Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu.

I don't really want to dwell further on the madness that is the Church of Higher Efficiency's* response to Naomi Schaefer Riley's anti-intellectual blog post dismissing all of Black Studies basically on the grounds that Schaefer Riley does not understand the titles of some dissertations. [background]

But I do want to note Amy Alexander's suggestion that cuts at UC and CSU should be the real target of outrage, as if there couldn't ever at any one time be more than one issue deserving of outrage.

As Gautam Premnath rightly pointed out, it's not as though the two issues are unrelated. "The crisis of public higher ed," Gautam observes, "has its roots in the contempt for scholarship you condone."

Schaefer Riley's MO—"check out these titles; aren't they obviously ridiculous? This entire discipline is clearly worthless!" is a very familiar one. Various mainstream publications trot out the ritual mocking of the MLA program every winter, as if a journalist's inability to understand the titles of talks in a specialized field proved something. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes how such tactics were taken up against (the title of a talk from) her work in her 1993 essay "Queer and Now." Anyone who knows scholarship knows that Sedgwick was a true thinker—careful, erudite, inventive, insightful. But you don't have to know anything to mock a title.

We're used to seeing such unrigorous hit jobs in the mainstream press, because the mainstream press is anti-intellectual. Amy Alexander has been defending the Church of Higher Efficiency's dubious decision to give NSR a blog (and, as Brian Leiter points out, this has been dubious for a very long time) on the basis that "CHE is a NewsOrg, not part of Academe." True enough. But if a paper purports to be the Chronicle of Higher Education, shouldn't it have a specialized knowledge of higher ed, or at least not be actively hostile to higher ed? Shouldn't ye olde MLA-season title-snarking be plain out of bounds for any higher-ed-related publication?

My sense is that a lot of academics feel ambivalent about the Church of Higher Efficiency—"it's a dreadful rag, but it's our dreadful rag." CHE is quite adamantly saying, "no, no, we're not your dreadful rag at all; we have no obligations to higher ed whatsoever." The Church of Higher Efficiency is thus taking the stance on scholarship that Amazon takes on books: you read it; it's a major part of your intellectual and personal life; it contains ideas? Great; whatever; to us it's a widget that we ship out of a warehouse in Tacoma. We are happy to ship you a coffeemaker as well; makes no difference to us. Pageviews, plz.

That's unfortunate, although I can't exactly weep over the Church of Higher Efficiency getting explicit about just how little it cares about higher ed per se. I mean, it's a dreadful rag (exception: the excellent Jen Howard). Rather, I want us all to make the connection that Gautam made, between these routine pot-shots at scholarship by journalists who proudly announce that they are not in a position to know what they are talking about and the kinds of sweeping policy changes that are currently leading to the effective dismantling of public higher ed in California and elsewhere. "Is college WORTH IT?" they ask. Not if you can make a career of announcing your lack of education and taking pot-shots at the educated, under the auspices of a periodical allegedly meant to serve the higher ed community, no less.

More public scholarship. Less Church of Higher Efficiency.

***

UPDATE 5/7: The Church of Higher Efficiency has apologized for its editorial oversights and dismissed NSR. Tressie McMillen Cottom deserves the internet equivalent of a standing ovation.

*"Church of Higher Efficiency": h/t Mark Sample.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Read, weep. Brava, Tressie.

It's not "the job market"; it's the profession (and it's your problem too)

I enjoyed Kathleen Fitzpatrick's recent piece in the Chronicle* on risk-taking and the responsibility of mentors to back up those junior scholars who are doing nontraditional work. The piece's key insight is that it's one thing to urge people to "innovate" and quite another to create the institutional frameworks that make innovation not only possible but consequential.**

Kathleen's observation comports with some ideas that have been floating around in my head lately, especially around "digital humanities." I and my Fox Center colleague Bart Brinkman were recently called upon to define digital humanities for the other fellows in residence, and in the process of talking it over with Bart, and during the discussion at the CHI, I've come to realize that I have some real pet peeves around the notion of the "job market" that come into relief specifically around the field of digital humanities.

It boils down to this: peeps, we're all connected.

The recent rise to prominence of digital humanities is indistinguishable from its new importance in "the job market" (I insist on those scare quotes); after all, digital humanities and its predecessor, humanities computing, have been active fields for decades. What's happening now is that they are institutionalizing in new ways. So when we talk about "digital humanities and the 'job market,'" we are not just talking about a young scholar's problem (or opportunity, depending on how you see it). We are talking about a shift in the institutional structures of the profession. And, senior scholars, this is not something that is happening to you. You are, after all, the ones on the hiring and t&p committees. It is a thing you are making—through choices that you make, and through choices that you decline to make.

There's something a little strange about the way that digital humanities gets promoted from the top down; it gets a lot of buzz in the New York Times; it's well known as dean-candy and so gets tacked onto requests for hires; digital humanities grant money seems to pour in (thanks, NEH!) even as philosophy departments across the country are getting shut down; university libraries start up initiatives to promote digital humanities among their faculty. I am waiting for the day when administrators and librarians descend upon the natural sciences faculty to promote history of science. No, I really am.

So it seems quite natural that there should be wariness and resistance to the growing presence of digital humanities. Perhaps there is some bitterness that you might get your new Americanist only on condition that her work involves a Google Maps mashup, because it was easy to persuade people that your department needed a new "digital humanist," whatever the hell that is, and it was not easy to persuade people that you needed somebody to teach Faulkner.

The situation is not improved by the confrontational attitudes of certain factions of the digital humanities establishment (such as it is), which are occasionally prone to snotty comments about how innovative DH is and how tired and intellectually bankrupt everybody else's work is. (Not so often, I find—but even a little is enough to be a problem.) Under those circumstances, DH seems clubby and not liberating; not a way of advocating the humanities but an attack on it, and specifically on the worth of that Faulkner seminar that you teach, and that non-digital research that you do. Why, an established scholar might reasonably ask, should I even deal with this "digital humanities" nonsense? Shouldn't I just keep teaching my Faulkner seminar, because somebody ought to do it, for Christ's sake?

Well, whatever else DH is, it is highly political, and it has political consequences. So, in short, no.

I'm persuaded that the widespread appeal of DH has much to do with the leveling fantasy it offers, a fantasy of meritocracy that is increasingly belied elsewhere in the professional humanities. As Tom Scheinfeldt points out in his useful "Stuff Digital Humanists Like,"

Innovation in digital humanities frequently comes from the edges of the scholarly community rather than from its center—small institutions and even individual actors with few resources are able to make important innovations. Institutions like George Mason, the University of Mary Washington, and CUNY and their staff members play totally out-sized roles in digital humanities when compared to their roles in higher ed more generally, and the community of digital humanities makes room for and values these contributions from the nodes.

This is true. Those involved in digital humanities have also seen the ways that THATCamps, blogs, and Twitter allow junior scholars and scholars at non-R1 institutions to cut geodesics across the profession, allowing them to spread their ideas, collaborate, and achieve a certain prominence that would have been impossible through traditional channels. I'm convinced that real possibilities lie here.

And as traditional scholarly publishing becomes more and more constricted and humanities department budgets are slashed, the fiction of academic meritocracy becomes harder and harder to sustain. Perhaps on the web, we think, through lean DIY publishing and postprint review, meritocracy (or its semblance) can return to the academy. It seems at once a way forward and a way to return to a (fabled) time when people cared about scholarship for the sake of scholarship—not because they needed X number of well-placed articles or a line on the cv or a connection at Y institution without which their careers would disappear. Perhaps DH offers us a way out of the increasingly rationalized death-spiral of "impact scores" and credential inflation. Perhaps it will let us out-quantify the quantifiers, or sidestep them altogether.

Of course, the web always comes with liberatory rhetoric that usually turns out to mean little more than "what the market will bear," and the ostensible meritocracy of digital humanities in the present moment is really no more than a misalignment between its alternative (and potentially even more aggressively capitalistic) value systems and those of the institutionalized humanities more generally. It can be disturbingly easy for the genuinely progressive intentions of digital humanists to become assimilated to the vague libertarianisms of "information wants to be free" and "DIY U," and from there to Google Books and charter schools and the privatization of knowledge—an enclosure of the digital commons ironically in the name of openness. At the same time, the naming of the "alt-ac" "track" (it is generally not a track, of course, by definition) seems to provide new opportunities for young scholars even as it raises research expectations for staff and requires those on the "track" to subordinate their research interests to those of the institutional structure that employs them. Digital forms are exceptionally good at occluding labor. How to navigate those waters thoughtfully—to realize the real promise of DH—is a question to which we must all apply ourselves.

So you see what I mean when I say that "digital humanities and 'the job market'" as it now manifests isn't a narrow, merely administrative sliver of life of interest solely to junior academics who are still gravely listening to advice about how to "tailor" the teaching paragraphs in their cover letters. Digital humanities has become important to "the job market" exactly insofar as it is causing major shifts in the institutions of the profession. These shifts are political. And if you are in my profession, then they are your concern.

*I know, "enjoyed" and "Chronicle" in one sentence... mirabile dictu.

**As we all know, I have a complex relationship with the word "innovation" and do not consider it an unqualified good, nor a transhistorical value. For today, however, we will leave that particular word a black box.

Thanks to Bart and Colleen for sitting through a less-worked-out live version of this rant last week.

The visible hand

Things on the internet are not made by magic; they're created by human labor. Who pays for that labor, and to what ends? Often, private corporations like Google pay for it. Wherefore?

Siva Vaidhyanathan's recent piece in the Chronicle argues that "Our uncritical dependence on Google is the result of an elaborate political fraud. Google has deftly capitalized on a decades-long tradition of creating 'public failure,'" which is to say, setting public projects up to fail so that private interests can swoop in and save us from our "broken" public sector:

Public failure may occur when the public sector has been intentionally dismantled, degraded, or underfinanced while expectations for its performance remain high. [...]

In such circumstances, the failure of public institutions gives rise to the circular logic that dominates political debate. Public institutions can fail; public institutions need tax revenue; therefore we must reduce the support for public institutions. The resulting failures then supply more anecdotes supporting the view that public institutions fail by design rather than by political choice.

[...]

Google officials, promoting their effort to scan millions of books purchased with public money [e.g. University of California, University of Michigan --N.C.] and donated by shortsighted universities, claimed they were trying to preserve libraries and perform an essential public service—just the sort of service that our great university libraries could have been working toward had they been allowed to succeed. Publicly supported institutions fail, so we leap into the arms of the private actor, ready to believe its sweet nothings.

Google Books is certainly read by most as a sort of public service that happens to be provided by a private corporation. Remember when the Bibliothèque Nationale de France resisted Google's digitization offers, only to later concede that they lacked funds to carry out their digitization project (the excellent Gallica) on their own? "La BNF se laisse séduire par Google," Le Figaro reported, using the language of sexual danger that Vaidhyanathan picks up in his Chronicle piece.

I'm largely persuaded by Vaidhyanathan's argument, although the persistence of this language of seduction (all literary critics know what comes next: betrayal) probably warrants further cogitation.

That Lovelace Google has practically unlimited funds to pour into whatever it wants is widely taken for granted, and it's well known as a place that is generous with said funds, especially with its workers. But despite its much-touted mission of non-evil (evil is such a strong word, isn't it?) its practices seem increasingly disturbing, including when it comes to digitization. Via Ryan Shaw, I recently came across the bizarre narrative of Andrew Norman Wilson, who says he was fired from a Google contract after inquiring into, and trying to document, the working conditions of "ScanOps":

They scan books, page by page, for Google Book Search. The workers wearing yellow badges are not allowed any of the privileges that I was allowed – ride the Google bikes, take the Google luxury limo shuttles home, eat free gourmet Google meals, attend Authors@Google talks and receive free, signed copies of the author’s books, or set foot anywhere else on campus except for the building they work in. They also are not given backpacks, mobile devices, thumb drives, or any chance for social interaction with any other Google employees. Most Google employees don’t know about the yellow badge class. Their building, 3.14159~, was next to mine, and I used to see them leave everyday at precisely 2:15 PM, like a bell just rang, telling the workers to leave the factory. Their shift starts at 4 am.

They are not elves; I repeat, not elves. Today Glenn Fleishman tweeted the picture below (via @GreatDismal):

hand spotted in a Google Book by Glenn Fleishman

Whose hand is this?

The image reminded me of Caleb Crain's post on encountering the finger of a Google technician in a translation of a Kant essay. As he wrote in a review of Adrian Johns's recent book on copyright and piracy,

... Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an author's words, the author himself still had them. It was better for an author to argue that his book was not an object but an exercise of his powers which "he can concede, it is true, to others, but never alienate". In other words, Kant explained - in a passage partly obscured by the fingers of the Google technician who turned the pages in the scanner - a pirated book was not to be understood as property that had been stolen; it was rather a speech act that had been compromised. The business arrangement that an author made with an editor might make it look as if words could be traded like watches or pork bellies, but it just wasn't so. Could there be a fitter representation of copyright's contemporary plight than the fingers of a Google technician obscuring Kant's defence of writer's rights? An author's consent, Kant cautions in a footnote, "can by no means be presumed because he has already given it exclusively to another", yet Google is struggling to effect exactly this sort of transfer of consent today, as it attempts to win approval for a legal settlement in the United States that will allow it to republish works whose copyright owners have not come forward. I couldn't have read Kant's essay so easily without the Google technician's labour - in fact, without Google, I might not have got around to reading it at all - but her fingers were nonetheless in the way. The internet's attitude toward Kant's words is ambiguous, combining respect, appropriation, liberation and accidental vandalism.

hand spotted by Caleb Crain

This scan is particularly ghostly, the hand covered over with a second hand reasserting the text of the Kant translation.

The hand--always the synecdoche for the worker (the mediator between the head and the hand, we learn in Metropolis, must be the heart)--is inserted literally into our view of the text, disrupting for a moment our sense that Google Books are, quite simply, books that have been "put online," as if books themselves could simply leap media and enter a disembodied realm. The intrusion of the hand shows us that these are photographs (of a sort) and that someone must have made them.

In an inversion of our usual intuition that images are less mediated than text, these hands make us realize that Google Books made us feel as though digital texts were unmediated--were the books themselves. In contrast, the awareness that the digital object is an OCRed image of text--a photograph of its own scene of production, complete with visual evidence of the hand that wrought it--forces us to acknowledge the strange backwards ekphrasis (text to image to fallen, "corrupted" text--OCR is a silent diplomatic edition) in a Google Book, the labor by which it was created and uploaded, and the person who labored, now knowable only through the operative, synecdochal appendages that both create and corrupt the digital object.

This is not to argue for some kind of metaphysics of book presence wherein only a paper book is a real book, not haunted by ghostly disembodied hands. Our tendency to efface the digital laborer, as well as the work of editors, designers, etc., is precisely what enables the widespread belief that e-books are necessarily cheaper to produce than paper books, as if the cost of the book lay in the printing. At least with the heft of paper one is reminded that there was, somewhere, a scene of labor. A Google Book effaces the medium of the medium, until a latex-draped finger appears before us, as if to reassert the tactile element always running beneath the digital.

Obviously, this is a Blogger blog, i.e. run on Google resources.
More on GB hand scans:

• The Art of Google Books Tumblr
(via Rebekah Higgitt)
• BoingBoing, 2009
• Sydney Morning Herald, 2007
• Wired, 2007--basically a link to Techcrunch
• Dan Cohen, 2006, linked by Philipp Lenssen and Barry Schwartz

Staying informed: a bridge too far

Naomi Schaefer Riley mentions Philip Nel's "what do professors do all day?" blog series in her recent Chronicle article. And again I ask myself: why do I ever read the Chronicle?

I am willing to believe that children’s literature is a legitimate field of study. But the idea that in order to teach Kansas State undergraduates about it effectively, one needs to “keep up with the literature” seems to me a bridge too far. And I bet you it’s a bridge too far for many state legislators as well.

Staying abreast of the field is "a bridge too far"? What?

Moacir's #JamesFrancoFacts are funny in general, but the one about getting Blackboard to work properly has to be the most hyperbolic, and therefore the funniest.

I should add that, reaffirming that it's not facts but questions that are really important, Ladysquires's James Franco questions are equally funny, and insightful to boot.

I much enjoyed this ProfHacker post by Nels P. Highberg on "What We Can Do for Graduating Seniors Today" [Chronicle paywall]. In general I think the ProfHacker series is good (though of course nothing matches the perfect wisdom of Ms. Mentor).

A Brief and True Report on the New Found Use of Twitter in the Classroom

The Chronicle claims that teaching with Twitter is "not for the faint of heart," a "daredevil" sort of thing to do.

Daredevil -- you know, brave, foolhardy, and done as a stunt.

Brave, apparently, because letting students communicate with you via what is seen as their natural medium, Web 2.0 (a misconception, by the way) might make you lose power. (??)

Foolhardy, because you can't control what the students say.

A stunt, because Twitter is on the web, therefore by definition vapid, ephemeral, a mere fad.

Oh, Chronicle of Higher Ed. Always bringing the laughs, always enjoying that so-called iced cream.

It was, I admit, with trepidation that I assigned Twitter as part of my new research course. It wasn't just a variation on the age-old Sakai forum, like the blog. It was really a new thing. But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to do it.

-Twitter is a real thing in the world. Despite the name, which suggests unserious chick stuff (pun intended), people use it and communicate with it. Somebody is, or somebodies are, the official tweeter for the American Museum of Natural History, the Canadian press Coach House Books, the Exploratorium, and the Harry Ransom Center, just to name a few. People, one day your job could be tweeting.

-As a medium, Twitter is qualitatively different from blogs and Facebook. It is public like blogs but social like Facebook. (Or rather, Twitter and Facebook are both social, but Twitter is social differently from Facebook.) In a course that examines various media, Twitter makes an interesting case study.

-The threshold of participation is low. It is informal and brief, meaning students are empowered to participate. It thrives on concision and links.

-Hashtags model a dynamic, non-hierarchical mode of organization that is typical of the web and distinct from most library catalogues. Students should be educated in the use of both models.

-Like most Web 2.0 applications, Twitter is interstitial. You never focus your attention on it; it's just sort of there, a low hum. I'm not above making my course intrude on my students' daily lives.

-Its publicness promotes community. Students see one another's thoughts and may respond in an informal way. This is especially valuable in the context of research.

-Other instructors have used Twitter to good effect.

I'm only three weeks into the semester, during which time the students have been tweeting for a mere two weeks. But so far I'm pleased with how it's going. The students are responding to one another. They know how to use a hashtag. They tweet more than the required minimum (because, I suspect, it's useful).

I tend to see an upswing in tweets the night before class; my students seem to use it primarily to respond informally to the reading. Sometimes it's kvetching, which I think is on the whole a good thing; the reading is genuinely difficult, and a certain amount of online griping means that no one is ashamed to admit it. Sometimes it's specific questions or observations. Sometimes it's just "Whoa" -- also a valid response. A few times, people have asked me questions via Twitter (my RSS feed keeps me informed of such things).

It is, as I mentioned, early in the semester. I'll be interested to see how the use of Twitter continues, especially as the students begin work on their research projects.

Evaluating Emerson

There's an article by William Major and Bryan Sinche in the Chronicle of Higher Ed right now arguing that, seriously, guys, Ralph Waldo Emerson sucks; we should stop teaching him.

Of the comments (so far there are four), one delights in this iconoclasm and three are shocked and grieved by the authors' failure to appreciate Emerson's genius.

It makes me wonder to what extent it's possible to evaluate a figure like Emerson with any sincerity.

In particular, reading much of the poetry of the nineteenth century requires that I suspend some preferences so as to achieve, or at least to simulate, some kind of immanence to the poetics of the period and genre. Teaching criticism is in part teaching people how to put their like-o-meters on hold to try to understand the text on its own terms.

But for several semesters I've been assigning an evaluative essay, an essay in which the student sets out her own criteria for poetic goodness and evaluates a poem on that basis. This, too, involves putting the like-o-meter on hold (I use examples from television: you may love to watch American Idol, but that's not the same thing as thinking it's good).* I want my students to have opinions about literature, and to be able to back them up. It's all part of the eternal quest to teach the difference between "subjective" and "arbitrary." Major and Sinche get to the heart of the matter: Many students find Emerson confusing and frustrating, or like him exactly insofar as he can be thought to propound orthodoxies with which they already agree ("I believe in self reliance because people should be responsible for themselves" etc.).

Whether or not they approve of Emerson, students' evaluative processes represent a terrifying challenge to the canon. Every teacher has read essays so confident in their ignorance that they have made her despair for humanity. Reading such essays, one thinks, "Ah, get a little more educated and you'll change your mind. Think harder and you'll see that William Carlos Williams knows exactly what he's doing."

At what moment do we say to students, "Yes, go ahead; you are qualified to judge this poet"? Usually it takes a Ph.D. or thereabouts; perhaps with the firmly canonized, such as Emerson, such a moment never comes. As the commenter guygibbs fumes at the Chronicle, "You should both be fired and sen[t] back to undergraduate school yourselves."

This is a real tension in evaluative criticism. We want to think we have no sacred cows, but of course we do have them. And it seems a shame to educate undergraduates primarily in order to inculcate in them a sense that they are not equal to understanding, much less evaluating, the literature that they read. It hardly seems conducive to professing literature; I want my students to become readers, not (necessarily) English Ph.D.s.

But on the other hand, if we believe in our profession at all, then we also believe that there is real knowledge and insight that must go into evaluative criticism. If, as Marianne Moore writes, "we cannot admire what we do not understand," it is necessary to do a little work to achieve understanding. The art of turning off one's like-o-meter is a matter of some study.

What is the difference between fresh innocence and hasty ignorance? This is a question of method.

As for Emerson, Mr. Transparent Eyeball himself, I can do no better than to leave it to James Russell Lowell:

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on,
Whose prose is grand verse, while his verse, the Lord knows,
Is some of it pr-- No, 't is not even prose... (42)

-----
*Of course, I'm cheating when I use reality television as an example, since its popularity is predicated on its badness, or at least its "lowness."

Lowell, James Russell. A Fable for Critics. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1848. Google Books. Web. 18 January 2010.

Major, William, and Bryan Sinche. "Giving Emerson the Boot." Chronicle of Higher Education (17 January 2010). Web. 18 January 2010.