The Applying for a Job Kiada: The University System of New Hampshire Idiocy

 

The new digital technologies of the brave new digital world are a double edged sword. I have known this fact for a long time but I recently discovered it yet again when I applied for an online teaching job with the University System of New Hampshire.

As some of you may know I retired from part-time college and university teaching in 2021. To say I have enjoyed retirement other than my ever increasing health problems would be an understatement. I have enjoyed the freedom to be able to listen to classical music when I wanted, read when I wanted, and watch TV shows or movies when I wanted.

Recently, I have begun to think about applying for jobs again. The reason for this is simple. I know that the politically and ideologically correct wild bunch at the White House are thinking about getting rid of Medicare as we know it.

So, I applied for a job at Siena College recently which I did not get partly, I suspect, because of my longer than shoulder length hair. I saw the person who interviewed me via Zoom, actually do a double take when she saw it. I also recently applied for an online teaching job—I did online classes at SUNY Albany and SUNY Oneonta—at Worcester Polytechnic in Massachusetts and I tried to apply for one at the University System of New Hampshire.

Both Worcester Poly and the USNH actually used the same third party application system (public and private corporations enriching other private corporations). I had no problem using this system when I applied to Worcester. The application system was able to autofill my application at using my vita. I was not so lucky when it came to the University System of New Hampshire application, however.

When I learned about the job from Indeed I went to the USNH company page (academic institutions as corporations) and created an account. I told the application to fill in the blanks with my vita. Unfortunately, it proved unable to do that simple task.  Why it was able to do this with my application to Worcester Poly and not able it at the USNH is beyond me and I want it to remain beyond me. Trying to understand computers is like trying to understand the human mind.

Everything went well with my USNH application until I was asked for my educational background. The system was able to fill in my name, my address, my telephone number, my email, and most of my employment background material. It was not, however, able to fill in my educational history. When I tried to put in the information manually the programme would not let me. Presumably this was because the system was too stupid to realise that since it did not put in the information and I thus had to it could not cope with the fact that I needed to do it manually when it wanted to do it automatically, or rather not done it, automatically. Life as surreal farce. 

At this point I gave up. Frankly, I have better things to do with my time then to waste it (time is money) trying to do what apparently could not be done.

I went back to the USNH again today to see if I could do the impossible. I wasn’t going to try to do this manually since whether I should be considered for the job, a professional job I should add, should be done solely on the basis of my vita since I am not applying for a job at McDonalds. I forgot my password so I tried to get a new one. When I requested a line to create a new password the link the USNH sent me arrived without a link I could actually click on.

The moral of this story? Computer associated systems used for applications can be utterly stupid on occasion. Perhaps this is because of the literalism associated with this stuff, perhaps it is the fact that humans create such systems, or perhaps it is because we live in a kafkaesque world. I don’t know and I don’t care to know. I will leave this theological questions up to hardshell Calvinists to try to discern.

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.

Postscript: I did finally get a parcel of material from the UUP. Sadly, some of it was irrelevant and there was once again (time number three) no form for the vision and dental insurance. I requested the latter again and will let you know when and if I get it.

Yet another postscript: So I finally got the materials I have been asking for since I retired the other day. It only took me five years to get the form to sign up for UUP vision and dental benefits. It is a relief to finally get this material. WooHoo!

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.

The Books of My Life: The Perpetual Dream

 

Gerald Grant and David Reisman explore the variety of attempts to reform the liberal arts in American higher education since the 1920s in their award winning book The Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Taking a page from Max Weber Grant and Reisman argue that these various attempts at reform (Grant and Reisman call them telic reforms or reforms pointing toward different endings for undergraduate education than those that dominated the world of undergraduate education at the time the book was written) can be conceptualised in terms of three broad ideal type forms: the neo-classical, the communal-expressive, and the activist-radical.

After defining what they mean by telic reforms Grant and Reisman flesh out their three ideal types of telic reforms in three subsequent chapters. In chapter three they explore the neo-classical great books programme at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland (and to a lesser extent at the campus in Santa Fe, New Mexico) with its we want to create the carriers and bearers of Western civilisation at its heart. In chapter four Grant and Reisman explore the communal-expressive ideal type of reform using Kresge College which was, at the time, part of the new University of California Santa Cruz, as its example. Kresge, according to Grant and Reisman, adopted their reform model of change me and I can change my world from social psychologist Carl Rogers. In chapter five Grant and Reisman explore the activist-radical type of telic reform using Audrey Cohen’s The College for Human Services (now the Metropolitan College of New York), as its prime example. The College for Human Services adopted a type of reform whose battle call was change the student and he or she can change the world making it a much better place in the process.

In later chapters Grant and Reisman explore similar reform attempts at and in other colleges and universities across the United States, all of which sought to bring engaged faculty and engaged students together in engaged and engaging interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary colleges and universities. Chapter seven focuses on New College in Sarasota, Florida. Chapter eight focuses on the colleges at the University of California of Santa Cruz. Chapter nine focuses on the two new colleges, at the time, in the university system of the state of New Jersey, Ramapo College and Stockton State College (now Stockton University).

I quite enjoyed Grant's and Reisman’s book. I was somewhat familiar with attempts to reform American undergraduate higher education but The Perpetual Dream added immensely to my previous knowledge of attempts to reform American undergraduate education. There were a number of things I found interesting about the book. I think that Grant and Reisman were correct in arguing that one of the central things these reforms wanted to do was to create a sense of community. I liked that Grant and Reisman took a historical, sociological, and ethnographic approach to higher education reforms. I liked that The Perpetual Dream was in large part ethnographic in that Grant and Reisman individually and collectively spent time interviewing those at colleges and in schools undertaking telic reforms. 

One of the disappointments I had with the book is that Grant and Reisman aren't as explicit in tying these reforms to the economic, political, cultural, and demographic change the US was going through in the 20th century. That said, one gets the sense that Grant and Reisman are arguing that the ideal type reforms they explore were attempts to counter the anomie unleashed by modernity. In this context I found it interesting and, in hindsight, obvious, that money, economics, was central to these experiments in American higher education. Monies seem to be an eternal problem for experimenting colleges particularly of the private variety. They aren’t mainstream after all. They are more akin to institutionalised bohemias. Antioch College, for example, perhaps the example of the activist-radical type, seems to have been almost always be cash strapped. The Metropolitan College of New York is facing financial problems as I type. 

Political realities have also impacted the longevity of American reform colleges and reform within colleges and universities. Recently New College has been in the news thanks to the successful attempt of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and his merry men to remake the college in their own politically and ideologically correct image. They want to make it, they have said, the HIllsdale College of the South. Hillsdale is a favoured college of some segments of the American right What is happening to New College reflects the broader reality that since the administration of Richard Nixon in the late 1960s and early 1970s the US has become increasingly dominated by neo-liberalism and right wing populism. Note of interest, one of the other telic colleges of the countercultural era, Hampshire College in Massachusetts, agreed to accept New College students who did not wish to attend the Hillsdale of the South. Paradoxically Hampshire has recently decided to close because of economic difficulties.

There were other things I found less troubling about the book. I found, for example, Grant’s and Reisman’s contention that unionisation efforts by faculty in American universities added a layer of centralisation and bureaucratisation to American colleges and universities spot on but wondered why they did not pay as much attention to something else that added centralisation and bureaucratisation to American universities, the increase in administrative staff. From the vantage point of 2026 it is clear that not only has there been an exponential increase in administrative bureaucrats in American universities since the time Grant and Reisman wrote, but that these bureaucrats, because they are addicted to federal dollars and the ties of research dollars to college and university rankings, are undercutting faculty co-governance and faculty freedom of speech and research. Perhaps the faculty unionisation efforts Grant and Reisman criticise, were a  necessary countervailing force even if it has proved to be ineffective in pushing back against increasing administrative authoritarianism in America's major research universities.

Grant and Reisman rightly note that the increasingly consumerist model of American higher education and its need for student consumers has impacted reform efforts. It is, as they also note, not easy to convince students who have an increasingly I go to school so I can get a job mentality that a liberal arts reform college or programme is worth their while. Needless to say, many of the business types that serve on college and university boards of governance have a similar "pragmatic" attitutde.

Finally, I was intrigued by the fact that one might possibly and profitably apply another Weberian proposition to the reform movements in American higher education, namely, Weber's conception of authority. Many if not most of these reform efforts began with a charismatic reform figure and, increasingly, over time, became tradition bound and bureaucratic after the charismatic figure leaves or dies. At St. John’s, for instance, Scott Buchanan eventually came to the conclusion that books, including books outside the Western canon, needed to be added to the great books reading list. By that time, however, he had left St. John’s and St. John’s curriculum had been fossilised and sanctified, had been, in other words, turned into a tradition by those who followed in his wake and any effort to change that tradition was seen as a profanation.

As Grant and Reisman note academic reform is a perpetual dream, something that never ends and something that is often grounded in and founded on utopian ideologies. In my academic life I have been privy to several attempts to reform the curriculum all of which involved the reinvention of the metaphoric wheel. When I was at the University of Albany, for instance, there was Project Renaissance, an attempt to develop a living-learning interdisciplinary programme for selected students at the University (Grant and Reisman ignore these living learning reform efforts). It was actually hardly interdisciplinary at all. It was comparative. When I was at RPI there was an attempt to create an interdisciplinary curriculum with classes of over one hundred students, something hardly likely, in my opinion, to create a sense of community let alone a helpful learning environment. That "reform" effort seems to have ended as well. And so it goes and so it will likely continue to go.

The Books of My Life: Racism, Sexism, and the University

 

In June of 1992 twelve graduate students in the Political Science Department at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver sent an anonymous letter to the Dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies at UBC accusing several White male professors in the Department of being racist and sexist. A few months later in November of 1993 six more students joined the chorus of voices claiming that UBC’s Political Science department was sexist and racist. 

Instead of investigating these accusations internally through UBC’s administrative officers tasked with investigating harassment and multiculturalism or by the recently appointed vice-president of Equity, an outsider was tasked with investigating the accusations, the Vancouver lawyer Joan McEwen. The McEwen report, which was finally issued in 1995, found the accusations of the graduate students credible. Even the president of UBC, David W. Strangway, believed the accusations though most of the administrators at UBC did what university administrators usually do, they sat with one leg on one side of the fence and the other on the other side. What the administrative bureaucrats at UBC did do was mandate that no further graduate students would be admitted to the Department of Political Science for a time. 

UBC sociologist Patricia Marchak in her analytical and ethnographic study of this battle in the culture wars being fought all across the English settler society world, finds the conclusions of the McEwen Report less than credible in her book Racism, Sexism, and the University: The Political Science Affair at the University of British Columbia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996). To Marchak, who was the Dean of Arts in the Faculty of the Arts when the affair began, the evidence, in the McEwen Report was not only anaemic. It was grounded in ideological correctness. In fact, according to Marchak, it was McEwen, who introduced racism and sexism into the report by repeatedly using terms like “white”, “female”, and “Jewish" in her final report, a report that sounds from its description more like a prosecutorial brief than an investigation of the facts of the case.

While racism and sexism seemed to be, on the surface, what the UBC Political Science affair was about Marchak argues that this battle in a long standing culture war was really about power. It was about, Marchak argues, who had the power to determine the Political Science curriculum at UBC, who had the power within the hierarchical Political Science Department at UBC, whether the Political Science Department at UBC would be one in which truth grounded in empirical evidence was pursued or good causes were promoted, and whether academic freedom and Enlightenment rationality (empirical facts and empirical context as evidence) or postmodern relativism (perceptions as facts) would prevail in the UBC Department of Political Science. As Marchak notes, this battle for the soul of the university was hardly singular to UBC or Canada. There were battles like this in other universities across the English settler society world in Canada, Australia, the UK, and the US, where Trump and his comrades are trying to remake universities and colleges in their own political and ideological correct image.

In 1995 the dean of the Faculty of Graduate Studies ended the ban on the admission of graduate students to the Department of Political Science. In 1998 then UBC president Martha Piper apologised for how UBC’s administrative bureaucrats had treated Department of Political Science during the affair (these apologies seem to always come after time has passed and the damage is already done, don't they?). As is so often the case with these after the fact apologies, however, it could not erase memories of the damage caused by vigilante like attacks on the Department between 1992 and 1995. 

I enjoyed Racism, Sexism, and the University quite a lot. Marchak was spot on about the impact of consumer capitalism with its mantra that the customer is always right on North American universities (one of the original sins of the modern North American university). I personally experienced this culture of consumer feelings when I received a visit from the college lawyer and the college equity officer at the college in which I worked when one student in a class of 34 complained about a joke i told which apparently offended her or him. She is right about the impact of managerial corporate capitalism with its mantra that professionals, well non-academic professionals, know best how to run the institutions of higher education (another of the original sins of the modern North American university). She is spot on in her contention that the anti-hierarchal attitudes of postmoderns undermines the notion of professionalism and professional training and its accumulated cultural capital and that the cultural war between moderns and postmoderns is a battle for power in the North American university. She is spot on that illiberal intolerance can be found among many postmodernist sects. The radical right hardly has a monopoly on illiberalism. She is right that many varieties of postmodernism have a radical democratic aspect to them. This makes some postmoderns close cousins to religious fundamentalism with its ideology of every man a Bible interpreter regardless of educational level and cultural capital accrued. She is spot on about the need for a middle way, a middle way that respects the seeking after truth, natural justice or due process, and merit (even if this is unequally distributed for class, race, and gender reasons), and respect and equity for all.

Finally, I do agree with Max Weber that value, what someone values, does impact what academics and fan boys and girls study but that does not mean that we have to throw out the scientific method with its dispassion with the everything is about power ideologically correct water. One can and should be trained in the fine art of dispassionate analysis grounded in an understanding that every human thing is grounded in economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic realities, even if many of those realities are nothing more than social and cultural constructs.

The Books of My Life: The American College Town

I was not born the bohemian that I am today. I became one. In fact, I became a bohemian sometime in the late 1960s in the Dallas, Texas of most of my early teenage youth. I blame it on music (mostly rock), books, the counterculture and associated countercultural politics, and, particularly on my long lost but still dearly remembered friend John Cerillo (sic). It was John who introduced me to a lot of these things, things that remain, along with the reflexive life in general (the only life truly worth living, in my opinion), a large part of my life today. 

I grew up in a different world than the world today. I did not, for example, initially consider going to an American college or university. It was not the rite of passage, the delaying of adulthood, that it is today. I planned, like many others of my generation, to get a well paying factory job (the almost $4.00 dollars an hour at the time not to mention good benefits at union plants), buy a car, listen to a lot of rock music, and read a lot of books when I wasn’t working. I guess I thought life could and should be a bit like high school at the time. Little did I know how right I was about the high school part since any job one is likely to get has a culture that is a lot like the culture of high school. And little did I know then what I know now that thanks to de-industrialism and globalisation those well paying jobs with good benefits would soon be largely a thing of the past in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and in the core nation world beyond.

It was an accident that changed my mind about attending university. While recovering from the accident—which only added to my health issues since I had and have sometimes severe and incapacitating asthma and some stomach issues—I started taking classes at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, near which my grandparents lived. I was living with my grandparents at the time since my gran was in many ways my “real” mum. Eventually I transferred to Indiana University in Bloomington, which my father had connections to, and which I heard was really nice and home to a lot of nice used bookstores. Like Erasmus, you see, I bought books and spent any monies left over on food and rent.

When I transferred to IU from Ball State I moved from a town that was not a college town to a town that was a college town. The Bloomington of my college years was a book buyers paradise. It was a pub goers paradise. It was, with its many and varied restaurants, an eater’s paradise. It was a walkers paradise with its gorgeous scenery. It was a lover of monumental buildings, some of them gothic, paradise. It was an art lover’s paradise. It was a music lover’s paradise given the almost 800 concerts the famous IU School of Music put on and Duroc Records. It was a learner’s paradise. It was, in sum, a great place to live.  What it wasn’t was a worker’s paradise. Jobs for those who wanted to stay in B-town after graduation were generally low paying service industry jobs. And while I wanted to stay forever in Bloomington eventually I had to move on since I had dreams of getting a Ph.D. and IU’s social sciences and humanities programmes, like many if not most elite research universities, generally did not admit its undergraduates to its postgraduate degree programmes.

Over the course of my 71 years I have lived in a lot of places, some of them college towns, some of them not. I have, for instance, lived in Dallas, Texas; Muncie, Indiana; Bloomington, Indiana; Austin, Texas; South Bend, Indiana; Toronto, Ontario; Athens, Ohio; Cambridge, England, Moscow, Russia; and Oneonta, New York. Only three of these are college towns and only one of them was a non-college town that has become a college town thanks to de-industrialisation.

As someone who became interested in the history, sociology, and culture of higher education before and after I was a university student I also developed an interest in what is and what is not a college town. In order to tell you why I think some places are college towns and some are not I need to fill in a little bit of the analytical and systematic back story to this issue. I take a five-factor approach to the stuff of human life, a five factor approach, I would argue, which allows us to dispassionately if not objectively approach the stuff of human life. These five factors, I would argue, provide scholars with a glimpse into a reality that is not purely subjective even if much of this “reality” is socially and culturally constructed.

So, with this in mind let’s go back and ask the question of what is and what is not, at least to me, a college town. For some college towns are any town that has a college in it. The problem with this argument, however, and this should be obvious, is that this definition of a college town is, in the final analysis, meaningless and meaningless definitions are not what the humanities and social sciences (let alone the hard sciences) are about. This definition of college towns is meaningless because it assumes that all towns with a college in them are college towns and that they are all, as a consequence, alike. The problem with this assumption is that it doesn’t allow us to distinguish between towns with colleges and universities in them, like New York City, New York, home to Columbia University, NYU, CUNY, and other colleges, Albany, New York, another town with several colleges in or near it, and towns dominated by their colleges and towns like Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University and Ithaca College, and Athens, Ohio, home of the oldest university in the state of Ohio, Ohio University (sometimes mistaken for the Ohio State University in Columbus (how about that branding!)). I would argue, in other words, that there are differences, important differences, between cities like Albany, New York and cities like Ithaca, New York. 

Anyone who has ever been to Albany and Ithaca and gained an understanding of them knows that there are important difference between these two urban areas. Ithaca is a college town. Cornell University dominates the city economically. Cornell employs one out of every three persons in Tompkins County, the county in which Ithaca is situated. Cornell dominates Ithaca culturally. Cornell’s concerts, talks, and exhibits dominate the small city’s cultural life. Cornell dominates Ithaca demographically. Cornell has almost 24,000 students while Ithaca has a population of around 30,000. Cornell is a significant aspect of Ithaca geographically. Cornell is 4800 acres while Ithaca is 6.04 square miles. Cornell dominates Ithaca politically. Like virtually all college towns in the US it tends to vote Democrats (the higher educated tend to skew left of centre and hence Democrat which is why the Nixon and post-Nixon Republicans such as the Trumpies and their fellow travellers have and are going after universities), particularly in presidential elections.

Albany, New York, on the other hand, is not a college town. Albany is not dominated geographically, demographically, politically, economically, or culturally by the University at Albany, the now defunct College of Saint Rose, the professional schools of Union University near the Albany Medical Center, SUNY College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering (which is once again part of SUNY Albany after being distinct from it for nine years), or Maria College, even when taken together. Albany is first and foremost a political town. The state of New York is the city’s largest employer. Albany is a regional medical centre. Albany Medical Center is the regional hospital for the capital region of upstate New York and is the second largest employer in the city. Albany is a regional shopping centre. People come from all around to shop at Crossgates Mall and Colonie Center, both of which provide significant employment opportunities (if not necessarily well paying and well benefitted employment opportunities) for Albany County's residents (and some outside of Albany County I suspect). By the way, it is worth reflecting on the fact that all of the dominant employers of Albany, New York, are service sector employers, something that tells us a lot about the economy of postmodernist America.

Given my interest in the question of what is and what is not a college town it was only a matter of time before I read Blake Gumprecht’s book, The American College Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Gumprecht takes a finer toothed comb to the question of what is a college town and what it is not than I do in my freshman level sociology and history courses, which is where I discuss the question of what is a college town. Gumprecht argues that college towns are distinctive and largely American places (there are, as he notes, fewer college towns in Europe, Canada, and Australia for historical reasons). Gumprecht does, like me, define college towns along economic, political, cultural, demographic, and geographic lines. He goes on, unlike me, however, to delineate five basic types of college towns. There are, he argues, flagship university college towns or research university college towns (e.g. Bloomington, Indiana). There are land grant university college towns (e.g., East Lafayette, Indiana). There are mid-size university college towns (e.g., Athens, Ohio). There are private liberal arts colleges college towns (e.g., Williams, Massachusetts). And there are religious college college towns (e.g. Hillsdale, Michigan). Gumprecht ascribes these differences in college towns to the size of the US (geography), American regionalism (cultural geography), and the newness of the US relative to old Europe, where there are very few college towns given the fact that it was urban before colleges arose and given its cultural differences from the US  including its general lack of the ideology of American arcadianism, the belief that students learn better and can better be controlled in more rural like environments.

After an introductory chapter in which he defines college towns Gumprecht uses case studies to explore the various types of college towns in the United States he enumerates. In chapter one Gunprecht uses the University of Oklahoma in Norman (Oklahoma’s land grand institution) to explore the campus as a public place and space and as a place of art thanks to its monumental buildings, its art museums, its other museums, and its manicured green spaces (emulating the British and French garden?). In chapter three Gumprecht uses Cornell University in Ithaca, New York (a university to which federal land grant benefits were added to an already existing university) to explore the fraternity, student ghetto, and faculty enclave spaces in college towns. In chapter four Gumprecht explores the retail and service landscapes in college towns using Kansas State University in Manhattan (Kansas’s land grant institution) as his example. In chapter five Gumprecht uses the University of California, Davis (California’s first agricultural school) to explore liberal politics and its achievements in college towns. In chapter six Gumprecht uses the University of Georgia in Athens (a university to which land grant funds and academic programmes were added) to explore the bohemian aspects—demographic, cultural, built environment—of college towns. In chapter seven Gumprecht uses Auburn University (a land grant institution) in Auburn, Alabama to explore sports culture (one of the, from the vantage point of today, three original sins of American colleges and universities along with its non-academic power structure and its increasing administrative bureaucratisation), particularly football culture, and its impacts in a college town in the South. In chapter eight Gumprect uses the University of Michigan (Michigan’s earliest state university) in Ann Arbor, to explore high tech changes afoot in one college town, changes that may, paradoxically, be the major factor making Ann Arbor less of a college town. Finally, In chapter nine Gumprecht uses the University of Delaware in Newark to explore student drinking culture and its spatial, political, and cultural impact on town versus gown tensions in college towns.

There are a lot of things I liked in Gumprecht’s book. I liked how he integrated historical and cultural geography, history, sociology, cultural anthropology, culture studies, and autobiography in his approach to college towns. I liked how Gumprecht defined college towns. Like me Guprehcht ties the singularity of college towns to economic, political cultural, demographic, and geographic factors. I liked how Gumprecht explored the dynamics of college towns, well at least college towns that are home to elite research universities, as a consequence of a number of factors yuppiefication and high technification amongst them. I liked that Gumprecht talked about sports in his chapter on a place where football is king, Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Sports is a big deal, perhaps an even bigger deal these days at the big universities like Michigan and Indiana and even at smaller non-Association of American research universities like Ohio University and Ball State. At the latter students had to pay mandatory fees which included fees for the sports teams and could go to football and basketball games for “free” if they so wished. It was the only way to keep intercollegiate sports alive there. Sports, particularly basketball, remains big at Indiana though football has become perhaps even more and more central to IU identity and boosterism thanks to recent on field successes and even appearances in the new college football playoff system. And I liked that Gumprecht's multi-pronged approach to college towns is repeatable and can be verified or falsified by looking at other college towns, college towns like Bloomington, Indiana. 

I spent, as I noted earlier, several years in Bloomington. Bloomington was not, in any way, a sleepy town when I arrived in B-town to attend IU. Students went to pubs particularly Nick’s, which was the most famous pub in town when I arrived and when I left Bloomington. Nick’s, which was a few blocks from the western edge of campus (this was before the now iconic college gates were added where Kirkwood ends and IU begins) was so popular that it added a third storey just before I left. Kirkwood was the site, along, if to a lesser extent, 4th and 5th streets, of the student oriented retail drag that stretched from the university to the square downtown. Kirkwood still had a hippy flavour when I arrived in Bloomington, though that changed during my years there. When I first moved to Bloomington there were two bookstores on the square (a critical measure of the old college town that was changing before my eyes; since that time the number of bookstores has ebbed and flowed, mostly ebbed, and the IU Bookstore became a brach of Barnes and Nobles and later Follet's with a consequent decline in the quantity and quality of non-text books). There was an ice cream shop on Kirkwood. And there were quite a number of restaurants including the Greek flavoured Trojan Horse and, eventually, the Uptown Cafe (we called it the Yuptown even in the 1980s).  There was even a hardware store on the square. Bloomington also, of course, had a student ghetto or several student ghettos and a kind of countercultural ghetto on the west side of town where those who came to school at IU but never left lived (I wonder if it is still there?).

Bloomington, of course, had and continues to have things that Gumprecht says are elements of a college town. It has and continues to have its student ghetto and bohemian enclaves. It had and continues to have its faculty enclaves. It has and continues to have a food co-op, Bloomingfoods. In the late 1980s and 1990s, an era before the brave new digital age arose, things began to change just as they did in Ann Arbor, as Gumprecht notes. Several things stimulated this change including quality of life issues (many hip mags rated B-town high on the great quality of life index), a decline in state financial support, the fact that increasingly Bloomington became a bed room community for upscale migrants from Indianapolis (the edges of the south part of Indy were about an hour away from B-town), and the building of an interstate that passed near Bloomington. Perhaps most importantly, however, Indiana University grew almost exponentially.

IU grew and then grew some more. The university expanded from the approximately 34,000 students when I was there to 48,000 students today as decreasing state support led to not only an increase in students but an increase in administrative personnel to handle the increase in the student population, including those from outside of the state and the US who pay higher fees. Of course, the increase in students was not the only reason for the increase in bureaucrats in a bureaucracy which had and has a life of its own as Max Weber noted years ago. The result of Bloomington’s and IU’s growth was that both the university and real estate developers built higher end apartments and condominiums to satisfy the high end “needs” of some students driving rental prices up in the process. Yuppification could be seen in the fact that the city turned the south side of the downtown square into a mall full of higher end stores aimed at an increasingly :upscale” and yupscale crowd. Retail establishments on the square, such as the hardware, store disappeared. 

The brave new digital world changed Bloomington even more. It, for example, made it difficult for bookstores to survive at least for a time. Bloomington’s most famous used bookstore, Caveat Emptor, which moved several times, ended up on the square and has almost closed for good a couple of times. The food co-op, which began as a co-op in which you had to work to buy food at, morphed into a food coop in which even non-members could shop and which was guided toward the radiant future of economic glory by a board of "professionals". Today it is a shell of its former self and has suffered through several busts. Subdivisions spread particularly on the east side of the city where IU and the College Mall are. The College Mall area saw increasing business development, a development that made parts of Bloomington look like suburban shopping areas of places such as Colonie, New York or the greater Dallas area which stretched west to Fort Worth and north to the Oklahoma border. Movie theatres declined in numbers and art films became increasingly the province of the Ryder, Bloomington’s longest running alternative newspaper. Recently the Ryder art film series died, like the alternative newspaper it published, with the death of its founder.  As the state of Indiana grew more right wing populist IU has been and is being forced into the politically and ideologically correct mould of the states politically and ideologically correct right wing populists.

There were some things I was less that thrilled by in Gumprecht’s book. I wish that Gumprecht’s excellent maps had been more detailed. Additionally, I think that Gumprecht could have taken an even finer tooth comb to college towns that he does. Athens, Ohio, a place that I briefly lived in the mid-1980s, is a college town but it a a college town with a difference. Ohio University, a second or third tier research university, and poor cousin to the Ohio State University, was and is known as a party town. It is probably the main factor that attracts students, particularly students from Ohio who know that OU is a party school, to it. Athens's retail geography reflects the fact that it is a party town. The Court Street and Union Street downtown area was home to some 24 or so pubs and it was home to an insane Halloween celebration when I was there.  On Friday one could stagger from one pub to another for staggered happy hours. Athens's pubs had character. One pub, for instance, was upscale, another was really down down-scale. Books were less important to Athens’s population. It was home to only two bookstores who sold books other than textbooks. Because of ebb and flow in incoming students Athens and OU were and are also hit by periodic busts. 

Additionally, Gumprecht seems to suggest that at least one other city I have lived in is a college town though it is not. Gumprecht, for instance, argues that Provo, Utah, home of Brigham Young University, BYU, or the Y is a college town, a contention I would strongly disagree with. The Y may, geographically speaking, make up a significant part of Provo. Its 35,000 students plus may make up a significant part of Provo’s population. It may also be an important part of the Provo economy. However, the Y, with its honour code and it consequent impact on things like Provo’s private housing—men and women cannot live together in private housing in Provo unless married—and liquor sales establishments—there were only two pubs and one state liquor sales establishment in Provo when I lived there—made Provo reflect, in miniature, the culture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. The Y’s culture and the Y's economic and political culture are, in other words, the culture of the LDS Church. All this, and particularly the Y’s honour code, make BYU less like the University of Notre Dame, where the student body was primarily Catholic when I was there just as BYU’s student body was primarily Mormon when I was there. Both had around 97% Catholic and Mormon in its student body. Most of the Y’s faculty were also LDS and the Y faculty mandated that all undergraduates take religious classes. All this makes the Y, which is a large research university on one level, more like, on another level Bob Jones, with its Baptist fundamentalist ideologies and strong mechanisms for the control of students, than Notre Dame, which I found a lot like an isolated monastery when I was there.

Another problem I had with Gumprecht’s exploration of college towns was that I thought it too focused on large flagship and former land-grant colleges and the college towns they are the central part of. Gumprecht’s chapters focus, in order, as I noted earlier, on the University of Oklahoma in Norman; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Kansas State University in Manhattan; the University of California, Davis; the University of Georgia in Athens; Auburn University; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; and the University of Delaware in Newark. Cornell, the University of California, Davis, the University of Michigan, and the University of Kansas are members of the elite AAU. Oklahoma, Kansas State, Georgia, and Delaware are land grant universities that developed into large research universities who aren’t yet in the AAU. Cornell was given land grant income by the state of New York. Gumprecht does talk about Williams College and the college town of Williamstown, Massachusetts but it would have been nice to see, for example, chapters on a small liberal arts college in a college town as defined by Gumprecht, a religious oriented liberal arts college in a college town, and a former normal school cum research university in a college town. 

Great book. Recommended. As an aside, I found it interesting to learn that Gumprecht has left academia and returned to journalism since this book was written. That is a sad loss to the academy.

Life in the Pissant Swamp: More Memories of Academic Old Days

 

Every once in a while I think back on my fifty or so years as a student and a teacher in higher education. I was a student at several academic institutions, mostly research universities, over those fifty years, and I taught in several academic institutions over those fifty years including Brigham Young University, the University at Albany, SUNY Oneonta, SUNY Cobleskill, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. During my over fifty years of being a student and teaching I saw a lot of interesting things as a participant-observer in the academic jungle but then I also saw a number of interesting things in life.

There were, of course, differences between the institutions of higher education where I taught history, communication, and sociology over the years. Two were small colleges. One, SUNY Oneonta, was a small liberal arts college with an increasing emphasis on the practical I can get a job by majoring in things like criminal studies and human services. The other, SUNY Cobleskill, was a small agriculture college and its student body reflected that reality. One had to teach very differently at these two colleges as I learned very quickly despite them being both small SUNY colleges. 

Two of the institutions I taught at were universities. One, BYU, was owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. It had an honour code and a notion of in loco parentis right out of the pre WWII years and the 1950s. The other was a second or third level research university that had been turned into a university in the 1960s by Governor Rockefeller and his boys. They wanted to create a university system in New York that rivalled that of California. They never came close. 

Still another institution I taught at was a polytechnic, RPI. RPI had a million dollar president and dreams of being MIT or Cal Tech, dreams that could never come to fruition given the marginalisation and small size of their liberal arts programmes and given the poor quality of their facilities (poor library, poor bookstore) compared to those two other institutions it unfortunately measured itself against. 

The students at the institutions at which I taught were also somewhat different. BYU and RPI recruited students nationally and had a healthy number of very good students. That said, the best students at BYU, the best students I ever taught during my academic life, had a broader intellectual focus than students at RPI. BYU was a large multiversity with strong programmes in the humanities, arts, and social sciences while RPI was a science institute with weak humanities, arts, and social sciences, and its students were more focused on the sciences. SUNY Albany, SUNY Oneonta, and SUNY Cobleskill were state and regional institutions. Most of SUNY Albany’s, SUNY Oneonta’s, and SUNY Cobleskill’s students hailed from New York state so these higher education institutions were very much a reflection of New York. SUNY Albany, BYU, and RPI had master’s and Ph.D. programmes if on a small scale and of much less elite status than say the University of Chicago, the University of California, Davis, or MIT. None of these three were members of the prestigious Association of American Universities, the universities that produce most of the faculty in America’s research universities. MIT and Cal Tech are members of the AAU and that should tell you something important about the difference between them and SUNY Albany and RPI.

In terms of faculty, I found them much the same at all of these institutions I taught at with the caveat that those at BYU were somewhat different than those at the other schools. The BYU faculty, most of whom were LDS, skewed somewhat politically conservative even in the humanities and social sciences, the areas that skew liberal in most non-religious colleges and universities these days. Additionally, faculty at BYU had to pass their own kind of honour code test to be able to teach at the Y. This is not to say that there were not faculty at the Y who were liberal in politics; there were. Nor is it to say that BYU faculty were unproductive in scholarly terms: they were very productive across the academic board.

As for the workplaces at all the colleges they were not that different from other workplaces that I have worked in apart from the educational credentials of most of the workers in academic workplaces. There were, as there are in other sizeable workplaces, cliques, including political and ideological cliques. Some of the workers got along. Some did not. There were workers who are interested in status and power. There was Machiavellianism. There were workers who were more introverted and there were workers who were more extroverted. There were workers with big egos and workers with even bigger egos. There were workers who regarded their area of work expertise in territorial fashion. There were bureaucratic meetings. There were missives from on high that were suppose to be obeyed. There were occasional parties. There was plastic fantastic collegiality. There were the poorly attended graduate student gatherings to give papers at which some papers that should have been critiqued more extensively were not.

Recently, I have been thinking a bit about my time at RPI where I taught in Science and Technology Studies for five or six years if memory serves. RPI students, as I said, were generally quite good even if they were very focused rather narrowly on the sciences. In my early days at RPI I used to say that the thing that distinguished RPI students from my students at SUNY Albany was that most of my RPI students were familiar with the various iterations of Star Trek while few of my SUNYA students at the time even knew what Star Trek was. 

At RPI I taught US History courses, a sociology of religion course, and I stepped in to teach a course on the war in Afghanistan after the faculty member who was supposed to teach it could not. Beyond academics I met with prospective students who were interested in history and took them on a tour of campus. I attended graduation parties. I was asked by the assistant dean to put together a curriculum for history in STS. I kept the two US history classes already on the books and wanted to add a course on the making of the modern world. There were a few grad students in the department but I never met any of them.

As a part-time faculty who was not on campus very often, only a couple of times a week in fact, I really did not get to know the faculty in Science and Technology Studies well. I met the chair, of course, Sharon Anderson-Gold, who was wonderful. It was she who gave me the opportunity to teach at RPI and she who counselled me on my academic career. I met Kate Boyer, a historical and cultural geographer, at the downtown library of SUNY Albany and was surprised to learn that she was the daughter of the noted historian Paul Boyer (author of books on the Salem witch trials and American religious apocalypticism) who I had communicated with about the Waco tragedy. She left for the University of Cardiff while I was still on the faculty. I met one of your typical high flyers, a historian of science who had dreams of holding administrative positions in the department and presumably the college if not beyond. There is, after all, money in those there administrative positions. He is no longer a faculty member in the department. I saw a couple of my colleagues on the bus occasionally and we exchanged little more than pleasantries. I briefly met the Fortun's, two on the rise cultural anthropologists who, I think, studied with hot shot cultural anthropologist Michael Fischer and like him were interested in the intersections between environmental risk and environmental disaster and science and technology studies generally They soon left for the Anthropology Department at the University of California at Irvine. And I met someone, thanks to a colleague at the University at Albany who told me about her, someone who was interested, as was I, in Mormonism.

Given our common interest in Mormonism I invited this faculty member out for lunch at Ali Baba's a wonderful Turkish restaurant near the RPI campus one day. I recall several things about this meeting. When she mentioned that she had looked at my syllabus for my Sociology of Religion class I asked her what she thought. She gave me a backhanded comment saying that it was better than previous iterations from other faculty members in the department. 

After our lunch she said she would invite me to lunch or dinner either at her new digs in Massachusetts or at Ali Baba's. She never did. I suspect the reason is a remark I made about ethnocentrism. She rightly noted that Mormons are ethnocentric. I pointed out, just as rightly in response, that so are other cultural and ethnic groups, such as Jews (I think she was Jewish and so was I). Ethnocentrism you see is an inherent aspect of how most humans and most human groups construct identity. In order to become you you have to create a them and the them you often create is profane to you in some way, shape, or form. I guess I was too politically and ideological incorrect for her.

After Sharon Anderson-Gold's death a newly appointed dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and the Social Sciences from the University of Michigan, undoubtedly with visions of even higher status administrative appointments dancing in her head, redid the STS curriculum extensively creating "interdisciplinary" classes of 100 students in the process. I was moved out of my office and stuck in a faculty gathering spot in the basement resulting in fewer students coming to see me. I did teach two more classes in the department but was not offered another history or sociology class under the new regime. Some of the reason for this may have been because I opposed the curricular reforms (which were hardly new, they had been tried before including recently at the University at Albany) of the new dean arguing that before one could benefit from interdisciplinary classes until one had to learn the basics of the core disciplines of the humanities and social sciences such as history. Another reason is probably because I did not want to teach a class to 100 students at the same pay rate I was getting for teaching 40. My time at RPI thus ended without much notice, with little fanfare, and without much of a bang. Such is the life of an adjunct, the lumpen academatariat of the postmodern university.

I have not worked at RPI since. I have not even been on campus. I have no idea if the curriculum has once again been changed by a new dean who too wants to make his or her mark before he or she moves onto something bigger, better, and more remunerative. I did see that the current Science and Technology Studies webpage tries to sell itself to prospective students by saying they have small class sizes. I assume this means that the academic experiment of a new dean who wanted to make her mark with classes of 100 students or more in a college of less than 7000 students at the time has been reversed. That, in my mind, is all for the good.

Musings on Original Sin and the American Research University

 

Recently I have been thinking a lot about the original sin or the nearly original sins of mega- (and increasingly maga-) research universities in the United States. I have been thinking a lot about, in other words, the presence of a Calvinist like original sin in universities classified by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching as Research Universities I and Research Universities II. These are the universities that generally offer a host of doctoral programmes. Some of them are also members of the "elite" and influential Association of American Universities.

It may seem to some that I am conjoining two phenomena that should not be mixed up given that I am talking about sin. Sin, of course, is usually classified as something cultural and more specifically religious in form, while universities are generally thought of as educational bureaucracies and hence without sin. On the contrary, I don't think that I am mixing incompatible things up here though I may be doing a bit of, what is for many, an odd kind of mixing and matching by arguing that there were and are three original sins that characterised research universities of the past and characterise research universities in the present.

There are, I would argue, three original sins that have characterised American research universities since the beginning. There is the sin of corporatisation (the corporate form and corporate leadership of research universities). There is the sin of managerial capitalism (the ever increasing numbers of non-academic bureaucrats) in American research universities. There is the sin of big-time college sports and the boosterism that accompanies them-- 

There are several reasons why I have been thinking about the three original sins of American research universities in American research universities. There is, for example, the current right wing populist attack on American research universities we are seeing as I type. The right wing populist forces associated with the cult of Donald Trump have been very clever when it comes to bending American research universities, particularly the research universities classified as Research I by Carnegie, universities, to their will. The maga forces, like many nations and organisations before them, have long thought of American research universities along with governmental bureaucracies (the "deep state"), state bureaucracies (which are staffed with educated people and as data has shown the more educated one is the more likely they vote liberal and left), and intellectuals as the "enemy" standing in the way of making America great again. 

Given this categorisation of research universities as "evil" or profane by right wing populists the maga forces are committed, just as their kissing cousins they were in Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Soviet Union, to reeducating the "left wing" administrators and faculties dominant in American research universities (studies have shown that faculties are indeed liberal but hardly radical outside of ever diminishing humanities and social science faculties, and vote Democrat). Welcome to the new cultural revolution! 

To accomplish this task the right wing populist maga forces have been using research monies as a weapon in their campaign to reeducate "evil" liberals, leftists, progressives, socialist, etc and their campaign to make universities Great (i.e., like us) again. They can do this because these research monies, which increased in quantity and significance to research universities during the Cold War and, particularly, during Lyndon Baines Johnson's Great Society, have become central to the continuing functioning of research universities and their hard science programmes and even their humanities and social sciences (the military-industrial-governmental-university complex). These research monies have become even more important to research universities in the economic contraction era of the post 1970s, an era when state support of educational institutions declined. 

Non-academic research university bureaucrats responded to this economic contraction and its era of boom after boom and bust after bust in several ways. They increased the numbers of students. They increased student fees. They increased the number of poorly paid and lucky to get benefits contingent faculty. They increased the number of non-academic bureaucrats to assure the continuing flow of research monies and donations from alumni and the wealthy.  The last, the research university addictiion to research monies as a kind of life blood, has allowed the bureaucrats at the Trump administration to use federal research monies as leverage, as a form of blakcmail, to bend universities like Indiana, Columbia, NYU, and Northwestern to their political and ideological will in what is in many ways a rerun of the McCarthy era in the United States.

One of the reasons maga has been able to bring many of America's research universities to heel lies in the very structure of the research university. As Thorstein Veblen pointed out long ago the American research university, unlike the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge which at the were a guild run by the faculty of the various colleges, was actually run largely by the business class who had high status in an America that saw business achievements, i.e., making monies rather than writing a book or doing philosophy, for example, as the height of American civilisational achievement. This meant that local and eventually regional and national business types were appointed to research university boards, the governing boards that controlled research universities. It has also meant that a growth mentality with its notion that growth is inherently good and that it must be maintained at all times, was strongly embodied in the local, regional, and national businessmen dominated research university governing boards.

Many research university bureaucrats, who were socialised into the same growth ideology as business men and women, also believed that growth was good and that growth helped enable the research university to survive and thrive and grow. In the post-1970s economic climate many of them came to believe that one of the ways to stimulate the growth in the student body was via big-time college sports (an ideology Murray Sperber laid to rest long ago). One can debate, of course, when big time college basketball and, in particular, big-time college football, arose and became central to America's research universities boosterist strategies. One can argue that it began in the years when Army's and Notre Dame's football teams or clubs fought their wars, wars that became a part of the fabric of broader American culture, with each other on the football pitches or fields in the 1910s through the 1950s. Alternatively, on can argue that big-time college football became important after World War II and particularly after the 1960s thanks to the the increasing professionalisation of college football and college basketball (the era when the category of "student-athlete" was invented),  the expansion of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, an NCAA that defeated, bought out, or occupied its rivals, making the NCAA akin to the commissioners of professionalised and professional sports in the United States, and the rise of regionally and nationally televised college football and basketball disseminating, in the process, the sports cult to the mostly male masses. I would argue for the latter and see the former as a prelude of coming not very attractive attractions. I would also argue that we are now at a crucial moment in the history of big-time college sports given the fact that increasingly professional college athletes can now be paid over the table instead of under it thanks to Name, Image, Likeness (NIL). Regardless of which perspective one takes it is incontrovertible that big-time college sports are now as central if not more central to the mission and functioning of America's research universities than education.

There is a lot that is rotten in the state of American research universities these days. There is the corporate control of American research universities. There is the fact that American research universities mimic the structure of American corporate capitalism. There is the fact that their has been an expansion of managerial bureaucracies in American corporate universities. There is the fact that monies are central and one of the central addictions of the non-academic bureaucrats who run American universities. There is the fact that in the increasingly economically unstable post-1970s era these bureaucrats have turned to part-time faculty who receive little pay and few if any benefits. There is the fact that American research universities have increasingly adopted the customer, the student, in other words, is always right mentality in American research universities (the university as consumer capitalist). There is fact of big-time college sports in research universities and the rot it brings including millions if not billions of dollars which are not used for educational purposes, the supposed mission of research universities, but for what are now professional sports teams owned if not controlled by university bureaucrats. There is the fact that academic bureaucrats, addicted to federal monies and the status such research monies bring are making treaties with the latest in the line of politically and ideologically correct "devils". And there is the fact that just as they did in the McCarthy era most American research universities are giving in to governmental power. I can smell the sinful stench from here.

 

Musings on Applying for Jobs at Schenectady County Community College and Hudson Valley Community College

 

Some of you may know that I retired from teaching history, communications, and sociology in the SUNY system in 2021 after almost twenty years of “service (or disservice or malservice) to the college age students of New York state”.  I have largely enjoyed my retirement years since then. I love being able to read in the morning, watch movies and TV shows on DVD and blu ray in the afternoon, enjoy hygge with a friend in the evening, and the luxury of writing on whatever I want whenever I want.  

On rare occasions, however, I have gotten tired of the retirement routine and wished I was I was doing more than going to the grocery store and getting petrol once in a while (not to mention forcing my self to do some exercise). I have applied for a few jobs since my retirement and gotten even fewer of them. For example, I worked briefly at the Albany College of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences until I had had enough of the ultra-bureaucratic kafkaesque nature of that bureaucracy. I worked at the Albany Public Library in Pine Hills but my sixty-eight year old body would just not take the kneeling and rising necessary for that work.

Recently I received a message from a colleague informing me that Schenectady County Community College was looking for someone to teach history part-time. After thinking about it for a while—getting the job would complicate my medicaid and SNAP—I inquired about the job and I received a message of interest. I told the person looking to fill the position that I could teach, since I have taught, world history, western history, or American history.

At the same time that I applied to teach history at SCCC I applied to teach sociology at Hudson Valley Community College. I had taught introduction to sociology and sociology of religion (one of my topical interests) for several years at SUNY College of Oneonta and I liked doing both classes a lot. I had also taught social problems and social stratification during my years of college teaching.

 I soon received one of those delightful form letters from the person who hired for that position at HVCC in all its brusque and banal glory telling me that they had no interest in my application for the position. One can never, of course, know why one’s application was treated in such a summary way. I suspect that HVCC’s academic bureaucrats were looking for someone with a sociology degree which I did not have (though I do have considerable graduate student coursework in sociology not to mention actual experience teaching sociology successfully). I do know that American bureaucrats do like their credentials and that the United States is probably the most credentialed society of the old British settler societies. Still, I was surprised by the rapid dismissal of my application since I had taught sociology successfully in the SUNY system for years. Apparently HVCC does not want someone who has actually successfully taught sociology classes for years. Oh well. Live and learn.

It was a different matter at SCCC. I was eventually offered a part-time teaching position. Initially I declined two classes and took one, the class in world history to 1600. So, I put in an official application online for this position. It was relatively easy, thank god, since I already had an account (not to mention years of disinterest in my application) with SCCC Human Resources.

I think the person who hired me felt that I wasn’t fully committed to taking the position and that I had some uncertainty in the back of my mind, which I have to admit I did. Teaching students who are, at best, only somewhat interested in the subject of a class they are forced to take is frankly not easy. Eventually he offered me an opportunity, a possible opportunity, to teach introduction to sociology on the same day as world history. Since I like teaching sociology more than history as it is easier to get students interested in something they find somewhat practical and I have made my course practical emphasising what sociology (and history and anthropology since I integrate these into the class) can tell us about ourselves, I accepted. And then bureaucratic reality set in. 

I thought that since I had taught for nearly twenty years in the SUNY system jumping through the bureaucratic hoops again would be a breeze since SUNY had all my data on file. It wasn’t, however, easy. First off the HR bureaucrats at SCCC could not access my previous employment information. Additionally, SCCC HR wanted an “official” copy of my transcript and had a mountain of forms that I needed to fill out in order to teach at SCCC. 

The person in Human Resources sent me the forms via email. My old computer, however, had trouble opening them and after the several minutes it took to open them I discovered that I could not do the application on the computer since I they were not online filling out friendly (click and the box for name etc, opens). I apparently was supposed to print them out which was a problem since I do not have a printer. I tired of buying one after another of them since they broke easily. So I told the HR person all this. I was, in turn, sent another batch of forms online that took seemingly minutes and minutes to open on my 2017 iMac.

As for the “official” transcript, I discovered that there is now a service called Parchment through which one can obtain one's transcripts. I don’t know whether Parchment is a privately owned company offering this service (rather than a service owned and run by universities and colleges) and is another one of the ways public universities help subsidise a private business but I suspect it is. What I do know is that I did my bureaucratic duty or, more accurately, I tried to do my bureaucratic duty, and created yet another of the seemingly infinite number of user names and passwords one has to create for oneself in the brave new digital world and availed myself of the service. However, once I got to the end point of the process Parchment told me the transcript would go to the registrar rather than Human Resources. So, I quit doing what I was doing on Parchment and once again contacted HR. HR told me there was a place to put in the email address of SCCC HR on the application but I could not find it. I wondered why, given that I ticked the for employment box in the first place, this box did not automatically come up somewhere down the line since I had ticked employment rather than applying to college (or some such similar jargon) in the first place. Oh the eternal mysteries of digital technology.

Long story short, I gave up and told SCCC that I was withdrawing my application. I told the person who hired me that I might be interested in working in the fall if I had more time to deal with the  mountain of bureaucratic stuff via filling out the forms the old way after receiving them in the post. I suspect, however, that I cut my throat when it comes to teaching at SCCC in the future. C’est la vie.