Israel’s unwarranted and outrageous attack upon the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is another sad reminder that the leaders of Israel are determined to indefinitely continue and defend the punishing and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip and the continued isolation of the West Bank, which has caused and continues to cause immense suffering and loss of life for the Palestinian people. Deaf to the cries and condemnations of the international community, Israel has pursued a calculated policy of punishment and humiliation against the Palestinians, explicitly designed to create a permanent crisis in the region, thus further justifying Israel’s continued policy of separation and apartheid. From the terrible 2008 Gaza Massacre to Monday’s premeditated assault upon the Mavi Marmara, Israel has sent a clear signal to the international community that it has no intentions of either abiding by international or humanitarian law, or of negotiating in good faith with the Palestinian people. Faced, like South Africa in the 1980’s, with a clear demographical disadvantage, Israel has chosen to isolate its minority population in a last ditch effort to maintain its implicitly racist policy of Zionist rule.

Because of this, it is now more important than ever, that the institutions responsible for supporting and abetting Israel’s continued aggressions against the Palestinians, including the City University of New York, be forced, at the very least, to end their investment in any company that aids in any way the blockade, isolation, and occupation of the Palestinian territories. Since Hampshire College’s successful and groundbreaking disinvestment in companies that support the occupation of Palestine in 2009, there has been a growing student disinvestment campaign, which has spread to universities across the nation from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, to Columbia and NYU. This movement is dedicated to convincing their college and university budget and finance committees to rearrange their investment portfolios so as to disinvest from companies such as: United Tech­nolo­gies, which man­u­fac­tures Black­hawk heli­copters used by the Israeli mil­i­tary, Gen­eral Elec­tric, which sup­plies the propul­sions sys­tems for Apache heli­copter gun­ships, also used by the Israeli Defense Forces, ITT Cor­po­ra­tion, which pro­vides night vision gog­gles to the Israeli mil­i­tary, Motorola, which is engaged in a $400 mil­lion project to pro­vide radar sys­tems for enhanc­ing secu­rity at ille­gal West Bank set­tle­ments, Terex, which pro­vides trucks for logis­ti­cal sup­port to the Israeli mil­i­tary, and Cater­pil­lar, which pro­vides many of the bull­doz­ers and con­struc­tion equip­ment used to build new set­tle­ments and to destroy Pales­tin­ian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. While this kind of disinvestment is a good start, the current intransigence of the Israeli government calls for more aggressive forms of disinvestment. Universities and other institutions should be encouraged not only to disinvest in companies that support the Israeli occupation and isolation of Palestine, but any companies that engage in direct business with or provide investment to Israel in any capacity.

Last March, The UC Berkeley Student Senate passed a resolution, supported in large part by the UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, (the resolution is reprinted below), urging the university to end all investments related to General Electric and United Technologies. The resolution passed the Student Senate but was callously vetoed by the Student Senate President Noah Stern. Currently UC Berkeley students are campaigning to overturn that veto, but UC President Mark Yudof, the same individual who recently raised UC tuition by 32%, has issued statements this month making it clear that the university policy supports disinvestment only in the case of genocide—a ridiculous and incredibly irresponsible high bar to set for taking action. While this may sound like a defeat, the resolution has gained steam and is being proposed at several other campuses in the UC system including UC San Diego and UC Riverside. It is time that the student government at CUNY including the Doctoral Students’ Council, The University Student Senate and the University Faculty Senate, took up the resolution as their own.

In the meantime, it will be imperative these next few weeks that those of us who care about the suffering and humiliation taking place in Gaza remain vocal and outspoken critics of Israel’s policy, and that we call on the US Government to unreservedly and critically condemn the attacks on the Mavi Marmara and the continued blockade of Gaza.

 Click here to see the full version of the “Bill in Support of UC Disinvestment from War Crimes”

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Increasing taxes, even upon the extremely wealthy, is not (and has never been) a very popular position in postwar America. According to a 2009 Harris poll conducted for the Tax Foundation, 56 percent of Americans believe they are paying too much in taxes; about half are opposed to taxes on soft drinks and junk food, and almost two thirds of those polled said they favored a complete elimination of the Federal Estate Tax. Although conducted by the Tax Foundation—which hides an arguably anti-tax bias in claims of bipartisanship and coded language about transparency and simplicity—these figures are nonetheless pretty consistent with the overall public sentiment since the end of the Second World War. In Gallup polls conducted from 1947 to 2009 a small majority of Americans regularly said their income taxes were too high; a slightly smaller group agreed that their taxes were just about right; while an extremely small minority, between 1 and 3 percent each year (communists no doubt!) said they thought their taxes were too low.

While this overall hostility toward higher taxes might be obvious to anyone who has studied the ideological underpinnings of American capitalism, or, for that matter, anyone who has been paying any attention to the recent “Tea Party” movement, these figures actually reveal a counterintuitive truth. Yes, almost all Americans have historically been opposed to increasing taxes, but they have also been near universally ambivalent about the taxes they already pay, regardless of how much or how little. Indeed, the poll numbers show that even during the periods of highest taxation (1950–1963) the average percentage of Americans who said their taxes were too high remained pretty consistent: about 56 percent. Compare this to the period of least taxation (1970–1990) when the top marginal tax rate plummeted from 70 to 30 percent, and the findings are startling. Even during this second period, which saw one of the greatest decreases in federal taxes ever (and consequently some of the most devastating cuts to state and federal spending, including the near complete devastation of New York City), the average percentage of Americans who said their tax rate was too high actually increased, from 56 to 61 percent. In other words, a small majority of Americans inevitably tend to complain about their taxes no matter how high or low those taxes actually are.

It is tempting to see this behavior as a kind of virtue; after all, an independent and inherently suspicious and critical populace is vital for any democracy; but the sad fact is that, no matter what the tea-baggers say, this knee jerk impulse against higher taxation is not driven by any grassroots distrust of the government as much as it is by corporate lobbying and simple, uninformed, and misguided greed. People generally want to keep as much of their money as possible, and they falsely believe that they know best how to spend it. Yet in the rush to hold onto what’s theirs, they often fail to see the bigger picture.

This resistance to taxation is a serious problem, however, for the Right has been extremely successful in manipulating America’s ingrained resistance to higher taxes and has managed, over the course of the last forty years, with the help of several Democrats, of course, to completely overturn what was once a relatively progressive tax system. Between 1951 and 1963, arguably some of the most prosperous and productive years in American History, the tax rate for those making more than $400,000 hovered around 91 percent. Today the top marginal tax rate, regardless of whether one makes $500,000 or $500 million, is only 35 percent. Considering that greater and greater amounts of wealth are being consolidated at higher and higher income levels, the result is a system where more and more money held by fewer and fewer people is being taxed at historically low levels. And yet, if one believes the polls, the people are as unwilling as ever to accept the fact that low taxes on the rich not only lead to poor services and crumbling infrastructures, but are responsible for much of our current ill-health, inequality, and general unhappiness.

As Tony Judt points out in his new book Ill Fares the Land, there is a direct negative correlation between income inequality and such shared social goods as health, happiness, and upward mobility. Measured against several other developed nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, the United States has the absolute greatest income inequality of any of these nations, with the exception of Great Britain, whose income inequality is only slightly lower. Consequently, the United States has an almost exactly opposite rate of social mobility, by far the lowest of all of the countries compared. Indeed, according to Judt, the percentage of a son’s income that can be explained by his father’s income has grown dramatically in the United States, from a historic low of 10 percent in 1980, to a whopping 32 percent in 2000. And yet, amazingly, the populists still clamor to abolish the estate tax! When it comes to health, the United States, sadly, fares even worse. Among the twenty developed countries Judt compares, the Unites States has the greatest income inequality as well as the worst health (as measured on the index of health and social problems), despite the fact that the United States spends, per capita, far more than any of the other countries Judt compares.

Although these findings clearly reveal that there is something fundamentally wrong with America, what really matters here is the obvious correlation between the virtues of health, happiness, and mobility, and income equality. The fact is that the greater the equality of any society, the higher the rates of happiness and general welfare. Until we learn to embrace this fact, until we learn to give up our ignorant resistance to higher taxes, and begin the long process of creating a fair and equitable tax system, we will remain little more than slaves to a flawed and corrupt ideology.

All of these conclusions then, for anyone interested in a fairer, more equitable and humane society, provide both a sense of hope and despair, for they reveal simultaneously that increasing taxes will be difficult, but also that higher taxes, once passed, would likely not be met with any greater hostility than our current tax rate, especially if those passing them can make the necessary connections between happiness and income equality. The political implications of these facts, however, are enormous, for they suggest that any president or congressperson willing to do the right thing and increase taxes significantly would face a lot of potential opposition in the next election. If Barack Obama is serious about his legacy, he will take that risk and take it soon. The longer we postpone real tax reform, the less time there will be for the American public to get used to it.

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—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by a whopping 32 percent. After the announcement that the increase had been approved, students and faculty took several actions: some refused to attend or teach classes, others took over campus buildings, while still others rallied outside administrators’ homes and on campuses across the state for several days, demanding that the hikes be repealed and state funding restored. Despite these rallies and the incredible amount of public outcry they helped generate, nothing was done to roll back or even ameliorate the situation. Instead, the administration explained away any responsibility for their actions, claiming simply that their hands were tied. Afterwards, the presidents of the several colleges, rather than rally with their students to take on Sacramento, chose instead to call in the police. In the wake of that decision several hundred students were arrested or suspended and scores more were beaten, detained, maced, or otherwise harassed by local police.

For many ordinary observers, the tuition increases at the University of California were seen as the inevitable result of state cuts to higher education, which were themselves the result of the recent economic crisis that has left both California and New York reeling from lost tax revenues. Although this is certainly part of the equation, there is another, arguably more important and certainly more insidious reason why the UC Regents found it so easy to pass such unprecedented tuition increases at a university that, like CUNY, used to be free. The answer is simple: the tuition increases will not affect them, their future, or their children’s future. The sad truth is that nearly all of the regents at the University of California, like the members of the Board of Trustees at CUNY, have no real stake in what happens to the students or faculty they supposedly represent. Instead, their loyalties are to the ideological whims of the politicians and bureaucrats who appointed or hired them, and upon whom their future employment and professional success is dependent.

Although the regents may have indeed imagined they were responding to an unavoidable crisis, the erosion of funding for state universities, from California to New York, is not merely the result of any one economic disaster, but represents instead an oligarchic, systematic, and ideologically driven attempt to privatize the nation’s several dozen state university systems by starving them of government funding and forcing them to charge more tuition while simultaneously seeking out further forms of corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. This process of corporate transformation is not merely a threat from politicians and ideologues outside the university, however, but is, more often than not, being carried out by those on the very inside, those like UC President Mark Yudof and CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt who seem dedicated to the idea of drowning their respective universities in the proverbial bathtub.

This structure of de facto corporate and political governance, so indicative of the new university, is nowhere more cynically self-evident than at CUNY, where the Chancellor recently welcomed the idea of radically increasing tuition, and the Chair of the BOT is also the Vice Chairman of an organization (Edison Learning) whose sole mission is the privatization of public education. This disconnect between the needs of the students and the ideological interests of its leaders exists in part because the City University of New York is currently governed by an incredibly hierarchical and dysfunctional structure of organizations and representatives ranging from an extremely powerful Board of Trustees, a moderately influential chancellor, several university presidents who are mostly beholden to the board and the chancellor, and a very loose coalition of faculty and student senates and organizations whose decisions, concerns, and protests are frequently ignored or overlooked. While the Chancellor ostensibly has control over the future direction of the university, his appointment is always contingent upon the approval of the Board of Trustees. Likewise, all of the college presidents, including our own Bill Kelly, are appointed only on the approval of the Board of Trustees. The students and faculty, meanwhile, have practically no formal representation when it comes to the future direction of the university where they work and study.

It is time that all of the stakeholders involved, including the students, staff, and faculty of CUNY, as well as the unions and organizations that represent them, begin to agitate for democratic reforms of the University’s governance structure in an effort to shake the monkey of corporate control off their backs once and for all. It is not enough to merely have the freedom to oversee the academic aspects of our work and to pursue our research and teaching unimpeded; we must also insist that we be directly involved in the larger economic and structural aspects of the university, paying attention to and taking control over the processes and decisions that so profoundly affect our day to day experiences.

The first place to begin this effort would be with a complete restructuring of the Board of Trustees. Currently the board consists of seventeen members, ten of which are appointed by the governor and five by the mayor. The remain­ing two non-appointed mem­bers of the board include the head of the Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent Sen­ate and the chair of the Uni­ver­sity Fac­ulty Sen­ate, the last of whom, because of supposed col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing con­flicts, sits with­out a vote. This means that of the seventeen members only two are actually stakeholders who have any real interest in the well being of the university, and of those two only one is allowed to vote. The fifteen members who make up the rest of the board, as the GC Advocate has reported several times in the past, are almost exclusively composed of persons whose primary experience and interests are in the business sector. The students and faculty of the university, meanwhile have absolutely no say in who is appointed to the board.

It should be obvious to anyone who believes in the idea of democratic self rule that the university belongs as much to the students, staff, and faculty as it does to the residents of the State of New York; and instead of allowing the governor and mayor to stack the deck with friends and political appointees, many of whom are sorely unqualified, we should insist that the size of the board be dramatically increased so that there is at the very least an equal balance between the interests of the state and the several groups of stakeholders of which the university is composed. Although the specifics of such a plan would no doubt involve a significant amount of nuanced legislation, the principle of equal representation is a good place to begin.

Instead of one student and one token, largely powerless faculty member, the board should be expanded to include one elected student representative, one elected faculty member, and one elected staff member from each of the eleven senior colleges, the six community colleges, and the Graduate Center for a total of seventeen students, seventeen faculty members, and seventeen staff members. Each of these members would have a full and equal vote in all decisions made by the Board of Trustees, except for the faculty and staff members, who would be able to vote on all decisions except those directly related to contract negotiations. Add to this an additional two gubernatorial or mayoral appointments, or perhaps two City Council appointments chosen by the City Council Higher Education Committee, and the BOT would be fairly balanced between the interests of the city and state, the staff, the students, and the faculty. Under such a structure, there would no doubt be much more debate, much less rubber stamping, and much more innovation. Most importantly, though, there would be a much greater concern for the interests of those whom the university was originally meant to serve. 

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The recent round of student protests and building take-overs at campuses across the University of California system this week have been both inspiring and heart-breaking. The devastating and unprecedented 32 percent increase in student “fees” (the UC system’s way of getting around using the word “tuition”) approved by the UC regents on November 19 reminds us of just how short-sighted, stupid, and callous most university administrations have been in their response to state budget cuts across the country. Instead of standing up to Sacramento and demanding restoration of cuts, UC President Mark Yudof told reporters after the vote: “Our hand has been forced. When you don’t have any money, you don’t have any money.” This is, of course, easy for Mr. Yudof to say whose first year salary was $828,000 and whose $10,000 a month house in Oakland, the New York Times reports, is entirely paid for by the University.
Instead of throwing up his hands and saying there is nothing he can do, why did Yudof not threaten to resign? Why not encourage the regents, all of them who voted for this disastrous increase, to do the same and resign unless the state restores the cuts? Why not work with his students to oppose these cuts rather than kowtowing to the whims of the state? The answers to these questions are clear: because the governance of the UC system, like so many university systems across the nation, is such that administrators and regents and presidents and trustees see themselves as somehow at odds with the faculty and students whom they are supposed to serve. The trend of corporate-structured oversight of public universities has brought those institutions to their knees and until this is changed there is little hope that these kinds of cuts will not continue.
Equally heartbreaking was the relatively low turnout in response to these increases. Instead of thousands, even tens of thousands of students protesting at every campus across the UC, the biggest protests never reached more than 1,500 people and although some campus buildings were taken over and strikes called, they seem to be having little impact on the actual functioning of the schools, which continued with their business as usual, despite the noise of protest all around.
Nonetheless, these demonstrations were inspiring for several reasons. First of all, despite the relatively low numbers (considering the nature of the increases), the protests were aggressive and vocal and received an enormous amount of national and local press. At UCLA on the day of the vote, protestors attempted to block vans bringing the regents onto the campus, heckled regents as they crossed the university toward the meeting site, were maced and beaten by police, and then after the vote, surrounded the building linked arm in arm, refusing to let the regents leave for more than three hours before they were dispersed by police in riot gear. Simultaneously, students across the system, including Berkeley, Davis, and Santa Cruz began large protests and building takeovers. Until Saturday night, administrative buildings and classrooms were still being occupied on several campuses. More than seventy students at UC Santa Cruz were arrested Sunday morning after a three day takeover of a building there, where they were in close negotiations with the UCSC administration over demands. These responses show that students are ready and willing to put their bodies and their futures on the line against the police and the callous UC administration. In resisting these tuition hikes as they have, the UC students have managed to raise the bar yet again, setting a very different kind of precedent, which might well be the start of a much bigger, more organized and, more permanent form of campus resistance.
But what does all of this mean for us? What lessons can we at CUNY take from these protests and demonstrations? After all, we are also facing yet another round of tuition increases, cuts, layoffs, and service reductions. What can and should we be doing now to prepare to resist these cuts? The first thing to be learned from the UC protests is that there is strength in numbers and any successful student protest campaign must make sure that it has the support of a majority of the student body and that those students are fully educated as to the nature of the protests and why those protests are in their best interest. One of the most disheartening things about following these protests were the number of UC students who seemed unconcerned about the cuts or who were actively angry at the protestors for disrupting the campus. While this may not have been the majority of students, the fact is that many students, for whatever reason, still went to class, and still allowed the university to keep functioning. Why they were not with their fellow students on the lawns protesting or at least refusing to attend class is a mystery, but the fact is that without the support of these groups no protest will be truly successful.
In addition to recruiting students to the cause, it is imperative that any campus resistance also include a good share of professors and lecturers who are willing to call in sick, cancel classes, or hold classes off campus until demands are met. Although a handful of radical UC professors vowed to do this (three of them actually appearing live on Democracy Now! to announce their intentions to honor the strike) they seem to have had little impact so far, and as we go to press on there have been few reports of any significant continuing protest on any of the UC campuses.
The other big lesson to take away from these events is that university administrations clearly do not care about the interests or the welfare of the students they represent. Not only did President Yudof and the regents refuse to do anything to stop the cuts, they allowed campus presidents and UC police to brutally disband several of the protests and building takeovers. At Berkeley, police in riot gear shoved and dragged students out of Wheeler Hall, while students at UCLA were maced, beaten with billy clubs and otherwise harassed by police. Some students are even facing charges of felony burglary for refusing to leave Wheeler Hall. This kind of zero tolerance, life-destroying retribution sends a chilling signal to all of the other students who might be tempted to protest or disrupt campus activities as a form of political action.
Surely the situation is dire for students across the country and it is becoming increasingly clear that dealing with the attacks on public education one extraordinary case at a time may not be the best strategy. Perhaps it is time that students began to create and re-create national student resistance organizations in response to the budget cuts and tuition hikes that are afflicting campuses everywhere. These organizations should not only be ready to organize and help coordinate massive student strikes, walkouts, and building takeovers, but should encourage higher education unions to form solidarity coalitions in an effort to tackle these problems at the legislative level as well. These organizations must agitate not only for laws that limit tuition increases and guarantee funding, but must also push for new legislation to reform university governance at large state and city university systems like UC, CUNY, and SUNY. While legislative action is often slow and full of awful compromise, when backed up with a powerful movement willing to put bodies on the street, and willing to face arrest and police brutality, it can be a powerful tool for creating real change. “Students and workers united,” as one recent protest chant put it, “will never be defeated.”
Whatever the strategy, though, it is clear that something significant must be done soon to end the economic violence against the working and middle classes. The creeping decades-long trend of budget cuts, even during periods of so-called “economic growth,” has seriously and perhaps irreversibly undermined the very foundations of public higher education. The students at UC are not only fighting for their own educations but are also fighting to insure that their children will someday have access to the excellent and affordable education they deserve.

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“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

Last semester I picked up a $1,000 check from City College for a faculty development workshop that I participated in over the winter break. The workshop was designed to introduce interested faculty to the uses of technology in the classroom and was, no surprise, sponsored by Verizon. As a struggling graduate student who finds himself consistently behind on the rent, I was delighted to receive the money, but part of me feels bad (well almost) since it turns out I really have no intention now, nor did I ever, really, of using any more technology in my classroom than I normally would. In fact, instead of instilling in me a sense of possibility and excitement, the workshop made me deeply suspicious of the supposed pedagogical value of technology in general. Although it helped me realize that there are, indeed, several kinds of fascinating and interesting things you can do with web applications both in and out of class, I remained unconvinced that using those technologies would actually help my students to better learn the things that matter: how to be, for instance, a thoughtful and contemplative person capable of formulating, analyzing, critiquing, and communicating difficult and original ideas.

The leader of the workshop was, I am quite proud to say, an old student of mine from Hunter College who is now getting his PhD at the Graduate Center and is the head of the Writing Center at my campus. For the entire eight hours, he led the faculty members present that day through a series of exercises that were meant to introduce us to web-based applications that we could use to “help students learn.” While I was familiar with most of the applications and platforms that were being introduced, I had never thought of using any of them in the classroom. From Google and Wikipedia, to YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, WordPress, and Facebook, we talked about the potential pedagogical value of these various information, publishing, and social networking platforms. It was a stretch, but we did our best to articulate the different ways we might use these programs or services in our classrooms. The idea of using blogs and Facebook pages was especially popular, as was the idea of using YouTube videos as learning tools.

After the workshop I felt obligated to think more about the ways that I could use some of this technology to help my students learn better, and, since I had to write a report on precisely that subject in order to qualify for the stipend, I spent a good amount of time contemplating my options. The more I wrote and the more I reflected on my thoughts, however, the more I realized that I didn’t want to use any technology in my classroom: not this semester, not next, and if I could help it, not ever. In fact, the more I tried to justify and find a place for technology, the more I kept thinking about what was being lost. Sure, showing a YouTube video is a fine way to generate conversation, but it is the conversation, and not the act of watching a video that really matters, and in an English class, where the subject is language itself, does it really make sense to show a video? Technology, no doubt, provides a vast array of new options, but do we really need more of these kinds of options, and do any of them actually aid in the learning process or simply provide us with a temporary distraction from it? What are we sacrificing when we introduce new technologies into the curriculum? And what kinds of messages are we sending to our students?

In an age of increasing technological innovation and scientific breakthrough it is easy to get caught up in the idea that, as educators, we must prepare our students for the brave new worlds that await them. As our lives and our relationships with others become more and more mediated through the use of technology, it only seems reasonable that we should teach our students how to use those new technologies to their advantage. To question this assumption, to ask why seems like a selfish, almost churlish endeavor, designed to actively cheat our students out of their right to self-empowerment. Nonetheless, once the question is asked the answers become increasingly complicated.

First of all, the use of this kind of technology in the classroom not only assumes that it will remain a viable and useful tool (rather than, say, going the way of the card catalog) but that the use of such technologies is a societal good. The idea that the university or academy, funded by Verizon, should feel obliged to keep pace with the entrepreneurial fits of the World Wide Web, or that we should feel ashamed not to be on top of the latest marketing device disguised as a communication platform, seems shortsighted.

Indeed, one of the things that frightens me most about the often uncritical embrace of technology in the classroom is the way that it potentially dehumanizes the educational experience, where students spend more and more time both in and out of class looking at video screens, computer monitors, Blackberries, and iPhones, rather than looking at the world around them, talking to each other, or most importantly, spending time alone with their thoughts. Sure, constant e-mail, tweeting, texting, and ironic Facebook updates may feel like meaningful communication, but what’s really being communicated besides a desperate desire for the type of community that without the distance digital communication makes possible would already exist?

What concerns me most, however, is not what we are introducing into our classrooms—after all, I admit a preference for polished, word processed documents instead of smudgy handwritten ones—but what we might be losing. I’d like to make the argument that, despite our increasingly technological lives, or perhaps because of them, the creation and conservation of technology-free spaces where people can, and are encouraged, to communicate face-to-face, free of distraction, with nothing more than their unique temperaments and their private store of knowledge and eloquence, may be more important than ever. Our students are already attention-deprived and overloaded. The idea of forcing them back onto the Internet, especially to privately owned, for-profit websites like Facebook and YouTube, as part of their schoolwork, seems at best counterproductive, and at worst incredibly irresponsible, even unethical. Instead, shouldn’t we be encouraging our students to carve out spaces of time for themselves that are free from the distractions of the market and the market driven popular culture that typifies the Internet. Shouldn’t we be encouraging them to be skeptical and critical of this mass culture, or better yet, encouraging them to ignore it completely. Should we not be inviting them instead to think in full sentences; to write more than 140 characters at a time; and to have the self reliance and self sufficiency to be alone with themselves and their thoughts for more than the seven or eight hours they spend unconscious each night.

As a profession we seem to have thoughtlessly embraced the idea of technology precisely because we see it as a way of making learning easier and more accessible for more of our students. Obviously—the logic goes—our students are comfortable using the Internet and social networking tools, so why not allow them to use those skills to learn? This kind of thinking is common among instructors who embrace popular culture because they think it will help their students “relate” to the course material. These are the same teachers who spend class time screening Hollywood versions of Shakespeare because students are supposedly incapable of understanding modern Elizabethan English or who teach rap lyrics or song lyrics as poetry, because it’s easier for students to get the difference between a tenor and a vehicle when it’s Tupac or Bob Dylan speaking rather than Dylan Thomas or Langston Hughes. But our calling as educators extends beyond merely providing our students with opportunities to learn material. As educators we are also responsible for providing our students with experiences which they would not otherwise have access to, such as the experiences that result from finding solutions to difficult problems, engaged and thoughtful conversation, and collegial argument. But even more than this, it is important that we offer our students alternatives to the kinds of experiences provided by the technology of mass media. If we are going to insist on teaching them how to get by in the corporate world they’ve been given, we need to at least teach them that other worlds are still possible. 

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