Life in the Pissant Swamp: What I Learned at a Communications Revolution That Was Not Really a Communications Revolution

 

Over the course of my university and college teaching career I have taught several different academic subjects. I taught, for example, Sociology, specifically Introduction to Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and Social Problems. I taught Cultural Anthropology. I taught History, specifically World History, Western History, European History, American History, The History of the War in Afghanistan, and Environmental History (the first such course taught at SUNY Albany). And I taught the History of American Television and An Introduction to Communications course in two different Communications Departments.

When I was offered a class in Communications I have to admit that I knew very little about departments of communication. As someone who went to a major level one research university for my undergraduate education I assumed they were like film departments in that they broke down communications forms showing how they worked and how they were impacted by broader economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic contexts. I assumed, in other words, that they were theoretically and analytically oriented.

My first foray in teaching Communications seemed to confirm that hypothesis. I taught a course on the history of television at a second or third level research university in New York. It went fine for several years and than, as so often happens with most jobs, there was burn out particularly as it related to dealing with students most of whom seemed more obsessed with grades as grades rather than as marks of academic achievement and with extracurricular activities. 

This difficulties associated with dealing with students was brought home to me during one term when I taught a class on the History of American Journalism, a class which I never should have taken on in the first place and which I had concerns about teaching even when I was asked to do it by a faculty member.In this class I had several students who were abusive toward me and claimed, fraudulently, that I had not indicated what I expected of them and that I had not explained to them how grades were calculated in the class. Students, you see, don't always read the syllabus and some of those who do don't quite grasp its content for a variety of reasons. In this class, by the way, I actually had students who did not know how to calculate twenty percent in a class where the maximum number of points was 100, something that was a shock even to me someone who had already taught in higher education for six years at that point. 

Nor did these same students understand how single payer and universal health care systems actually worked and work. Their knowledge of both, I found out when we explored journalistic data relating to the Canadian health care system in class, was very limited and was very ideologically driven. They did not know, for example, that a vast majority of Canadians were opposed to an American style health care system and they could not believe that anyone would not want to adopt American models of health care because, well they were American and America is the greatest country the world has ever seen. Amen. They could not believe, in other words, that anyone would not want to be like red, white, and blue them. 

The reason for this lack of knowledge among American college students about global health care systems is rather easy to grasp. Most of their knowledge of health care systems was and is mediated by the American media, a media in which there are negative stories about single payer and universal health care systems on a regular basis, an American media that usually simply accepts the testimony of demagogues who rant and rave and rage about health care systems other than America's own rather than exploring what the actual data itself reveals. And lest we forget, the American media is American after all. 

The students in my class had no first hand or unmediated knowledge let alone experiences with such health care systems and I made the mistake of telling them so. Teaching, I assumed, was, after all, about telling the truth, about correcting false opinions with the facts. I forgot, however, that what American higher education is really about in this consumer age is that customers, who are the backbone of college and universities, are always right because US colleges and universities need the monies student bodies bring into the college and university. Truth in most American colleges and universities, it seems, has as a consequence taken a back seat to ideologically correct driven fictions because in an age of belt tightening and fewer students keeping the customer satisfied is the mantra of the academic bureaucrat trained in business methods. Truth has thus been kicked out of the car entirely and is lying near death in the middle of the road somewhere in middle America.

My second foray in teaching communications took place at a small college that began life as a normal school which morphed into a liberal arts college in the 1960s. It was during this second foray in teaching communications that I learned that there was a division, a schism if you will, between three sects in communications departments: the sect that emphasises how to communicate, the sect that emphasises theory and critique if limitedly, and the sect that emphasises training students for jobs in the communications industries. Eventually the massive disconnect between these sects led the department I once taught in to split into two, led them to split into Communication Studies and Media Studies departments. I should note that though both departments continue to maintain the fiction that theory and practise go hand and hand in the Department in dialectical fashion in truth what passes for dialectics in the Department is actually dialectics without the dialectic.

The students I taught at this small college were, by and large, characterised by the same division the department was. My sense is that those interested in the more academic side of communications were a small minority compared to those who wanted a vocational education. Most of them, in other words, wanted a how to course in how to make television, how to make films, and how to make commercials. They had little interest in the more critical side of Communications, in the side of Communications that explores how communication forms actually work. They were, by and large, inscribed or sutured into the economic, political, and cultural status quo because what they came to college for was to get a job. They didn't want a critique and they certainly didn't want a history since it too was not really helpful or even relevant in their minds when it came to them getting a job working as a cog in the communication industries machine. Don't question Media Authorities seemed to be their unconscious mantra. I want a job was definitely their conscious mantra. Needless to say, both of those are nails in the coffin of a liberal education.

Teaching in Communications turned out to be a rather surreal experience. I was given Introduction to Communications to teach, something that I had never taught at that point and had no idea what it entailed. My conception of communications was, as I noted earlier, one in which one explored, historically, culturally, and socially, the communications media. So, I asked the chair of the department to send me a previous syllabus and the course text. She did. I organised my syllabus just like the one I was sent. The surreal part comes in when another faculty member who had previously taught the class asked me why in god's name I organised the class as I did. I told him the truth, namely that that was how the syllabus the chair sent me was organised. I later reorganised it in a way more closely aligned with the textbook, which made more sense to me.

In the end I count myself fortunate that I got out of teaching communications. I was offered a class in the Sociology Department, a department that was still, at the time, a department grounded in the academic liberal arts side of the higher education ledger. I taught Introduction to Sociology and Sociology of Religion for the Department for several years. I was also fortunate in that when I explained to the chair my lack of health insurance woes at the time I agreed to teach the class he gave me another class to teach when he learned I had to have a hip operation and that I needed to keep my health insurance so I could have this operation so I needed the second class in order to keep my health insurance (you only got health insurance if you taught two courses at the same college or university), something that fell on deaf ears in the Communications Department.

Eventually, I retired with a pension from the college thankfully before Sociology too was recreated more in the image of vocational education, a vocational education in how to be police officer and a vocational education in how to be a human services bureaucrat. Sadly, this seems the only option open to academic disciplines that want to survive in small colleges in an era of education for a job education, in an era which has seen the death of so many once upon a time liberal arts colleges.

As for Communications if I had my way I would take all of the academic courses out of that Department and transfer them to Sociology since Sociology of the Media is where they could and should be taught and taught more critically, analytically, and rigourously. As for the how to communicate part of Communication courses I would transfer those to English faculties where they belong. And the vocational courses in communications where should they go? Get thee to a vocational college (or since the best way to learn how to make films is to watch great films go watch the films of Alfred Hitchcock and, if you have to take classes take Film Studies classes instead). Communications Department, I doubt that anyone would really miss you.

The Books of My Life: Luis Bunuel (Krohn)

I did not discover the movie director Luis Bunuel until the late 1970s. My introduction to Bunuel his through hi surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930) in film classes at Indiana University in Bloomington. Later, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I saw his El angel exterminador (1962), a film that  is almost certainly is paid homage to in the season six Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Older and Far Away", and his last film, Cet obscur objet du desir, at one of the Ryder film series showings probably at Bear’s Back Room off campus in Bloomington. When I lived in Utah in the early 1990s I saw his film La Voie lactee (1969) with my favourite Mormon Yoderian at an art house cinema in the south eastern part of Salt Lake. Thanks to all this viewing I was intrigued with the surrealism, the Marxism, the critique of theocratic religion, and the humour in each of these Bunuel films.

Bill Krohn’s Luis Bunuel (Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2005) follows Bunuel’s movie career chronologically from his 1929 movie Un chien andalou ,which he made in Spain with his fellow surrealist Salvador Dali, to the last film he directed, Cet obscur objet du desir from 1977. As with all of the books in the Taschen books on directors edited by Paul Duncan Krohn’s Luis Bunuel is more like a  profusely illustrated encyclopaedia like entry on whichever movie director the book is about than an in depth study of a film director.

According to Krohn the Spanish born but cosmopolitan film director Luis Bunuel—over the course of his career Bunuel worked in Spain, Mexico, the US (including briefly in Hollywood), and France—Bunuel was simultaneously an avant garde surrealist and a Freudian, and Marxist movie director whose films centred around sex, often “deviant” or “perverted” forms of sexuality including a variety of fetishisms, religion, specifically largely somewhat respectful critiques of the right wing theocratic Roman Catholicism he grew up with, and politics, specifically a Marxist influenced politics that Bunuel was influenced by beginning in his youth. This political aspect of Bunuel’s films marks him off from a latter day filmmaker who is often compared to Bunuel these days, David Lynch, a director whose movies are often compared to Bunuel's but seem to me to lack the political aspects of Bunuel's films and to be be surrealism for surrealisms sake and little more (see Robin Wood on Lynch whose assessment of the director I agree with).

Krohn not only explores Bunuel’s auteurist themes in the essay and photographs in the book he also nicely illustrates the motifs one finds in Bunuel’s movies, motifs that show up again and again in Bunuel’s films. In a series of photographs from several of Bunuel’s films from the late 1920s to the late 1970s Krohn finds a number of recurring motifs in Bunuel’s films including legs, feet/shoes, back/vulva, breasts, young women and older men, bells and towers, religion, mad guns, guns, physical deficiencies and deformities, poultry, insects, animals, boxes, and dreams. The book ends with an excellent and very helpful filmography.

Krohn’s book is largely descriptive. It contains, if briefly, information on the contexts, the production aspects, and the plot of each film, which, as is almost always the case with books and monographs on films and film directors, is not always easy to visualise if one has not seen the films. Though primarily descriptive Krohn does not hesitate to offer his judgement on the quality of the films. Some will miss the analysis one finds in books like those of film critic, historian, and scholar Robin Wood but one must remember Krohn’s brief. His remit, as is true of all of the books in this Taschen series, was to write a brief encyclopaedic like entry and coordinate it with extensive and helpful illustrations. Krohns book does this well. That said the interpretive anaemia of the book is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is the lack of the crystal ball textualism that so dominates academic film studies these day.