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.

Expulsion, Attraction, Expulsion

Some administrators have the hardness to clear out deadwood by imposing new standards of evaluation. For institutions trailing behind the national curve, this task can be vital, but then problems arise once the clearing out has been completed—how does the university fill the new positions made available.  Those same administrators who chased out the old guard will now find it difficult to attract and retain quality replacements. If they start imposing the same standards they used to remove the unproductive colleagues in evaluating the newly acquired productive scholars, they will soon find that they have done nothing more than create a cycle of expulsion, recruitment, evaluation, and expulsion.  Nurturing a creative environment is quite different from weeding a rotten one out. 

Administrators may be satisfied that they have established a cycle of expulsion, recruitment, evaluation, and expulsion wherein a handful of applicants survive and the majority are removed.  But the real question—how has the institution improved qualitatively—remains unanswerable by this self-replicating process.  In today’s academic market, administrators can almost always assume that they will have a better pool of applicants with the next search.  However, as soon as restrictions and rubrics are imposed on the hiring process, the very best candidates are chased away, because the innovative thinkers do not fit the standards used to chase out the dead wood. 

The most successful administrators facilitate rather than evaluate. They allow their clever colleagues to go about their business without constantly asking how smart they are and how much business they  have completed lately.  An associate dean may hire the digital genius from Cork and attract the Belgian designer, but as soon as the university starts evaluating them according to generic rules, where one rubric judges all, these immigrants will drift away to friendlier, more inspiring fields.  To the administrator, it will seem that the Irish genius and Flemish designer just did not measure up, and so the university will never even recognize what they have lost. Instead they will go out, hire new recruits, and start the same process over, without ever seeing what they are missing in qualitative improvement.

Humanities' Scales

At dinner the other night, a colleague across the table asked, “Did they cut the writing program because it’s a subject that you have to teach in small classes? No more than fifteen kids at a time.”

From the administrative perspective, an institution wants to teach as many students as possible in a single class. Small colleges emphasize that they have a high professor to student ration. Big universities prefer to change the subject by celebrating large-scale activities that encourage the students to participate as a mass.  The pedagogical function of football games is to teach the crowd how to enjoy an event with 90,000 other people participating.  All the auditorium filling rallies and charities that a big university sponsors reinforce the idea that individual students can have meaningful moral experiences as a crowd. 

The question remains how to balance complexity with scale.  Can you have a subtle, nuanced intellectual encounter with a performer or speaker who is addressing a vast audience?  Sure there is the thrill of being swept up in a vast movement—and no we are not just talking about Fascism—fashion, football, Facebook all reverberate with the excitement of participating in an activity that everyone else is doing, too.

Can students learn to think critically and independently if their schools address them as a crowd? Sure there will always be a certain backlash and alienation produced by stadium events, but the point of a large gathering is not to create a new punk scene.  Can the 95% in the auditorium also leave the building having learned a subtle new insight about themselves and their favorite subject?

How do you show the Mona Lisa to ten thousand people a day in a manner that allows them to respond to the painting’s details and not the fact that they are being herded around an ensemble of pigments covered in plexiglass?

In order to teach large numbers, it might help to scale down the size of the syllabus. We cannot assign a 150-pages of reading per week to 50 students and expect the majority of them to be inspired.  Only fear will make them digest that much information --and then fairly quickly, the fear wears off.

To teach complex questions to a large class, we might have to slow down and concentrate on a single object.  Walk our way through one maybe two Wordsworth poems.  Even a single book of the Prelude is too much.  So many American humanities classes attempt to match the scale of the classroom size with the breadth of historical coverage.  A big audience requires a sweeping lecture—if we want students to come away with a vague sense of the historical sublime, sure.  But in order to make a theoretical insight that will last, we might return to the old German approach of discussing a few, meaningful pages. That philosophy seminar in Göttingen in which the professor never advanced  beyond the first 90 pages of Hegel's Logik taught me more about Idealism than most everything else.

If we are going to teach computational topography of 100,000 novels, then we also might shift the scale to concentrate on a few intense pages.