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: God and Race in American Politics

 

There is no doubt that religion has been at the heart of American life since even before there was a United States of America. This is a fact that Mark Noll reminds us of in his excellent book God and Race in American Politics: A Short History (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2008). Not everyone, unfortunately, gets this, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. Far too many in academia, for instance, have missed the important role religion has played and plays in American economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic life because, far too often, they see religion as an epiphenomenon, as something caused by, economics or politics rather than as an important factor in the drama, comedy, and tragedy that is human life. One person who does grasp the importance of religion in human life is the aforementioned Mark Noll.

Noll, long of Wheaton College in Illinois and more recently of the University of Notre Dame (where I spent a semester eons ago), puts religion at the heart of his book, God and Race in American Politics. Noll argues that religion and the various economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces it interacts or intersects with, particularly race, have been central to American political history, American political culture, and American life since the beginning of the United States.

Noll takes a chronological approach to how religion and race have, to use a word that has become common in academia these days, intersected and been central to American political culture. He argues that before the Civil War religion, White Anglo-Saxon Protestant religion, was the civil religion or civic religion that gave Americans a common identity and held American society together. The Civil War, he rightly notes, split America’s churches apart just as it split America itself apart over the issue of slavery. 

After the Civil War, Noll argues, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant public religion was replaced by a more generalised civil religion, a civic religion that united the divided American North and South in the era after Reconstruction. This new civic or public religion united Americans around notions of America’s choosiness and America' messianic destiny. It was a civil religion, says Noll, a civic religion in which race was elided, elided because those opposed to slavery saw race in abstract terms and assumed that once slavery was ended the problem of race in the United States was once and for all solved. It wasn’t, of course, as Noll and as subsequent history reminds us.

While Whites in the North, claims Noll, consciously or unconsciously swept race under the carpet so to speak and made their peace in a variety of ways with Jim Crow racial apartheid in the South, a space simultaneously opened up for Blacks particularly in the Black church, and, by extension, in Black communities. Black Christianity gave Black churches important leaders and it provided a space for a prophetic reading of Christianity which placed racial inequality at the heart of its prophetic calls for racial justice. In the process, Noll argues, Black Christianity and its friends in the White community laid the groundwork for a civil rights movement that eventually united many Blacks and many Whites in an effort to bring about an end to racial inequality. In time this civil right movement had an impact on American politics in the form of a civil rights act, a voting rights act, and equal opportunity legislation, and led to a host of other civil rights movements including those for women and gays (all things that are now under threat in Trumerica).

The civil rights movement also, as Noll argues, gave rise to a White evangelical and largely White conservative backlash. It was, paradoxically, aided and abetted, Noll notes, by the end of Jim Crow. The death of Jim Crow enabled Southern evangelical Christianity to shed its perceived links and ties to racism and spread out from the South into other parts of the US in particular the Midwest and the Intermountain West and even to Southern California. In the process the civil religion that was hegemonic in the post-Civil War era split apart giving rise to two and perhaps more civil religions at cold war and sometimes even hot war with each other, a split that is clearly evident today.

Noll ends his book ends with the election of George Walker Bush in 2004. In a final chapter he offers a moderate Calvinist reflection on the human condition arguing that while humans are fallible they also can change their worlds for the better. In time, Noll opines, he hopes that America can once and for all come to grips with and overcome the racism that remains central in American political culture and in American life.

Though Noll ends his book with a message of hope it is clear that America is once again deeply divided, perhaps as deeply divided as it was prior to the Civl War. At present, as Heather Cox Richardson notes in her book How the South Won the Civil War the South, and more specifically the South's states rights ideology and fear of big government ideology, has, at least for the moment, won the civil war that the US has been fighting in cold and hot form since the beginning of its existence. Whether the Southern states rights ideology (an ideology that has no problem rationalising the use of the federal or local governments to send the military to California or overturn legislation passed by, for instance, the Austin city council), and anti-big government ideology (an ideology that has no trouble rationalising using the paternalistic nanny state to forward their ideological agenda) which is, at least ostensibly, central to the ideological culture of Trump and his cult which is transforming American political culture as I write, has won the war or has won simply won the latest battle in the seemingly never ending American culture wars, is an open question. The question of whether the Trumpian faith will prove any more lasting than the WASP civil religion or the civil religion that was hegemonic in the US from the Great Depression to Richard Nixon awaits a future social scientist and a future historian to answer that question.

While Noll argues that religion and race have been the forces around which American politics and American culture circles—the election of Trump seems to suggest he is at least kind of right—he does recognise that at times other economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic forces are important and even hegemonic in American political culture. In this context it is important to remember that the Trumpies, the latest of American religious and secular theocrats, may play with race and religion but they also claim to be proponents of free enterprise and individualism as well as defenders of traditional values, the traditional family, and traditional notions of sex (it is, of course, rather hilarious in this context that Trump has been married multiple times and engaged in several extra-marital affairs, is it not, but then humans are well known for their hypocrisies), notions that are often allied with religion. As with states rights, the Trump cult may officially defend the gospel of free enterprise individualism but Trump and his sometimes buddy Elon Musk are some of the biggest welfare queens that I know of.

Whether Noll’s admission that factors other than religion and race have been and are central to American political culture undermines his argument is debatable. What is clear is that religion, a cultural factor, has long been central to American life and American culture along with a host of other cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographical factors, is an important factor in American political culture and American life today. It is likely to remain so for some time though the growth of nones, those with no religion, in America over the last fifty years or so is also worth watching

The Books of My Life: John Sayles (Molyneaux)

Modern and postmodern life is inherently absurd. Since human life is absurd it is also, as the reflecive person grasps, sometimes annoying. One of the most annoying aspects of human life, in my humble opinion, are critics, particularly literary, film, and television critics.

Critics, of course, come in all shapes, sizes, and flavours just like toothpaste and Jello. There are, for example, at least since the rise of the new digital media that can be used to make money, the casual amateur reactor who reads books and watches films and television programmes and reacts to them for money”. As a general rule the reactors to books are the best of this digital age species.

There are the fanboy and fangirl critics many of whom actually know something about the production aspects of what they read and watch because as fans they scour the  world for primary source material about the writer, director, and creator of the novels, films, and shows they adore. They generally turn the writer of the book, the director of a film, or the writer-creator of the show into a saint (and a sinner once he or she sins like all humans invariably do). Much of their knowledge, their cultural capital, about the making of a novel, a film, or a television show, comes from interviews with those involved with whatever they are reading or watching along with second hand sources such as biographies.

Then there are the academic critics. Academic critics come in several stripes. There are those, a minority, who actually do primary research on an author, a film director, or a television show creator. Generally speaking these critics try to put films or television shows into economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographical contexts. As I said these literary, film, and television historians, these social scientists, of art and commerce, are few. 

There are the crystal ball textualists of which there are, these days, many. Crystal ball textualism, the dominant or hegemonic strain of literary, film, and television theory academics have been socialised into and trained in these days, is not grounded on extensive contextual descriptive analysis. Crystal ball textualism assumes that everything you want and need to know about a novel, a short story, a film, or a television programme, can be found in the finished text itself. The finished text is what these wizards with special knowledge peer into in order to immediately decipher any text by teasing out the psychoanalytic dream worlds, the ethnic aspects, the racial aspects, and the gender aspects of the text they are peering at. They are aided and abetted in this task by the theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches they have been socialised into. This means that they, unlike more intense fan boy and fan girl critics, generally pay only limited attention to primary source materials beyond the text.

Each of these critic cultures are fundamentally cultural and ideological. They are strongly normative and value laden though many would not admit this. Some critics, many of whom seen to be wanna be writers of books and wanna be makers of films and television programmes tend to whinge and whine about movies they find too talky and with too little camera movement and editing. For them such talky and static movies are theatrical, a term of derision for them, and not cinematic because they are too talky and have too few cuts and camera movements (both of which seem to become moral forces for them). The fact is, however, and to the contrary, anything put on film is a moving picture, is a piece of cinema. Moreover, there is nothing inherently evil about a film with intelligent talk and limited editing, limited cuts, and limited camera movements. See Rear Window.

Another thing academics, particularly academic crystal ball textualists whinge and whine about as they study novels, short stories, films and television, shows is that aren’t politically and ideologically correct their politically and ideologically correct. For them any novel, short story, film, or TV show that isn’t anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-classist is inherently bad if not evil at least to some extent. For them progress is tied to a decline in racism, sexism, and classism. And while I agree with Richard Roud (“Introduction" to Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, 1980) that all criticism has normative aspects to it and while I have no problem with critiquing and criticising various forms of ethnocentrism in media texts, all cultural analysis, in my opinion, should be tempered by and grounded on sound descriptive analysis and primary documentary evidence before one moves on to interpretation and homiletics. 

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not arguing that all forms of criticism are equally normative and equally ideologically correct. The critics with the least cultural and ideological baggage are those historians and social scientists who do have the capital or at least some of the cultural capital to explore the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic aspects of “texts” and who do engage in primary research, film historians and social scientists like Gerry Molyneaux whose book on the independent film director, writer, and actor John Sayles I recently read. Molyneaux’s John Sayles: The Unauthorized Biography of the Pioneering Indie Filmmaker (Los Angeles: Renaissance Books, 2000) was, for me, a welcome antidote to the crystal ball textualism that dominates academic criticism these days and the ignorance is bliss reactions of YouTube reactors. Molyneaux explores Sayles’s life from birth to his latest film, which was, at the time the book was published, Limbo (1999). He takes readers on a journey that starts with Sayles’s birth in upstate New York through his work on Roger Corman films through his life as a writer, script doctor and through his life as a film director. He rightly notes that Sayles and others of an independent bent were stimulated by the fiercely independent cinema of writer, director, and actor John Cassavetes who, like Sayles, often wrote and acted in order to make money to fund his own cheaply, by Hollywood standards, made films, that were accused by some of being too talky and too primitive cinematically by some at the time.

What sets Molyneaux’s book apart from many other film studies monographs past and present is its focus on the broader social contexts of Sayles’s life and work. Monlyneaux nicely explores the economic contexts of Sayles’s films all of which were made for six million dollars or less, sometimes a lot less. He nicely explores the role Sayles’s partner, Maggie Renzi, played in obtaining funding for these independent films in an economic context that was often dynamic making raising funds difficult. He notes that Sayles often financed all or a good part of his films himself. He points out that whether Sayles’s films made a return on investment—often they did not—this translated into further difficulties  for him and Renzi to get money to make the films he wanted to make. He nicely explores what might be called the leftist political orientation of Sayles’s films such as the pro-unionism of Matewan (1987) and Eight Men Out (1988), the ethnic focus and ideological complexity of Lone Star (1996), and the humanism of Men With Guns (1998). He explores Sayles’s commitment to making films his way. He explores Sayles’s sometimes problems with the suits that ran the Hollywood studios and Sayles as scriptwriter and script doctor for hire, sometimes for the studios. Sayles, for instance, as Molyneaux notes, made Baby It’s You (Paramount, 1983) and he was the creator and show runner of short lived television show Shannon’s Deal (NBC, 1989-1990) for NBC,  the former, in particular, left a bad taste in Sayles’s artistic mouth. He explores Sayles’s career as writer of short stories and novels. He explores Sayles as actor. All of these—Sayles as a script writer, Sayles as a script doctor, Sayles as a writer of novels and short stories, and Sayles as an actor—helped Sayles make monies to fund his own films. He explores the theme of community in Sayles’s work and the complexities and ambiguities of Sayles’s work. He notes Sayles’s interest in race, in ethnicity, in class, and in unions, something that should earn Sayles a legion of politically and ideologically correct academic fans but doesn’t seem to have. In Sayles’s films so much if not all is on the surface and crystal ball textualists generally prefer directors who make them dig beneath the surface given that they perceive themselves as kind of cine-psychoanalysts with a social conscience.

Sayles has gone on to write further novels and films and direct further films since Molyneaux’s book was published foregrounding the fact that Sayles is still an artistic work in progress and that analysis of Sayles’s work is also a work in progress and so any conclusions about his work must remain tentative. He limitedly explores the criticisms of Sayles as a dialogue director rather than a cinematic director though he notes rightly that financial realities place limits on the equipment one can obtain and the film stock one can use, something that many of the critics who seem to think that films are made in an economic vacuum forget. Many if not all of these critics still think of art and the artist in romantic terms, as unsullied by the real world. Whether Sayles and Renzi will be able to put together what is necessary for Sayles to make another film remains an open question as I type given the realities of contemporary big money Hollywood film making and the difficulties in making independent films and getting them distributed these days. Perhaps streaming will come to the rescue. Only time will tell.

Molyneaux’s book on Sayles may not be as academically and intellectually sexy as books that come from the crystal ball textualists (some clearly find crystal ball textualists work sexy). It nicely lays out the actual economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of Sayles’s film. It provides a sound base line for further studies of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of the work of writer, director, and actor John Sayles even if, like fanboy and fangirl criticism, it tends to be too often more laudatory than critical. And while we like what we like—and I admit I like Sayles’s films a lot—what we like needs to be grounded in an analysis of the economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic contexts of life. Finally, Molyneaux’s book raises that eternal question about books on film directors: couldn’t it have done what it did in article and hence less repetitive form?
 

Say Hello to Indiana University Vichy...

 

You gotta love the governor of Indiana and his politically and ideologically correct groupies. They whinge and whine about too few Indiana University alumnae and alumni voting in Board elections. Then they proceed, after eliminating the election of Board members all together and firing two Board members who have been critical of the leader of Indiana University, to “elect” two new members of the Board (don’t you just love those collaborators jumping at the chance to serve on such a Board?) by a single “vote” all. And they have done it all with the collaboration of bureaucrats at IU in Bloomington. Needless to say, this is positively Hitlerian, Stalinist, and, need I say it, Orwellian.

So also is Orwellian the fact that today on the IU Facebook page, a page that spews propaganda on a regular basis just like the Facebook pages of other universities and colleges, they wished Herman B. Wells former president and chancellor of the university, a happy birthday. It is Orwellian because Wells stood up to the paternalistic puritanical patriarchs in Indianapolis when they wanted to inquisit and exorcise the Institute of Sex Research at the university, irony intended. This is enough to make one recall what a lawyer said to Joseph McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings, namely, have you no shame? The answer, of course, is that just like Tailgunner Joe IU’s powers that be and their propagandists have no shame. For them it is political and ideological correctness by any means.

If I could do it all over again I would have transferred to the University of Texas when IU arranged for me to finish my degree in Austin for health reasons. UT remains a real university unlike the sinking academic ship that is IU, a ship that has been sinking since the 1990s in the ratings guides to research universities. All I have to say is I am so glad I sent my diploma back to an IU—telling them to do the Johnny Paycheck with it—that is fast becoming a right wing politically and ideologically correct theocratic institution dedicated to turning out yes men and yes women for the cult of Tangholio and its bread and circuses. 

The Books of My Life: Wisdom’s Workshop

I have long had an interest in higher education. I am interested in academia as a bureaucracy, a bureaucracy that has changed just as broader society has changed over the years. I am interested in the economic aspects of institutions of higher education and the role economic interests have played and continue to play in colleges and universities in the core nation world and particularly in the British settler society world. I am interested in the politics of universities both internally and externally and the impact political bureaucracies have on academic bureaucracies and vice versa. I am interested in the demographics of universities and how these have changed over the years. I am interested in the historical and cultural geography of universities and the ideologies associated with notions of how colleges and universities should look. I am interested in the culture and subcultures and countercultures of universities, a culture and cultures that mirror while the broader world while, at the same time, wanting to change the world for the better (there is a lot of utopianism among university faculty, some of them old bohemians gone bourgeois, though only those in the applied sciences generally manage to change the world if not for the better).

James Axtell’s Wisdom’s Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016) explores the economic, political, demographic, geographic, and cultural history of the university from the Mediaeval era to the modern American research university or multiversity. and megaversity era. Along the way Axtell briefly, for example, explores the the Mediaeval, Tudor and Stuart (Oxbridge) and 19th century German precedents for the American research university, the historical genealogies of academic bureaucracies, the role faculties play in universities and the cultures associated with university faculties, tensions between the administrative bureaucracy and faculty guilds in universities, the built environment of universities, student life at universities, tensions between universities and the broader society including powerful economic interests particularly over the curriculum, the increasing use of part-time or contingent faculty in American universities (something paralleled in Canadian research universities as well), and the increasing ties between the university, government, and private corporations in his synthetic history of the modern university. Axtell ends his book by noting that American research university are overrepresented among the top universities globally in all the guides which rate universities around the worlds.

As a comparative history Axtell’s book is far too selective. Axtell largely ignores higher education developments Germany and Great Britain in the 20th and 21st century, somewhat surprisingly since the new post-World War II in Britain generally mimicked the post-war American research universities. He ignores Canadian universities like the University of Toronto, which, like the universities he does focus on, is a member of the elite Association of American Universities, the pan-bureaucratic arm of the elite American research university. And while these points may or may not be relevant—Axtell’s focus was on the rise of the American elite research university after all—something else he ignores, namely the fact that the size and wealth of the American economy, itself a product of geography, demography, and culture, is very relevant for why US research universities show up in large numbers in the lists of the top three hundred universities in the world. Sometimes size does matter and the US with its almost 400 million people (2018 estimate) gives it an economic and technological edge over smaller Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Germany. He also fails to explore the fact that there is great regional variation in the “quality” of US research universities with most of them being found in the US Northeast, Midwest, and Far West and far fewer in the South, the Northern Plains, and the Intermountain West where, again, size matters as does cultural history, particularly the culture of evangelical and secular anti-intellectualism.

 

Working for a Living: My Life in Publishing

As I have mentioned previously in these blogs I loved my undergraduate university and college years. When I began my academic career I saw undergraduate study as the first step in the academic teaching and research career that I dreamed was in my radiant future. Graduate school, however, with its petty politics (too mundane and banal for me), its bureaucratic nature (I am not a bureaucracy sort of guy), its anemic intellectual culture (particularly in History; less so in Anthropology and Sociology), its upper middle class culture (I have always found this culture sterile and banal), and its far too often soap opera like atmosphere (an atmosphere that proved to be morally disturbing on occasion) soured me on an academic career removing, in the process, the rose coloured romantic glasses that covered my eyes curing me, in the process, of the ideologically driven fever I had long had when it came to academia and an academic career. 

By the mid and late 1990s I was looking for ways to escape the ivory tower because by that time I had not only been cured of the romanticism I had about the academy, I also had little interest in teaching a bunch of teenagers and teenagers beyond the teen years who had little interest in scholarship and who instead saw college as a rite of passage one had to complete before getting ones monetary rewards in the post-college afterlife. One way I found to escape academia was by working. By 1995 I was, while simultaneously attending grad school, also working in one of those corporate bookstores that was a predecessor of those mega corporate bookstores where books were regarded as little more than a commodity. It was a nice diversion, a diversion that led to friendships if fleeting friendships, from the bureaucratic humdrum of graduate school, but it was not the work career that I envisioned for myself despite my continuing love for books. I simply could not see myself working in a corporation that saw books as something akin to Serta beds. 

Therefore in 1997 I decided to move to Moscow leaving graduate school and the corporate book world behind, or so I hoped. Before I left the US, however,  I decided, a month or so before the end of the academic term, to take my comprehensive exams just in case. I passed them despite having only a few weeks to study for them, despite misreading one of the questions on the exam, and despite taking time out from the exams to go to a lecture given by a noted scholar who hoped to teach at the university I was attending at the time. He did not get the position, rumour has it, because, sadly, he was considered too conservative in his politics.

When I returned to the United States from Europe in 1999 I was, of course, jobless and I needed to find a job so I could live. I had little interest in continuing my graduate school education for the reasons I noted earlier and because, frankly, I always got more from books than from graduate school. As an introvert and secular Calvinist (thanks particularly to the Shoah) whose goal in life was to limit my interaction with other humans as much as possible I found the books I chose to read gave me a better education in what I was interested in—my interests were more eclectic and multi-disciplinary that graduate school allowed—than did graduate school seminars and all without the routine and formulaic interactions even graduate school is full of.  

Fortunately, I had other options. A  friend suggested that I go to work at the place she worked, the Encyclopedia of New York State. The Encyclopedia, a publishing project of the Syracuse University Press, had set up shop in the Culture Education Center in the capital complex in Albany where I lived thanks to the support the project got from New York state. So I applied for a job as an editor with the Encyclopedia. After some hesitation—the lead editor on the project did not like the clothes I wore to my interview as they weren’t apparently professional enough (I had just come from working at a dirty video store before the interview and did not wear “professional” clothes to that job for obvious reasons)—hired me as one of the editors for the project. I was now responsible for finding contributors to write for the religious, ethnic, and cultural components of the project, which I did.

I liked working for the Encyclpedia for the most part. I was doing something related to books which I loved. Like any workplace the Encyclopedia had its plusses and it had its minuses. Since I knew and liked several of the other editors working on the project and I enjoyed finding contributors to the parts of the project I was working on it had more of the plusses than the minuses. The big problem with the position, however, was the fact that it was freelance gig (one that required filing taxes as an independent rather than as an employee of Syracuse University Press and that was a pain) rather than a career. So, when an acquisitions editor position opened up at the State University of New York Press in Albany 2000 I applied for it and after a couple of interviews got it. 

I liked working at SUNY Press quite a lot. I acquired books in the social sciences, including a few that I was quite proud of. One doesn’t always have much choice in acquiring books at a press that doesn’t have the prestige and hence acqusitions options of an Oxford University Press or a University of Chicago Press, for example, and I had to, as part of my job contract, acquire 24 books a year. On the plus side, and something else required of me by my job contact, I was required to continue a publication plan that had been put into operation by my predecessor. I had to establish a publication programme in New York State Studies at the Press. And while I was not the initiating editor of the Press’s acquisitions in that area, I helped create the first logo for the series, saw the first book in the series go into publication, and helped get the series rolling, all of which I was quite proud of. I was also proud of the fact that my first performance review was very positive, something that allayed any fear I might have had about succeeding as an acquisitions editor in the academic publishing world.

I now envisioned my work life as one revolving around a publishing career. I did not envision it as starting and ending at SUNY Press, however. So, when an acquisitions position in history came open at the more prestigious University of Illinois Press in 2001 I applied for it. I really wanted the job given the fact that the University of Illinois Press was one of the leaders in academic publications in history, the fact that it had one of the most prestigious if not the most prestigious Mormon Studies publication programmes in the United States and the world, the fact that I adored college towns, and the fact that I would be able to, I was told, should I be offered the job and take it, be able to take over the Mormon Studies list after the current editor of Mormon Studies retired given my expertise in Mormon Studies and the relationships I had developed with scholars in Mormon Studies. So when I was offered the job I took it.

The problem was that when I was offered the history acquisitions position at the University of Illinois Press—I was apparently not the first choice for the position given my limited experience in publishing—I was told by the editor-in-chief that the director preferred that I cut my shoulder length hair given the “conservative” nature of the history profession. This request, one which I did understand, had a sobering impact on my decision to go to the University of Illinois Press as I found the request rather petty (as did the editor-in-chief). The request to cut my hair sucked all of the joy I got from being offered the position at the University of Illinois Press and took all the romance I had about the Press and what I might do at the Press out of that job opportunity. Another thing, an ultimately somewhat petty thing, that turned me off about working for the University of Illinois Press, was the fact that there were limited Indian cuisine restaurant options in Champaign-Urbana at the time. So when SUNY Press matched what the University of Illinois Press offered me in terms of salary I decided to stay in Albany where there were several excellent Indian food restaurants one could eat at.

In retrospect—there is nothing like Monday morning quarterbacking to make one see things in a different and more realistic perspective—it was the wrong decision. When 9/11 brought the inevitable economic bust that is so common in the neo-liberal American economy I, being one of the last hired was one of the first fired. As I was sent hurtling out the door I, of course, got the typical corporate speak from the Press that when the economy recovered I would probably, possibly, be rehired. By that time, however, my feelings toward the press were hardly positive and I did not see myself as coming back to the Press after the way I was treated. Additionally, I was not fully convinced by the rhetoric of a future job opportunity at the Press, a hypothesis confirmed when I was not rehired after applying on a couple of occasions for positions at the Press.

After being made redundant I, of course, went on unemployment. I involved myself with the Communication Workers of America who were trying to unionise graduate student researchers at the University at Albany. I had a few publishing job interviews including one at Greenwood Press and one at the University of Alabama Press, where I was apparently choice number two for the acquisitions position. No cigar was forthcoming, however. Eventually I moved back to Texas for a couple of years but left the retail dead end job I had in Austin to return to Albany to adjunct in History and later in Communications Studies and Sociology. With few options and despite my love-hate relationship with academia and with teaching, I decided to finish my Ph.D writing a dissertation of Mormon Studies which was later published in much revised form as a book. After sixteen years of teaching I retired with a small pension from New York state which, along with Medicare, enabled me to squeak by month to month until, as is the case at the moment, my financial situation was tested by increasing health problems and increasing health costs in an America with the worst health care insurance system in the core nation world. 

And so it goes in the brave new postmodern world...
 

The Books of My Life: The Pleasures of Academe

When I graduated from high school in 1973 going to college was not the rite of passage for young adults it is today. Initially, my life plan was like that of a lot of others in my generation and cohort. I was going to get a well-paying job with good benefits at one of the local factories and spend the rest of my life labouring for the car of my choice and the stereo system of my dreams so I could listen to the music that was such a central part of my life at the time.

Life as it so often does, however, throws you curve balls. An injury forced me to reconsider working in factories for the rest of my labouring life, something in retrospect that was my good fortune since little known to me and most Americans at the time, the era of deindistrialisation and globalisation, both of which dried up the number of good paying and good benefit industrial blue collar jobs in the US and both driven by corporate elites and their political toadies, was just around the bend. So, in 1975 I enrolled in classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. In 1978 full of dreams about becoming an academic, I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington where I finished my bachelor's degree in 1983.

My undergraduate experiences managed to wipe some of the romantic sheen off my perceptions of academia turning me into someone who took a pluses and minuses approach to the academy. Despite this, I still hoped to attend graduate school and I still, despite the diminution of my romanticism about academe, had plans to become an academic. I didn't, however, know what I wanted to specialise in. Nor, given my broad interests in the social sciences and humanities, did I know whether I wanted to specialise in any academic discipline at all. I thus applied to and was admitted into a post graduate interdisciplinary programme in American Studies at Notre Dame. 

Not finding Notre Dame's version of American Studies particularly conducive to my interests and not finding Notre Dame and South Bend conducive to me, I took an assistant acquisitions librarian job at the Science/Engineering Library at SMU in 1985, a job which, in retrospect, I wish I had never left. Unfortunately, I did quit the job to go to graduate school with my dreams of the academic life still somewhat intact. Though I was accepted at the University of Chicago (Social Thought) and the University of Kansas (Sociology), I matriculated at the school that offered me the most money, Ohio University in Athens, where I studied Sociology beginning in 1985. 

Though I loved the intellectual and cultural life of Athens my interdisciplinary self still tugged at my intellectual heartstrings. So, in 1987 I matriculated into an interdisciplinary doctoral programme at SUNY Albany. Fearing the difficulties of getting a job with a doctor of arts degree I transferred into the Anthropology Department at Albany and took a master's degree in 1988. I didn't opt for the Ph.D. because anthropology seemed too ahistorical and too anemic when it came to the study of the modern and postmodern core nation world. I wanted to do anthropological and sociological history and I wanted to do work on the history of North American Protestantism.

Because of these interests I eventually applied to and was admitted into a Ph.D. programme in Sociology in 1991 at Brigham Young University, a place where I could study in depth and historically, ethnographically, and sociologically, a group I had become fascinated with, the Latter-day Saints. I liked aspects of BYU. I learned, for example, a lot about the history and culture of Mormonism. I was alienated, however, by the cultural religiously grounded parochialism of the Y and of the Mormon Culture Region. So once again I found myself exploring the academic marketplace.

Among the choices I had for graduate school after BYU was my dream college and university the University of Toronto (History of North American Christianity), Queen's University (North American Religious History and Mormon Studies), LaTrobe University (History and Sociology under the guidance of Rhys Isaac), and SUNY Albany (History). Money again was the deciding factor and I went back to SUNY Albany where I finally earned a Ph.D in history and wrote a dissertation on Mormon Studies. By this time, however, getting a job in academe was about as easy as taking a trip to Mars with either Mr. Amazon or Mr. Virgin Records. Moreover, I had already earned a lot of pension and health care credits while teaching in the State University of New York system.

All of this is a long way of saying I know academe. I have, thanks to being a student and a part-time teacher in the academy, irregularly in the 1990s and regularly since 2006 to 2021 when I retired, gotten to know by experience academia quite well. Memories of my academic life were stirred as I read James Axtell's The Pleasures of Academe: A Celebration and Defense of Higher Education (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), Like Axtell I found, over the course of my academic sojourn, pleasure in college towns (something I wish Axtell had been more systematic and analytical about since college towns are towns which the college or university dominates economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically), in college town bookstores (which are, I have always thought, measures of the quality of a college and university; it is no accident, for example, that the Coop Bookstore at the University of Chicago is one of the best bookstores in the US; it is also no accident that the Barnes and Nobles takeover of so many college bookstores, including that of my alma mater and the Harvard Coop, and the decline of supplementary books in such bookstores, probably reflects not only the increasing triumph of what Veblen called business strategies in academe but also the decline in the quality of student intellectual life and student reading life), in college town built environments, in college town intellectual life, in college town cultural life (lots of foreign film opportunities and musical performances in B-town), in college and university learning, in college and university research, in college town and college and university teaching, a not unalloyed joy, and even in college town semi-professional athletics (I was at IU when we won the NCAA basketball championship in 1981 and what I can remember of it was exciting, amazing, and wonderfully ritualistic).

What I don't remember is what the mostly demagogic polemicists who attack college faculty complain and whinge about: political and ideological correctness, elitism, too much faculty involvement in research and not enough in teaching, and too complacent and lazy a faculty thanks to tenure. It is hard to know what to do with such rhetoric. If anything, faculty, particularly part-time cheap from the bureaucrats point of view faculty, are overworked and underpaid in part because of the American tradition of anti-intellectualism that impacts college and university funding, particularly in the states, while administrators, who are increasingly authoritarian managers are overpaid, underworked, and committed to a retail model of education. As Axtell notes and the data he quotes quite clearly shows, such whinging is not grounded in reality. But them demagogues are not known for their commitment to empirical facts. The function and purpose of their anecdotally dripping rhetoric is to manipulate the masses by playing on emotions like fear rather than to have a civil, reasonable, and rational argument about what economically, politically, culturally, demographically, and geographically is. In the end, I think we need to call such empirically anemic rhetoric what it is, bullshit.

Given this it is hard to know to whom Axtell's civilly toned book is aimed and to who it is addressed. If it is aimed at the polemicists even if they even bother to read it, which I think is unlikely, they are likely to perceive it and the statistical facts within it as yet another instance of liberal or left wing political and ideological correctness. If it is aimed at someone like me, it is preaching to the empirically grounded choir. If it is aimed at the inbetweeners, at anyone with an open mind and a commitment to fact-based analysis, hopefully they will find it helpful in understanding academia and academic faculty. I suspect, in the end, however, that Axtell's biography/memoir/history/ethnography/quantitative analysis is aimed more at people like me than anyone else. And that may be a reflection of a divided America that does not talk to itself anymore and does not have a common identity and sense of community if it ever did outside of the Great Depression to World War II era.

Musings on Right Wing "Analysis" of the Trials and Travails of Antioch College

While I was exploring the continuing problems of Antioch College recently I ran across this little gem or right wing “analysis” of Antioch’s current economic problems by one Reed Alexander in the comments section of Megan Bachman’s update on the continuing economic problems of Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio in the Yellow Springs News on 29 March 2021:



"After all these years of “reinventing” itself – Antioch administrators still don’t “get it.” Antioch offers an antiquated approach to education – its sole mission is to indoctrinate young people with leftist propaganda. Other schools focus on providing students with cutting-edge skills to compete for jobs of the future, while Antioch judges success on the number of minds it can infiltrate with socialist ideology. A losing proposition.
A nephew of mine in roughly eight years ago attended Antioch because he thought it would expand his horizons to think more broadly about the world. Instead, because he was wasn’t liberal enough, he was ostracised (spelling corrected by me) by both faculty and administrators. Diversity of thought is not a goal at Antioch. Sad."

 While it is probably sad to some that Antioch College continues to have problems, problems which go back to the 1970s, what is also sad, if not surprising, is the abstract and decontextualised political and ideological correctness that undergirds Alexander’s response to Bachman’s article on the economic and demographic struggles at Antioch College. Where to begin?

First, Antioch is not the only college that is experiencing economic and demographic problems these days. So is, for example, the College of Saint Rose, a small Roman Catholic college in Albany, New York that no longer, to cite one example of curricular cleansing, has a Sociology Department. So did the University at Albany in the same city. SUNY Albany once had to cut its language and theatre programmes among others because of financial problems in the wake of an economic downturn and decreasing state monies.

Second, not all colleges and universities that I suspect Alexander would put in the “liberal” camp are having financial and demographic problems. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, one of the other colleges, along with Antioch and Swarthmore, Burton Clark analysed in his classic The Distinctive College, has a $569 million dollar endowment. Swarthmore has an endowment of over $2 billion dollars. Both have healthy student enrollments, healthy and productive faculty, and healthy academic departments. Another "liberal" university, Brandeis University, has a $1.2 billion dollar endowment post-Madoff.

Third, all cultures, subcultures, countercultures, societies, nations, the military, prisons, corporations, and educational institutions socialise. One might argue, for example, that The King's College (home of demagogue Dinesh D’Souza once upon a time) and Bob Jones socialises its students into variants of right wing Christian ideology. Unfortunately, and unscientifically, those demagogues with a political and ideological correctness axe to grind prefer to refer to certain forms of socialisation, forms of socialisation they don’t like (ah there once again is that pesky emotionalism that dominates right wing “thinking”), in other words, as “indoctrination” or “brainwashing”. A more value neutral and scientific term for the common phenomenon of cultural reproduction of the young or initiation of new members into cultures, organisations, and institutions, is the tried and true one of socialisation. That term, however, isn’t politically and ideologically demonic and frightening enough for right wing demagogues like Alexander.

Finally, the reasons some colleges and universities are having problems these days are multiple. First there are the demographic factors. I give you student decline and greater competition for the potential student pool. Second, there are the economic reasons. Some colleges and universities are poorer than others, some have less endowment monies and other monies to work with, and some are seeing decreases in state support in absolute and relative terms. Third, there are the cultural factors. Colleges and universities have different degrees of social and cultural capital in the minds of applicants and their parents. It is more appealing to those who have been impacted by branding, ideologies of ancientness, and other cultural phenomena to apply to and go to Reed or Swarthmore as opposed to Antioch or Ball State University.

I realise this brief discussion of colleges and universities and their trials and travails will have little and, more likely, any impact on the abstract politically correct demagogues of the world and those who pied pipper and ditto their ideologically grounded rhetoric. Still, people like Alexander, people who seem to prefer their analysis to be ahistorical, contextless, empirically deficient, and ideologically correct, make for, I hope, an interesting blog in the age of Kornbluth’s marching orange tinted bsing morons.

The Books of My Life: The Soul of the American University

Humans are, as well as being economic, political, geographic, and biological animals, cultural and meaning giving animals as George Marsden's The Soul of the American University (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) makes abundantly clear. Marsden's book, which places cultural history at its centre, explores how American colleges, once dominated by sectarian Protestant groups like the Presbyterians and Congregationalists, became, by the twentieth century, universities where "secularism" (or better the sacralisation of certain meanings) rather than Protestantism became the established "faith". 

Marsden argues that the seeds of secular establishment and Protestant disestablishment lay in evangelical Protestantism, the form of Protestantism that dominated American colleges, itself. As evangelicalism confronted the children of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment such as evolutionary Darwinism and evolutionary and historically oriented "higher" biblical criticism, evangelicalism split into the more "traditionalist", at least in self perception, conservative evangelicalism and moderate and liberal and even socialistic evangelicalism. This more moderate and liberal evangelicalism, claims Marsden, created a brand of Protestantism that adapted to and adopted Darwinism, adapted to and adopted "higher" biblical criticism, and tied mission to ethical and moral development and advocacy activism. Over time, the Protestant character of all of these was demagicified or secularised creating the modern university, a modern university shorn of its once dominant WASP Protestant heritage.

Though Marsden seems to place most of the blame for university "secularisation" on science and pragmatism and on academics, reality is a bit more complicated than that as Marsden seems to sometimes realise. Faculty did, as Marsden notes, come to place free speech and free inquiry (autonomy) at the heart of the faculty enterprise. It is not the faculty, however, who ran or who run American universities. As Thorstein Veblen noted in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 it is capitalist economic interests with their practical need for trained workers and for technocrats who, through university Boards and university administrators, really control and run America's universities. Today, the dominance of universities by economic interests and their fellow travellers who fetishise a particular economic ideology that has been dehistoricised and who worship the holy trinity of Mammon, Greed, and Managerial Professionalism, has provided American universities with a corporate model of governance, a corporate model of corporate planning (the planning is our plan mentality), and a corporate retail model of education where the customer, those consumers universities are trying to attract and maintain, students, are almost always right.

Beyond empirical issues there are problems associated with the normative aspects of Marsden's book. In the concluding chapter to The Soul of the American University, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript", Marsden goes all normative on us calling for and advocating a return of religion, and particularly Christianity, to the ivy covered groves of academe. Using postmodernism in the same way Mormon intellectuals do, Marsden takes a postmodernist approach arguing that if tolerance and diversity are truly central to the academic and intellectual enterprise religion too should be tolerated in a university environment that preaches the gospel of diversity.

There are, of course, several problems with such an argument. In an age where the Bircher/Dixiecrat anti-intellectual and inquisitional variety of Protestantism in both its religious and "secular" form has taken over the Republican Party should universities, with their emphasis on facts and valid approaches to empirical facts (economic, political, cultural, geographic, and demographic methods and strategies), allow such hate filled paranoid and conspiracy driven perversions of reality to enter the academic playing field? Should those intolerant of any views other than their own and who have made demonic inquisition central to their ideologies and practises be allowed into the halls of academe? Marsden implies they shouldn't arguing instead for the creation of Habermasian like boards of experts who adjudicate what varieties of religion are acceptable on college campuses along with the need for religious groups themselves to agree to certain broad rules of the academic game. Marsden, in other words, accepts that universities should and must have standards and those that violate such standards should not gain admission into university halls. Moreover, as Marsden notes, religious organisations are already present on university campuses. University campuses are full of religious oriented groups that students can join and find community and friendship at if they so wish (see, for example, Conrad Cherry, Betty DeBerg, and Amanda Porterfield, Religion on Campus, 2001). I, for instance, used to go to Hillel periodically when I was a student though less for religious reasons than for community and friendship. If students are not availing themselves of such opportunities is that the fault of "secular" universities or, for example, the fact that many of these religious groups are intolerant of and inquisitorial towards a number of empirically grounded political, economic, and cultural ideologies? Finally, one can and should question whether corporations, like universities, are "persons" with souls.

Now don't get me wrong, I quite like the structure of the University of Toronto, where I was admitted, with its three postgraduate theological colleges and its three religious based federated religious colleges that are part of the public University of Toronto (Canada has taken a different approach to the separation of religion and state than the US). I wouldn't mind if this structure was replicated in the United States and Marsden notes that there were attempts to replicate the Canadian model in the US and that they had limited long term success. It must be remembered, however, that the history of English Canada is different from that of the US and this is one reason religious colleges are affiliated with or federated with public and private universities in Canada. It also must be remembered that a "secular" curriculum is at the core of the federated colleges at the UofT--and should also be if the Canadian system is copied in the US, on the primary, secondary, or higher education level--and that, as D.S. Masters noted in his book on Protestant church colleges in Canada, such federation and affiliation played a major role in "secularising" church colleges in Canada. In Marsden's terms, I suppose, this brings us back to square one once again where we don't seem to be able to pass go. It brings us back to square one for when change occurs, as it, historically speaking, always does, religion adapts to this change and adopts aspects of these changes as both the history of Protestant liberalism and Protestant reactionism well show.

The Magical College and University Tour: Musings on the Abusurdity of Best Colleges and Universities Lists.

I have to admit, I get a kind of horror film like chuckle--funny yet scary--out of these best of lists whether they are the best films of all time, the best TV shows of the 1990s, the best sculptures since time immemorial, the US News and World Report rankings of American colleges and universities, or the CS list of the best universities in the world for 2021. The reason I do is because there are fundamental problems with these lists.

Let's start with reputation. Reputations are, at least in part, intersubjective and are impacted by broader practises associated with social and cultural capital. Reputations, in other words, are, at least in part, cultural and symbolic, and are often, if not generally, impacted by ideologies that are of questionable empirical status.

Second, there are different kinds of colleges and universities. There are, in the United States, for instance, teaching colleges (Siena), research colleges (Amherst), teaching universities (Fort Hays), and research universities (Indiana University, Bloomington, Ohio University). Each of these are somewhat different making comparisons between them, other than the conclusion that they are different, problematic.

I want to focus in the rest of this blog on research universities. When we do this it becomes crystal clear that there are, as a matter of empirical fact, important differences between research universities. There are, in the US, for instance, "elite" American universities like Indiana, Michigan Harvard, and Pittsburgh all members of the elite Association of American Universities. There are also, research universities that are not members of the AAU (Albany, Kent State, Nebraska, Syracuse) because they don't meet the criteria for membership. Comparing "elite" research universities with non-"elite" research universities is possible since they are both research universities, apples. Nevertheless, they are also different and are thus, to continue with the metaphor, rather like the difference between sweet apples and tart apples.

There are also important differences among these "elite" research universities as anyone with a grasp of history knows, a difference that is akin to the differences between sweet pink lady apples and sweet honey crisp apples. One of the differences in elite Association of American Universities universities, for instance, involves the issue of whether these "elite" research universities are all purpose universities with liberal arts, business, agricultural, and engineering schools, like Ohio State, Purdue, Penn State, Michigan State, and Iowa State, all land grant institutions of their respective states, or whether they are liberal arts universities.

America's land grant colleges began life as agricultural research colleges and universities thanks to the Land Grant College Act of 1862 and had the mission of engaging in extensive agricultural research and disseminating this research to farmers in the states in which they were located, states where agriculture was once dominant.

Some of the states where land grant colleges were founded,  however,  already had existing public universities. In the period after World War II many of these eventually grew into  "elite" research oriented liberal arts universities. These non-land grant research universities, such as Indiana University, Bloomington, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Michigan, and the University of Iowa, today are essentially large scale liberal arts universities with business colleges, schools of law, and sometimes medical colleges--Indiana's medical college is in Indianapolis, home to a growing non-"elite" research university, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, IUPUI, adding an important wrinkle to any empirical analysis. Thus to compare Indiana University, Bloomington, which is basically a massive liberal arts university, to Purdue University with its applied agricultural and engineering schools, research and applied research programmes that are research intensive, and with their expanding liberal arts programmes, is problematic and analytical controls must be put in place when comparing them. One must, in other words, compare like--liberal arts at Indiana--with like--liberal arts at Purdue. Any survey that doesn't do this is problematic for what I hope are obvious reasons.

Third, it is absurd to compare some American "elite" private colleges and universities with more selective admissions criteria, and who can be selective in their admissions, save when it comes to legacies and athletes, with state colleges and universities of the research or teaching variety, with less selective admissions criteria because their mission, at least in part, is to serve the residents of that state. Again this is like comparing various types of apples with each other.

Given all this, it is hard to think of these best of college and universities lists as anything other than historically anemic and theoretically week publicity. And that seems homologous with the world of neoliberal corporate capitalism we sadly live in these days, even in colleges and universities.

Alice in Wonderland Goes to College...

So, New Zealand universities collectively are facing half a billion New Zealand dollars in losses thanks, in part, to a decline in its foreign student body due to the coronavirus. If NZ universities are anything like those in the US they are top heavy with administrators who practise the retail model of education, one in which colleges and universities are akin to Walmart's and McDonald's. One study of a college in the US found an over 20% increase in upper level bureaucrats and an over 100% increase in mid-level bureaucrats between 1975 and 2008. Unless the mission of colleges and universities is to hire bureaucrats, some of whom are doing what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs" and many of whom are siphoning monies away from education, there is some pork that can and should be cut there.

In the upside down world of the upper level corporate educational bureaucrat whose ideology is that only we are essential and whose god is Mammon, just like that of other corporate elite, the decline in student enrollment, for instance, is not their fault or the fault of those corporate managers trained in mush like student personnel who man student recruitment and student retention offices in the corporation. It is instead, in their faultless illogical corporate logic, the fault of those who care for the grounds, who serve students meals, and who teach the classes that were once regarded as central and essential to the mission of colleges and universities. Alice in Wonderland, Franz Kafka, and Vladimir Voinovich are smiling somewhere.

The Books of My Life: Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology

Given that I have taught history, communication, cultural anthropology, and sociology over the years I have had ample opportunity to read several textbooks books in each of those disciplines. Recently I used Kenneth Gould's and Tammy Lewis's (editors) Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2018) in my Introduction to Sociology class and so I thought I would briefly share my thoughts about the book.

Ten Lessons in Introductory Sociology is made up of ten chapters ranging through Sociological Theory, Sociological Methods, Culture, Society, Inequality, Race, Gender, Social Change, Globalisation, and Applied Sociology, the last a rarity in introductory sociology texts but a nice addition given student interest in doing something practical with their academic major. As an introductory textbook ten lessons has several advantages. It is inexpensive in an era when introductory textbooks can cost an arm and a leg, a concern particularly important to students who are from middle and working class backgrounds. It goes for a topical and integrative approach instead of the encyclopedic approach of many introductory textbooks which can be confusing and mind numbing for many students. The topical chapters are written by specialists in the subfield. The topics selected for the book--all textbooks are inevitably selective--seem reasonable and rational. The boxes on food for thought in the chapters are often superb and relevant to students in their everyday lives allowing them to learn about sociology by putting everyday things into sociological context. The index also serves as the glossary which will be a plus for many.  On the downside--every introductory text has a downside--I wasn't always clear about the source of the data referenced within the topical chapters. The text is more applied and hence ideological than many other introductory textbooks and this may be a problem for some. The book's Introduction is far more selective than I would have liked it to be. Recommended.

The Books of My Life: Joseph Smith (Bushman)

The name Richard Bushman really takes me back. Once upon a time I was in graduate school. In one seminar I took with Professor Barker-Benfield on some subject, probably history and gender since B-B fancied himself a specialist in that area, we students were supposed to read Bushman's recently published book The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). I already knew some of Bushman's work. I had read his From Puritan to Yankee: Character and Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 (New York: Norton, 1980) earlier and found its argument on the transformation of Puritanism interesting and its utlisation of economic and cultural theory to make the argument about the transformation of Puritan identity even more interesting.

In the seminar I quickly learned that B-B was not a fan of Bushman or his work. As I recall, B-B found Bushman's work too middle class, elite class wanna be. As someone born in England class, you see, was never very far from B-B's mind. I don't know whether B-B disliked Bushman for reasons other than class and class wannabeism: the fact that Bushman won a Bancroft Prize and he never did, the fact that Bushman held a distinguished professorship at a prestigious American research university that was a member of the elite Association of American Universities and he didn't, the fact that Bushman took a more social and cultural approach to psychology than his mentor Donald Meyer--whose work I find too reductionism--or the fact that Bushman was a Mormon believer and he was neither. What I do remember is that I thought B-B misinterpreted Bushman's book on American refinement. He saw it as a paean to the middle class and the civilising process. I, on the other hand, thought, still think, and stated in class, that the real heroes of the book were the dirt poor Smith family, the family of Mormon "prophet, seer, and revelator" Joseph Smith Junior. I still think B-B let his ideology get in the way of a valid analysis of Bushman's book. That, of course, has been and continues to be far too common occurence in intellectual and academic circles past and present.

Another thing I remember about B-B's graduate class was that there was a remarkably ignorant and moronic statement made in the class by one of the other graduate students in the seminar. The student, who will remain nameless because I have simply forgotten virtually everything about her, remarked, during one of our classroom discussions, that she found the Mormon sense of persecution irrelevant. I had and still have a number of problems with such a remarkable, not in a good way, jeremiad. First, such etic statements do not take culture seriously while culture, as social theory and social scientific analysis shows and has shown for a century at least, is important if not central to an understanding humans and human groups and, as a consequence, must be taken seriously, very seriously. As Max Weber and Clifford Geertz realised some time ago, you have to, in order to understand human groups and human social movements, go native. You have to go emic, in other words, to grasp the meanings that often motivate and underlie human actions. That this rather obvious methodology hasn't been understood and put into academic practise by one if not more academic wanna bes, not to mention many academics, tells you something about the dismal theoretical and methodological state of the discipline of history. This statement also ignores the fact that the persecution of Mormons was real, very real. Mormons were persecuted, discriminated against, faced mob violence, and even possible "extermination" in Missouri and Illinois. Such a statement ignores the fact that real violence against "others", such as the real violence aimed at Jews and others during the Holocaust, to chose one example, has had and continues to have an immense impact on human individuals and groups particularly on a cultural and ideological level. Just look at the continuing importance of the memory of the Shoah in contemporary Israel and the Jewish community worldwide and the use of the "holocaust" by some in the Jewish community in Israel and the US as a political weapon that Foucault would have found fascinating. The ignorance, moronicity, and  arrogance at the heart of such a dismissive statement shows that stupidity and anti-intellectualism are sadly not the monopoly of the populist masses but can also be found in the contemporary academy.

So why did all this spring to mind? Because I recently decided to take another spin through Richard Bushman's biography of the charismatic and patrimonial (in Weberian terms) founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith. Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005) tries to walk the thin line between believing history and empirically grounded social scientific analysis if not entirely successfully. When push comes to shove, Bushman generally errs in the direction of a faithful interpretation of Smith's behaviour and actions and early Mormon history making Bushman's book more meaningful and valuable to the Mormon true believer than to the dispassionate social scientific analyst who seeks to understand Smith and early or primitive Mormonism in its broader cultural, economic, political, demographic, and geographic contexts better. Additionally, Bushman's book has a failing far too typical of so much historical work and historical biography of the past and the present; it sometimes becomes an exercise in kitchen sink trivial pursuit.

So what did I, a "gentile", a non-Mormon who spent the 1990s and the early and mid 2000s engaged in the study of Mormonism, learn and relearn from Bushman's biography of Smith. I learned that in what was still pretty much a traditional world, honour, something that was central to the traditional culture of honour at the time and in the past in traditional communities, mattered. Smith was embedded in a world of honour and honour mattered to him. Smith wanted to be respected and accepted in a world where gentility was a sign of status. He wanted others to recognise him as a gentlemen, if a "rough" gentleman. I relearned that Smith, was born into a family that had difficulty escaping poverty in a world that was changing thanks to the spread of merchant capitalism, sought financial security. I relearned that attacks on Smith and on Mormons generally were part and parcel of the vigilante violence that was far too common in 19th century America as attacks on Masonry, Catholics, Shakers, the Oneida Community, and Mormonism show. Needless to say, these vigilante attacks by "true Americans" on "others", whether for political, economic, or cultural reasons, continued into the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, making the study of American ethnocentrism and xenophobia a central part of any dispassionate and critical study of the United States. I relearned that Smith thought of himself as Abraham, as Isaac, as Jacob, as Moses, as the prophets, and as Jesus, and that he saw the Mormons as a figurative Israel made literally into the new Israel. Mormonism, after all, was and is a fascinating mixture of, as Smith perceived them, Tanakh Hebraicism and New Testament Christianity. I relearned that culture, particularly Smith's interpretation of the Bible filtered through the economic, political, and cultural present, was central to the construction of Mormonism and the creation of Mormons.

Given that Bushman's book tries to put the Mormon prophet and Primitive Mormonism into its ancient environment--a context that is problematic for those of us who are not believers--and its 19th century economic, political, cultural, geographical, and demographic ones, I can only recommend Bushman's biography to the Mormon faithful. It is likely to be and remain the standard work on the subject for 21st century believing intellectual Mormons for some time. I was, by the way, very annoyed by one aspect of the book. Bushman's footnotes cite only the last name of an author and a partial title of an author. This becomes a painful experience when one is looking for the footnote references in the bibliography where there are, for example, nine authors with the last name Anderson. Given this my award for the most difficult citation apparatus to manoeuvre through I have ever experienced goes to, moment of silence, Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith.

What a pity that Marvin Hill wasn't able to pursue his biography of Smith...

The Books of My Life: Public Access

What stands out to me about my recent reading choices is the fact that all of the books I have been reading lately have something to do with the American right. Recently, I have read books on right wing perceptions of anti-Americanism, the White separatist and White supremacist right wing, and the conservative Christian right wing. What can I say, it is the age of Trump after all. Given all this it should not be surprising that my most recent read, Michael Bérubé's Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (London: Verso, 1994) is, in part, focused on the American right wing as well.

 Bérubé's Public Access is one part post-World War II cultural studies and literary studies, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary theory, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies history, one part post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies in action (including a compelling reading of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey), one part exploration of post-1960s right wing attacks on post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies, and one part call for liberal-left political activism. It is the critique of right wing apologetics and polemics part of Bérubé's book that I want to concentrate on in the rest of this essay.

Bérubé's book does a good job of enlightening its readers about the contemporary American culture war right. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes and documents, are remarkably ignorant of post-1960s cultural studies and literary studies despite their claims that they are the vanguard of manning the barricades to protect America and America's young from its postmodern acids raising the question of how one can critique something one doesn't really comprehend and, in some cases, haven't even taken the time to read. This is, by the way, hardly the first time demagogues have claimed to be protecting someone from something they know very little if anything about. Think of all those anti-Marx folks who never read one sentence of Karl Marx's many writings. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé notes, really do have a tenuous relationship with empirical facts and empirical reality. The culture war right has consciously manipulated and lied about the writings or conference presentations of those they oppose as a strategy in the contemporary culture war knowing that few of those they aim their screed at will bother to ascertain whether the claims the culture right demagogues make about the "egghead left" are accurate or not. Most of the right wing culture war right, as Bérubé recognises, may claim to be warriors for free speech but the only free speech they vow to protect is their own politically correct right wing speech. Most of the right wing culture right, in other words, are more then willing to limit and ban the speech of those they disagree with and banish those who speak it to a kind of Foucauldian hell. Many in the culture war right, as Bérubé notes, have no interest in partaking of the rational back and forth of scholarly argument or the be fair to arguments you disagree with aspects of scholarly work. Jürgen Habermas we hardly knew ye.

None of this, by the way, is a surprise to me. I have personally seen again and again ignorance, flat out lies, and manipulations from the culture war right along with attacks on the speech of the "egghead left" on social media sites like Facebook. To state the obvious, one shouldn't expect anything else from a group of apologetic and polemical demagogues who self-righteously, arrogantly, and calculatingly see ignorance, a lack of empiricism, and demonisation as the means to the end of the right wing conquest and domination of America.