The Books of My Life: Ball State University

I wasn't much of a middle school, junior high, or senior high school student as my working class mum and my middle class dad and most of my teachers in Texas and Indiana can well attest. Most of my junior high and senior high school years in Dallas simply involved trying to survive the intense and debilitating asthma I got when I was around twelve, an asthma which sent me to the hospital on too many occasions to count and played a major role in turning me into introverted recluse. Medicines for asthma weren't as helpful in allowing one to live a "normal" life back then beyond cortisone which had its downsides. I enjoyed history and the social sciences but maths, the hard sciences, and the arts weren't really my cup of tea. As a result, I really didn't have outstanding grades coming out of high school in the early 1970s. 

My future life was already planned out even though I didn't plan it out. I was channelled into Distributive Education in high school by the high school powers that be. They apparently expected that I would ring cash registers and stock shelves for the rest of my life. My other option was the factory. I graduated from high school before America and most of the core country world deindustrialised thanks to the economic, political, and cultural transition of the core nation world from modernity to postmodernity, from a world in which manufacturing dominated to a world in which, for most, retail, or for the few, information, were generally the only economic options one had, and from a world in which the economy was largely national or even regional to a world in which the economy was increasingly global.

It was a serious injury that changed my life and made me consider options other than retail and factory work, which I did briefly but really didn't like as mine was increasingly the life of the mind. While recovering from this injury I grew increasingly interested in history, sociology, religious studies, and cultural anthropology, and, as a result, started thinking more and more about going to college. At the time I was living in East Central Indiana and there was a relatively inexpensive and not particularly selective university near me, Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. So, I applied for admission and was admitted.

I was quite naive when I matriculated at Ball State University in the mid-1970s. My high school teachers didn't even broach the possiblity that I might go to college with me so I knew little about what it meant to go to college. In fact, the first class I signed up for was a Comparative Religion taught by a professor who would become one of my first academic mentors, Carl Andrae, who had studied at Harvard with star Biblical Studies scholars Robert Pfeiffer and Henry Cadbury. Little did I realise that the Comparative Religion course I signed up for was a 400 level course and hence a senior level course. I saw it and wanted to take it. What I did realise was that the study of religion would become a part of my intellectual life ever since.

I liked Ball State. There were some lovely parts of campus, particularly the old quad. I met some intellectual stimulating fellow students and teachers and made some good friends (e.g., Russell Todd and Duane Stigen). I got a job working at a wonderful bookstore southwest of campus; I had long loved books thanks to my mum. Academically I did pretty well at Ball State making the Dean's List several times while I was there. In my heart of hearts, however, I wanted to go to Indiana University. IU, given that it was a long time member of the elite Association of American Universities, the research universities that trained and train most of those who taught and teach in America's colleges and universities--and I now wanted to be a college teacher-- seemed the right choice for me. I grew quickly to love the depth and breadth of IU's curricular offerings, the limestone gothic beauty and almost pastoral quality of its campus, and Bloomington, the quintessential college town, the places that I now most prefer to live in. By the way, years of graduate work, a Ph.D., and college teaching have cured me of any romanticism I once had about academia and teaching in higher education.

Though I tranferred out of Ball State I still have very fond memories of my time there. So, when I learned about a recent history of Ball State University, Ball State University: An Interpretive History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001) by Anthony Edmonds and Bruce Geelhoed, two Ball State history faculty members, I had to read it. Edmonds and Geelhoed do an excellent job of telling the Ball State story, a story BSU shares with other similar universities, the story of a how a normal school or teacher's college, a normal school that was initially the eastern branch of the Indiana State Normal School (now Indiana State University) in Terre Haute that was founded in 1918, transitioned from a state supported teacher's college to a state supported multiversity in 1965. They do a nice job telling how, as a consequence, so Edmonds and Geelhoed argue, BSU moved from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft. Along the way, Edmonds and Geelhoed explore the tensions that arose as Ball State became less a community and more a corporation. They explore how, in this journey, faculty salaries moved from an equity model to a merit model. The explore how Ball State became less a teaching oriented school and more of a research oriented school though teaching remained important if not central to the Ball State mission. They explore how administrative personnel, the faculty, and student numbers grew, particularly after Ball State became a university. They explore how the academic revolution that took place at Ball State changed the curriculum and culture of BSU. They explore how academic retrenchment with its decreased state support for higher education, has impacted Ball State since the 1980s. They explore how the transition from community to corporation at Ball State created tensions between an increasingly centralising administration and the faculty and, to some extent, between town and gown. They explore the well known role political and economic elite boosters and real estate promoters and speculators, particularly the Ball family of Ball Jar fame, played in BSU's history. Edmonds and Geelhoed end their tale of BSU's history with the inauguration of Blaine Brownell as the university's new president and with the hope that the Brownell years might restore the stability that existed at Ball State during the paternalistic and benevolent authoritarian Pittenger, Emens, and Pruis presidential eras. Unfortunately, since Brownell resigned Ball State has had five presidents, something some might see as a mark of instability or at least a symptom of the corporatisation of neoliberal American higher education with its musical chairs administrative positions.

There were a number of things I found interesting about Ball State University: An Interpretive History. One of the things I found interesting about the book was Edmonds and Geelhoed's exploration of student culture, the limited social activism at Ball State, a university where panty raids and streaking were more important to most of Ball State's students, who came primarily and still do, from East Central Indiana, than ending segregation or the war in Vietnam. I also found the reactions of Munsonians to social liberalism and what activism there was on campus, fascinating. Some of the reactions Edmonds and Geelhoed document are right out of the anti-communism liberal is socialism playbook of the now mainstreamed right in contemporary America. The more things change...

I really enjoyed reading Ball State University: An Interpretive History. I learned a lot of things I did not know about an institution I attended for a few years including my total lack of memory about the faculty and administration tensions over cancelled humanities and social science classes in the late 1970s when I was there. Highly recommended for anyone interested in higher education, college culture, and the broader factors affecting a number of colleges become universities in post-World War II America.

The Books of My Life: American Higher Education Since World War II

 

American Higher Education Since World War II: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019) by Roger Geiger, a prolific writer on American higher education, is an exploration of several economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic trends in American higher education since World War II.

Most of the post-World War II trends in higher education Geiger notes are well known to historians and sociologists. Geiger explores how American colleges and universities from research universities, regional universities, small liberal arts colleges, and community and junior colleges grew physically, in terms of student numbers, in terms of faculty numbers, and in terms of administrative bureaucratic personnel since World War II. He notes that governmental funding--federal, state, and local, scientific, and medical--impacted colleges and universities in the wake of World War II and how changes in this aid impacted universities and colleges and the students who hoped to attend them. He explores how broader social and cultural factors impacted colleges and universities and how broader society and culture reacted to these changes in higher education. He notes how an academic revolution occurred in American higher culture changing the economic and cultural status and curriculum of American colleges and universities. He explores how the selectivity revolution in American higher education enriched--economically, politically, and culturally--private and public research universities, particularly those members of the elite Association of American universities, and elite private research liberal arts colleges. He notes how the number of administrators and contingent or adjunct faculty have risen particularly since the neoliberal revolution in American political culture. He explores how student preparation for college has declined at the same time that grade inflation has increased. He notes how colleges and universities have come to be dominated, particularly on the administrative side, by a consumption and retail model of education in the twenty-first century. He explores how the tensions between the knowledge function, democratic function, and consumer function of American higher education played out in American colleges and universities.

Like any history Geiger's sociological and quantitative history of American higher education is selective. Geiger has little to say about American professional colleges and universities such as law schools, medical schools, and pharmacy schools. He does not explore the tensions that arose in religious universities like Brigham Young University, as Enlightenment "secularisation" impacted these religious institutions and their curriculum. He does not explore the tensions in religious institutions like Catholic University and the University of Notre Dame as they attempted to become research universities. He does not explore the anti-intellectual intellectualism and romanticism of the increasingly mainstream political right, a social movement that has entirely different historical roots than conservatism, in the same way he does that of the New Left. Beyond the culture wars Geiger ignores the cultures of American colleges and universities such as fraternity and sorority culture and sports culture, the last a culture which has strong economic, political, cultural, and geographic impacts on and in American higher education.

Some may find Geiger's American Higher Education Since World War II with its sociological and quantitative emphasis a far too limited and selective approach to American higher education. Some may find it a book that will appeal more to academic administrative bureaucrats and applied quantitative sociologists than to cultural historians. Some may wonder whether Geiger's jeremiad against the lack, in some quarters, of academic emotional attachment to country and his seeming conflation of anti-Americanism and valid criticism of the US politically, economically, and culturally is consistent with the academic emphasis on reason and the scientific method. Some may find Geiger too little attentive to how post-1960s American institutions of higher education reflected the transition from modern society to postmodern society, a society that is grounded in information, the retail sector, consumption, and  hyper individualism, and which gave rise to identity and victim cultures particularly on the tail ends of the political spectrum.

Musings on Right Wing Know Nothing Nonsense About Marxism

One of the, in my opinion, most nonsensical pieces of bullshit slung by right wing demagogues and ideologues these days, demagogues and ideologues who exhibit little if any knowledge about real historical Marxism, is their nonsensical whinging about "Marxist garbage" as one "commentator" so ahistorically put it.

First off, there is no debate today as to whether, as Karl Marx and his followers contended, that economic factors matter. They do as Adam Smith and almost every economist I know of also argues today. Most of us everywhere and at every time, have to work. Case closed. The debate is over whether, as again many contemporary economists contend, Marxist and non-Marxist, that economic factors matter more than any other factors. Not everyone agrees with this in the intellectual and academic worlds. Max Weber, argued, for instance, that economics was primary but that political and cultural factors also mattered. I would argue that economics, politics, culture, demography, and geography matter though not all equally, at every time, and in every place.

Second, many, of course, see Marxism and socialism as synonyms for redistribution of economic capital or resources. In reality, however, redistribution has been around as long as humans. Hunter-gatherers redistributed collected and hunted goods to everyone. Big men, chiefs, and monarchs redistributed economic goods to themselves thanks to their political and cultural-ideological power (god made us rich and powerful and wants us to be rich and powerful). The capitalists of the NFL redistribute talent to the poor at each and every draft and share revenue and those who watch such circuses love it. Redistribution, in other words, has been around long before there was a Marxism or a socialism. Usually, as history shows, most redistribution goes from poor to rich.

Third, I don't know, other than a small minority, anyone who still believes another contention of Marx, namely, that after a necessary period of capitalism the core nation world, the rich countries of the planet, or at least one nation in the core nation world, will evolve or develop communism and that as a result the state will wither away, a notion that should send right wing anti-statists into fits of orgasmic ecstasy. I know more people who still believe the equally utopian bullshite that oligarchic capitalism trickles down to everyone and that laissez faire liberal capitalism, free market capitalism, has given us the best of all possible worlds.

Speaking of bullshite, there has always been and there still is a lot of that around. The prevalence of bizarre conspiracy theories like those associated with a pizza place in Washington, DC (latter day bizarre blood libel) and much of the anti-vaxxer meets anti-state nonsense out there shows that quite clearly.

The Books of My Life: Revolutionary Dreams

 

Richard Stites's Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989) explores utopianism and experimentalism in the Soviet Union from the era of relative cultural, economic, and political openness of the Lenin era to the era of increasing cultural, economic, and political closedness of the early years of Stalinism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Along the way Stites addresses the seemingly eternal and ideologically driven question associated with many academics and public policy polemicists, namely was there a difference between Leninism and Stalinism. Stites marshals a host of cultural evidence to argue that indeed there was a difference between Leninism and Stalinism.

Stites traces Soviet utopianism and experimentalism to the utopianism, experimentalism, and iconoclasm of the mid-and late 19th century Russian intelligentsia, people, and state, a utopianism and experimentalism that was conservative, reactionary, Slavophilic, Christian, monarchist, militarist, and socialist. He explores how these various forms of utopianism and experimentalism took cultural, symbolic, ritual, aesthetic, architectural, and everyday life, forms in such missionary oriented social movements as futurism, populism, science fiction, cooperativism, collectivism (by the way, cooperatism and collectivism, as Stites notes are distinct phenomena though anti-communist and anti-Soviet polemicismts and apologists tend to elide this empirical distinction), and Taylorism-Fordism. Each of these social and cultural movements, Stites argues, tried to create new Soviet men and women, a new Soviet culture with new symbols, rituals, gestures, and living spaces, a new Soviet economy, and a new Soviet state from 1917 to the 1930s. This openness to various cultural movements ended, Stites argues, when Stalin instituted a new Soviet state, economy, and culture grounded in militarist and Taylorist-Fordist culture (functionalism) in the late 1920s and early 1930s, establishing an official "new" Soviet civil religion or public and civic cult (substantivism) in the process.

Stites's book should be essential reading for anyone interested in culture, cultural history, historical sociology, sociological history, and Soviet history. His book shows once again how important culture is in the study of humans, how meanings get institutionalised and made official by elites, and how, like the US and the nations of Western Europe, the USSR came to be dominated by a modernity in which bureaucratisation and conformity were central to social and cultural life. Revolutionary Dreams is an important and seminal work that I can't recommended more highly.

Musings on Politically and Ideologically Correct Substantive "Criticism"

Not only are there, as I noted in an earlier blog post, fundamental problems with substanceless contextless "criticism", but there are also problems with some varieties of substantive "criticism". Take Doctor L's (aka, Henry Lerner) "review" of the first edition of Andrew Hartman's A War for the Soul of America on the Amazon US website.

In his book Hartman explores the American culture wars of the post-World War II period and particularly the culture wars since the countercultural culture wars of 1965 through the early 1970s. There are a several things one could take Hartman to task for. For example, culture wars have been fought out in cold, cool, hottish, and hot variations even before there was a United States of America. I give you the numerous colonial and American culture wars over slavery, Americanness, America itself, religion, and immigration, for example. So why does Hartman focus his history of American culture wars on one particular period?

Doctor L, however, focuses his critical energies on Hartman's discussion of revisionist approaches to America's dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese in 1945. What fascinates me about Doctor L's review rhetoric is this: He condemns Hartman for his focus on revisionist approaches to the dropping of the bomb, particularly in the wake of the countercultural movement, apparently forgetting that "revisionist" approaches are themselves reactions to the dominant or hegemonic "mainstream" view, in this case the notion that the US had to drop the bomb on two Japanese cities full of civilians in order to end the war in the Pacific and, so they claimed, save American lives in the process. Such a view, however, is as selective and as politically and ideologically correct as the approach to the issue that Doctor L condemns.

How so? First, Doctor L buries the fact that not everyone before the US dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki found it necessary to save American lives and end World War II. Some, for instance, as declassified documents make clear, found the estimates of the numbers who would be killed in an attack on Japan exaggerated making "revisionism" present at the creation of the we needed to drop the bomb rhetoric. Second, as increasing documentary evidence makes clear, the war was over particularly after the Soviets attacked Japan. It seems likely, and yes, I realise that there are problems with alternative histories as there are with presentist approaches to history, that if the US had asked for conditional surrender rather than unconditional surrender and had negotiated with Japan over the position of the emperor, the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki could have been avoided and the war would have come to a less bloody end.

Underlying, of course, the dominant and selective politically and ideologically correct perspective that the dropping of the bomb was necessary to end the war in the Pacific is the moral and ethical notion that the lives of American soldiers were and are worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians. I suppose if you are a nationalist and you transcendentalise the nation then such an argument makes sense. If you take a general human rights perspective such as many Quakers do, however, where each and every human life is inviolable and thus the taking of human life is morally and ethically problematic, it does not. Moreover, the argument that it is acceptable to kill civilians by dropping bombs on them, something US military policy opposed at least in theory if not in practise, at least in the early years of World War II when it made a distinction between civilians and soldiers, assumes that the lives of America's soldiers and warriors are worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians.

Doctor L deserves credit for criticising a book, in this case the Hartman book on American culture wars, on a substantive basis. Unfortunately, his selectivity, a substantive selectivity driven by political and ideologically correct considerations is, as I hope I have made clear, problematic. Substance is great and it is necessary particularly in a scholarly context. Substantive discussion, however, has to take into account all the evidence and all the theoretical and methodological issues related to the evidence in a fair, balanced, and equitable way. Doctor L, in my opinion, does not do this when he accepts a perspective without substantively critiquing it and asking the question of what type of assumptions drove many and drive many to accept speculative notions of American deaths and what type of assumptions made and make many willing to accept the killing of civilians during war time.

Musings on Popular Culture "Criticism"...

As I noted in my blog on the Maude/Mandelker War and Peace a lot of what passes for so called popular culture criticism these days (and no doubt in the past) is irrelevant and ultimately adolescent. A lot of the "criticism" one finds on new digital age media sites like Amazon and Facebook is grounded in emotionalism, the I like it or dislike it school of "criticism", and misses the critical mark because this I like it or dislike if "criticism" ignores the economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic realities within which popular culture, whether lowcult, midcult, of poshcult, is made or produced.

A show like the BBC's long running Doctor Who, for instance, was in the 1980s, made with limited finances, made within the boundaries of British political culture, made within the boundaries of core nation science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and education, and made within the context of British and international media practises. The I like it or I don't like it school of narcissistic media criticism ignores all these realities and assumes the ideological posture of a fantasy, namely that all media products are alike in every given place and given time and can be analysed on the basis of the "critics" present, which itself is conceived in contextless hermetic fashion.

The problems with such a narcissistic and adolescent criticism should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of how society and culture really works. Doctor Who, for instance, had, in the 1980s a limited budget, such a limited budget that the show sometimes almost ran out of monies toward the end of the series, something that obviously affected the mise-en-scene of the show from set design to special effects. Such historical realities are not covered by that mantra of the I like it or I don't like it school of "critics", "boring". "Boring, is not a form of criticism. It is a social and culturally impacted psychological state that tells us more about the reader rather than the product the reader is listening to, reading, or watching. It is an emotional response that takes us into how the uncritical mind works and functions in modern and postmodern societies.

This vacuum packed form of "criticism" may and probably is useful in the formation of aesthetic cliques or gangs, cliques and gangs with a sense of identity and an identity grounded in ethnocentrism, but it is not helpful in understanding, in really understanding, popular culture in its historical social and cultural contexts. And it is only after we understand a piece of popular culture, that we can truly begin to comprehend it and put it into even broader contexts.

The Books of My Life: War and Peace (Translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude and revised by Amy Mandelker)

 

I recently read Amy Mandelker's 2010 excellent and very readable revised translation of Louise and Aylmer Maude's 1922 and 1923 translation of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's classic and innovative Russian novel Voyna i Mir/War and Peace. War and Peace, of course, as many commentators have noted, is a fascinating mixture of social theory, historiography, history, romance, epic, and reflection on Russianess and Sermon on the Mount Christianity, a type of internationalist Christianity lost in the merger between Christianity and state beginning in the fifth century C.E. except among Christian groups like the Quakers and the Anabaptists.

Before I read Mandelker's revision of the Maude's translation of War and Peace I spent a bit of time persuing the "comments" on this recent Oxford World's Classics translation on Amazon. Like so much "criticism" these days, a "criticism" made sadly more common thanks to the rise of social media sites like Amazon, the criticism of the Maude-Mandelker War and Peace was characterised by a lack of context and by emotionalism rather than reasoned contextual analysis. Some "critics", for example, whinged about the fact that Mandelker decided in her revision to restore the French text to War and Peace, something many if not most translators of War and Peace do not do. They generally translate it into English instead. Others complained about the difficulties of reading the English translation of the French passages of War and Peace contained in footnotes at the bottom of the page. Still others whined about Mandelker's revision and paring of the Maude's notes, which are contained at the back of the book. Still others complained about the lack in quality of the hardback edition of Mandelker's revised translation of War and Peace.

Personally, I found and find this "criticism", if you can call it that, misplaced and ridiculous. I had no problem with the restoration of French to War and Peace. In fact, I appreciated it. Incidentally, the Maude/Mandelker translation contains Tolstoy's 1868 "Some Words About War and Peace" from Russian Archive as an appendix. In "Some Words About War and Peace", Tolstoy, somewhat ironically,  defends his use of French in the text of War and Peace against contemporary criticism. I had no problem reading the English translations of the French at the bottom of each relevant page when necessary. I had no problem with Mandelker's paring of the notes to War and Peace and appreciated her updating of the mostly historical references in the text. And I had no problem with the quality of the hardback edition of the book. I don't think, after all, anyone with a knowledge of book economics can reasonably expect a book that retails for £18.99/$31.13/$24.95 and was printed in the United Kingdom to be of Folio Society quality. What I did and do have a problem with is the contextlessness rubbish that passes for "criticism" in these narcissistic me me me and dumbed down days.