This definitely caught my attention because I’ve been working on a short article about for-profit colleges for this blog.  Just recently PBS Frontline aired College, Inc. a documentary about the for-profit college industry. (It’s available to watch for free on the PBS website and also streamed on Netflix.)

As usual Colbert is on point.  He asks Hacker in the interview, what makes traditional colleges so special?  “Why is their crushing debt any different from the crushing debt of an online college?”  He has a point.  Overall student loan debt in the U.S. is now at $750 billion, roughly equal to the entire amount of credit card debt in the U.S.   The difference though, as PBS reported, is that for-profit colleges account for 10% of the nation’s students, but account for 44% of the student loan defaults.  What we are seeing in the for-profit college industry are risky short-sighted lending practices not unlike those that brought on the housing market crisis.

What’s most troubling about the for-profits is not that they are commercializing education.  There’s never been some pristine time when higher education was free of market values.  But what they are doing is amplifying the type of corporatization and extortionist profiteering already at work in the traditional higher education system.  (How many of you whipped out the MasterCard for those over-priced textbooks you were required to buy this week?)

What’s more is that for-profits are making some eye-popping revenue in the process.  For instance, the Apollo Group, Inc., which runs The University of Phoenix and other institutions, is an S&P 500 corporation valued at around $4 billion.

Next week I’ll be taking a closer look at College, Inc. and the recent screwball comedy Accepted, which is a silly but somewhat perceptive take on the for-profit college phenomenon.

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The CGEU logo

At the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions’ (CGEU) annual conference on August 8th, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, the CGEU voted to endorse and mobilize for the October 7th national day of action to defend public education. The conference was attended by 30–40 enthusiastic officials, members and staffers of graduate employee unions from the US and Canada. I spoke on a panel about the March 4th day of action with CCNY student Larry Hales and Jorge Cabrera, a California organizer and grad student with UAW 2865/UCal, which was well received. All the CGEU-ers were very supportive of March 4th, recognized the importance of student-worker alliances, and almost immediately began discussing how they could help organize for October 7th.

As I’ve discussed previously, not only are adjuncts and grad students the recipients of poverty-level wages, nonexistent job security and flimsy benefits, but they are at the center of the ongoing effort to privatize public higher education, so the CGEU is a very important organization with a vital contribution to make to this struggle. It’s going to take a major fightback on the part of graduate employees and other contingent workers over the course of the next decade-plus to defend the institution of public higher education and instructors’ salaries, so this coalition is very important. The recent contract victory of the Graduate Employee Union (GEO) of the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, a CGEU member, in which the GEO defeated attempts to rescind tuition waivers for graduate employees and won the expansion of benefits.

The CGEU logo is shown at right. At first I thought it was just a pair of gears, but after seeing it about ten times I realized that the cogs were actually books. The metaphor is nice: grad students are the cogs that make universities run. Although I don’t think it’s supposed to mean this, it can also be read as suggesting that universities are “edu-factories,” as the CUNYTIME collective once put it. (I finally got to use some of those invaluable art history skills in this blog!)

You can sign up for the CGEU listserv here. For some reason the PSC isn’t a member of the CGEU, but it should be. CGEU members have set a good precedent; CUNY Grad Center students should follow their example.

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“The iconoclasm need not be loud and messy.”

According to Michelle Latiolais, a former student of John Williams at the University of Denver where he taught for many years, this was a recurring bit of advice that Williams gave to his creative writing students.  Latiolais wrote about this in her introduction to another of Williams’s fine novels, Butcher’s Crossing.  Both Butcher’s Crossing and Stoner were recently published through the New York Review of Books Classics series which has brought back into circulation several titles that deserve to be revisited.  The cover designs in this series are all beautifully done as well, and the handsome cover of Stoner features a Thomas Eakins painting that perfectly fits the somber, contemplative mood of the novel.

(For the record, this John Williams is not to be confused with “John A. Williams” the African-American novelist and author of The Man Who Cried I Am.)

Stoner is among the most beautifully written of all the academic novels I’ve read.  In Stoner John Williams certainly fulfilled the principles that he taught to his own students.  The novel was first published in 1965, and I have come to think of it as a novel of “The 1960s”, but one that took a different angle on the social upheaval of that time.  While you can turn to Ginsburg or Burroughs for the noise and messiness, Williams provides a nuanced look at some of the social background that produced this rebellion: the conformity of middle-class respectability, the stifling norms of gender and sexuality, the worship of wealth and finance, the violence and death of perpetual wars.  It isn’t a book that aims to be loudly political. While all those themes are present in Stoner in various forms, they are all tucked away into a simple, powerful, and resonant tale about the life and career of a simple Missouri farm boy who becomes an English professor.

On the first page of the novel John Williams gives us a biographical blurb on Stoner that is as good a summary of the novel as any reviewer could write:

“William Stoner entered the University of Missouri as a freshman in the year 1910, at the age of nineteen. Eight years later, during the height of World War I, he received his Doctor of Philosophy degree and accepted an instructorship at the same University, where he taught until his death in 1956. He did not rise above the rank of assistant professor, and few students remembered him with any sharpness after they had taken his courses. When he died his colleagues made a memorial contribution of a medieval manuscript to the University library. This manuscript may still be found in the Rare Books Collection, bearing the inscription: ‘Presented to the Library of the University of Missouri, in memory of William Stoner, Department of English. By his colleagues.’”

That is his core story, but there’s so much more.  Stoner is born into a poor farming family in Booneville, Missouri.  He goes off to college with the idea that he will study agriculture and bring that knowledge back to the family farm.  Instead he discovers a passion for medieval English literature, and when his advisor presents him with an opportunity to teach some courses and pursue his Ph.D., Stoner finds himself on his way to career in academia.

In his personal life, Stoner ends up married to Edith, a socially awkward young society girl born into a family of “means” in St. Louis, Missouri. Her father is a pompous man of the financial industry, and let’s just say 1929 was not kind to him and his family.  Edith has been cultivated by her parents to be little more than ornamentation for some wealthy husband who will give her the comfortably dull life that she is accustomed to.  Despite the fact that he is not well off, Edith senses some kind of freedom in marrying Stoner (though she is unable to articulate it) and decides to accept his proposal.  The social and sexual awkwardness between them is apparent throughout their entire marriage, from their very first days together on through the later years as they grow into little more than emotionally distant roommates raising a young daughter together.

The most powerful section in the novel comes when Stoner falls into an affair with Katherine Driscoll, a graduate student who takes one of his seminars.  Driscoll is younger than Stoner, but is a world wise and experienced woman in her own right.  This could easily be dismissed as just another in the long line of sordid affairs portrayed in academic fictions (and nearly any fictional work involving heterosexual middle aged men.)  At one point Stoner acknowledges that his own situation has devolved into just such a cliché and in a moment of despair he sees himself as, “a pitiable fellow going into his middle age, misunderstood by his wife, seeking to renew his youth, taking up with a girl years younger than himself, awkwardly and apishly reaching for the youth he could not have, a fatuous, garishly got-up clown at whom the world laughed out of discomfort, pity and contempt.”

Though Stoner and Driscoll’s relationship is as innocent and sincere as extra-marital relations come, they run aground of the morality of the college community.  When a rival professor catches wind of their relationship he uses it as ammunition against Stoner.  Eventually his meddling forces Stoner and Driscoll to make a difficult decision about their relationship.

The language of the novel is quite beautiful and I could single out any number of passages that seem so precise and resonant in describing physical or emotional details in the story. I’ve seen more than one review compare it to Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, another gracefully written academic novel full of longing and desire.  One of the passages that stands out is when Stoner has just buried his parents and ponders the fleeting insignificance of the meager agrarian lives that they led:

“He thought of the cost exacted, year after year, by the soil; and it remained as it had been – a little more barren, perhaps, a little more frugal of increase.  Nothing had changed. Their lives had been expended in cheerless labor, their wills broken, their intelligences numbed.  Now they were in the earth to which they had given their lives; and slowly, year by year, the earth would take them.  Slowly the damp and rot would infest the pine boxes which held their bodies, and slowly it would touch their flesh, and finally it would consume the last vestiges of their substances.  And they would become a meaningless part of that stubborn earth to which they had long ago given themselves.”

As far as the academic world goes, Stoner subtly portrays some of the mundane activities of the academic life in a way few other novels accomplish, and it does so in an engaging style that doesn’t alienate the non-academic reader.  That said, one character who academics will certainly recognize is Charles Walker a graduate student in one of Stoner’s seminars.  Walker is one of those students who never lets the fact that he is unprepared for class keep him from participating in the discussions anyway.  In one particularly scandalous scene Walker is supposed to be presenting a paper of his own, but instead he improvises his presentation by bashing another student’s paper.  Now much ink has been spilled over the way that some theory junkies in literary studies rely on their pre-fabricated psychoanalysis or post-structural jargon and apply the same dull terms to whatever literary work they happen to be talking about.  Though “theory” came later, Williams shows us that the academic bullshitter was not invented in the 1980s and 1990s.  When Stoner is drafted to sit in on Walker’s orals committee he not only takes the shoddy student down a peg, he also provides a rather useful summary of the basic things that one should know as a scholar of early English literature. I think the best academic novels manage to be pedagogical in this way, by not only dramatizing the academic life, but also teaching something about the disciplines depicted in the work.

It’s no secret we are in a period of uncertainty about the future of the novel (or any other long forms of writing for that matter).  I think of novels like Stoner whenever I hear someone crowing about how many hundreds of books they just downloaded on their snazzy new Kindle.  (I’m posting this on a blog, so obviously I’m no Luddite.)  For me, the worst part of these technological changes is the brazenly arrogant attitude some people seem to take toward the amount of toil, effort and care that goes into producing just one of the novel titles that these technocrats so callously flip through in their fancy gadgets. It seems that the owners of e-readers always seem to brag about how many books they have accumulated on the device before they talk in detail about any particular one that they have read.  Stoner strikes me as the kind of finely tuned, elegant writing that we will never see again in this fast, cheap and out-of-control media environment.  Who has the patience to write such novels?  Who has the patience to read them?  Or even read about them?  I love novels like Stoner because they remind me of the value of the novel, the pleasures of reading the great ones over and over, and the ability of the novel to capture unique aspects of humanity that can only be articulated by the hand of a diligent, careful observer of the human condition.  A narrative artist like Williams can give shape and form to that confusing jumble of accumulated consequences and decisions that we call life.  I just hope that we can find strategies to preserve and cultivate this type of art, and this type of contemplation, somewhere inside or outside of this digital hive.

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The gates of City College. Thrown open by open admissions, today they are slowly but surely being closed.

Earlier this summer, it was announced that CUNY has introduced a waiting list for undergraduate applicants, yet another departure from CUNY’s mission of serving the “whole people” of New York and another blow to CUNY’s open admissions policy, already significantly weakened by policy changes in 1976 and 1999.

Open admissions was created as a result of the historic 1969 City College student strike and occupation, during which the school was occupied for 13 days, with additional protests held at Brooklyn College, Queens College and several high schools. Before the strike, all CUNY schools were overwhelmingly white. At City College, located in the middle of Harlem (and renamed Harlem University by the student occupiers), less than 10% of the student body was non-white.

The Board of Higher Education created the open admissions policy as a direct result of the student occupation, although the actual specifics of the policy were contributed by Harry van Arsdale, the head of New York’s Central Labor Council, as described by the Graduate Center’s own Joshua Freeman in Working-Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II.

In 1976, CUNY instituted tuition for the first time as a result of pressure from the financial industry. This resulted in over sixty thousand students dropping out, most of them students of color. This blow ended the intent of open admissions, but the policy remained officially intact until 1999, when the Board of Trustees ended remediation at the senior colleges, meaning that anyone who didn’t pass CUNY’s entrance exams had to go to one of the community colleges.

While this might seem like a reasonable requirement, its practical effect was to reduce minority and low-income enrollment at the senior colleges. At the time, the Board said that open admissions would remain in force at the community colleges, which they used to justify the claim that open admissions wasn’t really ending. However, critics argued that this was a step towards ending open admissions at CUNY in any form.

Now, eleven years later, the other shoe has dropped. Thanks to inadequate budget and facilities, CUNY’s community colleges are turning away applicants. This move will provide further fuel for the rapid growth off for-profit universities like Phoenix College and Kaplan University, a topic I’ll return to in a future post. The imposition of a waiting list is an example of “disaster capitalism”, the use of a natural or man-made crisis, in this case the financial crisis, to achieve economic or political goals of the ruling class not possible under normal conditions.

In this case, it serves the general privatization scheme pursued for the past twenty years by Democrats and Republicans alike in the US, and for the past four decades by the IMF in third-world countries. Today, public education represents one of the largest recession-proof revenue streams in the country, and for-profit corporations are salivating to get their hands on it. This same drive is also behind the massive push for charter schools in K-12 education, another topic I’ll be posting on in the future.

In the second part of this post, I’ll talk about how the wait list fits into the CUNY administration’s plans for the future of CUNY and other reactions to the new wait list.

Wait-Listed at CUNY, Part II: The Road to Privatization

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These competing explanations illustrate one facet of the PR strategy for privatizing CUNY. In reality, the waiting list is being caused by insufficient budget and space. CUNY schools are bursting at the seams, with record high enrollments: according to the New York Times City Room blog, “Since 1999, enrollment at the senior colleges has risen 28 percent, while community college enrollment had climbed 45 percent.” Schools have added more early morning, late night and weekend classes (most of which are being taught by adjuncts) to accommodate the influx, but it’s not enough to absorb all the students who are entering school now as a result of the recession, both in order to improve their job prospects and because they can’t find any work. At the same time, the university’s budget is steadily declining thanks to the repeated cuts of the past two years, making it even harder to accommodate the surge in enrollment.

But rather than presenting the lack of capacity as a blow to CUNY’s mission of educating all New Yorkers, CUNY Matters describes it as a positive development that will improve the quality of a CUNY education. “Quality” is almost always invoked by the administration and others when what’s really happening is that poor students and students of color are being tossed out of CUNY. As I’ve discussed before, a major part of the strategy for selling the privatization of CUNY is to frame it as reform. For Goldstein and others, the more CUNY looks like an elite private university, the better CUNY is doing. The idea of CUNY as a public service that is meant to serve the most in need is totally foreign to them, which is why only a movement from below, a movement of students and workers, can reverse the privatization of CUNY.

The CUNY Matters article trumpets the supposed increase in academic quality at CUNY, writing that “The increasing enrollments go hand in hand with the University’s successful efforts to raise the academic bar at all of the colleges.” The phrasing here is very slippery, probably on purpose. First, it suggests that the increasing enrollment is a result of the academic improvements at CUNY rather than the recession, although it doesn’t actually say this. Instead, it says that these two developments go “hand in hand,” which is true insofar as they are both happening at the same time, but which also suggests a causal connection that mostly doesn’t exist. (The alleged improved academic quality may have convinced some students to apply to CUNY, but the vast majority of the enrollment surge is undoubtedly due to the recession. Furthermore, most students whose decision to attend CUNY was affected by its improved academics were also influenced by the difficulty of affording private tuition at the moment.) Second, the article doesn’t mention that the main way that CUNY has “raise[d] the academic bar” of its student body is by excluding low-performing students—which, not incidentally, is the same technique used by charter schools to boost their academic performance over public schools—rather than by devoting additional resources to improving the skills and performance of those students.

The privatization of CUNY is proceeding mostly unnoticed along three parallel tracks: 1) creating a more elite university and student body, as discussed above; 2) creating a more vulnerable, cheaper, more flexible labor force; and 3) gradually freeing CUNY from public control, as attempted in the recently defeated PHEEIA legislation, which would have allowed the Board of Trustees to raise tuition without legislative approval. (Already, barely half of CUNY’s funding comes from public sources, with most of the rest of CUNY’s operating expenses coming from tuition.) CUNY can’t be privatized all at once because it would be political suicide for anyone who tried it, so instead it’s being done one small piece at a time.

In the news coverage of the waiting list, I only came across one critic of the waiting list: Ydanis Rodriguez, a recently elected City Councilman and chair of the Council’s Higher Education Committee. Not coincidentally, Rodriguez is also a CCNY graduate and was a leader in the 1989 student strike there, which goes to show the long-term impact that activist movements can have. Not only can they win demands in the short term, but they train a layer of activists who can supply future generations with valuable skills, values and experience.

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Despite all the recent hullabaloo, the world didn’t need Wikileaks to learn that the warisn’t going well in Afghanistan .  The 90,000-plus pages of leaked documents—which track the progress of US military operations in Central Asia between 2004–2009—offer mountains of evidence confirming what has been all too clear for some time: namely, that Pakistan is a duplicitous ally, the Afghan battlefield is chaotic, our objectives there aren’t worth the cost in blood and treasure, and the idea of “victory” is a chimera.  Nothing much new here!

But what the Wikileaks scandal does do is serve as a reminder that any successful outcome in Afghanistan will demand some serious creativity on the part of the United States and its allies moving forward. Thus far, we haven’t witnessed any encouraging signs that the Obama team is up to the task.  The “smart power” approach promised by Hillary Clinton during her confirmation hearings last fall has been noticeably absent in Afghanistan, crowded out by an overreliance on an already thinly-stretched American military and the ham-fisted diplomacy of Richard Holbrooke.  Clearly the Obama administration could use some fresh ideas if it’s going to get out of this mess responsibly.    

So how’s this for thinking big: As part of the eventual American withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Obama ought to make a concerted push for the relocation of the United Nations to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul. 

I’m dead serious. After nearly a decade of fits and starts, progress and setbacks, reality has set in that Afghanistan demands far more than the United States can provide on its own.  The key to stabilizing the country lies in international cooperation of the highest order. And yet for a variety of reasons getting potential partners to contribute to Afghanistan’s stabilization has been a tough sell.  Proposing to resituate the UN in Kabul would put all the cards on the table, contribute to Afghanistan’s development, and even offer the United States an avenue to reestablish leadership on an issue that is rapidly slipping from its control. 

In the first place, moving the world body to Kabul would provide immediate dividends to Afghanistan.  The decision to relocate UN headquarters to Kabul would demand the sort of security commitment on the part of all the world’s countries that to this point has been missing in Central Asia. Were every country in the world to relocate their missions and affiliated UN operations to Afghanistan, member states would be forced to get serious about training and maintaining a robust Afghan police force and military—perhaps with direct bolstering by the United States military—that would allow for the peaceful everyday operations of international diplomacy.  And this is to say nothing of the flows of investment capital that would surely flood the country if it became the hub of UN activity, capital which could dramatically change the face of Kabul—if not the country—through job creation, infrastructure projects, and the promotion of a formal economy that would surely follow. 

The move would also send a strong signal that weak state development is the priority issue on the international agenda.  With the exception of the days immediately following 9/11, high-level decision making in the UN takes place at a far remove from the exigencies of politics in the world’s most vulnerable spots.  The language of state weakness and a commitment to protecting civilians from the destructive forces of state failure colors everything the UN does.  And yet a startling disconnect exists between the urgency of life in spots like Afghanistan or Somalia and the leisurely pace of bureaucratic politics practiced on First Avenue.  Resituating the UN in a country like Afghanistan would rattle the international civil service from its comfy perch, inject its work with new meaning, and radically raise the political stakes by directly tying its own existence to the success or failure of the Afghan state. 

If nothing else, a relocation of the world body to an undesirable location may have the effect of ameliorating at least one of the persistent problems plaguing the UN.  For years, the world body has been held hostage by nepotism, creating a bureaucracy burdened by the weight of dead wood in its ranks.  Moving the UN to Afghanistan would eliminate the instinctual patronage of political elites within the organization to get cushy jobs for relatives eager to experience the pleasures of life in the big city. As the continued presence of NGOs in Afghanistan and countless other spots around the world attest, there are thousands of talented experts willing to endure the harsh existence of life under siege in the name of international peace and security.  Bringing even a fraction of them into the UN fold would invigorate the organization’s work and invest it with the experience and professionalism that would command respect from all corners of the globe.   

In addition, resituating the UN in Central Asia would offer a better reflection of the emerging dynamics structuring world politics.  It’s long been clear that the five permanent seats on the UN Security Council offer poor representation for the rest of the world’s 192 member states.  But until recently the organization’s Turtle Bay headquarters offered a stark reminder of America’s place atop the liberal world order that took shape following World War Two.  No longer.  For some time now the forces of globalization have been shifting the balance of power east.  The rise of China and emergence of India and a unified Europe as heavyweights on the international stage have dramatically recalibrated the world’s center of gravity.  Therefore, it stands to reason that the location of the UN executive offices should mirror these changed circumstances.  In many respects, Afghanistan is the perfect spot. It lies smack dab in the middle of these surfacing powers, and could serve as a useful point of contact in coordinating the new world order.     

Finally, proposing the move might even pay off for the president politically.  Obama desperately needs to find an exit solution in Afghanistan that is both politically viable and ethically responsible. So far, none seems forthcoming. If the situation in Iraq is any indication, the eventual drawdown in Afghanistan will involve swapping US soldiers for mercenaries bankrolled by the American taxpayer.  But what if Obama were to change the calculus and propose swapping soldiers for diplomats, turning swords into plowshares?  The president would signal to the world that his administration can think outside the parameters of force in its problem-solving approach to world affairs, demonstrating that the Nobel committee wasn’t unjustified in awarding him the peace prize just months after taking office.  It might even have the effect of infusing his lackluster foreign policy with the audacity that supercharged his race to the White House in 2008, a quality that will be sorely lacking in his bid come 2012. 

Of course, the realization of this plan might create more problems than it would solve.  The biggest worry, of course, would be a dramatic assault on a nascent headquarters building in the style of that on the UN compound in Iraq that killed Sergio de Mello. The UN would make an irresistible target for insurgent forces in Afghanistan, and that alone likely makes the idea a nonstarter.  There would also be myriad logistical dilemmas that would complicate such a massive undertaking, problems that might scare off even the idea’s most eager proponents.

But the larger issue rendering such a plan total fantasy is the brute fact that the powers that matter in the UN—the Security Council five, foremost among them—aren’t willing to abandon their business-as-usual approaches to the world’s problems—even when business is no longer usual—and make the kinds of necessary commitments needed to help struggling countries escape the anarchical disorder road-blocking their positive development. 

Which is why shaking up the status quo might be worth a shot.  President Obama missed a once in a lifetime opportunity to radically reorient the trajectory of domestic politics in the United States in the immediate period after his election.  The window for affecting meaningful change at home is now firmly shut.  But a new door will open internationally as Washington prepares to withdraw its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan over the next half decade or so.  Will the White House demonstrate the same willingness to take a gamble on ambitious thinking as it did sixty years ago at the founding of the United Nations?  Or will it fall back on the same narrow, unimaginative realism that has defined the US approach to world politics since the attacks of September 11^th? 

Arguing that the world should consider relocating the UN to Kabul may be politically unfeasible. But if the proposal were to emanate from the mouth of Barack Obama as part of a military exit strategy from Afghanistan that would benefit not just the region but the larger international arena as well, it could have profound effects.  It would show the world that the United States may have lost ground as the world’s unrivaled superpower, but that it still holds a significant comparative advantage in the production of big ideas—ideas that will not only shape the future of things to come but are necessary for international leadership in the twenty-first century.

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A student at City College asked me the other day what I thought about Af-Pak and all I could think of was this.  Maybe President Obama just needs some better marketing for his war in Central Asia.

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The increasing turn to an insecure, underpaid labor force is not just happening at CUNY; this is a national phenomenon, and it affects the future job prospects of all grad students. Our whole futures are tied up in this economic enterprise of public schools. If public universities’ funding continues to plummet, we can expect more and more adjunct positions and fewer and fewer tenured ones. That spells economic death for us. The CGEU is in the forefront of fighting for the labor rights of higher education instructors. Definitely worth checking out and supporting. The conference program is below. Visitor information for the conference is online here.

Thursday, August 5

5:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m., Registration

U. Cafe

Friday, August 6

8:00 — 8:45 a.m., Breakfast and Registration
9:00 — 10:30 a.m., Opening Plenary
10:45 a.m. — 12:15 p.m., Workshops I

Leadership Recruitment and Development; Maintaining Institutional Memory

Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto), Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902), Rob Henn (TAA/Wisconsin), Susan Valentine (GESO/Yale)

Running Contract or Advocacy Campaigns

Scott Bruton (Rutgers AAUP-AFT)

Privatization and the Globalization of Higher Education in Canada and the U.S.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (GSOC/NYU), Scott Drake (TSSU/Simon Fraser), Aman Gill (GSEU/Stony Brook)

12:30 — 1:30 p.m., Lunch

Speaker on RA Union rally, Kasia Sawicka (RA Union/Stony Brook)

1:45 — 3:45 p.m., RA Union rally
4 — 5:30 p.m., Workshops II

Recent Strikes in the U.S. and Canada

Peter Brogan (CUPE 3903/York), Natalie Havlin (GEO/UIUC), Kerry Pimblott (GEO/UIUC), Anna Kurhajec (GEO/UIUC)

Restructuring of Graduate Education and Academic Labor

Patrick Gallagher (GSOC/UAW), Michal Rozworski (AGSEM/McGill), Arianna Paulson (GESO/Yale), Matt Williams (New Faculty Majority)

Stewarding and Grievances

Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto), David Rowland (GEO/Michigan)

7:00 p.m., Dinner

Marc Bosquet Q&A via Skype

9:00 p.m., Party

The Bench

Saturday, August 7

9:00 — 9:30 a.m., Breakfast
9:30 — 10:30 a.m., Workshops III

Organizing Research Assistants and Post-Docs in the U.S. and Canada

Elric Kline (Rutgers AAUP-AFT, NJIT RA campaign), Jim McAsey (RA Union/Stony Brook), Jing Su (GEO/UMass), Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

U.S. Private University Organizing, including GSOC/NYU Fight for Recognition and NLRB Filing

Rana Jaleel (GSOC/UAW), Michael Cramer (GESO/Yale), David Assouline (GESO/Yale), Marie McDonough (GSU/Chicago)

Incorporating the Needs of Minority Sections of the Bargaining Unit

Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902/Toronto), Lena Palacois (AGSEM/McGill), Michal Rozworski (AGSEM/McGill), Kai Wu (RA Union/Stony Brook), Michigan?, York?,

10:45 a.m. — 12:15 p.m., Workshops IV

Creative Communications—web 2.0, facebook, tumblr, youtube, twitter, etc.

David Rowland (GEO/Michigan), Jorge Cabrera (UAW 2865/UCal)

The Canadian Bargaining Context in 2010

Geraldina Polanco (CUPE 2278/British Columbia), Juan Acevedo (TAUMUN/Newfoundland), Arvindh Raman (TAUMUN/Newfoundland), Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

Coalition Building on and off Campus

Tamara Kneese (GSOC/NYU), Cristina Cruz-Uribe (GESO/Yale), Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

12:30 — 1:30 p.m., Lunch

March 4th and Beyond

Jorge Cabrera (UAW 2865/UCal)

1:45 — 3:30 p.m., Workshops V

Making and Using Film Strategically for Your Campaign

Jim McAsey (RA Union/Stony Brook)

Strategic Campaign Research (including Public Sector Budget Research)

Dave Rowland (GEO/Michigan), Nathaniel Johnson (AFT)

3:45 — 5:15 p.m., Caucuses

U.S. Public Universities

U.S. Private Universities

Eastern Canada Universities

Western Canada Universities

7:00 p.m., Dinner

The Curry Club

9:00 p.m., Party

The Curry Club

Sunday, August 8

9:00 — 9:45 a.m., Breakfast
10:00 — 11:30 a.m., Closing Plenary

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In a previous GC Advocate article I presented my list of Top 10 academic films.  I received some insightful feedback from various people who read the list.  (And I heard from a couple of friends who chastised me for including John Singleton’s Higher Learning.)

To recap:  I am interested in the academic film as an extension of the “academic novel.”  Several of the works listed below were adapted from such novels.  As the critic John Lyons simply put it in his 1962 critical study, The College Novel in America:  “I consider a novel of academic life one in which higher education is treated with seriousness and the main characters are students or professors.”  Extending this basic concept to film, my objective here is to find works that seriously examine the meaning of higher education in some way. (And I do believe that humor is certainly a valid way to examine higher education.)

Considering the literary form of the novel, it comes as no surprise that so many academic novels are set in English departments and deal with literature professors.  And considering that several films have been adapted from this pool of academic novels, that dominance extends into academic films.   I’ve tried to identify a few more films outside of literature, and I’m always on the lookout for more.   Apparently David Cronenberg is at work on an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table, a novel about an academic physicist, so there is some hope on the horizon.

Limiting my previous list to 10 films meant excluding a number of other worthy examples in this genre.  So here are some brief comments on 10 more academic films I considered for the previous article.  Just the for the fun of it I’m ranking these as well, from 20 to 11.   I am also including a short list of several other notable films that fit the criteria, though this is certainly not a comprehensive list.  If anyone has any more suggestions, we’d love to read your comments.

20. Possession (2002) –  This film is based on the novel by A.S. Byatt. The director Neil LaBute is known for some appallingly awful male characters, but the closest we get to that here is the faint whiff of crass Americanism in the character of Roland Mitchell (Aaron Eckhart), a literary scholar from the U.S. studying in England on a fellowship.  The film follows the story of Mitchell and British literary scholar Maud Bailey (Paltrow) as they research a romance between two fictional Victorian era poets.  Rarely has any film dealt with the intricacies of literary scholarship at this level of detail, (though, yes, all the sleuthing is a tad exaggerated). The period setting and costumes in the overlapping historical narrative were quite lovely.  That said, I imagine this film is precisely the kind of dry, pretentious exercise that most people have in mind when I tell them that I’m interested in films about higher education.  Still, this is just too much of an academic film to dismiss entirely.  Unfortunately the rich material in Byatt’s novel just did not seem to transfer well to the screen.

19. The Squid and the Whale (2005) – Directed  by Noah Baumbach (who has made a name for himself chronicling the lives of discontented yuppie intellectuals)  The Squid and the Whale is a family drama centered on a couple of PhDs raising a family in Brooklyn’s Park Slope in the 1980s.  Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) is a pompous literature professor and novelist who is oblivious to the fact that his literary star is rapidly fading.  His wife Joan (Laura Linney) is growing tired of his cantankerous attitude, and has literary aspirations of her own.  Their two young sons (Jesse Eisenberg and Owen Kline) get caught up in the mix of their divorce, start acting out in various ways, and are forced to accept that their father may be more of an intellectual bully and manipulator than they realized.  As for the academic content, there’s a storyline where Bernard takes up with a young female graduate student.  His literary opinions also make for some biting moments of dry humor (in one dinner table conversation he dismisses A Tale of Two Cities as “minor Dickens”).  However, much of the story centers on the emotional family drama which is why, as much as I like it, I rank this one lower than other films that deal directly with higher education.  Still I find it a wonderful film otherwise, especially if you happen to be familiar with this particular neighborhood and its literary denizens.

18. A Single Man (2009) – Based on the novel by Christopher Isherwood,  the film was directed by fashion designer Tom Ford and  it certainly has its share of pretty people, in pretty clothes, in pretty settings.  However the film also calls attention to the homophobic political climate of the 1950s and 60s.  Isherwood’s ironic title is mean to invoke the lack of social validity for homosexual relationships during that time.   The main character, George (Colin Firth), is a British professor of literature teaching in Los Angeles in 1962, but he is far from a single man.  He has in fact just lost his partner of 16 years in an automobile accident, but he is not even allowed to attend the funeral. (It’s for “family only” a sympathetic relative of his partner explains to him over the phone.)  Claude Summers at glbtq.com has written an extensive and insightful article comparing the Isherwood novel with the film adaptation. As Summers put it:  “If the film lacks the political edge and spiritual profundity of Isherwood’s novel, it compensates to some extent for these failings by its intense feeling, as well as its sensual and elegant style.”

17. Wonder Boys (2000) – Adapted from Michael Chabon’s novel of the same name, Wonder Boys features Michael Douglas as Grady Tripp, a pot-smoking creative writing professor and novelist at a university in Pittsburgh who has been working on an interminable novel for seven years and is dealing with a recent divorce.  Two of his students are James Leer (Tobey Maguire), a socially awkward young writer who is obsessed with the details of celebrity suicides, and Hannah Green (Katie Holmes) who is infatuated with Tripp. The main set piece for the film is the university’s annual WordFest, a literary event that brings publishers and literary agents, among others, to the campus.  The cinematography is striking, featuring lovely gothic campus scenes in the winter.   I have not yet read the novel version, but the film seems to work well on its own as an entertaining satire of the obnoxious eccentricity one sometimes finds among the students and professors in the nation’s MFA programs.

16. Tenure (2009) –  This film came out in 2009 but apparently didn’t get much of a theatrical release.  It features Luke Wilson in the role of Charlie Thurber, a young English professor up for tenure review at the fictional Gray College.  Unfortunately for him he has spent his time becoming an engaging and effective teacher rather than padding his resume with boring peer-reviewed journal articles. The film is far from an accurate representation of how the tenure process actually works, but its heart is in the right place. It humorously addresses a very real and serious issue in academia: that devoted teaching is often valued less than academic stardom.  Among the funniest bits in the film is the storyline with Thurber’s best friend (played by Jay Hadley), a wacky anthropology professor who spends his time combing the woods for evidence of the elusive Sasquatch.  The online reviews of the film are middling, which might scare people off. And yes the film indulges in romantic comedy clichés (Gretchen Mol plays the hot young professor from Yale who is hired to replace Thurber, and they fall in love.)  Still, I think the film has spirit and portrays the academic life with humor, thoughtfulness and a refreshing lack of pretention.

15. Disgrace (2008) – Here is another novel adaptation, this one based on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace.  John Malkovich plays white South African literature professor David Lurie.  Lurie is a literary scholar in his soul, and a lover of Wordsworth and Byron, but in a corporatized higher education system that has become dismissive of anything but the most immediately marketable subjects he is relegated to teaching dull “communications” classes to disinterested students.  (Honestly, I cannot recall how well that distinction is driven home in the film, but it certainly resonated in the novel.)  The story begins with an ill-advised relationship between Lurie and a “coloured” female student, a scandal which forces Lurie out of his teaching post.  He leaves Johannesburg to visit his daughter Lucy in the countryside where they end up being the victims of an unrelated brutal attack by three young black men.  The attack and Lucy’s complicated response to it, which is contextualized in the novel, really needed more historical-political background than the medium of film could allow. But otherwise it is a competent, well-paced adaptation of the novel, and a haunting and resonant piece of work on its own.

14. Educating Rita (1983) – In this film Michael Caine plays Frank Bryant, an apathetic and alcoholic literature professor who tutors Rita (Julie Walters) a spunky 26 year old working class student taking Open University courses. (The British equivalent of our adult education programs here).  In this Pygmalion inspired screenplay Bryant takes a particular interest in Rita and introduces her to the world of literature and ideas.  As Rita takes to her literary interests she finds that her newly discovered intellectual curiosity unexpectedly drives a wedge between herself and the working class community she came from.  At the same time she does not feel at home in the privileged world of the academy either.   The film is a wonderful representation of a student’s evolving consciousness and self-confidence, and is ultimately a compelling story about the kind of liberating self discovery that can come through an education in the humanities, particularly among students for whom such high-minded pursuits are considered materially “impractical.”

13. Something the Lord Made (2004) –  As you may have noticed, most of these films are about the humanities (particularly English professors) but here is a great academic film that deals with the sciences. This HBO film tells the story of Viven Thomas (wonderfully portrayed by Mos Def), a black surgical assistant who assisted Dr. Alfred Blalock (Alan Rickman) in developing an open heart procedure to cure “Blue Baby Syndrome.”  Much of the film takes place in university research hospitals, at Vanderbilt University where Blalock first hired Thomas, and then later at Johns Hopkins University. Though he possessed a rare gift as a surgeon and was a self-taught  medical researcher, Viven Thomas was never able to afford to pursue his own medical degree. (The Depression of the 1930s exacerbated his financial troubles.)  Thomas was hired and paid under the title of a janitor even though the work that he did for Blalock was that of a research assistant. The film subtly portrays the institutional and cultural racism of its time, such as one scene in the film when Thomas and a black friend are walking down a sidewalk chatting, casually stop their conversation to step aside and let white couples pass, then pick the conversation back up again without missing a beat.  That Thomas did all this groundbreaking research while working in university hospitals where he was not even allowed to walk through the front door is just one of the many stories of injustice and institutional discrimination faced by African-Americans in the Jim Crow era.

12. Back to School (1986) – Rodney Dangerfield stars in this film as the buffoonish street-wise millionaire Thornton Melon, proprietor of a successful chain of “Tall and Fat” stores. To encourage his son Jason (Keith Gordon) to go to college and acquire the formal education he never had, Melon decides to enroll in school with him.  This film is certainly a silly comedy chock full of Dangerfield’s signature one-liners, but it also captures something essential about the American attitude towards higher education.  On the one hand we see college as a democratic means of upward mobility, but we also scoff at the college as a bastion of elitism and unearned privilege. Particularly interesting in Back to School is the conflict between Thorton Melon and Dr. Barbay, a pompous economics professor with whom Thorton is competing for the affections of English professor Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman).   From Bill Gates to Kanye West we revel in our stories of rich and famous college dropouts.  Dangerfield plays this quintessential archetype, a businessman without a college degree who made truckloads of money and gleefully gives the finger to all those smug college dons who insist that education is the only way to success, happiness or fulfillment.  As much as I support higher education I think it’s also important to honor and cultivate that autodidactic, do-it-yourself spirit.  The film splits the difference by showing Melon encouraging his son to pursue an educational opportunity even though he took a different route in his own life.

11. Kinsey (2004) –  I have to confess that I really dropped the ball on this one.  I saw this film in theaters when it came out in 2004, but it took another recent viewing for me to appreciate what an accomplishment it really is.  This definitely should have been near the top of my previous list.  Perhaps more than any other film I’ve listed so far Kinsey drives home the importance of academic freedom, and demonstrates how rational academic inquiry can have a huge impact on the larger society.   The film is a skillfully constructed biopic based on the life of biologist and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (played by Liam Neeson) and the groundbreaking research on human sexuality he spearheaded at Indiana University.  The film shows how Kinsey’s interest in zoology and the mating habits of insects and animals led him to question why similar scientific study had not been applied to human sexuality.  The film dramatizes how important it is for public health, and for the health of democracy, to have accurate scientific knowledge about sexual practices available in the public sphere.  It effectively portrays the dark ages of hypocrisy and misinformation out of which the feminist and gay rights movements emerged, and manages to do so without compromising on all the emotional and political complexity involved.

A few more films:

(Here are just a few more academic films that I identified but did not include in the Top 20)

Another Woman and Husbands and Wives. Both directed by Woody Allen.  Another Woman is based on Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and featured Gena Rowlands as a philosophy professor on sabbatical in New York writing a book.  Husbands and Wives includes a storyline with Allen as a novelist and creative writing professor at Columbia University.

A Beautiful Mind –  Directed by Ron Howard the film stars Russell Crowe as Princeton University mathematics professor John Nash.

Elegy – Based on Philip Roth’s The Dying Animal featuring David Kapesh (Ben Kinglsey) a professor of literature and “public intellectual.” Much of the academic content of the novel is absent in the film, but there’s plenty of naked Penelope Cruz, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Gaudy Night – Technically not a “film” but a 1987 three part BBC mini-series based on Dorothy Sayers’s 1936 mystery novel, set in an Oxford women’s college.  Beyond the mystery plot, the story also deals with the politics of women’s education.

The Great Debaters – Produced by Oprah, directed by Dentzel Washington who plays Melvin Tolson, a poet and professor who directed the debate team at historically black Wiley College in Texas and led them to a pioneering debate against Harvard University. (It was actually against the University of Southern California).

Iris —  Based on John Bayley’s memoir about his life with the novelist and professor Iris Murdoch.  Murdoch and Bayley met, and both taught, at Oxford.  Judi Dench gives a heartrending performance of Murdoch as she struggled with Alzheimer’s in her later years.

A Serious Man – The most autobiographical film from the Coen Brothers so far.  The story centers on Larry Gopnick, a Jewish physics professor in 1967 suburban Minnesota who is best by a series of Job-like calamities.  Joel and Ethan Coen were raised in Minnesota by two academic parents. (Their father was an economist and their mother an art historian).

Stomp the Yard – Like Spike Lee’s School Daze, this was also filmed on my alma mater’s campus.  But unlike Spike Lee this filmmaker seemed to think that black college students are incapable of any intelligent communication beyond snarling, scowling, fighting and dancing. Disappointing.   

The Savages – Indie film stalwarts Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play siblings who reluctantly have to care for their estranged father.  Hoffman’s character is a theater professor in Buffalo, NY struggling to write a book on Bertolt Brecht.   

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf –  A classic film (based on Edward Albee’s play) starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.  The film is more about an academic couple’s marital drama than about academia itself, but at least one other critic found it an iconic work of academic fiction. (“Who’s Afraid of the Campus Novel.”)

Even more films

(I haven’t seen these yet, but GC Advocate editor James Hoff has already been on my tail to hurry up and get something posted to this blog, so perhaps I’ll write about some of these in future posts.)

The Absent-Minded Professor

College

Dark Matter

Love Story

Mona Lisa Smile

Proof

P.S.

Revenge of the Nerds

Spinning Into Butter

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The Obama administration is seeking to make it easier for the FBI to compel companies to turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

The administration wants to add just four words — “electronic communication transactional records” — to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval. Government lawyers say this category of information includes the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. It does not include, the lawyers hasten to point out, the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.

While portrayed as a “technical clarification,” the request has touched off a firestorm among civil liberties and privacy advocates. A former Justice Deparment lawyer under Bill Clinton exlained that the change would be “bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review.” A lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that their “biggest concern is that an expanded NSL [national security letter] power might be used to obtain Internet search queries and Web histories detailing every Web site visited and every file downloaded.” According to Raw Story, “Internet attorney Marc Zwillinger even speculated that it might give the government access to social networking activity. ‘A Facebook friend request — is that like a phone call or an e-mail?’ he asked. ‘Is that something they would sweep in under an NSL? They certainly aren’t getting that now.’”

This most recent controversy is part of a much larger pattern. An important new report by the American Civil Liberties Union (described in a press release here) provides us with a full briefing on “National Security, Civil Liberties, and Human Rights Under the Obama Administration.” It worries about a “New Normal” where policies begun under Bush and continued (or even expanded) under Obama become standard operating procedure for the executive branch. The ACLU report (PDF) is about 20 pages and is worth reading in full but I’ve summarized it below, breaking it down into the key “positive” and “negative” elements.

Positives

• Some improvements in transparency, for example better rules governing classification, appointing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ombudsman, and releasing the Department of Justice memos that formed the basis for Bush’s policy on torture.
• Disavowal of torture, Geneva Conventions protection to be granted prisoners held by the U.S.
• Have not denied visas to foreign scholars and writers the U.S. government might not care for, as Bush did.

Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, a second Guantánamo.

Negatives

• Transparency: refusal to release photos of detainee abuse as ordered by an appellate court and support for an amendment to FOIA to bolster that refusal; refusal to release numerous documents that would cast further light on the Bush torture regime; releasing fewer documents relating to prisoners held in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan than the Bush administration did for prisoners in Guantánamo; aggressive pursuit of government whistleblowers.
• Accountability: no push for accountability for Bush administration officials who created the torture policy and indeed invocation of the state secrets doctrine to avoid releasing documents (Obama does not want to “look back”), no sympathy (much less support) for those who were tortured and are now seeking justice, most notoriously in the case of Maher Arar.
• Failure to close Guantánamo, but more importantly embrace of “the theory underlying the Guantánamo detention regime: that the Executive Branch can detain militarily—without charge or trial—terrorism suspects captured far from a conventional battlefield.” Bagram in Afghanistan and/or a prison in Illinois might well become (or actually already be, in the case of the former) the new Guantánamo.
• Authorization of targeted killing of suspected terrorists (including American citizens) outside of war zones.
• Embrace of military commission trials (with some modifications) that Obama had previously decried.
• “With limited exceptions, the Obama administration’s positions on national security issues relating to speech and surveillance have mirrored those taken by the Bush administration in its second term.”  Basically Obama has fully supported the assertion of the Bush administration that it’s fine to spy on Americans when the government deems it necessary for national security, and there’s nothing American citizens who are spied on can do about it.
• Expanded use of terrorist “watch lists,” including the addition of thousands of names to the notorious (and highly inaccurate) “No Fly List.” As the ACLU notes, in a passage that reminds one of Kafka’s The Trial, “Individuals on the [No Fly] list are not told why they are on the list and thus have no meaningful opportunity to object or to rebut the government’s allegations.”

The ACLU is at pains to emphasize that the Obama administration made some genuinely positive steps soon after taking office, though they are clearly outnumbered by the negatives. Overall they cast their report as an effort to persuade the administration to right its course and turn away from what Dick Cheney literally called the “dark side.” There are few encouraging signs though in terms of a change of direction, and assuming that continues to be the case the ACLU’s conclusion about the future is bracing:

if the Obama administration does not effect a fundamental break with the Bush administration’s policies on detention, accountability, and other issues, but instead creates a lasting legal architecture in support of those policies, then it will have ratified, rather than rejected, the dangerous notion that America is in a permanent state of emergency and that core liberties must be surrendered forever.

And there’s the rub. It was bad enough when the Bush administration was raging open warfare on the constitution, our international treaty obligations, and the basic rights of Americans, but what does it mean when an ostensibly “liberal” president puts his stamp of approval on that same approach? What future president, of either party, would ever attempt to rein in policies that aggrandize the power of the executive and which were okayed by two presidents who supposedly could not be more different?

Unlike health care, financial reform, or any other aspect of policy that requires a difficult legislative path, Obama had a fair amount of authority to chart his own course when it came to issues of executive authority. He largely has not done so, instead choosing to hew fairly close to the path of his predecessor, albeit with some notable and important exceptions. Back in late 2007 candidate Obama articulated quite different views on many of these questions during a Q & A, and I find myself wishing that fellow was sitting in the Oval Office right now. As Kevin Drum remarked in reference to the request for more info on our internet activity, “You know, if I’d wanted Dick Cheney as president I would have just voted for him.”

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