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.

Life as Crisis Management: An Open Letter to the UUP

You know, I like the idea of unions, particularly American unions, more in theory than in practise. But hey, isn't that true of so many things in life including social engineering plans? 

The reason I like unions and particularly American unions more in theory (though lesser in theory than European unions) than in practise is because I have been, as Nick Lowe puts it, nutted by reality. 

Let me explain. As a graduate student I was wrongly dismissed by a kind of vanity project (Project Renaissance) that was already carbon dated before it began and my union rep did little to help. Another union rep, in fact, later told my closest friend that I had indeed been screwed over by the union and that my case had been poorly handled by the union rep (who is still, I am told, still the union rep; nice job if you can get it). Then when I was an adjunct at Oneonta, where I joined the union, the same union that represented the full-time faculty and their "interests" (which were not always those of the part-time adjuncts) I was informed by a union official of what later became a clear reality, the powers that be were hiding classes of adjuncts so that no one could sign up for them in order to limit adjuncts to one class and, as a consequence, no health care since you had to teach two classes at the same college or university in a term to get the health insurance. The union basically took the powers that be party line (now what again is the labour theory of aristocracy?). 

After I retired I initially thought about joining the union largely for the benefits (the single reason many joined the union before retirement). I rolled over in my mind whether to join and eventually I did. So I sent my fifty dollars into the union, asked for a member card, and asked for information on vision and dental benefits which were available only through the union before retirement. The only thing I got was a no to getting a member card and no information on benefits. I responded with an up yours and turned in my card not card and got vision and health insurance through the state instead. 

I have recently written to the union because I want the vision benefit once again, twice. And this time, twice this time, I have gotten no reply. I have also recently re-signed my union card and made a confession of faith (“I recognise the need for a strong union and I believe everyone represented by a union should pay their fair share to support the union’s activities") as a part of it. Amen. Apparently, one thing the union is really good at, however, is Amish style shunning of dissidents like me. No union membership for me.

I am going to try again to get the unions attention by sending them this letter because I may not like unions in practise but I do like benefits in both theory and practise. So hey UUP can you send me an application for union membership form and information on benefits including their cost and where you send the dough for said benefits? If you can't do that can you please (I said please) tell me why and where I can go to file a complaint against you (AG?, Departments of Labour?)? 

Thank you. Have a nice day.

Life as Crisis Management: The Presto Classical Meets FedEx Kiada

I have been buying classical CDs from Presto Classical in England for a number of years now. My experience with the company has been good, quite good, that is until recently. 

Let me tell you how my experience with Presto recently took a downturn. Last month Presto had a half off selected Hyperion releases sale and I bit. I bit hard. I bought 33 discs during the sale because I have been collecting Hyperion’s Romantic Piano Concerto, Classical Piano Concerto, Romantic Violin Concerto, and French Song series for a number of years and a number of discs I wanted to get were part of the sale. 

As I mentioned earlier I had never had any problem with Presto. This time, however, I had a problem, a big problem, with the condition of the discs when they arrived. In the past discs I received from Presto were packed carefully and packed carefully in bubble wrap protecting the jewel cases from damage. This time was different, however, different in a number of ways. First off this time the default for shipping from Presto in England to the US, which is pricey but is generally more than offset by sales deductions if you buy enough discs and the quality of the packing, was FedEx. I admit I thought about paying the higher charge for shipping via USPS since my experience previously with FedEx was not good but I didn’t. In retrospect I should have.

Why is that? Well to begin with FedEx failed to get the measurements of the package which they needed to get in order to get the package through US Customs. They apparently did not get them from Presto and Presto did not make sure they had them on the manifest because, I was told, this was only a recent mandate and FedEx was not consistent at getting them. FedEx, in an act that was truly surreal, called me to ask me for the measurements. At first I though it was a prank call since obviously I could not give the measurements of the package to them since I did not pack the package or post the package and thus did not know the measurements of the package. Duh. I could only speculate about how tall, long, and wide it was.

Eventually the package did get out of customs gaol and made it through US Customs thanks to my emails and those particularly of Presto. Once the package was released from customs, however, FedEx, of course—and why would they since they are FedEx!—did not try to make up for their incompetence by getting the package to me as quickly as possible. It took several days before it arrived at its destination.

When the package finally did arrive nine days after FedEx said it would I got another big surprise. The discs arrived in a box that was 11 inches wide, 1l inches long, and a little over 11 inches tall, in a box, in a box, that was way too big to hold them tightly and thus protect them. The 33 disc, of course, bounced around in the box at will. When I opened the box, which took me aback given its size, it looked as if the discs had simply been thrown into the too big box with one piece of bubble wrap around them. That one piece of bubble wrap, of course, was not ample enough to protect the discs and was also slashed in several places. As a result 30 of the 33 discs had damaged jewel cases, severely damaged jewel cases in some instances. I gave the benefit of the doubt to Presto concerning this "packaging" since Presto items typically arrive in boxes that have their logo on the package. This box did not have that logo. It  thus appears that the package was damaged in transit and that the workers at FedEx simply dumped the CDs into an oversized box, yet more evidence of FedEx incompetence and their seemingly we don't give a shite mentality. 

I, of course, wrote Presto immediately. I sent them pictures of the box and sent them a picture of one of the damaged discs. I was not about to take pictures of all 30. I asked for a return label so I could return all the discs since I had and have no interest in purchasing a bunch of discs that look like they have been attacked by plastic eating mice or rats. 

So, what have a learned from this fiasco? I have learned yet again that FedEx is crap when it comes to shipping product and packing product. I have learned once again that capitalist efficiency and effectiveness is a crock. I have learned once again that I probably will have to file a complaint concerning FedEx with the New York Attorney General’s office of consumer issues and fraud.

Postscript: After sending two emails to Presto and getting no response I finally posted about the case of the mystery of the box that was too big for the CDs on the Presto Facebook page. I got an immediate response. Presto said they would look into the issue and also said they had done a search of emails sent to them via keywords and finally found my emails to them. They also asked me for more pictures which they could send to FedEx in order to confirm the damage FedEx did to the discs.

What I have done in the interim is buy CD jewel cases to replace the 30 that were broken and in some cases massacred by FedEx. That cost me fifty bucks. Presto offered to send me some but, of course since Murphy's Law is almost always in effect, they did so only after I had already purchased replacement jewel cases viaAmazon. I would prefer instead a reduction in my bill since it is very likely that Presto will get some remuneration from FedEx for this fiasco as I assume they had insurance on the package, or a gift card, preferably a gift car. No word on either yet..

Postscript Two: So, I sent two emails to Presto noting the damage done to the discs I ordered from them and which they sent via FedEx (30 of 33 jewel cases damaged; 1 disc with a foreign substance on it; 1 of the back inserts torn; 5 disc holders damaged). I told Presto I spent--let me be more specific--almost $52.00 dollars for jewel cases to replace the damaged ones as the two emails I sent to them were unanswered. I suggested they give me a partial refund or a gift card for the damaged items. Let me be more specific here. I would like a $1.00 dollar refund or gift card for each of the damaged jewel cases (approximately what I spent) which amounts to $30.00 dollars. I have not heard from Presto about this or about how their case against FedEx, who damaged the items, is going. One would hope for better communication from them about this. Anyway, I am contemplating filing a consumer fraud claim about Presto and FedEx with the NY AG's office and I am, not surprisingly, thinking about never buying from Presto again. 

 

The Books of My Life: Radical Campus

I don’t recall when I first heard about Simon Fraser University. It had to be sometime in the 1970s. I knew that it was one of the new universities being created and built around the globe in the post-World War II period in places like Great Britain (the most interesting of the bunch on new universities in the UK for me was the University of Sussex thanks to its interdisciplinarity), the United States (SUNY Albany), Canada (SFU, Lethbridge, Trent), Australia (La Trobe, Flinders, New South Wales, Macquarie), New Zealand (Waikato), and France (Nanterre). I also knew that Tom Bottomore, whose work on the history of sociological thought I admired, was there. What I did not know was that Bottomore had come and gone by the time I considered applying to Simon Fraser and that he came and went because of Simon Fraser's growing pains.

I thought about applying to Simon Fraser when I began applying to university in the 1970s. I ended up not applying, however, for some reason, probably because of the rain which I had had more than enough of when I visited my mum's England. Instead I ended up matriculating at Indiana University in Bloomington, something that, in retrospect, I regret given the humidity of the area and what has happened to that “university” in recent years. I now wish I had applied to SFU, the University of British Columbia, and the University of Texas, where I was going to finish my Indiana undergraduate degree anyway because of the health problems I had as a consequence of the climate in Bloomington, Indiana.

When it came time to apply for a postgraduate degree I once again considered applying to Simon Fraser. I ended up not doing so though I applied to several other universities in Canada including the University of Toronto,  the university closest to my heart in North America, and Queen’s University in Kingston, where Klaus Hansen and George Rawlyk, both of whom I wanted to study with. I also applied to the University of Chicago, the University of Kansas, and La Trobe University in Australia where I wanted to work with Rhys Isaac. I was admitted to all of them though none of them worked out for various reasons most of them revolving around money. I did not have it and I did not get the necessary financial aid in the form of teaching or research assistantships at any of them. I did get into a snail mail shouting match with the graduate chair at Kansas who eventually told me that perhaps I was not a University of Kansas kind of guy. I guess I wasn't. Oh well, such is academic life.

I never forgot SFU, however. Given my interest in the history of higher education and particularly in the history of higher education in Canada, the US, and, to a lesser extent, England and Australia, I never forgot that Simon Fraser was one of the new universities and I was interested in these new universities and if they really were that different from the old ones. For these reasons I wanted to learn more about the history of Simon Fraser. When the opportunity arose I picked up a copy of SFU historian Hugh Johnston’s history of the early years of Canada's “experimental” and “radical” (I would prefer the term “progressive” instead here) university Radical Campus: Making Simon Fraser University (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 2005).

Simon Fraser University, as Johnston makes clear, is historically important, for more than simply being one of the new universities being built across the globe in the post-World War II era. Along with the University of Victoria (initially a satellite campus of McGill University in Montreal and later a satellite campus of University of British Columbia) in the BC provincial capital, SFU, and importantly so, broke the monopoly on higher education UBC long had in the province of British Columbia. The government of Social Credit premier W.A.C Bennett decided, in the early 1960s, thanks in particular to demographic pressures, to break UBC’s monopoly on higher education in the province, and he did. As a consequence Simon Fraser offered to BC’s growing student population an alternative to UBC, as did the community colleges established in the province around the same time.

Though Simon Fraser was the brainchild of the Bennett government SFU was and is, as Johnston tells us, Gordon Shrum’s university. Shrum, who had been a physics professor at UBC, head of BC Hydro, which the Social Credit government had also created, and first chancellor of SFU, was, to a large extent, the creation of Shrum, It was he who, with the help of SFU’s first president Patrick McTaggert-Cohen and its first academic planner Ron Baker, both of whom Shrum hired, built this “instant university” from scratch between 1963 and 1965, the year the campus, which was still partly under construction, opened on the top of Burnaby Mountain east of Vancouver.

Shrum, McTaggert-Cohen, and Baker, Johnston tells us, established SFU’s character, its curriculum, hired its administrative staff, hired the initial heads of faculties at the university, and hired its architect and designer, Arthur Erickson and Geoffrey Massey (yes one of those Masseys). The modernist campus Ericson and Massey built (one similar to the campuses of the new US Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs Colorado, the new SUNY Albany campus in the capital of New York, and a host of other modernist campuses across the globe), reflects Shrum’s vision for SFU, one that drew on English elements and American elements. The massive Academic Quadrangle simulates, for example, if in miniature the quads and courts of Oxford and Cambridge while Shrum’s establishment of a board of governors for the university reflects a more US style of academic governance, a style of governance adopted by the University of Toronto and other Canadian universities in the early twentieth century and after. One might argue that this mixture of the English and the American is what makes English language Canadian universities Canadian and part of what, at least in part, makes English Canada, English Canada.

Shrum's academic vision for his university, one that was somewhat English, was one of curricular interdisciplinarity, a curricular interdisciplinarity dominated by the humanities, the arts, and education (the only other “practical”professional schooling for employment after graduation, commerce, was added at the last minute at the behest of one of the members of the board of governors Arnold Hean). His was a vision of a university with a small cadre of administrators, of a university with active faculty heads initially appointed by him and his staff, and of a university with an active faculty association (which never really got off the ground in the early years of the school given that limited numbers of faculty joined it).

Shrum’s vision for SFU was initially something that drew interested faculty and students to it in its early years. Many of them were fascinated by the university's “experimental” and “radical” or interdisciplinary aspect and character. Some will see this fact, namely that it was this “experimental” and “radical” in character, also, at least in SFU"s early years, Simon Fraser's Achilles heal. Much about the workings of process and power at SFU was not spelled out or addressed by its founder. Initially the play of power within the university had a more informal collegial English like character, hence the importance of faculty heads and the small administrative staff. Once issues of hiring, promotion, and tenure (something that was more important in American universities at the time) came into play, however, the struggle over who had the power became of great important.

The fact that SFU got up and running just as the student movement was becoming prominent, Johnston reminds us, all across the globe, also complicated the battle over process and power at SFU. This was exacerbated by the fact that one of the things the student movement and its faculty allies were concerned with was who had the power in universities. Many students and many faculty at SFU wanted more "democratic” universities in general and a more “democratic” Simon Fraser in particular. An additional aspect that complicated this struggle for power in at SFU was the fact that as Canadian universities were created and grew in the 1960s the differences between British, American, and Canadian conceptions of power and process, particularly amongst its nationally varied faculty, became increasingly important.

The issue of who had the power, as Johnston points out, became problematic at SFU when the questions of how faculty heads were chosen and when hiring, promotion, ant tenure issues and procedures reared their ugly heads in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many faculty (culture wars within the faculty are quite common) and students (culture wars amongst students are quite common) preferred elected to appointed heads seeing the election of heads as more “democratic”. They soon got what they wished for, and as a consequence, this gave meany the heady sense that, as Johnston notes, further “democratisation” of the university (not to mention Canadian society) was possible (the heady air of reform and revolution). As Johnston notes, these debates and disagreements, disagreements that eventually led to a strike by some Political Science, Sociology, and Anthropology faculty, an increase in paranoia and misreadings on all sides, and the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) censuring SFU twice for limiting academic freedom, if to little real effect, were the result of this battle for power and control of Simon Fraser University. That the battles in this culture war resulted in what was and is the original sin at the heart of American, Canadian, and increasingly British universities, the establishment of boards of governors made up of non-faculty elements who had a monopoly on power and who appointed the president and chancellors of their universities, will likely be read as a paradox by many. This original sin was aided and abetted by the BC legal system when a judge ruled that the power to hire and fire at SFU lay exclusively with the board of governors and that, as a consequence, whatever procedures there were for hiring, promoting, and firing of faculty was theirs.

Long story short, a long short story Johnston is more implicit about than explicit about (he is a historian after all), SFU became what it appears Shrum and many faculty who came to SFU in the early years of the school did not want it to become, a corporate university run by a board of governors and its appointed president. The history of the once “experimental” and “radical" SFU, in other words, was like that of other Canadian, American, and British universities in the post World War II period. SFU’s story, even if it began as something different, was the same as that of other universities in North America and Britain. It is a story of increasing bureaucratisation (see Max Weber), of increases in administrative personnel particularly in the middle and lower echelons of the administrative bureaucracy. It is the story of the bureaucratisation of faculties and the story of the increasing use of part-time quasi- faculty (sessionals, adjuncts),. It is the story of the need for more monies, monies that were increasingly raised via fundraising and wealthy donors as public support for education has not kept up fully with increasing numbers of students matriculating in universities. It is the story, of ever more pressure for “practical" professional programmes and the presence of more “practical" professional schools as the ideology of education for a job became more and more predominant and dominant (see Thorstein Veblen on this), a decline in the importance of the humanities, and the bureaucratisation of the interdisciplinarity that made SFU somewhat unique as it became a faculty with specific emphases rather than a mode of general operation. It is the story of more campuses, and, in turn, an even greater need for administrative personnel and the need—the circle of university life—to raise even more monies via fundraising and from wealthy donors who want their cut of “practical” and professional flesh as a consequence, and Americanisation. It is the story of isomorphism in action.

Life as Crisis Management: This Time it is UPS, or the UPS Kiada

 

It was only a few days ago that I wrote a blog about the Sisyphean task of dealing with FedEx, a private postal agency for those of you who don’t know. Today I am writing about my kafkaesque dealings with another private postal agency, UPS.

Both FedEx and UPS, along with a public postal agency the United States Post Office, USPS, can be difficult to to deal with as was proved to me once again this week when FedEx failed to get critical information from a company I bought CDs from in England before the package left England and it has been, as a consequence, stuck in customs in New Jersey since Monday of this week. 

As for UPS they were supposed to deliver a package to me yesterday between, they said, sometime in the morning, this sometime in the morning being left deliberately ambiguous, and 9 pm. So I did as you have to do when you deal with these postal corporations, I waited. I waited and waited and waited. Around 1 pm local time I looked at the tracking and saw that the package was stuck in Bayonne, New Jersey and that it would, UPS said, be delivered. What time or even what day it was supposed to be delivered was, as it always is with these bureaucracies and intentionally so, unclear.

So, I called UPS. It took me three to five minutes to finally convince the labyrinthian UPS automated answering system to give me a real living breathing customer representative. I asked the representative when the package was supposed to be delivered and he told me a thick accent that it would be delivered sometime tomorrow, Saturday. I told him I would not be home on Saturday and asked him to have it delivered on Monday. Stupidly, it appears in retrospect, I assumed everything was set. I even went to the grocery store and credit union afterwards.

When I looked at tracking this morning, the morning after, however, I saw that the item was loaded on the truck and is supposed to be delivered to me today. I ticked the box to change delivery times, as guest, but was met with a request for an almost $12 dollar charge for the honour of changing the time of delivery. That, that charge, which I regarded as emblematic of the sickness at the heart of vampire capitalism, was a no go for me. I ain't gonna pay to do something I already did via the telephone and which I or anyone else should not be charged for in the first place.

What I learned from all this is that the customer always gets screwed. UPS fucks us over in terms of delivery dates, fucks us over even when we call to change the delivery date, and it wants us to pay to change a delivery date online. This is the world we live in, I guess.

Life as Crisis Management: FedEx, Again

 

It happens like clock work. Every month I am reminded that we live in Franz Kafka’s world, that we live in Vladimir Voinovich’s world, that we live in a postmodernist world of bureaucratic absurdity. I was reminded of this yet again this week thanks to FedEx.

As some of you may know I love classical music. As some of you may also know I hate Amazon. Given this I try to order classical CDs from another source. Usually that other source is Presto Classical, an independent music store in England.

A week ago Presto Classical was having a half price clearance sale on Hyperion CDs, a classical label I admire and love. Time to buy alert. I bit. I ordered a tonne or a slew of Hyperion CD’s from Presto, so many, in fact, that I got the express FedEx delivery rather than the slower USPS one. Everything went swimmingly until the package of CDs got to US customs.

On Monday, American Memorial Day, I got a call from FedEx that took me aback (I initially thought it might be fake) because I had never experienced such a thing. They asked me how large the package of CDs I ordered from Presto was. As I had not packed the package I had no idea what its measurements were. I told them to contact Presto, they who actually packaged the package or to simply measure it themselves (the common sense approach). But that, of course, to paraphrase Faith in Buffy's body, would be wrong.

I tried to get hold of Presto but Monday was a holiday in Britain too. So, I estimated the size of the package (two rows of 5.5 inch CDs with safety packing material equals 14 inches wide. On Wednesday I finally head from Presto. They told me they send the measurements to FedEx and that my package would move through customs soon. As of [Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday...) morning it has not moved at all. Fingers are, however crossed.

Anyway short story short, this is the second time I have been screwed by FedEx. I am sure time number three will be coming soon. Why? Because, to put it colloquially, FedEx sucks. Oh and another thing, the FedEx representatives I spoke to had very thick accents something that proved problematic for a 71 year old without 18 year old hearing. 

In the end I am left to ask why the package was allowed to move from England to the US without the dimensions of the package if FedEx needed the dimensions of the package? The answer, I must assume, is because we live in the world of Franz Kafka and Vladimir Voinovich. 

Update: My CD's finely arrived nine days after they were supposed to thanks to FedEx. The morons at FedEx, however, had one more surprise for me. FedEx had somewhere along the line transferred my CD's from the package they were sent in to one that was far too big for the items. You can probably guess what happened. If you guess the discs arrived damaged you would be right. I immediately contacted the seller and sender, sent them pictures of the damaged discs ,and told them they should claim insurance for the damage and/or sue FedEx for their incompetence and idiocies. Let's hear it for American capitalism.

The Books of My Life: Demons/Devils/The Possessed (Dostoyevsky)

 

One of the things I wanted to do in my retirement is read or reread the great “big book” classics of Russian literature. Though the best laid plans of Ron don’t always come out as he intended, I have been able to largely do what I intended to do over the last several years. 

Since I have more in the way of cultural capital now then I had when I initially read some of Russian literature it has been an interesting experience reading or rereading the hefty Russian classics in my elderly years. The "big books" of Russian literature I have recently been able to get through or to get through again include Lev Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Ivan Goncharov’s Oblamov, Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, Aleksander Fadeyev’s The Young Guard, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, The Karamazov Brothers, The Idiot, and The Adolescent. I enjoyed them all immensely. They are, I discovered and re-discovered, classics for good reasons.

Recently I finished the last of the Dostoyevsky “big books” I have long wanted to read, Demons/Devils/The Possessed. I read two translations of this superb book simultaneously, the Penguin edition translated by Robert Maguire and the Alma edition translated by Roger Cockrell. Both were excellent though I think I preferred the Cockrell translation if by a very small margin. 

There were things I preferred in each of these translations, I preferred the notes in the Maguire edition. I found the notes in the Maguire, which were much more extensive and explanatory than in the Cockrell, superior to those in the Cockrell translation by a large margin. I preferred the Cockrell for its placement of the “At Tikhon's" chapter where Dostoevsky wanted it before his editor told him it would not make it past the censor. Maguire puts it in an appendix. 

There were also things I did not like in each translation. I did not like the use of country bumpkinish in the Maguire translation. It seems too mannered and fake to me. I did not like the use of Western measurements like miles in the Cockrell translation. I prefer that the Russian originals. I suppose that is the cultural anthropologist in me.

Finally, one thing I did not like about both translations was the fact that both placed their translations of the French, which in some chapters is extensive, in the endnotes. They should have been, in my opinion, at the bottom of the page a la the Oxford World Classics Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Footnotes make it much easier to read for those of us who have little French (like me) or no competency in French at all.