Monthly Archives: December 2012

2012 in Review

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It’s the end of a long year, and everyone’s doing some reflecting. As usual, it’s nice to take a look at how this blog has fared in the past year and to reminisce about its author.

The past year has been pretty crazy here at the Backslash blog. This humble wordpress blog saw almost five times as much traffic as the year before, and has gained a wonderful group of readers and followers. I have yet to fully come to grips with that fact, but I continue to try as you continue to keep reading. The upsurge in readership was predominantly due to what I actually thought was a mediocre post – “Catching Joseph Kony” – in response to the Kony 2012 phenomenon. There are actually two other LRA-related pieces I wrote that I am happier with – a history of peace and conflict and a look back on Invisible Children’s work. That they didn’t see much light is a result of bad timing as much as it is the result of how damn long they are.

Other popular posts this year include a brief look at Japanese internment in Arizona, the progressive history of Arizona’s constitution, and my contributions to the annual Caine Prize discussions. My favorite rant was probably a chance to direct my anger at a state legislator I dislike and defend lower tuition, but it’s unnerving how often people get to it by doing a web search for “students are irresponsible.” No doubt, the writing on this blog has improved primarily because of what I read – and I’ll continue to relay that through the weekend reading feature.

I spent a lot of this year in a lost state, but I’m gradually getting my footing. After spending most of 2011 doing something that I loved (teaching) that was unsustainable (read: unpaid), I started this year back in a public high school – a place I consider my domain – and ended up leaving that path. While that’s a somber fact for me, I’m happy to be where I am now, immersed in academia once again. The people here at Yale have taught me a lot just in these few months, and I’m sure they will continue to do the same. My wife has helped make the transition bearable, and technology has allowed my friends to keep me company and to make me want to improve my academic work as well as my blog-writing. Y’all rock, and I hope you’ll stick around for next year.

Weekend Reading

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Here it is, folks! The last weekend reading of the year!

In lean production, however, the goal isn’t to continuously develop workers’ skills or even improve the quality of their products. What’s continuously improved is the production process itself, and the metric for measuring improvement is efficiency.

Of course, as labor educator Charley Richardson has pointed out, efficiency is not an absolute concept, but is socially defined. Richardson notes, “Coffee breaks, production limits and staffing levels are all designed to improve the production process from a worker perspective and are all inefficiencies from a management perspective.” In a lean workplace, continuous improvement means the elimination of whatever makes the work process humane and tolerable in order to increase production numbers.

Ultimately, both the worker and the product are of minimal importance. Perfecting the labor process by maximizing efficiency, regardless of the collateral damage to worker or product, is the goal. In lean schools, teaching, learning, and student growth become secondary.

Silicon Valley’s countercultural vibe has long masked its Wall Street-style labor discipline: a heavy emphasis on smartness, flexibility, and willingness to work more grueling hours than the guy next to you. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has even confessed to “sneaking” out of the office to have dinner with her family so as not to run afoul of overwrought office cultures. So intense is the work expectation that the biography of late Apple CEO Steve Jobs has become a sort of Bible for the aspiringly sleep-deprived…

…this is an impressive absorption of female biology into a reinforcement of the work ethic. Everyone knows that men can work all the time by ignoring their families. But women give birth. They’re natural nurturers. What if they can perform both roles and somehow center motherhood and CEOship? She becomes a superworker, “balancing” two loads too heavy to be borne in any proportion. Women insist that they can “do it all” so as not to appear disadvantaged in comparison to their male colleagues; this scrabbling not to be left behind merely legitimizes the insane work ethic. Women’s desire to break the glass ceiling right under Jobs’s feet — Mayer has referred to him as one of her heroes on Twitter — reinforces the importance of a brutal, dehumanizing schedule. Women can do that too. Only more.

Rejecting the University

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Higher education is in a rocky place, you may have heard. More and more, colleges are placing the burden of cost on their students, raising tuition in astronomical amounts. Increasingly, public colleges are recruiting out-of-state students (who pay higher tuition), abandoning their mandate to educate the citizens of their state at low cost. Departments are absorbing each other – or closing completely – and new PhDs are becoming adjuncts rather than tenured, all while new vice presidents are hired and massive buildings are erected. Colleges are increasingly exclusive and costly, and they are continuing to move away from the purpose of educating young minds.

In the 2006 film Accepted, Bartelby Gaines, a high school graduate who failed to get into eight colleges, decides to start his own fake college to fool his parents. An entrepreneur by nature, he takes the ruse all the way: renting out an abandoned psychiatric hospital to serve as a college facade. The plan blows up as other people apply and end up enrolling in the institution that Gaines decides to run. There are two questions worth exploring when watching this movie: what problems does the film have with academia? And what does it really take to run a college?

Reject rejection – and all the exclusivity, cost, and waste that it symbolizes.

When Bartleby tells his parents he didn’t get into any colleges, he spins it by telling them that it is fiscally irresponsible for him to go to college. “We could spend $80,000 over the next four years, or I could make $80,000 over the next four years.” And it’s true – college is expensive and the cost is difficult to bear for many. Regardless, his parents are irate. “Society has rules,” his father argues, “first rule is you go to college. If you want to have a happy, successful life, you go to college. If you want to be somebody, you go to college. If you want to fit in, you go to college.” College is a social need above all else.

When Bartleby hatches the plan to mail himself a fake admissions letter – to the South Harmon Institute of Technology – he is joined by a cast of conspirators who help him renovate the hospital in preparation for his parents’ visit to school. What ensues is a glimpse into what the film accuses academia of doing wrong – and what the film views as education’s purpose.

When the Gaines family meets with the Dean of the college, a former professor recently fired from a job at the mall, he lambastes the entire notion of higher education. “A lot of people say that college is the time when young men and women expand the way that they look at their world, when they open their minds to new ideas and experiences, and when they begin that long journey from the innocence of youth to the responsibilities of adulthood. Now isn’t that a load of horseshit?”  When pushed on the view, he describes the school’s philosophy: “We throw a lot of fancy words in front of these kids, in order to attract them to go to this school, in the belief that they’re going to have a better life. And we all know that all we’re doing is breeding a whole new generation of buyers and sellers,  pimps and whores, and indoctrinating them into a lifelong hell of debt and indecision.” When the family is left speechless, he continues: “Do I have to spoon-feed it to you? There’s only one reason that kids want to go to school: to get a good job. To get a good job with a great starting salary.”

The uncomfortable silence is, naturally, broken by mom’s comment that it is “so refreshing to hear someone approach education so rationally.”

There’s a rejection of college’s enlightening promise, seeing the process of higher education as merely feeding capitalism.  And the parents gobble it up because that’s how more and more people are viewing education now.  The learning isn’t important, it’s the degree that will give you a well-paying job. It echoes all the parents that harp on their English-major sons and Philosophy-major daughters and praise the niece that’s pre-med or the neighbor’s kid that’s getting an MBA. It’s all around us, and it’s not just our families feeding it to us. Our school administrations and our politicians agree. More and more, university administrators are advocating for more “professional” degrees rather than traditional academic ones. When Florida Governor Rick Scott advocated shifting state funds from humanities and social sciences towards science and technology, he referenced anthropology majors when he argued, “we don’t need them here.” This mentality is everywhere. Even South Harmon’s new fake dean spouts it to degree-hungry parents.

How strange, then, that South Harmon Institute of Technology seemingly rejects the shit out of this notion. When faced with over a hundred newly accepted students later that day, Bartleby chooses not to own up to his lie. Standing before the new students, he bemoans college exclusivity and decries “isn’t it time you’re said ‘yes’ to?” and proceeds to let everyone into his fake college. In the very next scene the President of nearby Harmon College, the region’s elite academy, explains that selectivity and exclusivity are integral to a school’s stature.  While this is traditionally a reference to the admissions process, the President lays out his plan for a physical manifestation of this exclusion: a massive, gentrifying gateway “to keep knowledge in, and ignorance out.” Meanwhile, in order to craft a plan, Bartleby pays a visit to Harmon College to figure out what higher education is supposed to be. The ensuing montage is one of highly structured, stifling curricula, a lack of individuality in massive classrooms, and really goal-oriented, grade-driven students.

Despite his dean’s argument that college was about job-readiness, Bartleby decides to ask the new students what they want to learn. “All of our lives we’ve been told what to learn, well today the tide’s going to turn because today – we’re asking the customer.” This leads to the creation of a whiteboard covered in course ideas, and each student’s tuition is spent predominantly on those subjects. When the love-interest visits, she quickly asks Bartleby, “there aren’t any tests or required reading or any of that nonsense?”

But are tests and required reading really the problem?  When Bartleby tries to steer away from traditional higher education, it results in a broad curriculum taught by the students that relies on experiences rather than grades. No required Ancient Roman history class when you want to be a photographer, no spillover class in front of a speaker, and no recording of every word in case it’s on the test. But higher education was never supposed to be these things anyways. While a basic curriculum should provide some foundation for learning, the stifling major maps of many of today’s colleges are a way of streamlining students to make everything easier for administration. Massive class sizes save school’s money and grading systems quicken the evaluation process. And on top of all of this, the exclusivity of some universities is a part of why they are so expensive. All of this is a result of the commodification of education. It’s this type of education is the kind that treats students as customers.

So when the people at Harmon out Bartleby as a fraud, the crew decides to fight for accreditation  The state defines a college as “a body of people with a shared common purpose of a higher education,” and at the hearing, the board states that a college must have a facility, a curriculum, and a faculty. The facility comes in the form of a mental hospital with a skating ramp, the curriculum is wheeled out in whiteboard-form, and the students identify themselves as faculty (kinda like, you know, grad students).  Bartleby issues a monologue decrying college traditions of hazing outcasts, driving students crazy with stress, and robbing students of creativity. “You don’t need teachers or a classroom to learn,” he argues, “just people with the desire to better themselves.”

When the board votes to allow the school to operate on an experimental basis, the chairman states that “the true purpose of education is to stimulate the creativity and the passions of the student body.”  But what hope does South Harmon have?

South Harmon eschews everything from a proper gymnasium to tenured faculty in establishing its by-the-student-for-the-student model. It succeeds in placing decision-making with those most concerned with the education at hand – the students and the faculty. With students paying into the system with the hopes of learning something in order to better their lives, they ought to have a say in what they do in school. South Harmon makes good on this promise, using tuition funds primarily on the education of students. Today’s universities spend that same money on construction, marketing, losing $23 billion in investments – anything but teaching. Tuition dollars need to go towards education, and at South Harmon they do. At local rival Harmon College, the money is spent on gentrifying the neighborhood for an arch named after the President, by the President.

South Harmon also lacks grades completely. When visiting Harmon, Bartleby saw sleep-deprived students mumbling mnemonics and frantically scribbling down everything the professor says. Note-taking and memory strategies can help you learn, of course, but test-oriented learning isn’t learning at all. Today, education at all levels is obsessed with grades – be it standardized testing or many schools’ unspoken policy or not failing students (lest they ruin the school’s stats). But in classes of hundreds of students, grading a multiple choice test is the only way your SOC-101 teacher is going to decide that you passed. In small classes, where there is more attention paid to each student and more intensive learning rather than test-taking, grades aren’t needed. If the class is small enough, you can see who’s learning and you don’t need grades. If the class is small enough, learning will be happening, and you don’t need to fail people. South Harmon’s classes are all small – except a few lectures from the dean that seem more like a speaker series than a course. Small classes with committed faculty and engaged students mean you don’t need grades. Get rid of large class sizes, get rid of grades. Just like we need to get rid of endless spending on non-educational excess.

Another place where Gaines’ model is absolutely right is the complete lack of administration at the school. Administration is – of course – the most absurd part of higher education today. It’s the source of a host of problems we face today, like stringent curricula, tuition hikes, and lack of academic freedom and it’s the embodiment of the bureaucracy of education that we’re dealing with now. Indeed, my undergraduate years were spent at a state university with a team of over a dozen vice presidents, and I’m currently studying at a school with a dozen more. Faculty and students can run schools, and they should. After all, they’re the ones that higher education is meant to serve. Meanwhile, the effects of administrative-heavy colleges is everywhere, be it the monetary cost of administrative bloat, the disasters of appointed governing boards, or the erosion of faculty governance. And South Harmon soundly rejects its very existence.

It’s not a novel concept that institutions of higher education be run efficiently to better use resources for learning and research. Rather than fund administrative bloat, go on urban construction binges, sign deals with board members’ companies, or profit off of research patents, universities should be funding teaching and research for the public good. Universities used to be run predominantly by the faculty – whose primary concern was research and education – not full-time administrators. In the fictional world of Accepted, it took a team of would-be freshmen to build their own fake school in order to have a college not turned into a money-draining all-administrative body that saw teaching as a means to feed capitalism. What will it take for our universities to throw off the yoke of the administration and reclaim the university for those who use it?

Starbucks as Fiction

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Today, a message from Starbucks President and CEO, Howard Shultz, was posted. That message starts like this:

There are moments in our lives when we have an opportunity to ignite tremendous positive change—not just in the lives of the customers and communities we serve every day, but in our country. This was evident in the outpouring of support in the wake of the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary that claimed 26 innocent lives.

And, after citing a tragedy in which a gunman took so many lives, he continues like this:

In the spirit of the Holiday season and the Starbucks tradition of bringing people together, we have a unique opportunity to unite and take action on an incredibly important topic. As many of you know, our elected officials in Washington D.C. have been unable to come together and compromise to solve the tremendously important, time-sensitive issue to fix the national debt. You can learn more about this impending crisis at www.fixthedebt.org.

Rather than be bystanders, we have an opportunity—and I believe a responsibility—to use our company’s scale for good by sending a respectful and optimistic message to our elected officials to come together and reach common ground on this important issue. This week through December 28, partners in our Washington D.C. area stores are writing “Come Together” on customers’ cups.

It’s a small gesture, but the power of small gestures is what Starbucks is about! Imagine the power of our partners and hundreds of thousands of customers each sharing such a simple message, one cup at a time.

This is ridiculous even if you don’t consider the fact that the fiscal cliff is a fake crisis made by politicians, and even if you don’t consider that “fixing the debt” is code for slashing service after service in lieu of raising taxes on rich people – rich people like Howard Shultz. Even if you don’t consider that Fix the Debt, the organization Shultz links to, is run entirely by politicians and corporate executives, and doesn’t care about who is actually affected by austerity policies. Even if you don’t consider the fact that most debt-conscious policies include things like cutting funding to mental health facilities and other social services and not raising taxes on gun purchases or gun manufacturers. Even if you don’t consider that if you’re going to frame your stupid write-notes-on-cups campaign as a response to a shooting, it should at least address things that pertain to the victims. Even if you forget all this and are cracked out on low-wage-blended, fair-trade-marketed coffee, this is ridiculous.

It can’t be real.

Book Recommendations – South African Edition

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So, my online presence has been a bit quiet. Weekend readings and occasional tweets are still outgoing, but not much else. My first semester of grad school has come and gone, and the last few weeks have been spent polishing off two term papers, preparing proposals for my thesis, studying for a language final, and moving Henry James books around at the library. Now that all of that’s done, I wanted to recommend some of the many books I still have stacked on my windowsill.

For a South African history course, I wrote a term paper looking at how anti-Apartheid activists used their own trials as platforms to criticize the government. I concentrated on Nelson Mandela’s trials (when caught in hiding and then in the Rivonia Trial) and Steve Biko’s testimony in the Black Consciousness Trial, but found other examples too. I spent some time looking at court records on microfilm – like an old school historian – but these are a few of the more helpful books on the subject of trials during apartheid:

  • Donald Woods’ Biko is a great book for all things Steve Biko. A journalist and friend of Biko’s, Woods includes lengthy excerpts from Biko’s five-days-long testimony in the Black Consciousness trial which I’ve come to rely on. An alternative to this is Millard Arnold’s complete transcript of the trial, although it’s hard to find.
  • Michael Lobban’s White Man’s Justice, while not specifically addressing my topic, is a really good resource on how the apartheid state used trials to legitimate oppression.
  • Joel Joffe’s The State vs. Nelson Mandela: The Trial That Changed South Africa is a good account of the Rivonia Trial, on which Joffe served as an assistant counsel to the defense. His writing style isn’t the best, and he jumps back and forth from trial transcripts to his own narration without much notice, which can be frustrating if you’re doing research.
  • Mary Benson edited a collection of speeches given by activists in The Sun Will Rise: Statements from the Dock by Southern African Political Prisoners, which includes several statements I used in my paper in addition to other really interesting excerpts.

Another term paper I did was on the symbol of land and territory as a founding myth for South Africa. It was for my first ever sociology course, and I chose to look at South African history and the founding myth that Afrikaners had crafted. I used a lot of articles (by du Toit on the role of Calvinism, Templin on the Great Trek, and Marschall on monuments), but these books came in handy as well:

but nonetheless I’ve found these texts to be really helpful:

  • T. Dunbar Moodie’s The Rise of Afrikanerdom utilizes the sociological concept of a civil religion, and in this book he paints a clear picture of the role of the Boers’ Calvinist religion in their nationalism throughout the early twentieth century.
  • Leonard Thompson’s The Political Mythology of Apartheid examines the concept pretty thoroughly, looking at the history of the Great Trek and its place at the center of Afrikaner nationalism. It does a good job of looking at how this came about and when.
  • Another helpful text is Donald Harman Akenson’s God’s Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster. It compares the prominence of a covenant with God in the narratives of the Afrikaners in South Africa, the Zionists in Israel, and the Protestants in Northern Ireland. It doesn’t say much that Moodie and Thompson don’t already explain, but it’s a great comparative look.
  • The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century by Jennifer Beningfield was a great resource. Required reading for the history course mentioned above, it’s a really innovative look at how apartheid changed the actual landscape of South Africa. For this paper, the chapter on the Voortrekker Monument was essential – the whole book is well-worth a read.

And those are my recommended readings on South Africa. Hopefully someone finds these recommendations helpful. With the end of the semester, you should see more of me over the winter reprieve from school. While I might be done with these papers, I’d love any additions – feel free to comment if you know of other resources on these topics.

Weekend Reading

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And your regularly scheduled reading:

Gun manufacturers have successfully managed to shift virtually all blame for lax gun laws in America onto their lobbyists and their customers. It’s no coincidence that companies like Sig Sauer, Freedom Group and Glock (which also made one of the weapons used in the killings) are privately held. They strive for minimum transparency, and they have achieved it. The NRA, bless its heart, is a front—a perfect little whipping boy designed to weather all of your abuse so that Ron Cohen can drive to and from his office without a reporter shoving a microphone in front of his stupid fucking face. They have taken phrases like “Gun control” and “the Second Amendment” and crafted them into permanent, bulletproof diversions. They’ve done such a good job of shielding themselves that Sig Sauer doesn’t even feel compelled to issue a public statement when one of its weapons is used in a mass tragedy. They don’t have to express their regrets or spew some bullshit about being dedicated to making sure guns are used safely. Higher profile companies have to send out public apologies when they send out a bad tweet. Big Gun does nothing and doesn’t have to. Isn’t that remarkable?

The working class as it existed in Old Left political discourse was a sociologicalcategory, and it often referred to a specific type of wage labor: the industrial proletariat, employed in large-scale factory work. Such workers were thought to be the leading edge of socialist politics not merely because they were exploited by capital, but because they occupied a specific environment that tended to forge a collective identity and to facilitate disruptive mass action: factories in which workers were employed for a long period of time, and where they were massed together each day performing similar, routinized work.

The working class in this specific sociological sense has lost its political centrality both because of structural changes in the economy, and due to the transformation of political consciousness on the Left. Capitalism has increasingly replaced industrial workers with machines, and as a result the economy is more-and-more dominated by culture industry and service employment that is not conducive to fostering solidarity in the way the old factory model was. At the same time, the work of national liberation and feminist movements has forced an acknowledgment that the older conception of the working class implied the centrality of a particular white, male labor aristocracy, rendering invisible both unpaid labor in the household and the role of white supremacy in excluding non-whites from the most privileged sectors of the economy. However much the Old Left liked to portray the “working class” as a universal identity that subsumed particular interests — and as much as contemporary left nostalgics like Walter Benn Michaels might still like to portray it that way—the working class in its sociological sense was always a form of identity politics.

FDR leveled the workplace playing field some with the Wagner Act, for the first time making union security (closed shop) a reality. Labor union power and membership soared, as did wages and benefits; America suddenly had Social Security and unemployment insurance, child labor laws, a minimum wage, five day/40 hour work week, and within a few years, a powerful middle class.

To big business plutocrats, the New Deal labor laws represented a sort of political Holocaust that they never forgot or forgave. They lost their full spectrum political dominance over their workers and over the political and judicial direction of the country, and all that essentially because FDR brought to an end America’s “open shop” culture and empowered unions with “closed shop” union security.

But business vowed that one day it would have its revenge. And that revenge would be “right to work” laws.

Standing with Erik Loomis

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Like a lot of people, when Erik Loomis heard about the massacre in Newtown, he was angry. Angry at the proliferation of guns in America, at the frequency of mass shootings, at the power of the gun lobby of the NRA and weapons manufacturers. In expressing that anger, he stated:

I was heartbroken in the first 20 mass murders. Now I want Wayne LaPierre’s head on a stick.

It’s a common phrase that everyone understands as hyperbole. I want LaPierre to be held responsible too. But the Right has taken the statement literally and is outraged.

Remember, these are the type of people who tend to carry signs that say things like this and this and this and this.

Regardless of the obvious irony, conservatives have formed an all-out push for Loomis’ head on a stick, calling for his ouster from his current position at the University of Rhode Island. It’s absurd that an institution of higher learning would leave a faculty member vulnerable like URI has, choosing to issue an apology rather than defend his right to use rhetorical devices. But since conservatives are forming ranks to call for him to be fired, and his university seems slow to the defense, it deserves to be said: I stand with Loomis, and you should too.

Please go add your name to this post at Crooked Timber in support of Loomis.

Reading on Guns

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In response to Newtown:

Posts Worth Re-Visiting:

What Can We Do?

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Yesterday, in light of recent events, my friend Adam and I engaged in a thorough conversation over what the next step is in changing the national discourse on gun control. The truth is that I have no idea. I figured I’d lead with that before writing this post. I’ve never worked on any gun control issue, and I’m not even that well-read on the issue. But I have a lot of thoughts on it, because it’s something that enters my thoughts pretty often.

When looking at the recent history of gun violence and massacres in the United States, it’s hard to parse out a strategy or narrative that’s deals solely with guns. The perceived importance of guns is tied up with our Constitution’s Second Amendment, and any conversation about preventing such tragic events must include talk of access to, funding for, and reduced stigma of mental healthcare and increased support for victims of domestic violence. And when you talk about political or legal solutions to gun proliferation, you involve the political system, the powerful gun lobby, and the ideologues of the Republican Party along with unequal state laws, a Supreme Court that strikes down bans, and a Democratic Party scared to use its strength.

So, eschewing the question of when it’s right to talk about gun control, I ask: what will be done? We can’t really accept that nothing will be done, even though a lot of us have reluctantly muttered the question “how many more times will this have to happen before we do something about it?” at least a few times in the past week, month, year, or decade. But if we refuse the idea that nothing will be done, if we decide that something will be done, what will that something be?

A relative of mine recently tried to take advantage of some gun sales at a hunting store in Arizona, and the guns had all sold out almost immediately. When my dad asked him why, the relative reiterated the fear that Obama will be banning all guns any day now, so a lot of Republicans are getting them while they can. Nevermind the fact that Obama hasn’t had the gumption to do anything when it comes to gun violence, and has actually helped facilitate the militarizing of a host of countries around the world. What do we do about gun control when people are already hoarding weaponry to face both the apocalypse and the specter of a government crackdown on guns, both of which are completely unfounded?

It will be a long and arduous campaign to shift the cultural mindset. The NRA and similar organizations have always had a tight grip on the lawmakers of this country, and they have also fostered a deep love for guns among the citizenry. The recent radical turn of the Republican Party has only exacerbated this as more and more people feel tied to their right to bear arms. There’s no easy way to reverse this trend, but a long and committed campaign could slowly chip away at the power of firearms.

It is, of course, my dream that I could live in an America where there is either a full gun ban or something close.  But that’s all it is. It’s a dream, and it will remain that way. After all, yesterday’s tragedy, and many gun-related tragedies, was carried out by legal weapons. But there has to be some argument that, if killing sprees and this easy while ostensibly following the law, maybe we should change the law. The fight against gun violence and mass killings needs to start locally, and it needs to start with conversation.

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