Everybody Knows

Everybody knows,

so we can all agree that Leonard Cohen was a careful student of modern song, as Bruce Springsteen is. When you sing a popular song, you want everybody to know it.

What does everyone know? Cohen tells us in detail, but so have earlier African-American songwriters such as Nat King Cole in one of the finest Christmas Songs—“Everybody knows” the standard elements of a white Christmas. He tells us, “Everybody knows a turkey and some mistletoe, Help to make the season bright.” And then he hones in on the real excuse for consumer Christmas, the kids, “They know that Santa's on his way
He's loaded lots of toys and goodies on his sleigh”

Indeed the line “everybody knows” is an acknowledgement of the specific features of mainstream culture, we all know, both children and parents with their knowing nod, even those who live outside Middle American, those who serve and entertain but do not belong wholly. Nat King Cole’s gentle acknowledgement of cliché and convention, a relatively quiet tip off that he is singing for an audience that has very specific expectations, a collection of listeners who want to hear standard references in their Christmas songs, we all know what they we are supposed to hear.

This acquiescence to tradition and hegemony is then given a more critical version in Nina Simone’s “Misssissippi Goddamn” where “everybody knows” refers to the universal understood news that this particularly retrograde state does unspeakably horrible things to black folks, which everybody knows, but which cannot possibly be stated in song directly. Common knowledge here is not about the comforts of a Christian holiday but the brutality of racism, The phrase always also means that we don’t need to express these things because they are already known, whether its Nat King Cole’s Christmas or the violence of deep Southern racism.  Simone sings, “And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam” to tell us that we have all read the newspaper and that both black and white people know what goes on, but the line implies also that there are distinctly different forms of knowing. Everybody knows what they know which means they surely disagree. Nina Simone elaborates, then in case not everyone in the audience knows what she does:

 Hound dogs on my trail
School children sitting in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day's gonna be my last

Leonard Cohen expands on Nina Simone’s knowledge by listing off all the unacknowledged things that we know: that the dice were loaded, that the fight was fixed—for anyone who first heard the song, the list goes on to include more than civil rights politics to include our own personal, subjective delusions about ourselves.  When I first heard the song, I was thrilled that someone had finally spelled out –not just the fact that the world was crooked, but that we all knew it, despite whatever official optimism we Americans are required to project.

So when Bruce Springsteen sings the lines in “The Ghost of Tom Joad”:

Well the highway is alive tonight
Where it's headed everybody knows

He is turning against his own mythology of the promised land, even as he is echoing the lyrics of earlier songs. Springsteen borrows but only in order to acknowledge that his own hope of escape was false—a statement that may have surprised his fans but which he tells them they should have known of course.  In the end, they prefer the myth and not what everyone knows. Springsteen’s working class has abandoned his political viewpoint, and he is left with the cultured, academic crowd that studies the history of American song lyrics. Everybody knows now has been turned into a nasty revival of the violence coupled with political apathy—everybody always knew so what can we do? Thus, the phrase today has turned from a cynical critique of the system to a passive acceptance by working class voters who empower the wrong kind of boss because "everybody rolls with their fingers crossed."

German and Visual Studies: New PhD program

German and Visual Studies
At Penn State University

A new Dual-Title Ph. D. Program

We are pleased to announce a new dual-title Ph.D. program in German and Visual Studies at Penn State University. This new doctoral degree provides students a formal curriculum to investigate the history of German culture in relation to the theory, technology, history, and dissemination of visual images as they shaped social relations and personal identities.

Penn State is teaching a new generation of German scholars with an integrated understanding of all media. The German department’s culture faculty are active scholars in Visual Studies and have as a group published extensively in the field, including such topics as advertising, art, cinema, photography, fashion, theory, and architecture, as well as on the relationship between word and image in traditional print and digital media.

The German department will continue to provide a comprehensive graduate education in the cultural history of the German-speaking world, while the new program provides additional courses dedicated to Visual Studies. All doctoral students are encouraged to develop their own interdisciplinary agenda with scholars throughout the university.

Penn State’s Ph. D. in German and Visual Studies also brings together faculty and students from the College of Arts and Architecture, the College of Communications, and the College of the Liberal Arts. Faculty teaching in Visual Studies come from a wide range of departments, including Art History, Comparative Literature, English, French, German, Spanish, and Media Studies.

Enrollment in this innovative program begins in Fall 2017. Students applying for admission may make their interest in the Visual Studies degree known when they apply to the German PhD program.  Their personal statements should reflect their interest in visual studies.

January 15, 2018 is the deadline for applications.  For questions and further information about Penn State’s German and Visual Studies Ph.D. program, please contact Professor Daniel Purdy dlp14@psu.edu or Professor Sabine Doran sud28@psu.edu

How little we know about each other

Not only is this the season for graduation, it is also one for retirement parties.

The fact that higher education is explicitly hierarchical in the United States is hardly surprising, nor does it seem strange that the different sections of the education system have very little to do with each other, but what catches me off guard repeatedly is how little educational institutions know about each other.

All schools tend to be insular; they pretend that the only way in which to organize knowledge is according to the rules they are currently using, which is why educational institutions tend to replicate themselves. Their ingrained patterns of decision-making stretch on for decades, if not centuries. Such institutional habits can mean that universities are protected from sudden shifts and changes in the political world.  How many Happy Valleys are there across the country?  It takes much more than short term funding cuts to alter the habits of universities. On the other hand, this ingrained behavior also has its unnerving side. One of the secondary revelations that university scandals bring forth is the simple fact that this terrible thing that has us all outraged (hazing, sexual assault, cheating, murderous drinking) has been going on, overlooked and unaltered, for decades.

Nostalgia for the years we spent at school, along with the fund raising that fosters such sentimentalism, depends on the principle that university life now looks much the same as it did forty years ago. Not only does the campus look almost the same as it did when we were students, the students, deans and professors behave much the same. The undergraduates carry on with their social dramas now as we did then—this is the implicit message universities like to send their graduates as a reminder of their youth.  Higher administrators carefully preserve this sentimental stability while students and professors reenact it unwittingly.  Implicit in this nostalgia is the distinction between the world out there that constantly changes and the process of learning in here which carries on unabated.

But this insularity is not just a ruse to foster donations, it operates on so many levels within each university and between them, so that different institutions have no idea about each other.

It is always a marvel how little Ivy League and land grant universities understand each other.  If you have studied and taught at both types, you can see how they replicate their insularity on a larger scale, so that professors from each set often have the strangest ideas about each other. The one set looks down on the other, but what really surprises me always is that the snobbery cuts both ways.  Professors at land grant universities often insist that the Ivies don’t really teach you anything other than a small sliver of trendy theory. Ivy league professors shun land grant universities for having a medieval mindset. I remember my astonishment the first time I head a Midwest professor said he would never send his best students to an Ivy League university because they don’t learn anything there. Not to mention the East coast professors who believe that sending their kids to a state university was the kiss of death.

Underneath all these prejudices, which includes the number one prejudice that we have no prejudices, there are large-scale trends that affect us all.  Change does come to the university and the problems that you think are unique to your own institution often turn out to be shared. 

Professors and students always imagine that the things that disturb their sleep are the unique burden of their own special institution, when in fact they happen on Broadway as well as on the leafy campus.  The cruelties at one institution are accepted at another. Ivy League academics cling and claw to the hierarchy that tolerates them. Land grant scholars mutter that they deserve better than this corporate treatment.

Both sets of institutions depend on the army of under paid and unappreciated lecturers, yet each has a different explanation for why the system has to be the way it is.  Even in their misery, academics cling to the notion that their situation is unique and could be improved if they only went somewhere else like here only better—the peer institution that actually appreciates you.