Mr. DeMille, He's Ready For His Close-Up: Vito Russo And Gay Liberation

Michael Schiavi, Celluloid Activist:  The Life and Times Of Vito Russo (Madison:  University of Wisconsin Press, 2011).  361 pp. Index, illustrations.  $29.95 hardback.

It is June, otherwise known by Presidential proclamation as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, a time when major cities and resort towns around the country have parades and sell beer.  What we are celebrating, other than the success of GLBT entrepeneurship, is the Stonewall Riots.  An iconic event, it began on June 28 1969 in Greenwich Village, New York, following a raid on the Stonewall Inn, and continued on for days as roving groups of queers provoked, and resisted, the police.  This, it is said, was the birth of gay liberation, which is technically true.  Activists subsequently formed the Gay Liberation Front (GLF), a group that made a definitive break with homophile politics.  For those of you who don't know this history, homophile groups were accomodationist in their strategies, trying to persuade straights and the state that gays and lesbians, except for their sexuality, were just like everyone else:  unfortunately, in this day and age of gay marriage, gay babies and gay war, this is increasingly the case.

Homophile groups like Mattachine, ONE and Daughters of Bilitis were not, however, conservative, a charge made by the GLF at the time that scholars like Martin Meeker, Marcia Gallo and David Johnson have effectively refuted.  They laid a critical foundation for community building and formal legal action that would produce a gay rights movement of the 1970s that would seek to extend basic civil rights to people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender status.  GLF, on the other hand, adopted the confrontational stance that had become characteristic of the black power, anti-war and radical feminist groups with whom many of their members were, or had been, associated. GLF was to the homophiles as the Black Panthers were to the Urban League. 

We are long overdue for more books that look at this historical moment at the level of the individual life, as Michael Schiavi, associate professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, does in Celluloid Activist.  Vito Russo was one of the gay men who came to Greenwich Village as a young gay man to embed himself in its queer counterculture, and he quickly became involved in radical activism after Stonewall.  But Russo is even more famous for his path-breaking book, The Celluloid Closet:  Homosexuality in the Movies, originally published in 1981 and re-published in a revised edition in 1987.  Born in 1946, this founder of gay cultural criticism should be signing up at the social security office this year, but like many men of his generation he contracted AIDS and died in 1990.

Schiavi's is an authorized biography, which may account for its emphasis on Russo's achievements (which were many) and its less sure touch about the complexities of his personality.  Schiavi has a keen sense of Russo's place in the gay men's culture that flourished in the 1970s, organized around uninhibited sexuality, and known colloquially as "the party." Schiavi's difficult task of situating Russo in his social world, and interpreting him through it is largely successful, and caused me to wonder whether, for certain figures, group biographies are almost necessary.

Russo had a network of deeply devoted friends, who were attracted to his evanescent personality and sharp intelligence, friends whose patience he often tried.  Russo's love life is a particular minefield: he seemed to be both a little bit of (what we used to call back in the day) a star f**cker, and he very much enjoyed being the object of star f**king.  While relationships were not the strong suit of many queer folk in those years, in part because relationships were either not the point or they were wide open, Russo seemed to have a particular penchant for falling in love with beautiful, helpless, unemployed boys; pledging undying devotion to them; moving them into into his apartment; and then getting really, really sick of them and kicking them out.  It didn't make me not like him, but it did make me think that there was some deeper insight that Schiavi was avoiding here, perhaps out of tact and deference to the family.

Russo's work on the Celluloid Closet (which was made into a documentary after his death) came from a public lecture he put together over the years, in which he demonstrated, through film clips and analysis, how unnamed but very obvious "gayness" in films produced, and shored up, the idea of "heterosexuality."  This is such a basic tenet of queer studies now that it is hard to recall what a stunning insight this was in the 1970s and early 1980s, particularly since there were not so many gay or lesbian books.  Russo came to this analysis from his formal academic training in film and a lifetime of fandom.  Like many gay kids, Vito seem to have been born a movie queen and a fan of the great divas:  Stanwyck, Crawford, Davis.  He was one of those guys weeping in the front row as Judy Garland, in her late years, stumbled drunkenly over her lyrics mid-set.  He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of classic Hollywood film making and acquired a rather large collection of movies (Schiavi suggests that some of these may have been stolen) prior to the days when such things were available on VCR, and delighted in showing them to friends.

Vito maintained a rather tenuous economic existence, even though he worked constantly as a journalist and operated on the edge of show business, a world he clearly adored (one of his great thrills after his AIDS diagnosis was an introduction to Elizabeth Taylor.)  He was friends with Bette Midler during the Divine Miss M's Continental Baths days, and then not so much when he insisted that she identify with queer activism after her mainstream success, something she clearly viewed as exploitation and he viewed as her selling out the people who had made her career in the first place.  (I think they were both right, although it isn't clear what Schiavi thinks.) Vito's relationships with other celebrities endured, however, particularly his friendship with Lily Tomlin.  One of the interesting parts of the book which should push another scholar to get going on her, is Tomlin's development of comic characters that were clearly queer, her struggles over coming out, and her regret, voiced at the end of the book, that she did not do so earlier.

Vito Russo was in the first great wave of men to be diagnosed in the portion of the AIDS epidemic that swallowed communities of urban gay men in the 1980s.  One of the triumphs of this book is that it articulates what it felt like to be at Ground Zero in downtown New York, as one's friends died slowly of horrible diseases that could just barely be treated.  I found these chapters enormously difficult to read, as the lists of men who had peopled the early chapters of the book were diagnosed and died.  Schiavi also depicted, quite accurately in my view, how those years felt. I recall sick men taking care of sick men; the halls at NYU hospital where deathly ill people waited for a bed for days; parents unable to comprehend the cataclysmic, sudden death of a child; scattering ashes in favorite vacation spots.  People behaved far better than you might ever have imagined they could, and they behaved indescribably badly.  I recall watching an age peer wander around the room incontinent and unable to find the bathroom, the rest of us not knowing that his brain was being eaten by toxoplasmosis because his lover (who was also infected but didn't want anyone to know) insisted that our friend had been tested (he hadn't) and didn't have AIDS.  All of this is in the book, and Schiavi describes it with a sure narrative touch.

One reason to read, or to teach, this book, is that it links lots of different things in the life of one person:  gay community, activism, the emergence of a gay intellectual sensibility, the party, and the party's end.  Because of this, when it comes out in paper, you could easily use it as a text for a post-1945 GLBT history course.  But honestly?  It's also a good read -- not always an easy one, but a good one -- and you might want to have it on your bedside table when you are done with Gay Pride and ready to return to gay life.

Love, Literature, and The Art Of Making A Life In Priscilla Gilman's "The Anti-Romantic Child"

Priscilla Gilman's new memoir, The Anti-Romantic Child:  A Story of Unexpected Joy (New York:  HarperCollins, 2011), is this week's recommended reading.  It is mostly about Gilman's struggle to help her son Benjamin overcome a set of developmental disabilities that make him sound quite charming and interesting -- as well as a challenging child who gives intricate meaning to that imprecise phrase "special needs."  While she gestures at specific diagnoses, she resists the comprehensive and categorical workup with which so many of my students arrive at college.  She also refuses medication, which seems to be the go-to solution for the vast majority of kids who see a neurologist nowadays, as it seems to affect Benj’s brain chemistry in dramatic and unhelpful ways.  Intensive therapy, however, helps, and that story is going to be very instructive and encouraging for parents who are finding their way with similarly challenging children.  As the book argues implicitly, it matters less what is "wrong" with Benj than it matters to cultivate his talents and strengths as an individual, give him access and connection to a world of feeling, and give him a way to live in the world as a creative and unique person.

Benj is high end (fill in the blank -- any neurological diagnosis is a menu nowadays) which means that, with a lot of hard work on the part of his parents and therapists, a child who is clearly brilliant by any standard but lacks the capacity to interact empathetically, receive affection in recognizable ways, or function in a standard social or learning environment learns to do so by the end of the book.  The larger, and very compelling, theme of The Anti-Romantic Child, however, surpasses the particularities of Benj and his upbringing:  it is about the romance that everyone needs to have to imagine a life.  It is about what it takes to hold onto that romance and also grapple with the realities that clash with it.  Gilman positions herself as a particularly romantic person (she becomes a Wordsworth scholar), but also creates a compelling perspective on that for the reader.  The romances we develop about childhood, she proposes, are a healthy mechanism for choosing the parts of our upbringing that we want to honor and reproduce, while vowing not to pass on our own parents' shortcomings.  And while the family romance in particular sets the stage for disappointment -- since, after all, people are dealt children quite randomly, and fully able children are bound to simply be themselves rather than made-to-order progeny -- Gilman learns that romance is also really about joy.  As she watches Benj learn to live for himself, overcome simple difficulties that can be paralyzing for him, and actualize his humanity, she discovers in herself a whole new capacity for experiencing joy.

Perhaps it is no accident that Gilman has to recalibrate her romance about herself at the same time:  her marriage ends, tested by circumstance and the deepening knowledge that two adults can acquire about the nature of intimacy.  A second theme in the book is her path into, and out of, academia.  For a variety of reasons, Gilman's career as a literary scholar had seemed pre-ordained.  She gives birth to Benj while still in graduate school and, incredibly, is able to leverage a tenure-track job at Vassar as well as a part-time job for her husband.  Particularly because they have a special needs child, being near family and friends, as well as avoiding a commuter marriage, seems to be the miracle they need.  Increasingly, however, as she struggles with launching Benj, she also grapples with the knowledge that she has taken a wrong turn even as she has lived out a cherished romance about herself:

Vassar was a wonderful college, but my doubts, my dissatisfactions with academia remained.  I would find myself warning my students against my path; I couldn't in all good conscience encourage them to go to graduate school when they said they wanted to read great books all the time and teach great students like I did.  They were so idealistic; they had starry eyes and great hopes.  I wished one of my professors had been more honest and blunt with me early on; I wish I'd known what I was getting into, that being an English major bore little or no relation to being an English professor.  I was reading much less literature, especially world literature, now that I was a professor.  I had to read endless scholarly articles, book reviews, and student papers.  I had to immerse myself in the minor writers of my period.  And, of course, there were virtually no jobs; my career was an aberration, not a model that could be easily replicated.

Love for literature did not necessarily a career as a teacher-scholar make.  While having a developmentally disabled child was a huge challenge to that career, and to ordinary life, it may have also allowed her to speak the things to herself that many people feel but do not act on.

I would sit in interminable department or all-college faculty meetings where minutiae would be debated for hours, people got up in arms about the smallest matters, and both the bickering and the venom bore no relation to what was really at stake....Once I got to Vassar, I no longer had the anxiety about the unknown, but a new problem emerged; I realized that I had been so fixated on the elusive brass ring of a tenure-track job that I hadn't faced the fact that I wasn't truly suited to scholarship.....I knew what I had to do to get tenure, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

So she chucks it, moving to New York to have another literary life:

...it felt good to write to the head of the Vassar English Department and tell him I'd decided to leave academia after the coming year's teaching responsibilities were over; the father of a special needs child himself, he accepted my decision with great graciousness and understanding.  Stepping off that tenure track felt like an enormous liberation, and I looked forward to beginning at the literary agency the following summer.

Gilman's book is a must-read for anyone interested in disability studies, and a thoughtful, third wave feminist meditation on mothering, work, and the work of mothering.  But it is also worthwhile for those who have made academic careers, and are beginning to wake up in the middle of the night and wonder how they got there; those on the path to a scholarly career who may or may not have come to grips with the realities of why they want it; and those who cherish the reality of scholarly life in all its parts but have found the path to a tenure-track job frustratingly foreclosed by the poor job market.  Under what circumstances is it OK to change your mind?  Under what circumstances is it possible to live out your dream in another way?  While a special needs child might force those choices, or clarify such decisions, for any one individual, they are good questions for all of us to ask ourselves as we do the ongoing work of making a life.

Should They Stay Or Should They Go? A Few Thoughts On Who Is "Supposed" To Be In College

I have been reading a variety of books and articles in the past year that question the utility of going to college at all, much less whether it matters in the course of a life whether a young person decides to go to a selective,  private college. If you are a famous actress, for example, it might not.  Yesterday, "Kaiser," who blogs at CeleBitchy, mused about Emma Watson (of Harry Potter fame) and her decision to drop out of Brown, at least temporarily, because she holds herself to such high standards. According to the AP story Kaiser quotes:

Watson has always been studious. She enrolled to study liberal arts at Rhode Island’s Brown University in 2009. But being a movie star and an Ivy League student took its toll, and she says commuting back and forth to the U.S. left her stressed out. Ever the perfectionist, Watson couldn’t stand delivering a below-average performance, so she took some time off. How very Hermione.

“I just knew I was going to be beating myself up because I wasn’t going to be able to be doing the best that I knew that I could at school or in my job,” she said. “If I’d been getting B’s or C’s I would’ve been really upset.”

We all would have been really upset.  What a thoughtful person.  Exactly the kind of rational individual who is ideally positioned to take advantage of a liberal arts education.

And now let's hear from the other kids, the ones who don't have film and modeling careers to distract them.

Currently, I am reading In the Basement of the Ivory Tower:  Confessions of an Accidental Academic by the mysterious Professor X whose initial thoughts on this matter were published in The Atlantic in June 2008.  A teacher of expository writing, who ended up in this position in the first place because he bought too much house and needed a second job, Professor X's argument is that the vast majority of people who end up in our community college system don't belong in college at all -- and wouldn't be in college if the United States didn't have a collective fantasy that higher education is a prerequisite for even the lowest paid work.

Needless to say, one powerful message In The Basement of the Ivory Tower delivers is how profoundly different the lives of academics are, not just because our students are sorted and tracked at an early age by testing, poverty and race, but because many of the students in most need of close attention and the time to reflect, read and learn to express themselves are the least likely to have that opportunity.  Furthermore, a community college campus may be running two entirely different schools in the same space.  By day, tenured faculty and long-term adjuncts teach students who may indeed go on to a B.A.:  you might be interested to know that a number of these students end up at places like Zenith.  They  transfer in during sophomore or junior year, and do very well despite the fact that they haven't had access to the kind of curricula that elite liberal arts colleges see as a crucial foundation to upper level work.  Other than intelligence, one reason for this in my view is a higher degree of maturity and commitment to their courses than many students (who have taken this opportunity for granted) have.

By night, however, Professor X describes classrooms given over to the generation of tuition revenues, paid by working people who don't give a rat's a$$ about literature, can't write or put together a coherent thought, and are taking an Associate's degree because they can't advance in their ill-paid jobs without it.  Why, Professor X asks us, do we force dental technicians to read Wallace Stevens?  And why do we cycle students through the same course that they have failed before because we think that writing a coherent essay has something to do with putting in a Foley catheter or making sure all the right boxes on the income tax forms are filled out properly?

It's not a dumb question, except that it misses what is for me a crucial point:  if we are educating large numbers of people inappropriately, and at great expense to them, what would it mean to educate people well?  While Professor X displays a high level of devotion to his students, the "realism" that he insists we adopt towards community college students, as taxpayers and as citizens, verges so closely on contempt for them that the book can be a difficult read.  Granted, many students come to community college (or Zenith, for that matter) needing to be brought up to speed on things they never learned in high school.  The gap in some cases is far greater than it is in others.  But is that a reason to throw in the towel on college?

A redeeming feature of this book is that Professor X sees faculty and students as having ended up in the same canoe, up the same $hit creek, and without a paddle between them. "Our presence together in these evening classes is evidence that we all have screwed up," he writes.

I’m working a second job; they’re trying desperately to get to a place where they don’t have to. All any of us wants is a free evening. Many of my students are in the vicinity of my own age. Whatever our chronological ages, we are all adults, by which I mean thoroughly saddled with children and mortgages and sputtering careers. We all show up for class exhausted from working our full-time jobs. We carry knapsacks and briefcases overspilling with the contents of our hectic lives. We smell of the food we have eaten that day, and of the food we carry with us for the evening. We reek of coffee and tuna oil. The rooms in which we study have been used all day, and are filthy. Candy wrappers litter the aisles. We pile our trash daintily atop filled garbage cans.

You've got the message (the guy does have an MFA after all):  garbage in, garbage out.

That Professor X is an "accidental academic" speaks volumes, in the sense of how much public policymakers now prize the voices of "outsiders" to the profession of education, as well as the opinions of successful businesspeople and politicians (for whom having gone to school is qualification enough to play a decisive role in shaping public education.)  We who have made careers in higher ed, the reasoning goes, are far too immersed in our tenure systems, our unions, and our persnickety claptrap about committee work to understand "the big picture."  We are myopic.  We are perpetual adolescents who have fled from the challenges of the "real world" and pursued graduate educations that suit us for nothing better than to return to school for the rest of our natural lives ("Those who can't do, teach/Those who can't teach, teach gym," they are snickering in the New Jersey and Wisconsin governor's mansions.)

It's a surprise we are able to pull ourselves together to pay our taxes every year.

It's also not an accident that Professor X's day job is in government:  a self-confessed bureaucrat of some kind, he is no stranger to waste, mismanagement, and the outdated social theories that throw money at problems, as if money solved anything.  Indeed, that only a fraction of X's students are able to move successfully through the courses he teaches, and that a dramatically large number fail the same course repeatedly without apparently ever having had a clue what their own failure to do the work had to do with the outcome, is a compelling argument for cutting education budgets and excluding people from college altogether.

And yet:  what does it really mean about us as a society that we are able to tolerate, simultaneously, such vast gaps in educational opportunity, and such profound contempt for those people to whom we literally give almost nothing for their hard-earned tuition dollars:  not a clean classroom, not a professional teacher, not access to writing centers, not a class that meets before 10 P.M., not child care? 

When I taught community college as an adjunct over twenty years ago, we received repeated memoranda reminding us to drop students from the roster if they missed two classes.  Early on, I learned to throw these away without a thought, particularly since there were no administrators around between 7 and 10 in the evening when my two classes met.  But it seemed obvious that these policies were intended to weed as many students out of the system as possible -- after, of course, having snarfed up their nonrefundable tuition dollars.  For most students, missing two classes by midterm was routine:  babysitters not showing up, a spouse having to pull an extra shift unexpectedly, a relative falling into the hands of the law, housing court -- you name it, they were derailed by it.  Compare these to the equally good reasons I get from my current students for not coming to class ("I'm really stressed;" "My father's travel agent bought me the wrong plane ticket;" "my best friend is getting married in France;" "my roommate has been really upset lately") and ask yourself:  why are these working people not due the same care and consideration that we assume those who pay far higher tuition deserve?

If You Are Considering Writing A Memoir About Your Childhood Sexual Abuse....

...Don't.  At least, not unless you have a story to tell that pushes us beyond the horror of it all.

The Daily Mail, which reviewed Margaux Fragoso's Tiger, Tiger in the United Kingdom, says it is "shocking the literary world." Why? Because Fragoso references her love for the man who abused her for fifteen years, and because it is so graphic about the sexual fantasies they shared that some critics call the book itself pornographic.  The NPR review, which suckered me into buying this ghastly memoir (oh had I only clicked "read more") comes closer to why I am shocked by it:  it is such a poorly written book.  As Dan Koies writes delicately,

But it's perilous to discuss Tiger, Tiger, because when an author asserts her moral right to reclaim her abuse and recast it as story, it's easy to seem churlish when you wish that she were a better writer — or that she'd had a more careful editor. While Fragoso's publisher, FSG, is selling the book as a cautionary tale for parents and an act of bearing witness for victims of abuse, it's also positioning Tiger, Tiger, albeit uneasily, as a literary breakthrough. But though Fragoso can write with terrible beauty, often her memoir is hampered by awkward sentences, sloppy storytelling and the kind of unbelievably detailed description and dialogue that makes you distrust a memoir's voice.

No kidding.  I can add to that.  There not a single likable, compelling or interesting character in the book, including Fragoso.  Furthermore, the "big secret" which she hints at throughout -- that she was one of many children, boys and girls, who were sexually abused by this man -- is patently obvious by the time we get the reveal in the last ten pages.  Really? You mean he lied and you weren't the special one after all? 

Understanding that child sexual abuse is a truly terrible experience, and a vicious crime, why any press would publish a memoir that doesn't compel a more passionate response by the reader is a mystery.  In fact, the chapters consist of four dreary (and mostly predictable) scenarios that are repeated over and over.  Those scenarios are:

• Schizophrenic mother repeatedly turns her child over to abuser, sitting there watching TV and writing obsessively in her notebook while the abuser sneaks off to kiss and cuddle her daughter; 
• Narcissistic, OCD, misogynistic father too self-absorbed to raise his own child repeatedly turns daughter over to abuser.  Fearing his own attraction to Fragoso, he pushes her away, making her receptive to the overtures from the abuser and sending confused messages about "fatherly" love that abuser capitalizes on; 
• Abuser's girlfriend creates safe space for abuser to abuse Fragoso, her own sons, and numerous foster children, despite repeated accusations by the entire neighborhood and social workers that the abuser is, in fact, an abuser;
• Long, self-justifying speeches by abuser about what a caring person he is and how special and unique his relationship with Fragoso is.

Yuck, yuck, and yuck.  What a good memoir on this topic would look like isn't clear to me, but none of the people who ought to read such a book -- in other words, people who match the description of any of the people in Tiger, Tiger -- could easily learn much from it beyond the fact that they are not alone.  It's important, perhaps, but it's not enough.

Really, the best advice I have ever gotten on this topic was from a friend who said to me once:  "Always watch out for Mama's boyfriend. "  Which is kind of what you learn from Tiger, Tiger, but it takes over 300 pages to get there.

Deep Cleaning, And Other Cosmic Issues: A Review of "Clutter Busting"

Brooks Palmer, Clutter Busting:  Letting Go of What's Holding You Back (Novato, California:  New World Library, 2009).  219 pp. $13.95, paper.

One of the reasons that self-help books are so successful is that they introduce complex thinking to people who aren't normally exposed to it, or who are made uncomfortable by it.  Conversely, self-help books introduce simple thinking to people who spend most of their time thinking, or at least acting, complexly.  The formula for a successful self-help book, as far as I can tell, is a title that invites the potential reader into the utopian possibility of relieving the stress of the modern condition, and simultaneously becoming modern in a far more successful way.

Take the slow food movement, as it has manifested itself in the United States.  Inspired by former commune resident, and now Chez Panisse chef, Alice Waters, slow food ideology argues that we need to look to taken for granted features of daily life for the places that we have the most control over our happiness and health.  Emphasizing the process by which things reach the table, slow food addresses critical ways in which the modern, and now the post-modern condition, undermines people of all races, genders and classes by persuading them that they really want mediocre food.  Industrial food production creates labor force abuse, high prices for inferior products and poor nutrition.  The phenomenon of "fast food" permits us all to live fast as well, doing more work for less money as we substitute a time-wasting family breakfast for a Dunkin' Donuts drive-by that costs as little as $3.00 a person and gets us to work and school faster.  Habits sold to us by the processed food industry reduce our sociality and our good health.  As slow foodies easily point out, what is gained in time and convenience is invariably lost in relaxation, nutrition, and taste.

That said, life as a slow foodie has a deceptively simple formula:  grow as much of your own food as you can, buy locally, use fresh ingredients, sit down and face each other at meals.  Those of us who followed Barbara Kingsolver's journey into this world in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle:  A Year of Food Life (2006), which is not a self help book, immersed ourselves in the beauty of this experience. Kingsolver also did, and did not, point out the difficulties of this commitment:  the creativity of growing and canning is matched by hours of back-breaking and mind-numbing labor; the seasons in which everything is fresh also requires giving one's personal calendar over to the weather and sudden ripening of a crop; you have to decide which roosters to send off to the slaughterhouse (don't, whatever you do, name the chickens); and the food stored for winter can dwindle to a few basic items long before the farmer's markets open.

My guess is that it also helps to have a big advance.

Authors like Kingsolver, Suze Orman, Andrew Weil, and Brooks Palmer, different as they are, are successful for the same reason.  The message is:  do this one thing, and you will be happy.  You will be healthier, happier, and best of all, you will be free, something that a great many Americans have craved for three centuries or so.  If you think this is just a white thing, you probably have not yet read bell hooks' Sisters of the Yam (2009), in which hooks (of whom I am a great fan but for this one volume) advocates a self-healing process that African-American women can undertake through the consumption of self-help books.

I purchased Clutter Busting:  Letting Go of What's Holding You Back in a book store that largely serves academics, which I realize was meaningful.  I bought it in exactly the way Palmer argues purchases should not be made, on impulse and in response to some neuron that fired off in my head that sent the message:  "you will be happier if you buy this book."  (Note to those who want to start clutter busting now:  Brooks also has a blog.)  A true clutterer, as I discovered to my great relief, would never have read the book, but would come home and put it on a surface.  Subsequently, s/he would have become ashamed, put it in a box, and stuffed it under the bed, with dozens -- perhaps hundreds -- of self-help books that had been purchased, unread and hoarded over the years.  Palmer, a professional stand up comic and clutter busterer,  features lots of clients who are desperately trying to help themselves by buying and acquiring things, prominent among them New Age books and tapes, and only getting into deeper doo-doo in the process.

Palmer's central argument is this: culture producers tell us that we are what we own, and many of us are persuaded that having consumer goods and things of great monetary value makes us happy.  Some of us acquire these things on the street, unable to pass an item that looks useful without stuffing it in the car.   Whatever we acquire, whether it is the magazines that we subscribe to in order to better ourselves, the multiple cats we can't bear not to bring home from the shelter, or the makeup we buy to look pretty, we become briefly exhilarated as we possess the object, then depressed when we realize that, like all the similar objects our home is filled with, it hasn't solved anything at all.  The objects then more or less taunt us, and fill our houses in such a way that they overwhelm us.  Worse, they become objects of sentiment, holding feelings that we are unwilling to let go.

Like all successful self-help people, Palmer tells stories about people who, under his guidance, have recovered from this cycle.  Usually the process of recovery involves identifying what role objects of various kinds play in your life.  The process points out how you are failing to value yourself by allowing objects this power, and what your feelings actually have to do with either real people you refuse to let go of or insecurities that are undermining you but which you hold dear.  Disabling one's self by clinging to unwanted objects and people (yes, people, pets and services are clutter too under the right circumstances) is a problem for psychotherapy, but it is also something that is amenable to action.

Most of these stories are allegories masking as reality, and show the reader very directly how to take action.  All include a cathartic moment in which Palmer's clients perform exercises of various kinds that induce a crying jag, or a an attack of helpless laughter, and then make them free.  There is no one who bars him from the house, or sets the dog on him, for example.  Palmer's techniques revolve around confronting people's delusions, talking to them about shame, and working through the emotional obligations that they feel towards objects.  They sometimes ask the object whether it is ok to send it away and explain why they must; in other situations he asks them to "name" piles of unused stuff.  "You are crap!" you might shout at a dirty, old pile of unreturned student papers from 1996 (secretly,of course, you fear that a student will return to tell you that you are a horrible teacher.) "What a pile of useless garbage!" you would point out to a pile of unused CDs that were really expensive, are still on your credit card, and that you don't ever listen to.

Here, by the way, is a good place to address the obvious point that all self-help books are not the same. But they all require these moments of truth that are arrived at through confrontation.  I could imagine Palmer holding hands with Andrew Weil as, lovingly, they cleansed a food cupboard of uneaten boxes of Ritz crackers, healthy but tasteless salt-free soups, and cocktail napkins from your last birthday party.  Simultaneously, I fantasized about a Palmer -Suze Orman smackdown in the making.  Orman would know that all those CDs were on your credit card ("And ya charged 'em?  Dintcha? DINTCHA?!") and insist you hold a tag sale to begin paying that card down.  Palmer would argue that attributing any value, monetary or otherwise, to the CDs was simply a way to hang onto them, and that they should go to the Salvation Army hasta pronto. 

One flaw in the book is that all of Palmer's clients are "cured" forever, when we know that most clutter bugs do not receive permanent salvation, slipping back into their habits and needing to be dug out again. All of Palmer's clutter bugs begin lives of self-actualization by taking the baby/giant step of clutter busting, when actually, just ceasing to hoard would be a major change that might allow a person to live exactly the same life in a happier way.  But that's ok:  in that way, Clutter Busting holds out a similar promise as Butler's Lives of the Saints without all the gruesome scenes that becoming a saint involves. 

Palmer points out what we Marxists already know:  it really isn't about the stuff, is it?  It's about the commodity fetish.  It's about  the feelings we get when we look at stuff, and the deep betrayal we suffer when commodities fail to deliver.  Clutter is about aspirations unmet; unspoken feelings of loss; relationships we can't let go; old injuries; and lack of self-esteem.  For academics, four shelves of books, double-shelved, that you have never read says:  "I'm worried I'm not smart enough!"  Or, "Maybe if other people see these books, they will recognize that I am smart."  Meanwhile, the books sit there looking at you, sending another silent message:  "You bought us, now you are stuck with us.  Before you get to your own writing, or any reading that would give you pleasure, you have to make good on the promise to read us.  What -- you don't" (sniff!) "want us any more?"

Palmer would suggest that you sit down and have a chat with these books, thank them for the time they have spent in your house, apologize for not reading them and explain to them that you want them to go somewhere that someone will really appreciate them.  Then box them up and take them to the library sale.

What's the Answer to Higher Education, Gertrude?" "Alice, What Is The Question?*

Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus, Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It. New York: Times Books, 2010). 271 pp., index; $26.00 hardcover.

For those of you have aspirations to publish for a popular market, Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s contribution to the contemporary national debate about higher education does a lot of things right. The title poses a question and answers it – enticing you into a text that proposes to tell you the details that link the two. It has been cannily released in what is normally a slack summer book season (in other words, after the Summer Reading List issues of the Nation, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker; and right before these same publications announce what should be on your agenda for the fall.) Best of all, it is designed to freak out all the parents who are about to write their first $25,000 check (or some combination of cash and I.O.U.’s) to the college of their child’s choice, and the parents of rising seniors who are about to begin the College Admissions Derby. Imagine all these parents buying this book to find out that they are, or will be, paying for – nothing!

Full disclosure: although I am not quoted in the book, I had a very enjoyable phone interview with one of its authors. Furthermore, like Jesse Lemisch over at New Politics, I found that many of its themes speak to real issues in the academy: the casualization of teaching labor, the lack of curricular direction, ginormous corporate salaries paid to top executives, the failure of faculties to reform their own practices, and the high cost – in dollars and mortgaged futures – are but a few things that deserve more attention than they are getting.

My problem is this: Dreifus and Hacker treat the diverse field that is higher education with such a broad brush, and are so vague as to what the structural causes of the problems they identify are, that it is hard to know what we should take away from this book, why it asserts the things it does, or who the authors think the agents of change for higher education are supposed to be. They offer a vast range of critiques – many of which are the topic of regular debate in the education literature – but the agenda for reform is vague except for the familiar, free-market notion that parents can create change by taking their education dollars elsewhere.

Higher Education reserves some of its harshest criticism for a few of the most selective schools (which are referred to as the “Golden Dozen,” a term I can honestly say after a lifetime of working in universities I have never heard) and spends less time than it should on public schools like Evergreen (Washington State) and New College (Florida), which are truly innovative, teaching-oriented and inexpensive. The authors have a tendency to compare the apples over here with the oranges over there, spreading their analysis of schools over all the chapters. Because of this, even a professional educator like myself ends with very little sense of what a formula for a good college education really looks like, or how I, as a scholar, might contribute to a reform agenda (except by giving up research and writing, and returning my salary.) Worst, Higher Education gives non-professionals very little sense of how the different facets of university life work might, and sometimes do, work together to produce a good undergraduate education.

Hence, the biggest point Higher Education misses making is that the flaws in, and expense of, an undergraduate degree have evolved as a result of a privatization agenda that shifts a variety of costs formerly undertaken by government and private industry (through taxation) to students and their parents. Without this larger context the book's most salient points (that an undergraduate education is nearly unaffordable, and that the liberal arts are being de-emphasized for undergraduate training that can be immediately converted to a paying job) are far less meaningful. Privatization explains the shift towards what the authors identify as "The Triumph of Training” in chapter 6: students believe that their BA’s should certify them for the career that will pay back their bank loans; and corporations can hire workers for low-level corporate jobs without the expense of training them.

(Short irrelevant question: did Barbara Ehrenreich and Jonathan Kozol read this book before they blurbed it? Or were they in a particularly ecumenical mood when they did? Because Hacker and Dreifus's argument is more or less the exact opposite of what Ehrenreich and Kozol have argued on behalf of for years.)

Higher Education’s most consistent point throughout is that a college education costs too much (I agree); that students graduate with tens of thousands of dollars in loans (I agree – although the authors should have devoted a chapter to the consequences of this); that administrators are being hired and paid on a corporate scale (I agree); that college faculties rarely explain why they do what they do, or what an undergraduate education ought to look like (I agree); and that colleges and universities are providing vast numbers of services, entertainments and extra-curriculars that are driving the cost of higher education up without improving the quality of education (I agree.) There’s also quite a nice chapter at the end of the book that remarks on schools that they thought were exciting, and that advises parents to “think out of the box” when helping their children put together a list of potential colleges. My one caveat is that while they mention the establishment of “honors colleges” at Arizona State and Ole Miss that offer a liberal arts experience at a public school price, my question is: what is so innovative about creaming off 20% of an incoming class and giving them something “special” – while letting the remaining 80% flounder? It’s called tracking, and it’s not reform unless everybody gets access to the same small classes and high standards.

But the things that I liked about this book were too frequently negated by discussions that I found hasty and ill informed. I found Hacker and Dreifus’s grasp of the state of affirmative action thin, particularly since they mostly address admission to the “Golden Dozen.” Their views about the role race plays in higher education more generally are partial at best and incoherent at worst. The way in which this subject is glossed without any reference to social class or a family history of higher education also leaves the false impression that all Black students need “help” of one kind or another in the admissions process; and opposes this to stereotypical notions of an Asian “model minority."

Another problem – given that the real focus of the book is on a consumer-driven model of education -- is that many of their discussions assume a more or less one-to-one relationship between tuition dollars and university spending on a variety of things that, they rightly argue, have nothing, or little, to do with the classroom. Interestingly, this mirrors the current Republican position on the national deficit, as if the national deficit and social programs have a direct relationship to each other that is separable from tax policy and military spending.

Without a more nuanced discussion of why university budgets operate the way they do, what student needs are, how services support classrooms, what drives the perceived need for administrative staff (particularly in student services), false assumptions about lavish spending on unnecessary frills leap out. For example, when they cite the high cost of scientific research, Hacker and Dreifus don’t make it clear that although the money for research is often frontloaded by universities, scientists are expected to earn it back in the form of grants (many of which are corporate) – and that not infrequently, patents from their work and overhead extracted from grants go back into the university’s coffers as profit. As a second example, many faculty members would agree that management is top-heavy and overpaid: but who exactly is going to handle the 10,000 + applications received at every liberal arts school? Who will support the mandate to provide accommodation for the disabled? Who will raise the private and foundation dollars to replace lost federal and state dollars? And who will manage the infinitely more complex budgets that result? While it appears that numerous faculty were interviewed for this book, it is rare that we hear from an administrator, except when s/he is doing something fabulous, like refusing a salary over 400 K.

Although Dreifus and Hacker both teach, they don’t dig very deeply into a variety of other reasons that higher education, particularly public colleges and universities, have become so much more expensive, and so much less invested in the liberal arts. The most important of these would be the end of the Cold War, which slashed funding for a variety of fields that were critical to the arts and social sciences, from Anthropology to Russian. Twenty years of other federal cuts to universities followed, cuts that have also been made by state legislatures even in the most flush economic times. At the same time, the same legislatures, and their State Boards of Regents, have amped up and failed to supervise lavish D-I sports programs that have a use ‘em and lose ‘em attitude toward students. For example, the New Jersey State Legislature just cut Rutgers University’s budget by 15% -- having authorized in the past decade the creation of a multi-million dollar football program, with a new stadium. As another example when, in 2009, Connecticut basketball coach Jim Calhoun publicly gave Governor Jody Rell the finger in response to her request that he accept a 10% cut in his multi-million dollar salary like every other state worker, what politician – the governor included -- demanded that he accept the cut?

Those who follow Margret Soltan's University Diaries will be glad to know there is a whole chapter on why big-time college sports are a waste of money, but this chapter also misses crucial details. For example, Dreifus and Hacker never mention that athletics at many public schools are partly funded by a mandatory “student activity fee,” which every student must pay even if s/he is working 40 hours a week to finance her education and would never dream of going to a football game. They also do not mention that there are viable ways to keep a sport competitive and fun without tremendous expense to others: the club sport model, on which the school contributes a token amount and the athletes raise the money themselves. Or that to some of us, commitment to athletic excellence is a sign of character and often correlates with academic achievement, particularly in women.

Perhaps my greatest disappointment with Higher Education is that the authors are over the top disparaging about the work of most faculty, much as the collapse of the auto industry is often blamed on the greediness of auto workers, rather than the failures of management. This is also a place where collapsing all schools great and small, public and private, truly undermines their argument because their targets are salaries and research. Worse, it is faculty who – in many ways – need to be rallied to produce change, and the book does its best to alienate them. Hacker and Dreifus offering little, or selective, explanations for the following assertions:

Faculty members are, by and large, elitist and selfish, consumed with their research, and uninterested in their students. While Dreifus and Hacker offer a few good examples of faculty who are devoted teachers, the book emphasizes that indifference to students is the state of play. While Zenith didn’t make it into the “Golden Dozen” (thank God), I have to tell you – we are not that different from Amherst and Williams, who did, and the vast majority of us who work at small colleges care deeply about our teaching and our students. Some of us stay in our jobs despite our discomfort with the high cost of private colleges because our teaching is nurtured, rewarded and encouraged there. We don’t all agree on what “good teaching” is, it’s true – but on the other hand, neither do the authors. At the beginning of the book, they chastise faculty for not making contact with their students; towards the end they seem to think distance learning from adjuncts is a pretty good solution to ameliorating high tuitions. So which is it that we strive for, guys -- the magical relationship with the prof or the magical and thrifty relationship with a grader and a video monitor?

Faculty members are overpaid. This, I would have to say, stung, particularly in a year where I received a raise far below COLA, after having received no raise the year before because of the recession. Where Dreifus and Hacker got the idea that “education is a public service job,” or that faculty are all prancing around in designer clothes paid for with hard-earned tuition dollars, I don’t know. When they count the hours we “work” they count classroom hours: not the time planning classes, meeting with students, keeping up with our fields, writing lectures, grading papers (no, most of us do not have assistants who do this) planning and running majors, chairing departments – the list goes on. While there are a vast number of adjuncts who are -- as Carey Nelson the original Tenured Radical, would say – working for food, I don’t think $100,000 a year is too much to pay someone after ten years of education, eight years of probationary service, and between five and ten years at the associate ranks. And, although this is the salary that is cited over and over, the fact is that the vast number of full-time, tenured or tenure-track faculty make well below 100K. Gaps at rank at the same institution, and even within the same department, can be enormous. On what basis would our salaries be decided? That isn’t clear. And why should education professionals at the peak of their career be working at a wage that might otherwise be earned by a social worker, priest or Teach for America trainee?

Scholarly research is unnecessary. Hence, sabbatical and research funding is unnecessary (the sarcastic crack about spending a year that the bulk of us spend writing and doing research in Tuscany “recharging” was just nasty.) Where advanced knowledge in the humanities and social sciences is supposed to come from, who will support it if universities don’t, or what we will actually have to teach undergraduates twenty years from now if everyone with a Ph.D. stops doing research and writing, is not clear. The vast majority of us can’t get a commercial publisher to give us the time of day, so big advances like Higher Education got are out as a source of funding. Dreifus and Hacker’s suggestion -- that people interested in research should be at think tanks instead of teaching in a university, or that they can use their “three-day weekends” for their scholarship is, frankly, just thoughtless.

Faculties neglect the teaching of basic knowledge, teaching specialized courses out of their research so that they won’t have to work hard. It is simply not a fact that a departmental curriculum that offers numerous specialized courses is invariably neglecting its responsibility to core knowledges, offering students a variety of trivia instead that give them no clear view of the field. The authors do not even come close to proving that it is, or that students find this to be a problem. Two of the oddest critiques in this vein were the assertion that in an introductory English class students ought not to be asked to read a little Foucault (theory, in general, is perceived here as extraneous to the needs of an undergraduate); and the assertion that if one Chemistry class is required of an undergraduate, it should be a survey of the field – not the introduction that might lead students into the major.

I found these strange because both are highly arguable and other points of view are not articulated. Like him or not, Foucault changed the field of literature, and learning to read theory is a skill, just as calculus is, that is useful to pursuing a variety of majors. And as for Chemistry – most of us non-scientists would say just the opposite: make students take a real science course that does what other introductory courses are supposed to do, which is give a student entrée to a major. Don’t have them take one of those B$ “science for poets” courses that they know perfectly well is to “satisfy a requirement” and “make them well-rounded” – not to challenge or stimulate them. Students can see through this kind of curricular window-dressing in a second.

Because the book is so broad brush, the question Dreifus and Hacker never ask is: what would be a fundamental set of values to re-organize higher education around? How can we make it affordable? How can we restore the "public" in public education? Why does it matter to have private and religious schools in the mix, and what are we willing to do as a society to support that? What are curricular models that students and faculty, together, find powerful – and why? Why have the choices in higher education narrowed so dramatically in the past twenty years, and why have so many progressive colleges become so conventional?

And what would a greater national commitment to higher education look like that actually put the interests of students first?

*This riffs off of a famous, and probably apocryphal, exchange that is said to have occurred between between Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein on Stein's deathbed in 1946.

Day 1, The Professor: A Conversation With Historiann About Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings

Several weeks ago we at Tenured Radical received an email from Historiann, who was reading Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings (HarperCollins, 2010.) She notified us that this book -- a combination of memoir and cultural criticism -- was right up our alley. Several days later, when this slim volume by a Stanford English professor I have long admired had arrived by three-day shipping (and all household activities had been put on hold indefinitely as we went on a binge of reading and downloading Art Pepper albums), Tenured Radical and Historiann agreed that a blog-to-blog conversation was in order.

This is the first of three posts taken from that conversation, which was conducted over email and then edited down. Day 2 will appear tomorrow at Historiann, and then you will want to return to here for the final post on Day 3 (Thursday, July 22). Stay tuned to Comrade PhysioProf, who also got hooked by this collection and will be chiming in with his own essay during our three-day special event.

Readers may also wish to check out interviews with Castle at largehearted boy and Salon; reviews at the Book and Harper's; and Castle's own blog, Fevered Brain Productions, where she posts her art.

Tenured Radical: OK, Historiann, here goes. Much as I want to cut straight to the essay about The Professor Herself, I think we owe our readers a little introduction to Terry Castle. I have been a fan since one of her articles, "The Marie Antoinette Obsession" (Representations 38, Spring 1992) showed up in a pile of submissions for the Berkshire Conference article prize. For people who haven't read it, the article is both historical and literary, and concerns a fin de siecle phenomenon in which Victorian women wrote vivid accounts about imagined relationships with Marie Antoinette's spirit. One woman had a fantasy about having been the doomed Queen's lover in a past life; another pair of women "encountered" her while they were touring Le Petit Trianon. The stories, which overlapped with the emergence of homosexuality and the definition of lesbianism as a female sexual category, became a recurring phenomenon in a very narrow time frame when sexology had emerged but was not yet dominant. In other words, Marie Antoinette encounters were occurring at an intellectual/cultural moment that followed the Oscar Wilde trial in which the idea of "homosexuality"carried legal and social stigma but the idea of sex between women did not, nor was lesbianism more generally understood as a scientific description for women who loved each other. Since it was widely rumored that Marie Antoinette had had affairs with women (it was one of the charges at her trial, along with the accusation she had committed incest with the Dauphin), she became a tragic figure into which late nineteenth century women inserted fantasies about "who they were." I remember thinking that this was one of the most intelligent and imaginative articles I read that year, and I wondered, who is this person?

But I never bothered to find out until you suggested I read this new book, The Professor and Other Writings, a collection of essays that are pleassantly un-academic, but equally imaginative, intelligent, creative and quirky. And of course, you were exactly right when you said that Terry Castle is a blogger manque. Who knew the Stanford English Department harbored someone like us?

Historiann: Who, indeed. At first, her essays seemed rather discursive and not terribly argument driven, which is what made me think that they were written in more of a bloggy fashion than in traditional essay form. But, as on blogs that mix the personal and the quotidian with the professional and the profound, it works for her. For example, in "My Heroin Christmas," she explores her fascination with jazz musician Art Pepper by listening compulsively to his recordings on a DVD walkman and reading his semi-pornographic 1979 autobiography, Straight Life while visiting her mother over the holidays. (She calls Straight Life "the greatest book I've ever read. . . It knocked my former pick, Clarissa, right out of first place. As Art himself might say, my joint is getting big just thinking about it," 42. That was a pretty clever bit of foreshadowing there--pay attention!)

Towards the beginning of the essay, she notes that she's staying in a room in her mother's house that used to belong to "Jeff." Jeff? When I first read that, I thought, "how odd--or even sloppy--to mention a character who hasn't yet been introduced to us." But over the course of the essay in which she explores Pepper's outrageous, reckless life, Castle makes it clear why she is thinking and writing about Jeff and his role in her troubled family life. At the end of the essay, it makes sense that she riffs off of Pepper's music and autobiography in exploring the family life she lived as the child of divorce whose parents both remarried and introduced stepchildren into the family.

I also really enjoyed "Sicily Diary," a hilarious description of a holiday with her girlfriend in 2004 in which she memorably sees the Capuchin catacombs full of mummified corpses, picks up a stomach bug, and feels conspicuously middle-aged and Anglophone. Here's a sample: "Like a fool I kept trying to eat that night: had some tortellini with Maalox for supper, washed down by a large bicchierri of orange flavored Metamucil, the healthful fiber supplement B. [her girlfriend] had brought with us from California. Tottering around Lipari town that evening--everyone else in thongs and mini-shorts and see-through beach wraps--we looked pale and Victorian and ridiculously out of place. Lady Hester Stanhope and her Special Friend. Why hadn't we gone to Lesbos instead?" Another memorably funny passage inspired by her new dachshund pup, Wally: "Though only eight months old, Wally is as slutty and insouciant as Private Lyndie England. All she needs is a dangling cigarette and a tiny pair of four-legged camouflage pants," 84.

"Desperately Seeking Susan" is one of the two essays that has received the most attention in this collection, and anybody over the age of 35 will probably flip to this one first, because it recounts Castle's sort-of friendship with Susan Sontag, a public intellectual of great interest to many girls or young women who ever dreamed of living in New York and having people listen to them and take them very, very seriously. Castle got acquainted with Sontag when Sontag sent Castle a fan letter (really!) and then had a stint as a writer-in-residence at Stanford. But, being friends with Susan Sontag sounds like a lot of work and a lot of self-repression, because like a lot of smarty-pants people (regardless of celebrity, but magnified by it undoubtedly), Sontag sounds like she was mostly a condescending pain-in-the-a$$. Castle tells several stories of how she's reminded clearly and in no uncertain terms that she's not in with the kool kidz in New York: "I was never quite sure what she wanted. And besides, whatever that was, after a while she stopped wanting it. I visited her several times in New York City and even got invited to the London Terrace penthouse to see the famous book collection. (Of course, Terry, mine is the greatest library in private hands in the world.)," 98.

Who talks like that? Have you ever had a friend who repeatedly called you by your first name like that? I have, and I find it terribly condescending, as though I might forget my own name or my place (subordinate, always!) in the relationship.

Tenured Radical: Not exactly. But I do think it is a not uncommon experience for popular, non-academic writers to cling to academics with a combination of lust and loathing. And really famous people can be dramatically insecure - often all those dinner parties, fans and bombast are about bolstering their own egos. The public intellectual and the academic can be a perfect combination made in hell, if you think about it. They don’t have the credentials, and we do; we don’t have the audience we crave and they do. So it’s this nasty little circle of envy and dependence, where we are pretty much always the supplicants – except, as in the Sontag case, where the playing field was initially leveled because Sontag was out of her element during the Stanford fellowship and it triggered all her insecurities. I’m guessing that glomming onto Castle was her way of reassuring her self that she was still "Susan Sontag." She needed someone to perform in front of who also knew the ropes and customs of academia.

Historiann: Great point. There’s a similar kind of envy and loathing that characterizes the relationship between scholars and journalists in particular. They hate it that we have tenure, but we don’t have the audience that they do. (At least off-blog!)

(To Be Continued Tomorrow at Historiann.)

Are We All Really Alike? The Strange Marketplace of Louis Menand

Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010). 174 pp., index, 24.95 hardcover.

I realize that I am a little late to the party here. But let me just say – whether you like Louis Menand or not, whether you think that folks who spend most of their lives in a very comfy chair at Harvard are better qualified to talk about education or not – people like Louis Menand matter and it is best to keep up with them. I guarantee you that you will be at a meeting with your president, provost or dean, and something is going to come out if his or her mouth at some point, and you are going to think: “Where the frack did that come from?” Your confusion will not be resolved either -- unless you read this book.

Don't worry. It's short. In fewer than two hundred pages, Menand discusses what he considers to be the four central questions for higher education in the United States that we were left with at end of the twentieth century: general education curricula and the difficulties of implementing them; the crisis of legitimacy in the humanities; the meaning of conversations about interdisciplinarity; and the question of why “professors all have the same politics.” (16)

Menand is one of those people who knows a lot about some things and not so much about others, and speaks about both in the same authoritative tone. This can be annoying, but you have to separate out your annoyance about the things he is bloviating about from the ideas that are truly thought provoking. I liked the first section of the book best, in which Menand discusses the origins of liberal education and why general education curriculums were devised in the first place as a reform and a response to the rise of professional education. The answer to this question is worth knowing, since it explains a lot about why discussions about great books and curricular requirements come up in the first place, why they are so often perceived as a corrective to cultural decline, and why they are so contentious. Gen eds emerged at moments where intellectuals were most concerned about the relationship of elite institutions to citizenship (Columbia devised its program in 1919; Harvard produced its in 1945.) “A college’s general education curriculum, what the faculty chooses to require of everyone,” Menand argues, “Is a reflection of its overall educational philosophy, even when the faculty chooses to require nothing.” Columbia’s not-so-hidden agenda, Menand claims, appears to have been anxiety over the integration of the large numbers of Jews and other first-generation Americans matriculating at the university: the Great Books curriculum, they hoped, could serve as a mini-melting pot. (23,35)

Since I teach at a college that has no requirements (we have “expectations” that students will take six courses across the three “divisions,” humanities, social sciences and hard science.) I’ll come back to this in my next post, but Menand’s statement that the choice to require nothing is a choice impressed me enormously. I think he is right about this, I think it is intellectually lazy not to have a core curriculum of some kind, and I think it has consequences for how our students perceive the work of attaining a B.A..

One of the curious features of the book is that Menand’s investment in the university as an engine of progress badly skews his view of the recent history of higher education and the enormous changes that resulted from putting an end to gender and race segregation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In Menand’s view, bringing women and people of color into elite institutions – as students and as faculty was a natural outcome of a late Cold War market imperative to broaden the talent pool. Not only does this sever the diversification of the university from post-war social movements almost entirely, it attributes the entrance of women and people of color into the university as a direct consequence of the National Defense Education Act, a position for which he offers absolutely no evidence. We have women in formerly male elite institutions because some men fought other men about it quite bitterly; we have women's studies programs because of feminism, not because university presidents thought they were a buttress to democracy; and we have equal access because laws were passed and lawsuits were filed. “If the nation seeks to maximize its talent pool in the name of greater national security or greater economic productivity or both,” Menand argues, “It will not wish to limit entrants to that pool on the basis of considerations extraneous to aptitude, such as gender, family income, and skin color.” (73) Can we apply this model to the admission of Africa-Americans to the University of North Carolina? I think not.

Personally, I think Menand's model is a far better description of the Soviet Union in the 1920s than the post-war United States, and I wonder why Skip Gates – the editor of the series in which this book is published – did not ask him to rethink this chapter. It is a historical fact that it took numerous lawsuits to desegregate higher education by race and gender. Until 1972 it was absolutely legal to discriminate against women applicants to law school on the basis of their gender; and it took the enforcement of Title IX during the Ford and Carter administrations to ensure that once women arrived at university they had equal access to what was offered.

Even more peculiarly, Menand argues that the inclusion of these new bodies and the scholarly work they did had no real impact on the academy or on the liberal arts. If you believe that people like Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Gayatri Spivak, Joan Scott, Paul Gilroy and Lisa Lowe have transformed intellectual thought, think again. It’s not that Menand thinks their work isn’t important; it’s just that he doesn’t think it is terribly original. In his view, these lines of thought have already been fully established by (white, male) scholars like Paul de Man, Thomas Kuhn, Hayden White, Clifford Geertz and Richard Rorty. (82, 84)

Which gets to a critical, bizarre and perhaps the least well informed, part of this little book: that the interdisciplinarity claimed by post-colonial, queer, critical race and feminist studies isn’t really methodologically based. Rather, it is a kind of public relations strategy to establish the reputations of individual scholars by being ornery and by posturing a lot about how passé discipline is. These fields are interdisciplinary at all, he argues: they are only anti-disciplinary. (85) How do we know this? Because their faculty all hold tenure in disciplines. Furthermore, investment in interdisciplinarity is not really intellectual, Menand argues: it’s all about status anxiety, and the fear that college professors have that they have ceased to be relevant anywhere but among other disciplinary scholars. It stems from the need “to feel we are in a real fight…with the forces that make and remake the world most human beings live in,” Menand notes, and we who are interdisciplinary displace our desire for a “real fight” onto institutions that are ideologically tilted towards discipline. “The institution is not inherently a friend to innovation and transgression and creativity,” he says, and you can nearly feel the friendly pat on your shoulder. “But it is not inherently an enemy, either. Interdisciplinarity is an administrative name for an anxiety and a hope that are personal.” (125)

One wonders exactly how familiar Menand is with the world of interdisciplinary thought, since the following chapter – “Interdisciplinarity and Anxiety” – is muddled in a way that is uncharacteristic of the rest of the book and uncharacteristic of Menand’s writing in general. One is constantly reading along and having things jump out – “you cannot take a course in the law (apart from legal history) outside a law school” (105) – and thinking, Well that’s actually not true. Further along, he suggests that the appeal of interdisciplinarity “is that it will smooth out the differences between the empirical and the hermeneutic” by getting two scholars that represent these forms of thought “in the same room together.” (118)

The chapter is full of tautologies that make you really glad that Louis Menand is not your dean, and that he is safely lodged at Harvard where he can do little harm to others. For example, try htis idea on for size:

“Interdisciplinarity is not something different from disciplinarity. It is the ratification of the logic of disciplinarity. In practice, it actually tends to rigidify disciplinary paradigms. A typical interdisciplinary situation might bring together, in a classroom, a literature professor and an anthropologist….This methodological contrast is regarded as the intellectual as, in fact, the intellectual and pedagogical takeaway of the collaboration.” (119)

Well, no. That is in fact, exactly wrong. What Menand is describing is a multi-disciplinary, rather than an interdisciplinary, paradigm, in which the point is to engage the object of study from multiple perspectives, rather than to reconsider the nature of its objectness altogether. Twenty-first century interdisciplinarity means, in short, putting the empirical and the hermeneutic, or any two paradigms, together in the same brain, not in the same classroom. Or try this idea:

“Professors are still trained in one national literature or artistic medium or another.” (120) Again, this is just wrong. There are interdisciplinary Ph.D.s, and there would be more of them if scholars were not required to adhere to disciplinary appointments in the hiring process....Until professors are produced in a different way, the structure of academic knowledge production and dissemination is unlikely to change significantly.” (121) This is precisely bass-ackwards: as those of us working on the ground in interdisciplinary programs know, until faculty are widely hired with full appointments in interdisciplinary programs, graduate students will be trained conservatively and with an eye to competence in a discipline, because otherwise no one will hire them. Similarly, the tenuous hold interdisciplinary fields like American studies, women’s studies, queer studies and critical race studies have in the academy has directly to do with university administrations being unwilling to challenge the influence of departments.

In the final chapter, “Why Do All College Professors Think Alike?” Menand muses about a study done by Neil Gross and Solon Simmons, in which these scholars "discovered" that the vast majority of college professors really are registered Democrats, and really are liberal, or at least centrist. Shockingly, “the more elite the institution, the less likely the professors there are to be left wing,” and the faculty at SLACs are more likely to be left wing than faculty at research universities. (135) Except for pointing out the obvious, which is that just because people belong to the same political party doesn’t mean they actually think alike about much (think Strom Thurmond and Hubert Humphrey, circa 1948; or Barack Obama and Dennis Kucinish, circa 2010), I’m going to leave this one alone – except to say that actually, in denying that there is conformity in the academy, Menand’s evidence tends to suggest, falsely, that there is. Both things can, in fact, be true: that faculty tend to hew to certain kinds of truisms (for example, that “disciplinary scholarship” is rigorous and pioneering, and “interdisciplinary scholarship” is emotional an anxiety-ridden); they can all be registered in the same party; and they can simultaneously committed to a kind of radical individualism that means they can rarely agree on anything, much less a set of political ideas or intellectual approaches to those ideas.

Which brings me back to the question of general education, the thing that I wish Menand had stuck more tightly to, because it isn’t clear to me that relinquishing a core curriculum has been a good thing for American higher education. But this topic deserves a post of its own.

To Be Continued…..

Today's Assigned Reading: Ayn Rand, Tony Judt and Dean Dad

I spent the first part of the morning absorbed in Jennifer Burns' Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right (Oxford: 2009). I always thought there were two kinds of people: those who were simply mad about Rand, and others (like me) who couldn't make it through the first fifty pages of her histrionic prose and cheesy philosophizing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong (as one usually is when, as on Facebook, there appear to be only two choices: "Like" and "Dislike.") There are also those who are neither Rand worshippers or Rand avoiders, but who are just smart, like Jennifer Burns. For all the books that have been published lately about the rise of conservatism in the post-World War II United States, I would have to say Goddess of the Market is the most unusual, in that it teases apart the different philosophical strands of conservatism and libertarianism, while also connecting them to political movements and figures that themselves deserve more attention: Wendell Willkie, for example. Burns also does a terrific job of knitting Rand's philosophy of individualism into a wider intellectual world that preceded the resurgence of conservatism as a governing philosophy in the 1960s. Another bonus is that I have always felt a little guilty for never reading Rand -- and now I can once again back-burner her, but all the better informed by Burns' account. It's a win-win.

In other reading news, check out Tony Judt's column in today's New York Times, "Israel Without Cliches." I've been following Judt's memoir pieces in the New York Review of Books, which should be mandatory reading for young historians, particularly since they detail the many complex and non-academic experiences Judt has brought to his life of scholarship. They are beautifully written; and they not-so-unsubtly illustrate what it means to be a cosmopolitan intellectual. Like many feminists, I sometimes begin to foam at the mouth at Judt's uninformed (but not unopinionated)) views on the place of women in the academy (prone -- see "Girls! Girls! Girls!" April 8 2010), and everything that modern American Studies is built around ( "Edge People", March 25 2010). In "Edge People," these two targets of condescension merge. if female graduate students are most notable as fodder for sex and marriage (which makes it all better), provided almost solely for the benefit of distinguished male faculty on the loose in middle age, we learn that "the shortcoming" of "para-academic programs" like "'gender studies,' 'women’s studies,' 'Asian-Pacific-American studies,' and dozens of others" (scare quotes around these fields are his)

is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves —thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine. All too frequently, such programs are job-creation schemes for their incumbents, and outside interest is actively discouraged. Blacks study blacks, gays study gays, and so forth.

What is it that Judt writes about again -- uh, whites? Europeans? Men? Talk about a job creation scheme that has really influenced the academy. Aren't you glad he wasn't your dean? Nevertheless, despite occasionally wanting to reach through the page and shake him for using his perch to say stupid and ill-informed things about fields -- and people -- he clearly knows nothing about, I am enjoying this series enormously. The New York Times piece,on the role of anti-Semitism in public discussions of Israel, displays Judt at his most lucid in dealing with a difficult problem that can have otherwise reasonable people screaming at each other in seconds.

In other writing news, Dean Dad elaborates on my post about voluntary retirement in academia here.

Crossposted at Cliopatria.