I remember back in the 70s when I went to church regularly with my parents, there was a guest pastor who railed in good old fashioned Lutheran fashion against pop culture. He was so engaged in fire and brimstone that we all got a kick out of it. He even skewered me when he pounded against children who watch Star Trek so many times that they can recite the dialogue. Mind you this was 1975.
Today I am off to NYC to hang out with my 45 year old friends at the latest Star Trek film. Over thirty years after receiving my first denunciation of repetition.
Never mind Kierkegaard. Repetition is now built into our environment. It is no longer an existential decision a lá Nietzsche. Now it is all there is.
Culture is indeed over, just as those horrible conservatives claimed. This Hegelian conclusion applies to the upper class of the West. Culturally we have not moved beyond the 70s, whether it’s Star Wars or the Sex Pistols. Technology has moved forward amazingly, but content, otherwise known as quality, has changed only in the sense that 1970s thoughts have been unfolded, rehashed, and disseminated further, but never upended, denounced, overthrown or replaced. You still hear Pink Floyd and Jim Morrison as you drive down the highway.
Is there no avant-garde other than the old guard?
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Manufacturing an Education
Lots of thought has gone into figuring out why the cost of college tuition has risen faster than inflation over the last decades and the easiest target has been the faculty. Administrators point out that labor costs are the largest proportion of any annual budget.
This is of course true for many institutions,
How to reduce labor costs is the concern of every institutional head, capitalist or otherwise. For a while the higher-ups imagined that applying corporate budget analysis would help sift out the "unproductive" elements of the university, classes with low enrollment, for example.
Industrial production has been mechanized tremendously over the last century, but higher education has not found any way to reduce the number of faculty comparable to the reduction in factory workers.
Perhaps this means that education requires personal attention. Humans interacting with other humans. The product is still an idealistic one, which is to say it requires more than manufacturing, it requires both the producer and the product to believe that more is happening in the exchange than simple creation of economic value.
This is of course true for many institutions,
How to reduce labor costs is the concern of every institutional head, capitalist or otherwise. For a while the higher-ups imagined that applying corporate budget analysis would help sift out the "unproductive" elements of the university, classes with low enrollment, for example.
Industrial production has been mechanized tremendously over the last century, but higher education has not found any way to reduce the number of faculty comparable to the reduction in factory workers.
Perhaps this means that education requires personal attention. Humans interacting with other humans. The product is still an idealistic one, which is to say it requires more than manufacturing, it requires both the producer and the product to believe that more is happening in the exchange than simple creation of economic value.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Nowadays everyone makes films
Something about the films of Adrei Tarkovsky makes you think he was a white haired man when he shot them. Every one seems like the last statement of ancient mystic, and yet he made films for decades. Watching these old clips of Tarkovsky today, you see a handsome fellow, never mind his similarity to the deposed governor of Illinois.
The first Tarkovsky film I ever saw was Sacrifice, during the 1980s in a cold, wet German university, where we all smoked and worried about nuclear war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRBIJR1d5mc&feature=related
What language barriers there were for a Russian to direct Swedish actors. A nice lady translates, and Tarkovsky breaks into English with a slip into French. The slow tracking shots of Sacrifice are here filled with a Babel of directions, “My right or yours?” “Right for the camera, left for you.” The set is as noisy as a kindergarten or a construction site, and yet the film is hauntingly silent. All sorts of chatter ‘til everyone agrees to have lunch after this shot. The exquisitely subtle movement of the camera on the screen is shown here to have been set up with Tarkovsky riding like a boy on a choo-choo train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8TPVib-Kw&NR=1
What a contrast between the happy play of shooting in the Nordic sun and the film’s on screen apocalyptic tone. Another reason to delight, and to take another look. These documentary snippets make you rethink existentialism, like when you first heard that Kafka thought his stories were comical.
The first Tarkovsky film I ever saw was Sacrifice, during the 1980s in a cold, wet German university, where we all smoked and worried about nuclear war.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRBIJR1d5mc&feature=related
What language barriers there were for a Russian to direct Swedish actors. A nice lady translates, and Tarkovsky breaks into English with a slip into French. The slow tracking shots of Sacrifice are here filled with a Babel of directions, “My right or yours?” “Right for the camera, left for you.” The set is as noisy as a kindergarten or a construction site, and yet the film is hauntingly silent. All sorts of chatter ‘til everyone agrees to have lunch after this shot. The exquisitely subtle movement of the camera on the screen is shown here to have been set up with Tarkovsky riding like a boy on a choo-choo train.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1c8TPVib-Kw&NR=1
What a contrast between the happy play of shooting in the Nordic sun and the film’s on screen apocalyptic tone. Another reason to delight, and to take another look. These documentary snippets make you rethink existentialism, like when you first heard that Kafka thought his stories were comical.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
The return of the Generalist
As the size of humanities departments diminishes, graduate programs need to reconsider how narrowly new PhDs should specialize. From the Ivy League to state universities to traditional colleges, liberal arts departments have shrunk, even as the discipline continues to find new methods and questions.
To keep up with the expanding subjects, departments need to train students to become more flexible, capable of teaching and writing in more than one field. If a history department has just one French scholar, it is not enough for that professor to focus only on the newest specialty. Somehow it is necessary to teach it all, to cover seventeenth-century Absolutism along with the colonization of Algeria—a tricky move if there is only one French history professor.
Yet increasingly we are confronted with the reality that if we don’t teach a subject, no one else will.
Lots of professors are less than eager to teach beyond their specialty. How is teaching a distant subject matter going to foster your publication record? If the Cold War is your domain, how is teaching the eighteenth century going to help you finish your book on the Berlin Wall?
Ultimately, we have to move in both fields, the ones in which we teach, and the ones in which we publish. The result may be less narrowly defined publications and less historicist courses. Classes may ask bluntly what does the French Revolution have to do with the Cuban missile crisis or the Iraq war? Essays may more inclined to explore the longue durée.
Either way, we will have to think more broadly.
To keep up with the expanding subjects, departments need to train students to become more flexible, capable of teaching and writing in more than one field. If a history department has just one French scholar, it is not enough for that professor to focus only on the newest specialty. Somehow it is necessary to teach it all, to cover seventeenth-century Absolutism along with the colonization of Algeria—a tricky move if there is only one French history professor.
Yet increasingly we are confronted with the reality that if we don’t teach a subject, no one else will.
Lots of professors are less than eager to teach beyond their specialty. How is teaching a distant subject matter going to foster your publication record? If the Cold War is your domain, how is teaching the eighteenth century going to help you finish your book on the Berlin Wall?
Ultimately, we have to move in both fields, the ones in which we teach, and the ones in which we publish. The result may be less narrowly defined publications and less historicist courses. Classes may ask bluntly what does the French Revolution have to do with the Cuban missile crisis or the Iraq war? Essays may more inclined to explore the longue durée.
Either way, we will have to think more broadly.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Corporate University?
Now with the news that GM has had too many brands that need to be pared away, one is reminded of all the downsizing that humanities departments have undergone. The Liberal Arts have been subjected to a corporate model of accounting while GM it seems has been following a different pattern, one that preserved old brands --not unlike preserving old languages. Is Pontiac the practical equivalent of Latin? or Old Hittite? Should we applaud GM for its commitment to history?
Monday, April 13, 2009
It's gone. . . .
What to do in the absence of a good bad sci fi television series? How to carry on, now that the tedium of Battlestar Galactica is over? This is the secret burden of those raised on any version of Star Trek, the yearning desire for the comfort of pompous impossibilities. Network executives have surely anticipated this response, and I am merely unaware of the next installation coming my way for me to loath and desire like cheap candy.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Professorial Voice
Went to a lecture given by an old professor of mine, a famous fellow, who has written more books than years I will probably stay above ground. Eighty books to Sander Gilman’s name:
Sitting back to take in his talk, I was immediately struck with how unchanged he looked, and then most remarkably the sound of his voice. If you don’t see someone for a long time, the voice is the feature you most thoroughly forget.
The sound of a human speaking does not linger like an image or a piece of advice once given. If he is real person, we don’t hear the voice over and over again as if he were Robert Plant. Yet when the voice returns, once you hear your old teacher again, the satisfaction and pleasure of recognition is quite remarkable.
I had heard him speak many times, in class and down the hall, yet this intimate apprehension had been replaced after leaving graduate school by reading and professional commentary. “So what do you think of Sander’s latest book?”
But today what really mattered to me sipping coffee in the audience was the childish happiness of hearing an authority who had trained me speaking familiar truths again, and yet not without surprising turns of thought that reminded me of his continued mastery.
Sitting back to take in his talk, I was immediately struck with how unchanged he looked, and then most remarkably the sound of his voice. If you don’t see someone for a long time, the voice is the feature you most thoroughly forget.
The sound of a human speaking does not linger like an image or a piece of advice once given. If he is real person, we don’t hear the voice over and over again as if he were Robert Plant. Yet when the voice returns, once you hear your old teacher again, the satisfaction and pleasure of recognition is quite remarkable.
I had heard him speak many times, in class and down the hall, yet this intimate apprehension had been replaced after leaving graduate school by reading and professional commentary. “So what do you think of Sander’s latest book?”
But today what really mattered to me sipping coffee in the audience was the childish happiness of hearing an authority who had trained me speaking familiar truths again, and yet not without surprising turns of thought that reminded me of his continued mastery.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)