Innovation does not equal high enrollment

There are just so many examples of how institutions undermine themselves, despite their best intentions. In the era of budget cuts, administrators have become more concerned than ever with maintaining high enrollments. So now some universities have begun a review of courses in order to eliminate the “under-enrolled.” Missing in much of the discussion about course enrollment is a consideration of course content.

A common distinction, in graduate courses, is made between courses that are listed, and often required, by the department bulletin and “special topic” courses which are taught by faculty interested in developing a new research topic. These “special topic” courses have been targeted increasingly because they are under-enrolled. However, the low enrollment in such courses does not indicate that these courses are unimportant or uninteresting. In fact this year’s special topics course may become a requirement in five years, it’s just that no one can predict that today.

Special topic seminars are, in my experience, where the new research happens. Every literature department can fill a course on Romanticism, but not everyone is willing to take a course on race theory in German Idealism. Just wait though a few more years, and those handful of students who took the race theory course will be publishing up a storm. The Romanticism students will probably be following in their tracks. Yes, its more pleasant to discuss Wordsworth crossing the Alps than the Haitian Revolution. But if we pause a little, we will find that of course Wordsworth has a few things to say about slavery in the Caribbean and before you know it we have dissertations on race theory in Romanticism—here’s the point though. The race theory class was first presented as a “special topics” course, something outside the mainstream curriculum, an innovation, an experiment, a professor’s first attempt at laying out a long and complex argument. Someday we may all think Wordsworth’s most daring poem was dedicated to Toussaint L’Ouverture. But you heard it first in a “special topics” seminar.

So if you want a university that innovates, that does not fall back on the familiar, a university that grows and develops new research, please, dear high-level administrators, do not cut the special topics seminars, just because they are under enrolled.

Global Encyclopedia

Globalization operates as an encyclopedic form of knowledge of which the internet is of course the ideal media. With globalization, we all get to rove around uncovering and learning tidy bits of knowledge from faraway places without putting them into any grand historical context.

We get to talk about one or two moments in history, connect them through a network and then draw some striking conclusion about a different previously unrelated matter. The kind of dialectical juxtaposition Walter Benjamin nurtured in his Arcades Project, where the commodities sold in nineteenth-century Parisian side streets revealed something about the rise of Hitler, is now acceptable across the globe, so long as one has a theoretical model that allows us to make an article about Kojak reruns in Thailand explain post-Vietnam War economic relations in South East Asia.

The other side of encyclopedic knowledge is the potential for fakery. You don’t have to be an elaborate forgery to assert knowledge. You just merely need to have read an article or two on the subject. Expertise feeds the encyclopedia. Without some scholars who know the particular field, you would not have a convincing article on Wikipedia, but once the article is on the internet, there is room for endless circulation and appropriation. We can claim knowledge of Shanghai city planning while sitting in Illinois.

Eighteenth-century Europe was full of such armchair experts. Everyone who could read devoured travel literature about places far from Europe. Immanuel Kant lectured for years on anthropology without having left his hometown. Christian Wolff could generate treatises on a host of subjects not just one or two. Being learned meant knowing a lot about many things. We are again floating into such an encyclopedic phase. It is refreshingly interdisciplinary. We all get to hold forth like a contemporary English professor, who can teach a seminar on Hitchcock or Kafka. We get to spin historical connections like a German philosopher of old, compare Chinese history to Egyptian in 22 deft pages.

As an old Medievalist once told my multilingual friend—you’re either brilliant or a fraud. Alas the majority of us will just be panting to keep up.

Peer-reviewed

The reliance on strict rules to evaluate the intellectual quality of academic publications is by no means a unique American phenomenon. With the integration of university degrees across the European Union, professors and researchers are increasingly evaluated in terms of well-defined scales that rate the quality of anything put into print. In Belgium, for example, academic publications are grouped broadly into letter categories (A, B, C) with subdivisions within each.

The first purpose for this standardization is to rate professors within a university, and then, secondly, to compare regional and national systems to each other.

Thus a web site urging students to attend French-speaking universities in Belgium will compare the total number of publications in peer-reviewed journals within the Walloon system to other European Union areas.

Here is an example of the kind of claim used to compare one European region to another:

“Various international surveys show that Belgium is one of the countries that publishes most and whose publications are among the most often cited, with regard to its number of inhabitants and to its gross domestic product. This international visibility is confirmed by numerous publications in renowned scientific journals. In 2003, the European Commission published its “Third Report on science and technology indicators 2003”. This report assesses the quality of publications in the major universities of the EU countries and rates those of Belgian researchers highly.”

http://www.studyinbelgium.be/start.php?lang=en&rub=3

The number of peer-reviewed publications is then compared to the per capita ration of university trained researchers within a regional economy. So if Belgium has a higher density of researchers within the general population, this is interpreted as an indication that the Belgian economy supports growth through universities. The next statistic linked to peer-reviewed publications and density of researchers is the number of new companies started in a region. The more spin-offs and start-ups, the better the integration between universities and the economy must be, for new technology firms are often derived from university research. Hence the famous research belts around universities specialized in technological research.

The problem arises when these indicators are used in a reverse manner so that they become rules for hiring and firing faculty, for structuring universities, for evaluating students. These indicators may show that a university is operating successfully, but they may not at all be the reason for its success. Requiring that researchers publish in peer-reviewed journals is in a sense pushing the indicator, i.e., trying to artificially increase the numbers that once were a neutral sign of educational accomplishment. If researchers used to publish only half their articles in peer-reviewed journals, and the rest as book chapters, conference proceedings, and editorial-board journals, they will not have necessarily increased their intellectual productivity by now publishing 75% of their work in peer-reviewed journals. They may well be accomplishing as much as they did before, they are just changing the media they use to publish.

Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that peer-review actually produces innovative research. In fact one could argue it produces more mainstream conclusions that are less likely to disturb existing norms. The really radical approach to a research question may well appear in a small journal catering to a select group of readers, rather than in the official institutional journal.

Quality indicators run the risk of stifling exactly that which they are measuring when they become mandatory rules, for they tend to produce conformity

So to return to the Belgian example above, Belgium has a high rate of highly rated, peer-review publications, which is used to claim that Belgium has a better university system than other parts of Europe. However, the same statistic is also an indication that Belgium is much stricter in policing its academics and that it more aggressively enforces rules requiring faculty to publish in peer-reviewed journals.

While there is no question that Belgium has excellent universities, and we should all be so privileged as to teach there, the question remains whether the Belgian universities are truly better than those in other regions, where a faculty member’s curriculum vitae might not be so strictly evaluated. Is it possible that British or Dutch universities are also excellent, they just don’t worry as much about indicators as much as the Belgians do?

At every level of the university system, from the classroom to the EU-wide comparison, a grading system has to distinguish between those students who follow instructions carefully and those who have really smart ideas. Relying on indicators and then enforcing them is very much like having homework written out neatly and turned in on time –this is very important, to be sure. Still, the indicators to the extent that they are mandatory are likely to become indictors of how well the administrative apparatus operates, rather than signs that the ideas on the page are clever.

Given that as teachers and administrators we are all interested in having students learn more than punctuality and proper form, we should be clear that measuring indicators does not foster creative intelligence, it might just do the opposite.

Assisting Asssitants

The job market has been such that universities have, for some time now gotten, a much higher quality pool of incoming faculty than would have been the case twenty years ago. We have had time to watched some of these people go through the acclimatization process of leaving their high-grade graduate programs to settle into mainstream universities.

We all know that the decisions about who gets to teach at primo universities and who ends up somewhere else are not so finely tuned. There are a fair number of high quality, brand new scholars who land at universities that really are not used to having such hot house flowers on their faculty. What becomes of these delicate researchers and writers in the tussle of tenure and administrative review? What becomes of their great promise? Why do some cruise on to publish lots of fine books and articles, while others stick to their one track?

University administrations would love to know how to separate the long term producers from those who settle into a comfortable routine after tenure. I am definitely not here to conjure some answer to this perennial question. There are lots of people out there making such judgments. Universities have an enormous array of reviews and evaluations to pick the wheat from the chafe.

And while the pressure of a deadline has a wonderful effect concentrating the mind on finishing a manuscript, more needs to said about how the review process creates a conformity that undermines its own goal of fostering faculty productivity.

Review processes very often insist that faculty publish in one kind of journal rather than another. For example, there is the concept of a mainstream flag ship journal, one that represents the best scholarship in a given field. For some universities, it is important that their faculty demonstrate their scholarly prowess by publishing in these journals. At other universities, publishing in mainstream journals is a sign of mediocrity, that a scholar is not really cutting edge.

But the rule varies from one discipline to another, from one scholar to another. The problem is when university administrations make broad rules in favor of one over the other, without considering the character of each contribution, i.e. when the quality of an article is judged by the journal in which appears. For young faculty this problem is heightened because very often they went to a graduate school where one rule applied and then they end up teaching at a university where the opposite rule governs tenure decisions.

Add to this-- the general unwillingness of bureaucracies to allow for flexibility. Every educational institution I have ever attended has governed its internal decisions with the presumption that its rules are the only true and correct ones. There is a long list of German departments in this country who all believe they are the best. The University of Michigan has no trouble thumbing its nose at the University of Chicago. And while UC Riverside may understand that it is not in the same league as Princeton, it will insist that its junior faculty follow the California state conventions for demonstrating scholarly excellence, never mind what they told you back east.

I am pulling these examples out of thin air, there are no hidden stories behind them, I am not thinking of anyone in particularly as I write this summary of 20 years experience. I may be totally unfair to the individual institutions but the tendency is common enough,

Still, I have heard department heads of big, Midwestern universities declare that they would never let their best students apply to an Ivy League graduate program, because “they don’t have a comprehensive curriculum there.” Similarly, I have seen Ivy League professors quietly pass over State university PhDs because they don’t come from "truly innovative programs."

OK, so we all know academia is full of picky jealousy.

The trouble arises for junior faculty who have not yet mastered the different standards. And the real problem is that in the long run, the pressure to switch from one standard of scholarship turns clever thinkers into conformists. If you were trained to find the hottest new trend in art coming out of Europe, you are going to have a hard time publishing in a flagship journal. Likewise, if you think like a social scientist about journals, you French colleagues may smile in disbelief.

While the Ivy League can readily afford to toss away excellent scholars, because there is always another wave of brilliance rolling in, other universities might pause to consider the varieties of scholarly accomplishment, to bend a little more.

Docks of Berlin

The restored silent film The Docks of New York offers all sorts of enticing interconnections. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Docks of New York gives you a highly stylized view of a dive bar hotel back when New York was still a seaport.

George Bancroft plays a steam ship stoker who has a night on shore during which he rescues a woman who has just thrown herself into the East River. She is played seductively by Betty Compson. There is lots of lush lighting in the foggy night. George Bancroft swaggers around in his slick black jacket like he’s the tough old uncle Robert Mitchum tried to emulate. And Betty Compson is clearly the prototype for Marlene Dietrich. She vamps about like Courtney Love, looks enticingly disheveled throughout the movie. Clothes, putting them on, taking them off, runs as a theme throughout the movie. In fact, the plot ends with a court room drama about a tight-fitting, glittery dress.

There is a swath of restored silent movies out there to be seen. Makes you realize people made slinky, sexy movies long before sound and color. The restoration slows the movie down, gives the images a three dimensional quality, the lighting suddenly has depth and when the actors move you can see the sensuality in their swagger and stutter.

Just from reading the back of DVD packages, you would have thought that Josef von Sternberg was a Jewish Austrian count, who rose to fame in Berlin and then fled the Nazis. Yeah, but turns out he grew up in Queens, dropped out of Jamaica high school, and hung around as a kid in NY and NJ movie studios. Sure he became famous when he made Dietrich famous, but he shot these cinematographic wonders before going to Berlin, thereby complicating the old claim that it was German Expressionism that introduced Hollywood to the wonders of atmospheric effects in movies. --Maybe it was German intellectuals from Queens who learned their tricks in Berlin.

Can’t wait to see the next one in the queue.

Wilder Still

Sometimes you think that all film scholars are grumpy people with chips on their shoulders about not getting the respect they feel they lack

And then you read Gerd Gemünden’s delightful book on Billy Wilder: A Foreign Affair: Billy Wilder’s American Films (Berghahn Books, 2008).

Good cheer, wit and irony are the by-products of watching a Billy Wilder movie, and Gemünden does not spoil anything with his light, fast, smart analysis. As the title suggests, Gemünden shows how Wilder brings an immigrant’s perspective to Hollywood, the foreign affair is not in Berlin but LA. Not only does Gemünden compare Wilder to Adorno in SoCal exile, he sustains the juxtaposition across the book, so that the academic heavy-weight reader starts recognizing the cultural critique in Wilder’s fast-paced success.

Wilder’s Weimar Berlin career has always loomed just over the horizon in my mind. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to find an archival trove of early, early movies, screen plays from Wilder in 1920s Berlin. Gemünden carries that idea into the famous Hollywood films. We will surely never be able to download Wilder’s early screenplay credit Der Teufelsreporter: Nebel in der Grossstadt. Wilder and Gemünden assure us that it is crap, but I always want to believe that there is a dissertation’s worth of urban modernity in that film.

No need for such fantasies, Gemünden finds that same sensibility in Wilder’s American movies. More than Adorno, Gemünden’s argument seems motivated by Georg Simmel’s essay on The Stranger—that alien figure who resides amongst us, knows us perhaps too well and never quite stops being other. The outsider as insider does not just have to write Minima Moralia, he can also direct Marilyn Monroe.