to be, what you gave back was an issue of conscience. Now that the empire has ended and times are getting tough, it’s an issue for public debate.
The other aspect of the current debate has to do with the foxes guarding the chicken coops. The fact that there’s so much furious blogging underway that completely ignores what’s best for students proves that the interests of some professors are not the same as the interests of students. That’s why we have administrations, and that’s why we need them. Yeah, but we let Wall Street insiders run the SEC and Monsanto run the USDA, you say. So why pick on professors? Well, financial collapse and GMO factory farms seem like good reasons…
Knowledge, Memory, Identity
07/16/2011 10:14
Carr quotes Emerson’s 1857 essay “Memory,” that “memory gives stability to knowledge; it is the cohesion which keeps things from falling into a lump.” Carr seems to be suggesting that the unique “cohesion” that comes from each person’s experience of the world, is a big part of individual identity. So it’s no surprise he sees a problem in the results suggesting that online information is changing the nature of memory.
According to the study Carr is responding to, test subjects were more likely to remember the location of information rather than the information itself, if they believed they would be able to access that info freely on the web. I think this is interesting, but I’m not as alarmed as Carr. The process of building these associative, personal webs of “cohesion” from data may work as well at one level higher of abstraction. It's knowing the url of your text rather than memorizing the words. Yes, you can say that knowing where your English/Spanish dictionary is, is not the same as being fluent in Spanish. But you really don’t sense that difference, until you’re dropped in the middle of a South American city, and need to communicate with the locals to get your next meal.
And that’s the big difference, I think. Until we get outside the world of knowledge (facts gathered from texts, whether paper or electronic) to the world of experience, it’s a distinction without a difference. I’m going to remember my Spanish much better, if I need it to get through the day in Santiago, than if I have a quiz next Friday.
So it’s about motivation, and the personal, practical importance of memory in our lives. This has obvious implications for educators. “Why do I care?” is not just a pain-in-the-butt student question, it’s the basis of building “cohesion.”
Jonathan Rees picked a couple of interesting quotes from the Carr blog to comment on. The first one outlines this “Google Effect on Memory,” and when I read it I thought of the stories I’d once heard about bards who could recite epic stories from memory. They used a set of mnemonic tricks I’d love to be proficient in — but as a culture we pretty much forgot them as soon as reading and writing became prevalent. Was this a loss? For individual brainpower, probably. But it was a gain for knowledge overall, because now we don’t have to spend our lives “becoming” one text, like the characters in Fahrenheit 451. We can read a thousand, and expand our horizons.
I don’t think the availability of online sources reduces us to a set of walking “bookmarks.” Online sources are ephemeral. You learn that the first time you lose access to something you really wanted to cite, because they took down that page. More important, knowledge of whatever type is such a pale, powerless thing when compared with experience, that I just can’t get excited about the issue. People should get up from their desk chairs once in a while and do something!
Jonathan writes about picking the right facts to teach, and I agree. The other thing that occurred to me, after the thought about the bards, was about narrative. We use story elements, themes, narrative arcs, and causal threads to organize a lot of this information. A history that avoids causality, as James Loewen says most high school textbooks do, is a meaningless jumble of facts. Whether we like it or not, we’re back in the dangerous world, I think, of myth-making.
But the question of motivation is still a huge one. Why should people care what we say about history, or calculus, or economics, or literature? If we really address that “so what?” issue, we might find a way to make our stories stick in the minds of students. We might even find a way out of the crisis in higher education…
Don't Drink Keene Water
07/21/2011 14:07
The document is called “Quality: Annual Water Report,” and the front page features a large glass being filled with clear, pure water, and the Keene city seal. In the introduction on the second page, the water department tells us how proud they are to present their annual water quality report. On the third page, we learn that Keene’s water contains the microbial parasite Cryptosporidium, which causes nausea, abdominal cramps, and diarrhea that “most healthy individuals can overcome…within a few weeks. However, immunocompromised people are at a greater risk of developing life-threatening illness.” The report does not say what the effects of repeated exposure are on healthy people, but I’d imagine they might include more or less chronic nausea, cramps, and diarrhea. “Although filtration removes Cryptosporidium,” the report says, “the most commonly used filtration methods [meaning, the ones Keene is using] cannot guarantee 100 percent removal.” Well water from the Court Street and West Street aquifers is not filtered at all, according to the report. This would be the water that supplies not only my home, but the local hospital and at least two old-folks’ homes.
The Court Street and West Street well fields are known to be vulnerable to contamination. In a 2002 study, both water sources got several “high susceptibility ratings.” So it’s really unclear to me why the city would not have corrected this problem by filtering its sources. Are we not paying high enough property taxes to afford a safe supply of tap water? REALLY?
So far in 2011, Keene has violated clean drinking water standards ten times. The violation in each case was turbidity, or cloudiness in the water. This cloudiness “tells us whether we are effectively filtering the water supply.” Although the pamphlet insists that turbidity has no health effects, the city admits that “turbidity can interfere with disinfection and provide a medium for microbial growth.” (Their italics)
Let me get this straight: you don’t filter the water, in source fields that are historically at high risk of contamination, and that interferes with disinfection. So what’s the solution? Oh, just use more disinfectant?
But wait! For about half of 2009, Keene was violating the city’s Treatment Techniques standards. So they started adding more polyaluminum chloride to reduce the organic material in the water. But this, combined with the high levels of organic carbon, raised the levels of “disinfection by-products.” The two main byproducts were trihalomethanes (chloroform) and haleoacetic acids (HAA). According to the pamphlet and other sources (here and here), these compounds are known to “lead to adverse health effects, liver or kidney problems, or nervous system effects, and may lead to an increased risk of cancer.” The city claims that there were no “disinfectant by-product violations,” but I wonder who sets the limits? Chloroform levels as high as 54 ppb were detected (the violation level is 80), and HAA levels reached 38 ppb (violation = 60).
The steps Keene is taking to resolve these problems with its water supply, according to the pamphlet, amount to just this: “The settings on the discharge valve of each filter will be modified to restrict the backwash discharge rate of flow, or the programming will be changed to result in the discharged water being directed to the waste tank instead of the clearwell. Either of these solutions will prevent this high turbidity occurrence in the future.” (Their italics) I’m sorry, but at this point I’m not buying it. If it had been as simple as flipping a switch, it would have been done years ago. Changing the settings on the filters will not change the condition of water that is not filtered! And it won’t get the Cryptosporidium, the chloroform, or the HAAs out of my drinking water.
I hate to say it, but I’m going to start buying bottled water. And I’m going to seriously consider not paying my City of Keene water tax anymore.
Google, stick to your knitting
08/08/2010 19:25
Metahistory
04/14/2009 18:14
I read Hayden White’s Metahistory. Okay, I admit, I only read some of it.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
I remember reading articles of White’s in historiography class (seems like a long time ago -- only 2 years!). He seemed to be the voice of reason, set against the irate ravings of Arthur Marwick. And the position he took seemed eminently reasonable.
White does make some good points in his introduction. He raises some interesting questions about the nature of narrative, how story forms and archetypes can function as interpretive prompts for the reader (and maybe for the historian). But then he goes off on a wild, ridiculous, nearly unreadable tangent for about 400 pages, before he concludes that since all knowledge is basically invalid, you can believe any type of history you want.
Needless to say, I skipped most of those interminable 400 pages.
I reread the beginning of Marwick’s article, where he responds to White. I’ll have to look at them more closely, but it seems a shame that clear, plain-language writing frequently advocates reactionary politics, while radicals who have a legitimate case against the status quo often let themselves become lost in their rhetoric.
My thoughts on White in more detail here.
blah blah Middle Class blah blah
02/22/2009 17:06
I checked out the Vice President’s MiddlleClass Task Force, because it’s always hovering there on the top right of the screen at whitehouse.gov. I read Jared Bernstein's introductory blog post. (he’s the Executive Director and Joe Biden’s chief economic advisor) It was all well and good, as far as it went. But that was the problem.
35,000 people have already emailed the Task Force with questions and comments, so i went ahead and left mine. I think they're trying to paper over the big rift in American society. It isn't the split between the rich and the middle class, who often see eye to eye (as an example, the recent CNBC rant about not wanting to help fix the housing crisis). The big problem in America is the split between the rich/middle alliance (the administration and its main allies) and the working class.
The government and the media can pretend all they want that "the poor" are just people who've lost their “middle class” jobs. But I think deep down they know this isn't true, and at some point they're going to have to deal with the fact that they not talking to working people. Because the Repubs are going back to race-bating, using country and now hip-hop music to try to fool working-class people into thinking that just because the Dems can't see them, the Repubs are the party of the workers. That is a big mistake. It will come back to bite the administration and the Dems in general. They're institutionalizing the new class war.
New Tech Gripes
01/21/2009 23:25
So I upgraded the ISP service, and bought a new web design package, RapidWeaver. Inevitably, I spent the entire day trying to get the things to work, separately and together. The email on the new server isn’t quite working yet. I managed to get the web software to actually publish the pages I designed. Buried deep in the Support Forum’s thousands of posts, is a suggestion that worked. It wasn’t a user-error sort of thing. You have to delete some cache files from a Library file in your User file. Not the type of thing you’d stumble over, even if you were a certified UNIX hacker and C programmer with 20 years experience. Maybe they should’ve mentioned it a little more prominently? Would’ve saved me a couple hours of frustration - and I can’t be the only one...
It’s a good thing, after all, that there’re simple solutions like iWeb. Sure, you get herded into the dot Mac world, and woe betide you if you want to do things your own way. But even so, the themes in iWeb are easier to customize than the themes in RapidWeaver. If iWeb could’ve synchronized with a third-party ISP, rather than forcing me to publish the whole site every time and ftp it to the server, I’d probably never have switched. Cuz I’ve got to say, even after all the frustration getting it going; once I changed a couple things on the site and it uploaded only the changes in a second or two --- THAT was COOL!
This photo is apropos of nothing, but I like it.
It’s a good thing, after all, that there’re simple solutions like iWeb. Sure, you get herded into the dot Mac world, and woe betide you if you want to do things your own way. But even so, the themes in iWeb are easier to customize than the themes in RapidWeaver. If iWeb could’ve synchronized with a third-party ISP, rather than forcing me to publish the whole site every time and ftp it to the server, I’d probably never have switched. Cuz I’ve got to say, even after all the frustration getting it going; once I changed a couple things on the site and it uploaded only the changes in a second or two --- THAT was COOL!
This photo is apropos of nothing, but I like it.
