The Bank of America Kiada or Ron Gets Screwed Again Thanks to His IU Credit Card

It, incompetence that is, never stops. It never sleeps. It always rusts. It never ceases to amaze me and, at the same time, it never stops fucking me over in some way, shape, or form. I learned this joyous lesson again today.

So, a bit of backstory first.  I have an IU credit card through Bank of America, hence the picture to your left. I got it when I was still proud of Indiana University alum. It was where I took, on the Bloomington campus, my bachelor’s degree. I am no longer a proud graduate of IU, a school that while it is growing its sports programmes and spending millions doing so, is slashing Humanities programmes, which historically have been at the heart of the college and university in general and at the heart of IU in particular. IU, which was once upon a time an overgrown liberal arts college and not Purdue, has recently seen its administration, its Trumpian administration (the Trumpian governor of Indiana has packed the Board of Directors with politically and ideologically correct flunkies), decided to end bachelor’s programmes in Art History, American Studies, Cognitive Science, Comparative Literature, Dance, Earth Sciences, Geography, East Asian Studies, Gender Studies, German Studies, Music-Ballet, Religious Studies, Statistics, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to cut master’s programmes in African Studies, Comparative Literature, Communication and Culture, Journalism (they also tried to end the print version of the student newspaper the Indiana Daily Student but backlash, including from money givers like Mark Cuban, forced them to backtrack on this), Statistics, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. They decided to eliminate doctoral programmes in African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, Art History, Astrophysics, Chemical Physics, Classical Studies, Comparative Literature, Gender Studies, Public Policy, Theatre and Drama, and several foreign language programmes. The flagship Indiana University campus, in other words, is becoming more and more like, as one Cynthia Fox who took a doctorate at IU and who teaches at SUNY Albany reminded me, more and more like the financially unstable I SUNY Albany, a university I did postgraduate work at. That these programmes, particularly the doctoral programmes, were some of the best in the US and were internationally known and highly regarded seems to have been of little if no consequence to the politically and ideologically correct and corrected Board. What does seem to have been consequential is the fact that these programmes were often critical of the mythhistory that undergirds the delusional populist right’s perceptions of American history. And they should have been and should be because academic and scholarly analysis is not nor should not be cheerleaders for delusional mythhistory myths. Moronicity on the march.

It is moronicity on the march because you simply can't have a world class university with doctoral programmes in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Music, or hard sciences without strong language programmes, something IU has had for years and something IU has been known for and something that has made IU a world class university in the post-World War II era. I suspect the parochial closed minded theocrats on the IU Board probably know this and this is exactly what they want because a world class university breeds empiricism and that breeds the questioning of myths, something the theocrats who run IU and want to return it to what is was in the early 19th century, a seminary, don't want. Obey theocratic authority seems to be their mantra. I hope the Association of American Universities takes a long hard look at what is happening at IU, the making IU theocratic again, and do to IU what they did to the University of Nebraska and Syracuse University, drop them from this organisation of elite American research universities. It would be a perfect match since IU has already dropped significantly in world university rankings, and deservedly so, since I was a student in Bloomington. The IU I went to is not the current plummeting IU, an IU that looks more and more like SUNY Albany (which isn't in the Association) every day save that SUNYA wasn't at the bottom of a recent free speech rankings analysis, that exists today. 

But back to the credit card fiasco: Because of these cuts and because of the increasing emphasis on winning sports programmes at IU I returned my diploma to my department, Religious Studies, and I intended never to use the Bank of America IU Credit Card I had again because it benefits the IU Foundation monetarily and financially. It turns out I had to keep it, however. I had to keep it because I became a member at Costco and Costco, you see, has a honey pot deal with Visa, the credit card company, and they only accept Visa at the cash wrap. So, I had to keep my IU card in order to shop easily at Costco because I could not use my American Express card, which is my default credit card. And use my Visa card I did.

In June I paid my bill to the Bank of America. This morning I got up and I discovered that this bill had been paid. Again. Since it had already been paid I wondered why I had been charged twice particularly after I had paid it. After four phone calls, two to my credit union and two to Bank of America (they each blamed the other for the redundant charge), I learned that the Bank of America had recently switched from an old online banking system to a new one. The problem was that the old remained active as well. So while I had paid my bill, something the new system clocked, the old system, which I had the recurring payment option turned on on (it was not on in the new system so I thought I was OK), did not clock the fact that the bill was paid so it charged me again for something I had already paid. Hello Franz Kafka.

I finally got the problem fixed, or, I should say, I hopefully got the problem fixed (stay tuned). According to Bank of America the recurring payment option on the old system has been switched off and my refund has been approved. It took me two hours of pro bono work to get this problem fixed (so much for the time is money mantra). And some wonder why some of us are so angry about the seemingly never ending Sisyphean nature of the brave new digital postmodern world. We are angry because fuck ups like this happen every month if not every week for those of us who avail ourselves of the toys of this brave new digital postmodern world. They are, it turns out much like everything else of importance, a double edged sword. They are very helpful in some ways and they are a royal pain in the arse in others (see above). God I am glad I am not long for this increasingly fucked up digital world, a digital world where fact and fiction mingle on the same level. Moronicity on the march.

Oh I almost forgot, thank you Bank of America for fucking up my credit score...

Postscript: I got the refund from Bank of America on 21 July 2026. It is always nice to get a refund for something one should have never been charged for.
 

Musings on Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism (Warner Classics)

Of all the giants in the classical music recording business Warner Classics is by far the best. Warner Classics leaves Decca and Deutsche Grammophon in its dust. 

Recently I picked up a copy of Warner's Carl Maria von Weber box set, Weber: The Spirit of German Romanticism. The box set celebrates the 200th anniversary of Weber’s death.

I am not going to talk about the quality of the music making. Many of the recordings, which date from 1908 to 1996, have gotten good reviews in the late great Penguin Guides to classical music and in Classical Music: The Listener’s Companion, an American counterpart to the Penguin Guides, a guide I generally prefer to the Penguins. What I want to talk about instead is the choice Warner Classics made of what to and what not to put into this box set.

I have no problems with the items that are in the box set whether the recordings of the symphonies, the concertos, the chamber music, the lieder, or the operas. I am not sure about the discs of works after Weber, meaning taking off from Weber, or the transcriptions and arrangements of Weber’s work. They are probably not necessary but I suppose they are nice to have.

What would have been nice, however, is if Warner included even more performances of Weber’s actual work. While the Harnoncourt recording of Der Freischutz is nice to have why wasn’t the EMI Kelberth recording of the opera not included as as part of the multi-disc historical recordings discs or as a standalone? And why wasn’t the Virgin Pay and OAE recording of the two clarinet concertos and the clarinet concertino not included to give us an idea of what Weber sounds like in a historically informed performance with original instruments? After all both EMI and Virgin are part of the Warner’s stable now.

As with the recent Bizet box set Warner has given us another wonderful box set. At the same time, however, the box set could have and should have been better. But then beggars can’t be choosers I suppose and it priced for beggars like me.

 

Rolling That Bolder Up the Price Chopper Hill Yet Again...

 

There are several things in life you can count on. Death. Taxes. Corporate greed, incompetence and, malfeasance. Human stupidity and moronicity. And problems with the Capital Region’s Price Choppers.

Last week, I think it was, Price Chopper had a special on Beyond Meat Patties. Since the only Price Chopper I know that carries Beyond Meat—though they advertised the Beyond Meat sale in flyers that don’t carry it including the East Greenbush and Glenmont Choppers—is the Delaware Avenue store, the store that used to be called in popular parlance, the Ghetto Chopper, the Chopper where lots of poor college students shop. Anyway, on Saturday morning I got up and got to the Delaware Chopper at a little after 6 am. And guess what? They didn’t have the patties. I asked a stocker who was working if they were in the back. He said maybe but that finding them in the back finding them would be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

I wanted to buy other items and thought well I will just get a rain cheque for them. Uh think again Ron. Customer service was closed so no rain cheques for me there. The cash wrap didn’t have them either so no rain cheques for me there. So, I wrote to Price Chopper headquarters explaining the situation and asked for a rain cheque from them. After several days I got a canned reply that read that the folks at PC central would check into my issue. Yeah, sure. As for rain cheques from them well again no rain cheques for me from this source either.

Was I surprised by this corporate bs? No. Was I surprised by corporate incompetence? No. Was I surprised that something that could have been done easily—rain cheques for the patties mailed to me—was beyond (pun intended) the ability of Price Chopper central? No. All of this is part of parcel of the American corporate world. All of this is part and parcel of the bureaucratic corporate bs we consumers have to put up with everyday. And it is for this reason that Price Chopper should not be surprised that I prefer to shop at Costco, the Big Y, and Hannaford.

The Books of My Life: The Making of the Modern University

 

Virtually ever since the modern university with its devotion to the scientific method, its various natural science, social science, arts and humanities departments, and professional schools, and its graduate programmes arose in late nineteenth century America, intellectuals who have written on the transformation from college to university, academics like Lawrence Veysey and Roger Geiger, have sought to understand why these new universities were so different from the antebellum and early 19th century college that preceded it and why they have dominated the American higher education environment ever since. Often these analyses were tinged with a sense of sorrow and of loss. George Marsden in his The Soul of the American University and other of his essays, James Turner in several of his works, and D.G. Hart in several of his works, seem to regret that the modern university did not put morals and religion at their heart as the old colleges supposedly did. So does Julie Reuben.

In The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) Julie Reuben has waded into the debate over why the differences between the old colleges, which put morals and religion at their heart, and the new universities which seemed not to. Like others before her Reuben explores how the new science, one grounded in evolution and change rather than Baconianism with its emphasis on observation, taxonomic classification, and the discovery of unchanging natural laws, aspects that made it easy at least initially for Protestants to harmonise science with Christian ideology. Reuben explores how this new science, a science which impacted everything in academia from Biblical Studies, to the natural sciences, and to the new social sciences, played a role in this transformation. Unlike earlier commentators who saw a more of a straight line between religious college and secular university, Reuben sees more circles and curves (something that is not necessarily a bad thing).

Reuben grounds her study of the transformation of American higher education in articles of academics,  and particularly in essays by university presidents in “popular" magazines like Popular Science Monthly (which she references extensively particularly in the early chapters of the book), Science, the Atlantic, in the new scholarly journals of the era including the American Journal of Sociology and Political Science Quarterly, in books, and in primary source material, particularly presidential records and university presidential reports. She focuses on eight universities, the two state universities of Michigan and California, and the private universities of Johns Hopkins, Chicago, and Stanford—three of the new universities that arose in the era—and Harvard, Yale, and Columbia—three old colleges that transformed themselves into universities. While Reuben focuses on these eight schools other universities make cameo appearances in the book including the universities of Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Acadia (presumably the one in Pennsylvania and not the one in the Canadian Maritimes).

While not denying that evolution and modern biblical criticism did “secularise” American universities Reuben argues that the transformation from old college to new university was much more complex and nuanced that many other commentators on the transformation have it. Reuben argues that there were three ideal type stages in this transformation: the religious stage between 1880 and 1910, the science stage between 1900 to 1920, and the humanistic and extracurricular stage from 1915 to 1930. 

In the first stage according to Reuben, university reformers, who were part of what was essentially a social movement, tried to reconstruct a Christianity for the new scientific age. They opposed denominational control of the universities they were building seeing it as too dogmatic and close minded compared to the open and free inquiry ideology proffered by the new science. They saw sectarian colleges as inhibiting this free and open inquiry thanks to their hiring of members of their own denominations and the peer pressure at these colleges to follow the party line of the denomination that ran the college. 

Despite this scepticism about denominational colleges and the belief that such colleges limited freedom of inquiry, university reformers did not initially, according to Reuben, want to jettison religion or morals and moral education, or the notion that the study of everything together resulted in the unity of truth from the curriculum of the new universities. They believed that science and particularly evolutionary science with its emphasis on observation (their definition of objective) could be harmonised with Protestantism, Liberal Protestantism that is. This they attempted to do, claims Reuben.

By the early 20th century, Reuben argues, this effort at the harmonisation of evolutionary science and religion had failed. The evolutionary study of science (something that fed into the new biblical criticism which argued that the Bible developed rather than came fully formed out of nothing) led many to conclude, says Reuben, that scientific and religious “truth” differed and that the new science could not be harmonised with either the old or new adapted religion. Moreover, students at the new universities showed little interest in courses on religion studies scientifically or in religion itself. Finally, they concluded that religion had an emotional not an intellectual value.

While these reformers marginalised religion in the new universities they did not jettison moral education, secular moral education, from the curriculum, writes Reuben. They thought that moral education was essential for teaching students good personal habits including good hygiene, good character, and good citizenship (as they narrowly defined this).

By the early 20th century, writes Reuben, universities were in full departmental and specialisation mode. There were departments of natural science, departments of social science, and departments of the arts and humanities. The faculty, and particularly the new faculty, were now specialists in these various disciplines. There were, for instance, faculty members who specialised in some aspect of chemistry, physics, biology (which at one time saw itself as the scientific branch that could unify all the other disciplines), sociology, political economy, and literature. This fragmentation was, for them, progress, a progression toward greater and greater knowledge. At this point, writes Reuben, it was faculty in the arts and sciences who claimed the ability to unify all truth and to teach moral education to students if in a more impressionistic way than the natural and social sciences.

By the 1910s and 1920s, claims Reuben, the fragmentation of the sciences and the departmentalisation of knowledge led many university reformers to conclude that the unification of all scientific truth was impossible. University leaders attempted to stop this fragmentation by taking over college athletics, intramural and intercollegiate, from the students, building dormitories, and offering an array of services to students. For academic bureaucrats, says Reuben, this created a sense of school spirit and school community. Morality, writes Reuben, had now evolved into morale. The age of seemingly ever increasing academic bureaucracies and academic non-teaching bureaucrats was born.

Here endeth Reuben’s lesson on the decline of the old religious college and the rise of the modern secular university. This lesson adds some wrinkles to those of previous explorers of this transformation, specifically the tripartite stages of new university evolution and the claim that, at least in the first two stages, reformers did not want to jettison religion, specifically a Liberal Protestant Christianity which was harmonisable with evolutionary science. One can argue that they never did in fact jettison either religion or morals from the academic curriculum in that Liberal Protestantism was replaced by a kind of utopian religion of science and moral education became morale education, claims Reuben.

I quite liked Reuben's The Transformation of the Modern University. I found her argument quite compelling. That said, I did have a few but moments. Wouldn’t it have been helpful to add a few land grant state universities into the mix say Cornell, Michigan State, Ohio State, or Purdue? Was the secular revolution more “advanced” at those schools given their emphasis on science and particularly agricultural science? Shouldn’t there have been greater regional balance in the universities studied? No Southern or Intermountain West university found a place on Reuben’s study list. What was happening at Alabama and Alabama’s land grant school Auburn? What was happening at Texas or Texas’s land grant university, Texas A&M. What was happening at Utah, Utah’s land grant institution Utah State, or at BYU, a Mormon owned school that also taught agriculture? As for the sources, are they too skewed in the direction of academic leaders? And why was there no discussion of American anthropology, that mixture of evolutionary science and humanities cultural studies that, in its structure—biological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, archaeological anthropology, and cultural anthropology—claimed to be oriented toward a wholistic understanding of humans and their environments? Wholism institutionalised? Despite these buts I highly recommend Reuben's study of the rise of the new universities.