Life as Crisis Management: The Albany Bone and Joint Kiada

 

As anyone with an inquiring and reflexive mind knows the health care industry in the United States has become increasingly bureaucratic (as well as increasingly for-profit) since the 1970s. Bureaucracies after all, modern bureaucracies for the modern world, are one of the central characteristics of this "best of all possible worlds" we now live in as Max Weber reminded us some one hundred years ago. 

As someone whose health is not what it used to be—in truth it was never particularly great given that I have asthma since the age of twelve—I get to experience the joys of health provider bureaucracies on a monthly if not a weekly basis these days. This week the bureaucratic joy I did not enjoy was yet another cancellation of an appointment I made and the arbitrary reassignment of my visit to the doctor to another day and time slot by a bureaucrat at the Bone and Joint Center in Albany, New York.

A bit of backstory. I have long had muscle and back issues. Some of this is undoubtedly do to poor picking up heavy items practises, the impact of my asthma on my muscles and back, aging, and the fact that I did not have a car for some twenty years and my body served as a pack mule for carrying groceries home from the store during those years. As a result, I had to eventually see a back doctor some seven or eight years ago just after I had a hip replacement. One day while seeing my hip doctor at the Bone and Joint Center the x-ray I had to see how my hip was doing revealed that I had arthritis in my back. My hip doctor recommended I see Dr. Riccio, a back doctor at the Bone and Joint Center in Albany. 

Riccio diagnosed my with arthritis in my back. He prescribed cyclobenzaprine for my back problem just as my GP, Dr. Walsh, did before him. It helped but there are, as there is with so many of the medicines allopathic doctors prescribe these days, issues with cyclobenzaprine, He also told me that cortisone shots would probably help. As someone who used cortisone when it was the most effective medicine for treating asthma back in the 1960s and knew the side effects and limitations of cortisone, however, I demurred cortisone treatment. Short term fixes are like heroin—or so I assume. They are short term fixes that last for a short period of time kind and then reality sets in and hits your harder than it did before.

Recently I have been having more muscle and lower back pain. Fearful that my left hip—the one that was replaced—and now my right hip as well might have gone bad bad—I went to see my hip doctor, well a new hip doctor since Dr. Fuch’s had retired, the fourth of my many doctors to retire or leave their practisea in the last five years. Before leaving the Bone and Joint Center I made an appointment to see Riccio again on 20 September at 12:15 pm for my back problems.

I chose the 12:15 pm appointment slot because I live near the Albany Veterans Hospital, Albany Medical Center, and St. Peter’s Medical Center and the traffic during rush hour is murder on the street that I live. On occasion, I even have a problem moving the car at all because the traffic is so heavy and not every driver is willing to give you space to move your car into heavy traffic. So, long story short, I make appointments at times that allow me to avoid the traffic.

Well this week I received an email from a bureaucrat at the Albany Bone and Joint Center indicating that my appointment had been moved from September to October and from 12:15 pm to 8:00 am, rush hour all without consulting me. The change was made solely on the basis of bureaucratic whim as far as I can tell. This has the whiff of monarchy about it doesn’t it?

Now I wouldn’t mind going to the doctor at 8 am if the traffic wasn’t a problem where I live. I didn’t mind the change from September to October either. What I did mind is being arbitrarily given an appointment at exactly the time I did not want it, rush hour. I thus cancelled my appointment and will see if I can transfer my business to a doctor at Albany Med. At least I can walk to Albany Med on most days and can be there in fifteen to twenty minutes and don’t have to worry about traffic. And while I don’t like bureaucracies and the one size fits all arbitrariness of bureaucracies, at least getting to Albany Med is less painful than driving three or four miles, sometimes through traffic, to the Bone and Joint Center.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Hochschild, Goffman, Sly and the Family Stone, and YouTube

 

One of the fascinating things about social media is that it verifies a lot of what social anthropologists, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, and social psychologists interested in the micro meets macro and macro meets micro of everyday life have been saying for years. Social media sites like YouTube speak volumes about the commercialisation of everyday life, about front stage and back stage, about surface acting and deep acting,  and, if in a variation of this theme, about everybody wanting to be a star.

No one has explored the commercialisation of everyday life more broadly and more intensively than Berkeley sociologist Arlie Hochschild in books like The Managed Heart and in the papers collected in her book The Commercialization of Intimate Life. In The Managed Heart Hochschild found that those working in retail in capitalist societies developed emotional strategies to successfully traverse the mine field that is the service or retail sector of the economy, the dominant sector of the capitalist economy in postmodernist core nations. Hochschild’s emotional labourers, such as the airline attendants and bill collectors she studied, match, she argues, their emotions to their job. Airline attendants develop cool and calm emotions and demeanours to assure passengers, many of whom have qualms about flying, that everything is safe and thereby assure them that everything is going to be alright and  that they will enjoy their flight experiences. Bill collectors, on the other hand, develop emotions to deflate those they are trying to get monies from in order to guilt trip them, trick them, and threaten them to pay the bills they owe. 

On YouTube, a media form that seems to have been made of the postmodernist service sector age—it is, of course—most “reactors” engage extensively in a form of emotional labour. Most “reactors", develop emotions to assure viewers that they care about what they are reacting to and plead with them or guilt trip them into liking their “reactions", subscribing to their “reactions", or going to Patreon—where many of the reaction videos to films and TV shows start life—to support their “reactions”. They engage in this emotional labour in order to get their viewers to financially support them and their “reactions” in order that they can make more “reaction" videos and thereby earn more monies, perhaps even enough money on which to make a decent living or to supplement monies they earn from other sources.

I don’t mean to imply here that some “reactors” don’t do “reactions" for something other than financial support and financial gain. Some do. Intellectual labourers like Fil from Wings of Pegasus, for instance, engages in public service digital broadcasting when he explores the role tune correction software and not live “live" performances are playing in the popular music industry and “live “ on stage these, something that says something about the cyborging of human life. Ellie Anderson, professor at Pomona College, part of the Claremont Colleges, is performing a public service by educating potential watchers of her videos about the history of philosophy and its various schools of thought. But they, those in the knowledge sector of the postmodernist economy, are, in my experience, the few, the proud, the empirical “marines” of social media just like they are in broader society.

Social media’s emotional labourers foreground the existence of what social anthropologist and sociologist Erving Goffman referred to as front space and back space. Goffman argued that all the world is indeed a stage and we, all of us on the stage that is life, are merely players on the large stage that is life. On this stage the actors of everyday life have a front stage and a back stage. They portray to those they engage in performative interactions with, some of which are ritualistic and formulaic, the image of themselves that they want their larger interactional audience to see and feel. Generally speaking, most actors develop a front stage that others, their peers, will like. They want to be adored. They also, Goffman argues, develop a back stage, a part of them that they generally want to keep hidden or try to keep hidden from those they interact with, a part of themselves they don’t always want their broader audience to know. Only a few actors, like the drummer of the Canadian band Rush, Neil Peart, reveal this back stage in a forthright way, something Peart does in his lyrics to the Rush song “Limelight” from the album Moving Pictures or the writers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer do in the sixth six of that television show when Buffy’s writers portray fanboys and fangirls as adolescents in need of growing up (not to mention the fictional character of Cordelia Chase in Buffy). But then Peart and the writers of Buffy (and Cordelia) were “cult" celebrities for whom any stigma for criticising fans for wanting to express their public devotion to him or for portraying the very fanboys and fan girls who adore Buffy as adolescents in need of growing, is unlikely to result from these reveals given the fame and the intense love and devotion fans or groupies have for Rush and for Buffy.

Many of the “reaction” videos on YouTube problematise this division between front stage and back stage. Many “reactors” try to be genuine and authentic in their reactions wanting us to believe that their front stage is their back stage and vice versa. The problem—and this is as true of real life as well—is that given that they end up heaping all manner of praise on the films, television shows, and musics they watch and listen to it is next to impossible to know whether they really mean what they say or not since viewers have no first hand face-to[face experiences with these “reactors". Only a very few, such as Rob Squad Reactions and Wilburn Music Reactions, actually say in their “reactions”, at least on occasion, that they don’t really like what their audience has requested they listen to. It is hard, in other words, to know whether they are engaged in surface acting where they really don't believe what they say and are reacting in the way they are, which is what I suspect is largely the case, for other reasons, such as financial gain, or whether they are engaging in deep acting, life’s version of method acting, where they actually do believe in what they are saying for whatever reason, something that may be as much a function of deep socialisation or peer pressure as “authenticity”. And it is hard to rise above peer pressure.  Needless to say, the confusion of front stage and backstage is evident in the live not live performance of so many post baby boom pop performers today.

Finally, social media sites like YouTube validate, in part, what Sly and the Family Stone observed many years ago, that everybody is a star. Given the impact of the mass media, mass media such as Hollywood films and television and popular music, for instance, and the apparatus that surrounds stars, many in today’s core nations seem to want to be stars. YouTube gives them that opportunity. Like the media of old, however, only a few can really attain the stardom and celebrity they seek. And only a few will be able to make a living off the “stardom" they attain on social media. And let’s not forget that for many of these celebrities celebrity may be fleeting and turn into a nightmare thanks to our gotcha gossip oriented I hate you now TMZ society. Needless to say, this state of affairs is not that different from stardom and celebrity in the past. Just ask all those silent film stars who could not make the transition to talkies and Katharine Hepburn.

Working for a Living: My Life in Publishing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: Reviewing "Reviews” at IMDb

 

For those of us that have learned over the course of our lives that human life is absurd and hence amusing, the internet and its world wide web provides us with a lot to be amused by. I had this hypothesis verified for me yet again when I visited the social media “information” site IMDb just the other day.

Recently, I watched an episode of the Canadian television show Murdoch Mysteries, which has run on Citytv and the CBC since 2008. The episode was entitled ‘Clean Hands” (CBC, 16:6, 17 October 2023). In that episode two of the central characters in the show, Murdoch himself played by Yannick Bison (once I came across an American “reactor” on YouTube who called him bison after the beast), and Julia, his doctor wife played by Helene Joy, infiltrate two Mennonite communities, one more “liberal” than the other, near Berlin (now Kitchener thanks to English Canadian nationalism during World War I) Ontario. Murdoch and Julia become participant spies in two Mennonite communities in order to find out who murdered a young Mennonite lad who was about to get married and who, because of his more secular ideological bent, was a circle who did not fully fit into the square pegs that were these two old order Mennonite communities. 

IMDb is a database founded in 1990 by a British computer engineer. It had its coming out party on the world wide web in 1993. It is a useful if imperfect database that contains information on films, which was its earliest focus, television shows, podcasts, home video, video games, and streaming content. I occasionally go to it to learn more about films and television shows. One of the things I am sometimes interested in which IMDb often contains information on is where films and TV programmes are shot. I wanted to ascertain where the episode of Murdoch I just watched was filmed so I went to the IMDb Murdoch “Clean Hands” page.

I was unfortunately unable able to access the information I was looking for. I did, however, find something else that interested and intrigued me even more. As I wandered around the IMDb Murdoch “Clean Hands" page I happened upon a “review" of the episode—there were five in total at the time—which I found simultaneously interesting, informative, and problematic. This “review” authored by "Steiner-Sam" entitled “Gross Misinformation of early 20th-century Ontario Mennonites” claimed that the CBC, the network that commissioned Murdoch and broadcasts it it in Canada, had done a “pitiful” job in representing Mennonite history and culture in Ontario. He claimed that Ontario Mennonites do not live in “colonies”, that they do not use matchmakers, that they do not avoid the wives of others, that they do not shun for disagreements, and that they do not lock their unwed and pregnant daughters in attics, 

There are several empirical problems with this “review”. First, the Canadian public television network CBC does not make Murdoch. The CBC commissions the show and as a consequence does have some say over the show as a result. The show is actually made by Shaftesbury Films—Rogers Sports and Media was also involved in making the show in its first five seasons before it moved to the CBC after Citytv, which is owned by Rogers, cancelled it. Shaftesbury is a private corporation founded by Christine Jenkins, who gets an executive producer credit on the show as a result, in 1987. It is Shaftesbury who hires the actors, hires the writers, and hires the craftspeople associated with the show with, of course, varying amounts of input other interested sources. By the way, Shaftesbury, is aided in their financing of the show thanks to Canadian and Ontario tax credit policies and funds from the Canadian Television Fund. 

Second, Mennonites do live in colonies. Russian Mennonites, those Mennonites who migrated to and settled in Russia as a result of persecution in Mitteleuropa, lived in colonies like Chortitza and Molotschna in the Russian Empire. Some of the members of this Old Colony Mennonite community would eventually settle in Canada, Mexico, and Paraguay after leaving Russia in the early 20th century to avoid serving in the military. Mennonites have historically been non-violent. Interestingly, many of the Old Colony Mennonites who settled in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia including in urban areas like Winnipeg (now the city with the largest number of Mennonites globally) and Vancouver, later re-migrated to Mexico and Paraguay after receiving state promises to avoid the socialised for conformity practises of English Canadian schools, including the English Canadian British nationalist faith, and, of course, military conscription.

Third, like the term “colony”, which can mean many things including a geographical part of a colonised state under the political control of another, the original thirteen US colonies, a group of people who identify with each other while living in a foreign place, and a settlement in which people live close together—the last two definitions can clearly be used to describe separatist Old Colony Mennonites in the Prairies and separatist (colony) old order Mennonites in Ontario —the term matchmaker, someone who arranges marriages or relationships, can also take different forms. Matchmaker, for instance, can refer to a position, usually a female position, which is institutionalised and hence official in communities or it can refer a role in communities which is not officially institutionalised and which functions on an unofficial level as opposed to official level. Old Colony Mennonites, including those in Canada, like many other if not every other community across the globe, have unofficial matchmakers, unofficial matchmakers who can be recognised by the community as “official” in an unofficial way.

Fourth, Old Colony Mennonites do shun. As is the case in other old order Anabaptist groups, those who “stray” in Old Colony communities are, at least officially, initially reprimanded by a deacon. Those who still refuse to conform can be denied or “set back” from communion. This makes them outside of the fold, people who are shunned. If conformity is not forthcoming after these forms of discipline the offending party can be excommunicated.

Fifth, the episode does not portray all Mennonites as locking their unwed and pregnant daughters in attics. It portrays the hiding of an unwed and pregnant daughter, a daughter who the family hopes will  be married off in the future after she gives birth, as the response of one Mennonite family to an unwanted out of wedlock pregnancy.

Finally, let’s not forget that Murdoch Mysteries is a fictional television show that uses a host of strategies, many of them meant to manipulate the emotions of viewers such as tone, genre, drama, tragedy, comedy, satire, parody, music, and editing to manipulate viewers. Murdoch is not by any stretch of the imagination a documentary about early 20th century Old Order Mennonite life in Ontario and does not pretend to be so. It doesn’t even pretend to be a realist text. In fact, no film or TV programme, documentary or otherwise, is ever “real” or ever can be “real” making the notion that films or TV programmes can be or should be “real” an ideology that ultimately cannot be achieved in films and TV shows making the fetish of “realism” the film and television equivalent of the Holy Grail. Given this, if one wants to actually learn more about early 20th century Ontario Mennonites, one can—though most won’t, of course—take advantage of the fact that there are a number of excellent academic studies of North American and Canadian Mennonites out there in scholarly book land that can be read by those interested in Mennonite history, Mennonite society, and Mennonite culture.

IMDb is, of course, not the only social media site on the world wide web that give the reflective a strong sense that human life and its adjuncts—its political, economic, demographic, and geographic cultural ideologies or ways of perceiving—are humorous and at the same time frightening in an enlightening kind of way. There is also YouTube which, I suspect, is even more visited than IMDb, and there are also social media sites like Instagram and TikTok. What all of these social media sites say about human nature, about human gullibility, about the ideologically constructed blindness that impacts the human “race”, and about researching in a digital age that makes research easy, is a question I will leave you to answer if preferably in an empirical way.

For further empirical information on the Old Order Mennonites and Old Order Anabaptists see Harry Loewen and Steven Nolt, Through Fire and Water: An Overview of Mennonite History (Scottdale, PA and Waterloo, Ontario: Herald Press, revised edition, 2010) and Donald Kraybill and Carl Bowman, On the Backroad to Heaven: Old Order Hutterites, Mennonites, Amish, and Brethren (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

The Books of My Life: Values in Conflict

Colleges and universities, universities and colleges, colleges within universities, colleges as universities, whatever the equation, education and higher education have occasioned much gnashing of teeth over the years in the cultural wars that have come to typify the modern and postmodern worlds. One of the domains where these culture wars have been fought out in the modern and postmodern worlds is in the highly bureaucratised educational sectors of modern core nation societies, sectors that are thought by many to be central to the “proper” functioning of a modern and postmodern society. Talcott Parsons would certainly be fascinated by it all.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw no less gnashing of teeth about higher education and particularly higher liberal arts education then, well pick almost any date, the 1900s, the 1920s,  1960s. the 1980s, or the early 1990s as York University Canadian historian and social scientist Paul Axelrod reminds us in his Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 2002). If one can conceptualise the polemics and apologetics over higher education and particularly the polemics and apologetics over a liberal arts education as lying on a continuum with total “traditionalism"—however that is defined since, as Axelrod notes, the notion of what constitutes a liberal education has changed across time and even space—on one end of the spectrum and total innovation—again however that is defined since notions of innovation have changed too across time and space—on the other, Axelrod lies, I think, somewhere in the middle. 

Axelrod recognises that things have changed not only educationally but politically, economically, culturally, geographically, and demographically in the modern and postmodern world and he recognises that higher education must adapt to those chances. At the same time Axelrod wants to preserve, in the midst of this change, the core of a what he defines as a liberal education for a postmodern world, a liberal education that encompasses creativity, autonomy restraint, control, intellectual breadth and specialisation, diversity, tolerance, and a liberal education that produces (or potentially produces) well rounded potential employees complete with essential good employee traits. The problem, as Axelrod notes, in making the argument for the contemporary importance and relevance of a liberal arts education is the important role economic elites and politicians with their education for a job “pragmatism” play in contemporary higher education and in higher education bureaucracies.

Axelrod, of course, is not the first polemicist and apologist writing on higher education to defend the value of a liberal arts education in the face of higher educational change and societal change. As Axelrod reminds us the eccentric social scientist Thorstein Veblen in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 pointed out the dominance of business interests in the rise of the modern research university of the late 19th and early 20th century and the impact this was having on faculty activity, the university curriculum, and the governance of research universities, public or private, with their mania for new educational technologies (in Veblen’s era a mania for the modern Prussian and German higher education model), more students, and higher education public relations spin and decried it. As Veblen notes, by and large the US, and I would add the Canadian universities in the process of becoming research universities, largely chose not to follow the Oxbridge or Camford model of governance, one that gave academics control over their Oxbridge colleges at least until Margaret Thatcher assumed the throne in that green and “blessed" isle, something that says a lot about the cultural meanings and ideologies that dominate both nation-states.

One of the things that became central in the age of university expansion in the age of Veblen and after was branding, something Veblen notes was important to research universities when he was writing in the early part of the twentieth century. Spin doctoring has continued since Veblen’s day and has become central to colleges and universities as a even a brief gander at college and university Facebook pages quite clearly reveals (something that also brings to mind academic discussions of bullshite). One of the pieces of  public relations universities particularly relied on after World War II, an era that saw an increase in government expenditures for education and particularly higher educational research, relevant research in particular, of course, and in students, was that education could prove helpful—particularly monetarily helpful—in the job market of the seemingly ever changing post World War II world. 

These burgeoning research universities still had a bit of the old amidst the new in the era after World War II. They were characterised by a paternalism, a hangover from the higher education produces gentlemen and, if in a lesser and in a more circumscribed way, genteel ladies ideology, and they limited free speech. These research universities limped on in the early sixties and by the mid and late sixties were conceding some things to student activists during the “revolutionary” era which ended in loco parentis to some extent and only for the moment. They were also helped immensely by the seemingly never ending financial largesse of the government and growing corporations coming their way during the era.

And then the oil crisis hit followed by inflation and stagflation and later a host of capitalist booms and busts. In the wake of the oil crisis governments and corporations, both increasingly caught up by the passionate wet dream that there was money to made in them there gilded hills of economic globalisation. As Axelrod notes, the post oil crisis era was an era characterised by declining public support for colleges and universities. It was also, he notes, an era of increasing grade inflation in universities, increasing college and university reliance on student fees, private gifts, and targeted state support, mostly not for the liberal arts. It was an era characterised by the increasing corporatisation, bureaucratisation, consumerisation, and retailisation of universities, something which gave us, amongst other things, university and college speech codes and calls for universities in particular to remould themselves for the realities of the job market in a world where neo-liberalism with its belief in the market as god had triumphed at least for the moment, the new paternalism. And, perhaps even more importantly, it was an era in which new technologies, thanks to the triumph of the brave new digital world and its shiny new toys, new toys which bred speculation in universities, government, and business about how these shiny new toys might change higher education and how higher education “commodities” are delivered.

In a final coda Axelrod wonders about where universities might go in the wake of the early 21st century. Of course, writing from the vantage point of 2024 one has a little better idea about how to answer this question. Neo-liberalism remains dominant in the political culture of Canada, the United States, and England. Universities and colleges continue to pursue governmental, noblesse oblige, and corporate monies, and social media like FaceBook have simply added to the university and college penchant for pollyannaish spin doctoring or public relations work. Grade inflation continues at liberal arts centred universities where probably too many students with a limited interest in the liberal arts are matriculating given the continuing—and at this time still at least partially correct hypothesis— that more education equals more financial remuneration. Universities and colleges still try to be relevant though the relevance of Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Latino and Latina Studies (Latinx Studies) has been increasingly overshadowed by “pragmatic” education” for the “new” economy and programmes like computer science, security studies, and data collection. The culture wars over higher education continue and right wing populists continue to maintain and expand their better poker hands thanks to claims that universities and colleges are dens of political correctness (hyperbole grounded in a selective gaze) though those making such polemical claims are themselves politically and ideologically correct (not to mention demagogic and hence skilled at manipulating the masses for political and ideological power ends) though not all of them seem to recognise the rather obvious fact that they are (hypocrisy). Events like the recent Israel-Hamas War have allowed authoritarian if not fascist university and college presidents or chancellors acting not only at their own behest but at the behest of boards of governance dominated by more “traditionalist” business types and rich donors, to increasingly rely on the surveillance and forceful arm of the increasingly militarised and fascist police (when it comes to outsider dissidents not to mention minorities) to maintain "law and order" on campus.

Axelrod’s book is an interesting addition to the culture war polemics and apologetics over education and higher education in a neo-liberal dominated world and a reminder that the culture wars over education seemingly, never stop. This educational theory and practise Sisyphus, like rust and decay, apparently never sleeps. In the end, as I was reading Values in Conflict, I, a child of the sixties for good and bad and a dystopian leaning student of utopianism whether of “left” or “right”, Bolshevik or capitalist, persuasion could’t help but muse about the fact that the more things change the more they seemingly stay the same. Values in Conflict made me even more certain that my scepticism about any form of social engineering, whether heartfelt or cynical, and whether educational or general, was misplaced and that utopian engineering of all stripes is likely doomed to failure in the long run. Additionally, I couldn’t help but muse about whether the liberal arts university and college and the liberal arts themselves will survive the latest utilitarian threats to them. I suspect they will survive in some form or another but likely largely at major high status and wealthy research universities like the University of Toronto and the University of Texas and in research colleges like Amherst, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar. Stay tuned for further episodes in the never ending saga of the Trials and Travails of a Liberal Arts Education coming next year to a theatre near you.

The Books of My Life: Mikhail and Margarita

 

I have had a long love affair with Russian literature and particularly Russian satire and Russian magical realism, a style of fiction that seems invariably tied to authoritarian political contexts in which they were written such as Tsarist Russia, the USSR, and much of Latin America. Over the years I have devoured books by Gogol, by Zamyatin, and by Bulgakov.

I first read Bulgakov’s magical realist novel Master and Margarita sometime in the 1970s while I was still a teenager. I was immediately hooked. Eventually I read everything by Bulgakov that I could get my hands on. Later I was lucky enough to be able to re-read most of Bulgakov’s works during the time I lived in Moscow. It was wonderful to be able to go to many of the places Bulgakov described in Master and Margarita including the Arbat, the Master’s house, Bulgakov’s flat, the Sparrow Hills, and the Patriarch’s Ponds.

Given my love of Bulgakov it was only a matter of time before I got around to reading Julie Lekstrom Himes’s love letter to Mikhail Bulgakov, Mikhail and Margarita (New York: Europa Editions, 2017). Mikhail and Margarita is a historical novel written by someone familiar with Russian and Soviet history and 1920s and 1930s Moscow. It is fictionalised tale that centres around an imaginary romance between Mikhail and the woman who had one been the lover of the Bulgakov’s friend, the famous Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam, Margarita. The relationship between Mikhail and Margarita is complicated by the fact thatan official in the USSR’s secret police is also in love with Margarita and is determined that she will be his.

Mikhail and Margarita has been sitting on my bookshelf for several years. I suspect I held off reading it because in the back of my mind I thought I would be disappointed by it. I should not have worried. I really enjoyed Himes’s book. Mikhail and Margarita, which weaves aspects of Bulgakov’s life and works into it, nicely transports readers back to Stalin’s Moscow and nicely gives readers sense of what is was like to live in one of history’s many police states.

One thing I didn’t like was a review of the novel I read after I finished the book. An anonymous reviewer for Kirkus, a noted short review magazine, found the book humourless—it is meant to be serious—found it lacking in the satire department—it was not meant to be a satire—and finds the characters uninteresting—something I wholeheartedly disagree with. Isn’t it a pity that so many normatively driven reviews who often seem to be lacking in the descriptive ability department take it upon themselves whinge and whine about the book they might have written rather than the book they are supposedly reviewing. Culture and ideology, on the march.

A Critical Ethnography of Social Media: More Maps of Misreading

 

As I noted earlier, humans are, for cultural reasons, inherently ethnocentric. When a group creates an us, a group of insiders, whatever that insider group happens to be, they also have to create, via an equal and opposite reaction, a group of outsiders, a them.

This categorisation of some into us's and others into thems can take many forms, including a manichean, us good, them bad, form. This manichean form of identity classification and categorisation, of course, has dominated human culture for millennia and continues to dominate human culture today in alliance with a parochialism that mixes and matches human ignorance with human arrogance. 

In the brave new world of postmodernist digital media this manichean ethnocentrism is widely available for empirical viewing on a smart phone and a computer near you as I recently found out while doing participant observation research on and about social media. Needless to say social media sites like YouTube are a boon for the ethnographic observer and analyst who now doesn’t even have to leave the comfort of his or her armchair in order to travel to a not so exotic exotic culture any longer.

I recently stumbled on two possible if not probable culturally and ideologically driven maps of manichean misreading while doing ethnography on YouTube. The first was “reactor" Brooke Whipple’s “reaction" to one aspect of the the fifth season Buffy the Vampire episode “The Replacement”. In The Replacement" Xander, one of the original Scoobies or Slayerettes, is split into two halves, a suave Xander, who most “reactors” believe is not the real Xander, and a joking to hide his self-doubts Xander, the Xander who most “reactors” assume is the real Xander. At first the Gang is unaware that both Xander’s are the real Xander split into his confident and self-doubting halves by the demon Toth. Once  they realise, thanks to observation and research that both Xanders’ are real they devise a strategy to put broken Xander back together again. As they are preparing to do this Riley, Buffy’s ex-military boyfriend and graduate student in Psychology at the University of California-Sunnydale remarks, in what is clearly coded as comedy, satirical comedy, that the two Xanderses make him want to lock both of them up in a room and perform experiments on them, a reference, of course, to social scientific and particularly Behavioural Psychology twin studies. Not getting either the tone or the reference Whipple responds that of course Riley would want to do this since he is with the government.

Now, there is no doubt that states and nations have a distinctly checkered record when it comes to the treatment not only of their own citizens but of alien others as the deportations that occurred in the US in the World War II era, the lies associated with the US prosecution of the War in Vietnam including claims about North Vietnamese attacks on American ships and the massacre by American military of civilians at My Ly (one that recalls massacres of First Peoples by American troops and civilians in the 19th century), and US military experiments on pacifists with LSD make clear. However, private capitalist corporations and universities, public and private, also have a checkered past when it comes to truth telling and experimentation as well. See, for example, GM’s attempts to defame Ralph Nader for telling the truth about one of their cars and corporate experiments in Taylorism. So, the arises as to why Whipple chose to single out governmental nastiness while simultaneously ignoring corporate and academic malfeasance? Is it because Riley was in the US military? If so, why did Whipple not note what should be obvious to anyone with an empirical mind at this point, namely, the historic links between corporations, the government, and the military, public and private? Knee jerk manichean government evil, private bureaucracies good on the march? I suspect so.

The second example of potential knee jerk manicheanism in YouTube “reaction” videos I stumbled across were the many sensationalist Doctor Who is about to be cancelled “reaction” videos by “reactors” whose journalistic and scholarly credentials and expertise are questionable, to say the least.  No group of fans get more proprietary and red faced about their object of desire and devotion than Doctor Who fans, a fan clique that has been around since the mid-1960s. Doctor Who fans whinged and whined about the meta Doctor Who of the Douglas Adams years. They whinged and whined about the revival of the show in 2005 wandering if would do justice to their nostalagiased and romanticised memories of the show. They whinged and whined when David Tennant passed the torch to a new Doctor. They whinged and whined when Jodie Whittaker became the first female Doctor. They whinged and whined when Disney+ signed on to do Doctor Who with the BBC, something that required series fourteen of Doctor Who to become season one of Doctor Who again. They whinged and whined when Ncuti Gatwa became the first Black British Doctor, Doctor 15.

Recently, Doctor Who devotees (and one suspects those who have no devotion to Doctor Who but who are devoted to having their politically and ideologically correct way) have been boo hoo hoo and running around like chickens whose heads have just been chopped off prophesying that Disney+ is about to cancel Doctor Who because of its low ratings. In fact, ratings, for the nu new Who have been, as one Disney executive is quoted as saying that the ratings have been good though not stellar and Disney+ and the Beeb have just moved forward on a Doctor Who spinoff, hardly evidence that backs up “reactor” claims that the death of Who is imminent. They have also been conveniently forgetting that Doctor Who ratings have ebbed and flowed ever since the show came on the air in 1963. 

Given this empirical fact—the ebbing and flowing of the Who audience numbers—one invariably has to wonder if something else, something hidden, something below the surface something devouring from below is going on that accounts for all this whinging and whining about the most recent series of Doctor Who. Is it race, perhaps This type of whinging, of course, parallels all the whinging and whining that went on when Jodie Whittaker became the first woman to play the role of the Doctor.  If past is prologue one has to wonder whether some Doctor Who fans and some of those right wing populist ideologues who fancy themselves as warriors in a culture war for the soul of the universe (seemingly playing out their version of a pulp science fiction film in their comic book imaginations) can no more stand a Black man in the role of the Doctor than they could stand a White woman in the role of the Doctor. Manichean culture on the march? I suspect so.