Never Let a Good Crisis Go to Waste

The news media of late presents an even more skewed view than usual of the state of our institutions of higher learning.

The current skirmish in the culture wars concerns the reaction of a handful of activist students and professors to the war in Gaza.  If all your news diet consists of Fox News, pro-Palestinian activism and incidents such as the occupation at Columbia and a scattering of other, mostly private universities are rampant throughout American higher ed.  If I am to believe the clickbait headlines in my newsfeed, all of the commie elitist professors on every single campus in the country are indoctrinating all of their students in a woke orthodoxy which, if unchecked by loyal Americans, will result in the destruction of Israel.

This reportage is a cynical ploy by right wing news outlets to further polarize the electorate ahead of November’s election by appealing to the prejudices of their audience.  Tapping into festering resentments across a vocal segment of the public is profitable.  Pigeonholing anyone with any schooling beyond twelfth grade as an out of touch elitist with a head filled with useless “knowledge” is a good media strategy.

Like Fox’s audience, my only experience with the protests is what I watch and read.  The campuses where I work have been quiet.  The topics of Israel, Gaza, and Hamas are largely unmentioned by my students and I have only touched upon them in passing as they are largely tangential to the subjects I teach.  This goes to show that the people most agitated about what is undeniably a humanitarian crisis are on the fringes while the people most affected get lost in the ideological dogma of others.

Let’s begin with the campus protestors.  Let’s stipulate that the events of October 7^th and beyond have been horrific for those affected on both sides.  Having said this, the rhetoric wielded by the pro-Palestinian activists is disturbingly pro-Hamas.  It seems they are blind to the implications of “From the river to the sea.”  Quick to accuse Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, they are explicitly advocating the genocide of Israeli Jews.  Their behavior towards their critics or even towards anyone outside the group is also couched in rhetorical excess, branding them as “Zionists” without regard to the person or the arguments posed.

Now on to the cultural warriors of the right.  Unwilling to brook any criticism of Israeli policies or actions, they brand any critics as “anti-semites” who seek an end to Israel.  They willfully ignore Netanyahu’s heavy-handed policies in the West Bank and his ill-fated abandonment of Gaza to Hamas rule.  There doesn’t seem to be any questioning of the intelligence failures which led to the October 7^th attacks.  (Considering that the attacks coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War—another intelligence failure—one would think Netanyahu, his advisors, and the Israeli intelligence establishment would have been more alert.)   The delusional worldview of evangelicals for whom Israel’s existence brings us one step closer to the End Times has taken on a cult-like status across the political right, further polarizing the discourse.

The overflow effect on domestic policy has been to put American higher education in the crosshairs even more so than usual.  The focus has been upon “elite” institutions but the larger targets are colleges and universities across the board.  Conservatives want to replace so-called political correctness, which is not nearly as prevalent as charged, with their own orthodoxy.  Calls for the resignation of Columbia’s president, coming on the heels of the resignation of Harvard’s president after her congressional testimony on campus activism, is calculated to create a chilling effect.  Calls for cutbacks of humanities and social science courses and their replacement with more vocational curricula are another front in the right-wing war on academia. The limited scope activism that has the right in a lather is merely a convenient opportunity for them to advance their anti-intellectual agenda.  For them, Israel is beside the point.  The war in Gaza is a convenient opportunity, nothing more.

 

© 2024 The Unassuming Scholar

Eyes Open

I underwent my first faculty evaluation for an online class last year.  We’re evaluated by our department chair every four years; my last eval was pre-pandemic when I was mainly teaching in a live classroom.  These evaluations, on ground or online, include an anonymous student survey on their take on my performance.

It’s easier for me in a live classroom where I can gauge the students’ reactions to me in real time.  I can pretty much predict how they will describe my performance.  Online, I’m blind.  So, it was with a frisson of trepidation that I read over the survey comments.

The written comments are optional, which means they are usually left by students who either love you or hate you.  The latter category of comments included a disparaging description of me as “woke.” 

Woke is a funny choice of a snarl word, since it never really caught on among liberals and progressives.  The only occasion I remember using it in the classroom was a few years ago.  I had slept poorly the night before, and that day’s talk was not one of my best.  After a couple of stumbles, I paused and apologized and told them why.  I facetiously remarked that I should be more woke.

No, woke the way it’s used by conservatives is just part of their funhouse mirror vision of how they think people to their left are.  In the case of the critical student, he (it was probably a he) meant that I had failed to cater to his prejudices.  Concerning the course, there is really very little ideological content.  If my material has a flaw, it is that it is maybe a little more rah-rah about the status quo than I actually feel about it.  If it is woke in this student’s estimation, it’s likely it’s because I acknowledge the existence of non-whites, that we took our land from its indigenous occupants, that slavery and Jim Crow actually happened, that police violence is visited most often on Blacks and other people of color, that LGBTQ people have rights, and so forth. 

It is disconcerting for me the way each of us lives within our own media-driven ideological bubbles.  I grew up in an era where there were only three television networks (four if you counted PBS), most moderately large cities had at least two daily newspapers, AM talk radio was fringe, and the internet was in the future.  There was already a deepening rift between left and right, but there weren’t cable news and social media to channel extremist ideas unrooted in fact.  I am sure that the present climate of mutual mistrust explains the distaste for my classroom statements among some of my distance learning students, and that the quasi-anonymous online environment where teacher and student will never meet personally emboldens them to proclaim their beliefs with little concern for their potential offensiveness.  Pity.

 

© 2023 The Unassuming Scholar

This Looks Familiar

Fall semester begins tomorrow.  Not that I, my online students, nor my colleagues can do anything about it. 

You see, the college website is down.  Has been since yesterday.  After a day and a half of silence, IT finally took to Twitter to explain the matter.  

For the second time in eighteen months, the college has fallen victim to a ransomware attack.  The last one delayed the end of Spring semester by more than a week.  This one will probably delay the Fall term for who knows how long.  A temporary page assures students they can access their classes and contact their instructors via the LMS.  This instructor accessed the linked backdoor LMS login page.  The LMS rejected my password as invalid.  Funny, it worked before.  I tried to rest my password.  The password reset page is down.   

You would think the administration (and our IT folks) would’ve learned from last time.  Just like last time, the response was slow and the messaging unclear. Just like last time, the college has retained the services of a “third party consulting form.”  Maybe it would be cheaper to just pay off the hijackers and be done with it. 

Maybe they should just hire the hijackers.

  

© 2022 The Unassuming Scholar

Altered Landscape

A few years ago, I joined an adjunct faculty discussion forum on Google Groups.  More of a lurker than a joiner, I’d read some of the discussion threads if they interested me and ignored the others.

The forum was active for a while, then fell mysteriously dormant for the longest time.  I had pretty much forgotten about it when the moderator sent a message asking if we would be interested in reviving it.  It’s been about three weeks, with more than a dozen messages landing in my inbox each day.  I’m still a lurker, but what’s being discussed is alarming.

There was some tension at first.  In any online forum you always have people who want to stir up drama rather than contribute.  In this case, a row came up surrounding an admittedly ill-advised remark by the moderator describing adjunct working conditions as slave labor.  She was called out by one member.  The moderator apologized for her poor choice of words, but as is so often the case with these situations it was more about the complainant than the complaint itself.  There were more recriminations followed by more apologies. The kerfuffle ended when the offended colleague demanded to taken off the mailing list.

That initial unpleasantness aside, the forum topics have generally fallen into two categories.  The first category consists of anecdotes and advice negotiating the unemployment insurance mess arising from the large numbers of people out of work owing to the coronavirus pandemic.  I’ve mostly ignored these posts since I’m teaching a full (adjunct) load this summer and don’t qualify for UI.

Then again, I should probably pay closer attention.  The second thread has to do with the steep learning curve experienced by my colleagues new to online learning.  Our institution’s campuses will remain closed through at least the fall semester.  Official communications contain dire warnings that faculty who fail to complete the distance learning training course will have their fall offers of employment withdrawn.

This requirement has inspired numerous angst-ridden exchanges.  The fear some of them express is as palpable as the written word allows.  It isn’t as much a matter of mastering the LMS and its bewildering array of features, it’s also the state-mandated accessibility requirement that has everyone—myself included—anxious.

The problem is that this is an under-supported mandate for adjuncts.  We are strongly encouraged to add visual media to our courses, but features such as Camtasia or DIY options like YouTube have godawful self-generated closed captioning.  But you have to have closed captioning to comply with the accessibility requirement.  So, a number of disheartened colleagues have had to resort to manually adding the captions.  This is a labor- and time-intensive process when you’re prepping content for a 16-week class.  Similarly, we are required to convert PDF files into more accessible formats and add “alt-tags” to any images.  Both are also labor intensive though not to the despair inducing extent of creating and properly captioning video content.

Naturally, no course preparation work is compensated under our contract, though there have been vague promises of a stipend for the newbies who finish training and build a compliant course.  Those of us who are established online faculty must submit at least one course for review during the fall.  I have exactly one fully compliant course, a shell I created two years ago and which passed muster but was never assigned to teach.  Like my colleagues, I have my work cut out.

All of this begs an existential question.  Is online instruction the effective equivalent of a live classroom?  The COVID-19 crisis is providing clues.  Since March, I have extensively interacted via videoconference platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, and GoToMeeting.  Six months ago, I’d only heard of the latter and only then because they underwrite some the programs I listen to on NPR. 

Zoom is the preferred platform at my college, and at first it was kind of cool to attend trainings and department meetings seeing coworkers’ faces arranged Brady Bunch-style on my laptop screen.  The novelty wore off fast.  After a while I found myself switching off my camera, muting my mic, and going about my daily business during trainings where the moderator’s screen was the focus point and active participation wasn’t required.  I don’t think I was the only one.

What we’ve been left with is a shiny tech-dependent version of an old model, the correspondence course.  Back when, these courses were of mixed quality.  Some programs, such as the extension courses offered by land grant universities, were respectable.  Others, most often private outfits advertising on matchbook covers and in the back pages of magazines, had lesser reputations.  A notorious example was LaSalle Extension University, based in Chicago, which thrived in various guises for over seventy years until it folded in 1982. 

The GI Bill and federal student financial aid multiplied the opportunities for abuse.  Some correspondence schools received shameless celebrity endorsements; Bennett Cerf, Rod Serling, and Phyllis McGinley shilled the Famous Writers School.  The Famous Writers School, the subject of an exposé by Jessica Mitford in The Atlantic, deliberately misled its applicants, 100% of whom were accepted, that these renowned authors would personally evaluate their work.  (FWS continued to feature Cerf in their print ads well after he died.) 

The completion rates for FWS students, many of whom received federal financial aid, were abysmally low.  One FWS official told Mitford that the school wouldn’t be profitable if every student finished.  After Mitford’s article, the Famous Writers School lost much of its enrollment, limped along for a few years, and eventually closed.

Such past abuses notwithstanding, federal financial aid is still a cash cow for unscrupulous for-profit operators.  The occasional scandal, such as the one surrounding Corinthian Colleges, still erupts, while some self-proclaimed institutions of higher education are too big to call to account.  (The University of Phoenix, National University, Grand Canyon University, et al., come to mind.)

There have been precursors of online courses stretching back to the 1950s with NYU’s Sunrise Semester TV program.  My own institution offered two-credit courses built around TV programs for many years.  You watched the episodes at home and went to campus at your convenience to take exams.  (For a few weeks in middle school I faithfully got up at the crack of dawn to watch a series on the history of Mexico.  I found out much later that this was one of the TV courses.)  The college currently has two dedicated cable channels for instruction, but they are used sporadically.

Television wasn’t a panacea, however.  Sunrise Semester was an extension program and the two-credit classes I described weren’t widely accepted for transfer.  But they did afford options for nontraditional students.

A generation ago, the idea of web-based instruction was a dubious proposition.  I first came across it in the late 1990s, when it was part of my job to confirm the accreditation of high schools attended by applicants to our employment training program.  This was merely a check-the-box exercise if they had attended local public schools or established private schools. 

When faced with an applicant enrolled in a private online school, I was in turn faced with a conundrum.  Until then I didn’t know online schools existed.  In fact, there were no accreditation provisions for them at the time.  I phoned the virtual school’s principal, who invited me over to his brick and mortar office to discuss.

The principal was a pleasant older gentleman who assured me that web-based instruction was the future.  Being a) new to the very idea, and b) hamstrung by my employer’s policy that schools be actual places, I offered my skepticism.  He demonstrated one of the courses, navigating through one of the clunky Web 1.0 browsers available then (probably Netscape or Mosaic).  I was at once impressed and unconvinced. 

More than twenty years later I’m just as unconvinced, but I am in the minority it seems.  Considering that community colleges such as mine cater to a wide cross-section of students, a long-term or semi-permanent shift to distance learning might be a welcome change for many.  I strongly suspect that it will be welcomed by administrators as well.  The college can still collect the same tuition and fees with reduced overhead.  Unused facilities could be repurposed and monetized as office or commercial space. 

Even as students at pricey four-year universities are demanding tuition refunds after their classes went remote, trade publications such as Inside Higher Education are predicting that the pandemic will force many community colleges to a mostly online format. 

The paradox is easy enough to resolve.  If I was paying out the nose to attend, say, Columbia, Penn, or Dartmouth, I would expect the experience of campus life at those institutions. For their mostly affluent student bodies college is a social experience, a lifestyle.  By contrast, the largest identifiable subset of community college students just want a diploma.  For older and other nontraditional students, school is just one part of their lives to juggle along with work and family.  This may be disappointing for me and my fellow liberal arts profs, but those are the facts on the ground (and in cyberspace).

There’s just one remaining obstacle to our sudden and perhaps irrevocable shift to remote learning, the digital divide. 

I discovered this in no uncertain terms after we went on lockdown.  Our main campus is suburban and students in the surrounding communities mostly have reliable internet service and cell phone reception.  I teach at two of our satellite campuses.  One is in the well-heeled community where I live.  Even though it’s 85 miles from the mothership most of my traditional-demographic students there are technologically well-connected to the college’s resources.  Few of them fell behind because they couldn’t access the course.

The other campus presented a different story altogether.  While situated in a picturesque small town, a substantial number of students live in the surrounding hills.  Not all of them have reliable home internet or cell reception.  A winter snowfall or summer wildfire emergency could leave them without electricity for days or even a week or two.  A few, but still too many, are homeless and did their work from the campus computer lab before the lockdown. 

Within the first two weeks of the stay at home order, about a third of the class had stopped participating online.  The campus administration attempted to ease the situation by affording wi-fi service in one of the campus parking lots so people could work from their cars or while seated outdoors.  It’s unclear to me whether this helped many students.  Several of my students ended up failing or earning a lower grade than they would have made had on-campus instruction concluded normally.

The funny thing is that we’ve been aware of the tech gap for a very long time.  The Clinton administration floated the idea of providing laptops to low-income families twenty-five years ago.  In the present, my state’s governor has pledged to remedy the digital divide problem but obviously that can’t happen overnight.  The deficiency’s implications for education, K-12 and higher, are damaging.   

The folks who tout technology as the answer to all of society’s problems conveniently omit how unevenly these solutions benefit people.  I happen to find the altered landscape of online instruction among COVID-19 discomfiting.  But for those who cannot scale the suddenly heightened obstacle of the digital divide will have deep implications, not just for them but for our society as well.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar

Remote

It’s been a week.  I’ve been cooped up indoors for a solid week.

Like so many others, I’m self-isolating in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.  Along with a comparative few lucky enough able to do so, I am working remotely.  I’ve left the house only to check the mail and take out the trash.  So far, I don’t mind.  My habits are solitary, so the social distancing thing is pretty much a given.  Better to stay home than to deal with a paranoid public outside my front door.

I’d said so long to last Thursday’s evening class telling them that we’d interact online for the next two or three weeks, the timespan quoted by the administration.  As of midweek the duration has been extended until semester’s end (right before Memorial Day).  I’ve seen the last of my students; from now on our relationship will be virtual.

I’m ambivalent toward online instruction.  My summer classes are usually distance learning, leaving me free to check in from wherever which means I can travel on my own schedule and not necessarily on semester breaks alone.  (Not that I’ll be traveling anywhere anytime soon…) 

But in person classes work best in my experience.  Liberal arts subjects are narratives, and it’s hard even with recorded lectures to sustain a narrative with any life in it online.  All you’re doing, really, is presenting bare facts, and students are paradoxically more likely to ask questions in a physical classroom than by email or LMS message.  Online discussion boards are stilted and inhibit meaningful dialogue.

The abrupt shift to online only has caused the predictable heartburn among colleagues and students alike.  As one student put it last week, “If I wanted to take an online class I would’ve signed up for an online class.”

It’s for our own good, of course.  And we’re all in it together, albeit in cyberspace.  But it’s not the inconvenience that worries me about my students’ welfare.  There’s the obvious; I want them all well.  But the local economy is heavily dependent on tourism, and my younger learners (and not a few of their elders) typically work in hospitality. While they undoubtedly have lots of time now to devote to my class, they’re not earning what they need to pay the bills.

There’s a lot of that going on.  Daily unemployment claims in my state doubled over the last two days.  Meanwhile surreal headlines commingle the horrible and mundane; one from yesterday’s CNN newsfeed read “U.S. Death Toll Hits 149; Dozens of Malls Close.”  Conflicting messages about the crisis continue to shake confidence.  And when there is uncertainty in a crisis people start to behave unpredictably.

The examples of erratic behavior are mounting so fast you need wings to stay above them.  A middle-aged Brooklynite got in a shouting match with a bunch of twentysomethings congregating outside a bar.  He felt the patrons should have stayed home.  One woman was quoted in a news report as being too scared to buy gas because she might pick up coronavirus from the pump handle, evidently forgetting she could have just gotten a couple of paper towels from the dispenser to avoid skin contact.  People without symptoms insist upon wearing face masks in public despite pleas from health officials to refrain from doing so.

Then there’s the panic buying and hoarding.  Fortunately there hasn’t been any of that locally; on my last trip to the supermarket everyone was shopping normally.  But you hear the stories.  There’s the hoarding of toilet paper and hand sanitizer, of course.  There are the nervous suburbanites clearing shelves of pasta, rice, and beans as if in anticipation of a siege.  Then there are the enterprising folks who roam from store to store buying up scarce items looking to sell them at a premium on Amazon.  Just today a senior citizen was robbed in a parking lot of the bag of groceries she was carrying.  I had to read that last story twice to believe it.

It’s easy to get a laugh out of panic buying when there’s no credible evidence of impending shortages.  But there are vulnerable people already adversely affected by the abrupt economic downturn who could be made to suffer further, people who don’t have the financial resources to meet price increases in household necessities.  At this point there are local food banks forced to cut back on their operations due to the quarantine policies, and the one serving students at my college has closed for the time being.

Economic divides become more evident in crises.  The online editions of the Business Journal ran an article today—behind a paywall, naturally—with the headline, “The Rich Confront the Virus: ‘Do I Quarantine in the Hamptons?’”  The opening line, the only one publicly visible, reads with nary a touch of irony, “Even in an age of inequality, a global pandemic can be a great—and terrible—leveler.”

Normally I’d dismiss such a fatuous pronouncement with a harsh laugh if it didn’t echo a tidbit a student shared with me.  The student works as a livery driver shuttling well-to-do seasonal residents from our small airport to whichever mountain aerie is their home away from home.  That afternoon she had driven a family arriving from the Bay Area.  People with means tend to be unguarded among the servant class, and these were no exception.  It was a younger family with school-aged kids, and one parent remarked to the other that it was a good thing the schools had closed since they could “wait out” the “craziness” seizing San Francisco and other cities.

This student is both observant and perceptive, and she was startled and amazed by their choice of words.  She was disturbed by their obliviousness.  They believed themselves above it all and had decided to take an extended ski vacation while civilization broke down elsewhere.

I’m not so surprised.  We’ve been on a slippery slope toward apocalyptic thinking for a long time.  Whether this is due to the disproportionate cultural influence of evangelical Christianity or plain and simple self-absorbed fear is hard to say.  It’s probably a little of both.  Community is a thing of the past.  As Robert Putnam put it, we’re bowling alone.  COVID is making us even more suspicious of each other than usual.

Returning to the vacationing family, they would surely be indignant at what their driver did once she had safely delivered them at their destination.  She thoroughly cleaned the car’s interior with disinfectant.  It probably never occurred to them that they could possibly pose a threat to anyone; it’s the rest of the world that’s the threat.  Remote, indeed.

© 2020 The Unassuming Scholar 

Unperson

You arrive for your 12:30 section.  As the outgoing class filters out and your section filters in, you make small talk with your colleague Margaret.

“Did you hear about Darrell?” she asks.

“No, what about him?”

“He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

“He’s left.  All of a sudden.  They’ve got a replacement covering his classes.  Have you talked to him?”

Darrell is a casual friend.  “No, we teach on different days,” you say.  Your curiosity turns to unease.

“I’d hoped you knew something.”

“Nope.  It’s news to me.”

“That’s not good,” said Margaret.  “I hope Darrell’s okay.”

“That makes two of us.”

After class, you try to email Darrell only to find he’s no longer in the college email directory.  You don’t have his personal email address or phone number.

A quick glance at the spring and summer class schedules does nothing to assuage your anxiety.  Darrell’s unlisted, an unfamiliar name substituted for his usual sections.

You catch up with Margaret later in the week.

“Any news about Darrell?” she inquires.

“Sorry, no.”

“Let me know if you find out anything.”

Finding out anything is futile.  You obliquely query a classified employee you know in the dean’s office.  She confirms Darrell has left his job.  You suggest that it might have been a family emergency, a sudden illness perhaps.  She smiles nervously and says no.  You don’t press the matter further.  This is not good.

Your confusion mounts.  You don’t see eye to eye with Darrell on some issues, but he’s an all right guy.  He has a good reputation among the students as far as you know.  It occurs to you momentarily, and only momentarily, that Darrell had committed an impropriety with a student.  That doesn’t line up with what you know about him and you reject the idea.

An equally ominous thought comes to mind.  You ask yourself whether it was something he said in class, a student-customer who took exception to an opinion and raised enough of a ruckus to earn Darrell a one-way ticket out of academia.

Days pass.  You make one last attempt to get to the bottom of the Darrell mystery.  You weave it into a chat with a former student who also works in the front office.  She smiles warily.

“He just left all of a sudden.  I’m not sure why.”

“Just thought I’d ask. Thanks.”

Here one day, gone the next….

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

This Is a Test

"Good afternoon, everyone.  In a moment, I'll pass out your exam.  You will have the entire class period to complete it.  But, first, does everyone have a Scantron and a No. 2 pencil?"

A forest of hands goes up, belonging to maybe a quarter of the class.

"Is that a yes or a no?"

One of the raised hands speaks.  "No, Mr. Scholar.  We don't have Scantrons."

"Braden, did you hear me mention last class that you needed to bring one for today's exam?"

"I wasn't here last class."

"That's unfortunate.  Did you read the announcement I posted on Whiteboard?"

"I guess."

"So you knew what to bring, correct?"

"I guess. Is it okay if I run to the bookstore and buy one?"

"It's more than okay if you want to take the exam."

"I'll be back."

"I'll be here."  

Braden and the rest of the Scantron-less students file out in a flurry of door-slams.  The prepared students settle into the exam.

Soon, a gaggle of latecomers arrive with the obligatory series of door-slams.  With a rustle of falling bookbags and tearing zippers they settle into their seats.  After a few moments one of them has an epiphany.

"Mr. Scholar, I don't have a Scantron."

"I'm sorry to hear that, Kaden.  Ask one of your neighbors if they have an extra."  

Kaden is fortunate.  Another of his group is not.  "Mr. Scholar..."

"Yes, I know, you don't have a Scantron.  Yes, you can go to the bookstore to buy one."

"Will you still be here when I get back?"

"Yes, indeed, Jaden.  I will be here the entire class period.  If you can make it back within that time, I will be here."

Jaden is relieved to know this and celebrates his good fortune by slamming the door behind him as he leaves.  This is immediately followed by yet another riot of door-slams as Braden & Co. successfully return from their quest for testing supplies.  They take their places with a rustle of falling bookbags and tearing zippers.

The door opens once more, this time with a flourish.  It's Skyler, still another of today's students oblivious to the demands of the clock.

"Hola, Mr. Scholar!"

"Hello, Skyler.  Do you have your Scantron and pencil?"

Skyler gives you a deer-in-the-headlights expression.  He hurriedly turns and exits.  The classroom door slams behind his back.  Without a flourish.  

One exam down.  Two to go.  The semester's end is so, so far away...

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar

Hey Buddy

I thought about writing a post for this year’s commencement.  I’ve settled for posting this instead:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKnKBdpnKc

Enjoy

Climate Change

Going through this morning’s campus mail, I found a hand-addressed envelope among the usual clutch of publisher’s circulars and club announcements.

This is unusual.  I rarely get personal mail through the college.  The missive was formally addressed to “Mr. Unassuming Scholar” at my college’s main campus where I’d taught during summer session.  That explained the delay between the day it was mailed and my receiving it at the satellite campus where I normally work.  I surmised it was from one of the students in that class, but there was no return address.

I’d hoped it was good news about the sender’s transfer to a prestigious four-year uni, or an award or scholarship won.  No such luck.  Instead, the envelope’s only contents were a clipping from the Wall Street Journal.  It was an editorial by David Gerlenter published last week.  Its heading: “The Real Reason They Hate Trump.” 

Evidently the sender considered me to be one of the titular they.  The gist of the article is that those in the “Left” (i.e., mainstream centrist Democrats who oppose the president’s policies) do not have any program aside from attacking him.  More to the point, “they” hate Donald Trump because he’s a larger than life version of the average American.   The sender highlighted what he (presumably it was a he) believed were the most important passages in case I missed it in my liberal cluelessness. 

In a week which witnessed such horrors as the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh and the mailing of pipe bombs to Democratic politicians and the murder of two African Americans by a white supremacist in Louisville, receiving a clipping from an anonymous critic is beneath trivial.  But in one sense it’s all of a piece, reflections of the sea change in an already poisonous social climate which existed well before the 2016 election.  Incivility has become an accepted social norm.  We choose our “enemies” and proceed to dehumanize them.  For a few of the less balanced among us, it is a short leap to violence.

Most of what we experience is petty nastiness from the people we disagree with or have chosen to dislike us for who we are.  Unreasonableness festers on both sides of the divide.  Among some of my colleagues, political discussions that don’t categorically vilify Trump are met with knee-jerk hostility.  Early on in the Mueller investigation, a friend asked when (not if, when) the president would be impeached.  I said that as far as I could tell The Donald’s misdeeds did not rise to treason or bribery or high crimes and misdemeanors.  Her expression hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and she asked in a strained voice why I was taking his side.  I wasn’t defending him by any means; I was simply reading the tea leaves of the news and offering an opinion of what was politically feasible. 

The Gerlenter article gets one thing right in that Democratic leaders have been tone deaf when discussing the very working people the party has historically championed.  Barack Obama saying that they needed to let go of religion and guns and Hillary Clinton describing Trump supporters as “deplorables” are the most cited examples of this.  Such attitudes percolate through affluent liberal social circles, an implicit criticism which is as much of working class culture and tastes as it is of their political preferences.

This trend cuts both ways, and again it’s often a matter of style.  While affluent liberals take a condescending approach, some of the symbolic blows struck by the Trump crowd verge on the childish.  Sometimes it’s merely offensive bumper stickers and T-shirt slogans.  Other times it’s less benign such as the practice of diesel pickup owners disabling emissions controls so as to produce sootier exhaust while passing Priuses, a pastime called “rolling coal.”  Sometimes it takes a dark turn in the form of racist, anti-immigrant, or homophobic websites and social media posts.

The White House’s protestations that the president is not responsible for the uptick in hate crimes are factually correct on their face, but it is a disingenuous argument nonetheless.  Donald Trump has benefited enormously from the bottled-up anger of poor whites.  Gerlenter’s thesis that Trump is what half of America sees in the mirror as their idealized self is spot on.  As another commenter said (and I don’t remember who), Donald Trump is a poor American’s idea of a rich person.  He’s the product of mass frustration over the perceived loss of an American dream. 

What’s left unsaid, or more accurately unacknowledged, is that even in the era of our nation’s “greatness” many of those sporting MAGA hats still would not have thrived.  The myth of equality in America is that it’s myth.  Always has been.  Consequently, the only thing propping up the self-image of many Trump supporters is the prospect of preserving white male dominance. 

Conservatism is all about hierarchy, and the only arena in which working class whites historically benefited from hierarchy was through racial and gender dominance.  That’s what’s driving the PC backlash; it’s an assertion of the supposed right of straight white men to dominate.  Trump’s antics with women, his xenophobia and anti-immigrant rhetoric, his insensitivity to the rights of others, his bluster, his substitution of his own judgments for the actual expertise of others, and his gaudy, shameless persona are all a figment of their collective id. 

As for the assertion that liberals are devoid of solutions or a viable political program, I pretty much agree.  For three decades the Democrats have merely tread water; instead of offering an alternative to the Republican program it instead swung to the right so as to hold on to any kind of base.  Like my unnamed correspondent who sent the clipping, like Mr. Gerlenter, I can plainly see that the Democratic Party is adrift and rudderless.  That said, my unnamed correspondent misjudges my political stance.  I am not a liberal.  I am a progressive.

Republican candidates have muddied the ideological waters in the run-up to next week’s election by tarring centrist Democrats as dangerous radicals.  Whereas I once inwardly bristled when a professor in graduate school described the public of being politically unsophisticated, I’m beginning to think she was on to something. 

What were simple ideological descriptors have become epithetic projectiles.  Most progressives are not dangerous radicals, and the typical liberal certainly is not.  And yet half the voting public is being gradually convinced this is the case if they aren’t there already.  And although the mainstream Dems are short of new ideas, my fellow progressives, particularly those who espouse the idea of participatory democracy, are not only forging new ideas but organizing on the street as well.   Maybe their efforts will ultimately stem the tide of political climate change for the better…if they’re given half a chance.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

All against All

I was in the faculty workroom doing paperwork when Darrell walked in and slumped into a chair across the table from me.  He looked dejected and worried.

This was unusual.  Darrell, a retired career military man who incongruously wears a utility cover with his customary shirt-and-tie ensemble, normally projects a confident aura.  Whatever was bothering him, I didn’t want to pry.  After exchanging laconic greetings, we sat in silence for a few minutes even though it seemed he really wanted to talk.  Finally, he spoke up.

“I got an email from my department chair.”

“Yeah?  What about?”

“She didn’t say.  I’m supposed to see her Monday at four.”

“I’m sure it’s nothing serious.”

“I don’t know…”

“Did something happen?”

“Well…”  Darrell described the uncomfortable reaction he thought he saw from a student in class.  Like most vets, Darrell is a conservative.  During his lecture that morning he put forth his view that the War on Poverty had failed because of the personal shortcomings of the people it was meant to help.  The student’s demeanor became quietly hostile, though s/he said nothing at the time.  Whatever it was, it left Darrell rattled.

“I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“I hope so.”  Darrell got up to leave.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks.”

Catching up with Darrell a few days later, it turned out the student in question had in fact made a formal complaint.  The ensuing discussion with his chair was awkward.  According to Darrell, she hemmed and hawed and said while faculty have academic freedom we have to be sensitive to phrasing, student sensibilities, etc., etc. 

Predictably, nothing came of the matter.  I’ve been an adjunct instructor longer than Darrell.  I see the department chair’s summons for what it was: A passive-aggressive nonresponse to a student gripe about something which does not merit disciplinary action but still looks to the student as if the college has done something.

While I disagree with Darrell’s views on the subject which brought the complaint, I believe in academic freedom.  These ominous summonses have a chilling effect.  Common sense and good manners dictate a sensitivity to the feelings of others.  However, I have found myself self-censoring and at times avoiding particularly controversial topics even though I teach in a discipline which cannot avoid these completely.  The things I see happening in academia do little to ease my anxiety.

And so I was unsurprised by an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education which encapsulates the strife of the campus ideological wars.  The piece documented an incident last fall at the University of Nebraska.  It’s a story without heroes in which almost everyone involved behaved badly.

It began with a student who set up a table on the campus quad.  The student, a recent alumna of a summer training program for young conservative activists, was canvassing for a group called Turning Point USA.  Perhaps you’ve heard of them; they’re the organization behind the “Professor Watchlist.” 

Turning Point encourages students to identify (or target) liberal and progressive faculty.  Having the temerity to speak against corporate malfeasance, pointing out white privilege and denouncing racism and sexism, favoring reproductive choice and LGBT rights, promoting peace over war, suggesting that human activity just might be responsible for climate change, criticizing the Religious Right, and being “anti-Israel,” among other sins, can get a proffie’s name on the Watchlist. 

Back to our budding young activist.  Having set up her table, a university employee reportedly told her she could not disseminate propaganda in that part of campus and that she would have to move to a predesignated free speech zone.  Fair enough, though the employee’s use of the word “propaganda” to describe the student’s activity could only further agitate the rage junkies who would latch on to the ensuing incident as an example of the lefty subversion of ‘Murican values.

Safely ensconced in the free speech zone, a passing doctoral student and English instructor caught sight of the Turning Point table.  Outraged by its presence on what she would later declare to be “her” campus, the instructor made up a picket sign denouncing the student as a fascist. 

Things went rapidly downhill.  As she had been taught by her Turning Point mentors, the student took out her phone and began recording the picketer.  They began circling each other.  At one point the picketer flipped off the student on camera.  She called the student a “neo-fascist Becky.”  She denounced the student as a white nationalist and white supremacist.  She swore at the student.  Finally, the student began to cry.

This was a bit much for another faculty member who had joined the anti-Turning Point picket.  She walked over and tried to comfort the student and gave the student her email address, inviting the student to sit down later to talk about their political differences.  The student packed up her table and left and the incident ended.

Except it really didn’t.  Turning Point posted the video of the incident to its website, which went viral.  The tom-toms sounded throughout the conservative jungle, and soon angry letters and emails began arriving in the offices of Nebraska’s elected officials.  The university president was summoned by the state legislature.  The instructor, a woman in her late forties, was eventually suspended from her teaching duties as penance for her public overzealousness.  And our young conservative?  She’s become the Right’s darling du jour.

This incident was a set piece with strawpersons on both sides: The shrill social justice warrior shouting hyperbolic slogans.  The emptyheaded suburban Barbie hostile to a multicultural America.  Most people are content to leave it at that.  Predictably, there has been little discussion of what this episode means for campus discourse. 

For me, the Nebraska incident exemplifies what can go wrong when political strife in the larger society encroaches on academia.  Both sides are consumed with a righteous indignation.  Neither acknowledges the right of the other to express their views.   Making matters worse, the instructor’s confrontation with the student escalated from a simple difference of opinion to a situation where a grown woman bullied some poor kid to tears (something for which the instructor was unapologetic).  As a result my distaste for everything Turning Point represents conflicts with my deep-seated revulsion toward bullies, tempered by a sour satisfaction in the knowledge that the student Right has its own snowflakes.   

It’s tempting to blame Donald Trump’s political rise for the seeming resurgence of right wing Know Nothingism and the ideological war of all against all, but the truth is that the current campus wars are an extension of the social polarization of the last several decades.  As an undergrad in the 1980s, I remember the sniping over political correctness and speech codes on the one hand and the monitoring of liberal professors by conservative groups like Accuracy in Academia on the other, though this was more rumor than fact at my politically quiescent regional state uni, 

Even now, most educational institutions are backwaters of social consciousness.  It’s surprising whenever any of the community college students I work with express any kind of informed opinion let alone take a side on an issue.  Last semester I was startled when, during an unusually spirited classroom discussion of current events, a student declared that the only answer to our problems was revolution.  Several students murmured agreement.  No one objected.  I nodded gravely, simultaneously pleased and unsettled.  The discussion moved on.  There were no repercussions afterwards.

Sometimes apathy works in your favor.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar

Heads Will Roll

Watching Fox News a few weeks ago, on one of the inevitable year-in-retrospective programs which air the last week of December, an item in the news crawl caught my eye.  “Far-Left Professor Booted,” it read, or something like that. 

I had to think a moment to make the connection, then it hit me.  The reference was to Drexel University professor George Ciccariello-Maher.  I name-checked C-M in a post a while back when he had stirred up a minor media storm by sending an angry tweet after a first-class airline passenger gave up his seat to a soldier in uniform.  That post wasn’t so much meant to discuss the good professor but to mull over the public’s media-conditioned attitudes toward the military and veterans.

Now I find myself asking what Ciccariello-Maher’s firing says about the present state of academia.  C-M had already landed himself in hot water before the soldier tweet by calling for a “white genocide.”   He was apparently suspended by Drexel last October after he blamed President Trump for the Las Vegas shootings.  Switching channels to CNN, I was informed C-M had actually resigned in the face of death threats against him and his family.

I confess I don’t know much about George Ciccariello-Maher in spite of his working in a discipline related to my own.  What I have been able to glean is that C-M belongs to a certain breed of academic whose public pronouncements tend toward sophomoric oversimplifications of complex issues.  Lots of heat, but precious little light. 

These kinds of statements may gain the rapturous attention of coddled undergraduates and the ire of the anger junkies on the political right.  But they make honest progressives like me wince.  As we slip further into a war of all against all in which we destroy the careers and lives of people we don’t like, such grandstanding further undermines the already precarious state of academic freedom.

I teach at a community college (two of them, actually).  I’m employed as contingent, or adjunct faculty.  No tenure.  No job security.  Just a feeble guarantee of academic freedom which will inevitably evaporate into thin air the moment some student with a wild hair up his or her ass and an axe to grind decides to lay waste to my livelihood.

My own interpretation of American history and society is not really that different from that of Ciccariello-Maher.  I just don’t express it in short bursts with my thumbs is all.  I am also careful to point out that there are other perspectives than mine, that there are many caveats and subtleties to any controversy, and that if a student disagrees with my conclusions that’s okay as long as their own are based in fact.

I don’t know if this approach is the reason, but I have had few strong disagreements with students over the years.  Even my openly conservative students seem to be okay with me for the most part.  It could just be that they’re taking the path of least resistance toward collecting three credits and a grade.   Probably so.  My fingers are crossed that that’s the case and that my luck will continue to hold.

Obnoxious proffies like George Ciccariello-Maher make high profile targets for conservative trolls compiling “watch lists” of faculty who don’t wave the flag or embrace the lay religion of American exceptionalism.  However, safeguarding the right of professors to express unpopular opinions is why we have tenure and academic freedom guarantees in the first place.  As someone who has lots of unpopular opinions I feel threatened whenever the ability to openly express them without fear of retaliation is challenged.

Higher education itself is an inviting target, and not just for right-wing media outlets.  This is nothing new; Richard Hofstadter famously laid bare the deeply ingrained anti-intellectual streak in our culture more than a half-century ago.  Even as credentialism has swollen the ranks of post-secondary students, popular skepticism over the whole enterprise hangs in the air.  (Or as a piece in The Onion once put it, school isn’t really America’s thing.  We just play the game to get what we want.)

The levelling of higher ed has resulted in the perception colleges and universities should be little more than elevated trade schools geared to training the public in marketable skills and nothing else.  We’re doers, not thinkers, so why waste time on useless crap like art history and poetry and sociology?  And while we’re at it, why should we listen to a bunch of overeducated jackasses tell us things we don’t like?  Besides, brains aren’t everything.  In the real world, they’d be working for C students.

(Hmmm…It seems I’ve digressed a little.  Apropos of the preceding paragraph, I should say a few things about myself.  Firstly, every paid position I’ve had since age 21 has required a bachelor’s degree or higher.  And no, I didn’t have rich parents to put me through school.  I worked lots of odd jobs to pay for my studies.  Secondly, while I did have to wait until my mid-thirties to actually apply my classroom knowledge in the workforce, at least I was able to make that happen.

Oh, and my major?  Humanities.)

Returning to the topic at hand, the firing (or forced resignation) of Professor C-M underlines the need for stocktaking within our own ranks.  The trend toward treating students as customers and learning as a commodity, a topic I’ve commented upon often in this space, is stifling the sacred endeavor of free academic inquiry.  We are letting this happen at our peril.  As for me, I’m holding my breath waiting for the next head to roll silently praying it isn’t mine.

© 2018 The Unassuming Scholar