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J.K. Rowling oversteps copyright... because fans are easier to pick on than academics?

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

The unique ways lawyers and authors try to stretch and distort copyright laws are reaching new levels of absurdity.

At first, I thought the article below was going to go toward a new argument about derivative fiction authorship (a case I believe can and should be made, but a more difficult argument than the point I want to make here).

Then, I realized that Rowling was actually suing what is essentially a critical VOCABULARY guide to Rowling's works.

What? What sort of absurd assumptions sit behind this suit? That the Encylopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary should have obtain copyright permission for every entry they include for a term or an entry that has a clear author with copyright?

It gets even sillier. It appears to me (check out the article below and see for yourself) that Rowling and her lawyers are going after FANS of her works largely because they are a less empowered group, rather than target FAR BIGGER offenders of the type of behavior the lawsuit seeks to punish.

What offenders am I referring to? Why, tenured academics in the humanities, of course! There is not an academic in the humanities in the U.S. who has not received tenure specifically for writing about and critically analyzing (and professionally profiting from) someone else's copyrighted work!

If what these fans are doing is a copyright violation, then nearly every scholarly book in the humanities, perhaps every college student's research paper which cites as sources CREATIVE AND COPYRIGHTED WORKS is, by virtue of the reasoning in this lawsuit, is ILLEGAL.

What a bizarro world this is.

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

J.K. Rowling's Dark Mark

Why she should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon.

By Tim Wu

Posted Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008, at 7:59 AM ET

As I wrote in October, over the last few years, the relationship between fan-written Web sites and the copyright owners of the content they draw on, if legally murky, has at least been peaceful. Once it dawned on media companies that fan sites are the kind of marketing that they usually pay hard cash for, they generally left the fans alone. But things turned sour in the fall, when the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site announced plans to publish a book version of its fan-written guide to the Potter world. Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?

[...]

At issue are the giant fan-written guides like the H.P. Lexicon or the Lostpedia (for the show Lost) that try to collect all known information on topics like Harry's pet owl or the Dharma Initiative. Rowling takes the position that she, as the original author, has the right to block the publication of any such guide. In her words: "However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

But Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be "recast, transformed, or adapted." But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.

Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge Borges or The Lord of the Rings. As long as a guide does not copy the original work verbatim, it falls outside the category of "adaptation." And that's why it is largely unnecessary to discuss the more complex copyright doctrine of "fair use." Rowling's rights over the guide don't exist to begin with, so we don't need to go there.

[...]

Bizarrely, Rowling says that the fan guide would prevent her from writing her own guide to the Potter world. "I cannot," she said in a statement "approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book. ..." To begin with, Rowling sounds entirely too much like a Death Eater in this quote. More generally, two products in the same market isn't called pre-emption—the word is competition. Why not let consumers decide which guide they like better? Rowling might object that the fan's guide will be strewn with errors or poorly written; but it is hardly the job of copyright to protect us from bad execution. And the fan's guide might actually be better, or at least different.

There are more ethereal reasons that Rowling ought not win. For reasons anthropologists will someday understand, volunteer encyclopedias have become the place to find what passes for our collective wisdom. Wikipedia is the clearest example: It may be wrong sometimes, but it is nonetheless a statement as to what we know. To her credit, Rowling accepts this and tolerates the online version of the H.P. Lexicon. But a general rule of the kind she is asking for isn't so generous: It would, by necessity, give copyright owners power over the content of Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias that discuss their works. Not the end of the world, but certainly a subtle form of thought control.

In the end, this dispute is about the current meaning of authorship. Rowling is the initial author and deserves the bulk of the credit, respect, and financial reward. But she has all of that. What she wants is a level of control over the Potter world that just isn't healthy. The authors of fan guides, like house elves, rarely get famous or rich. They deserve legal credit for their modest contributions, not the Wizengamot.

What bothers me above is that the author, Tim Wu, while making good points, is perhaps missing the most important point.

Wu is drawing some kind of unconscious distinction between critical study through works of of analysis and cataloging and documenting done by SANCTIONED and IMPORTANT author-types (a self-appointed class, as declared by the various academic credentialing or the established publishing industry) and ordinary people, hereto referred to by the diminutive label "fans."

He never mentions this distinction in the article, but he also never reaches or sees past it. What is the difference between a fan seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of Rowling's work and a tenured professor seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of, say, Emily Dickinson's work?

And no, the fact that Emily Dickinson is dead, or supposedly "canonized" by some massive sanction system called a "literary industry" doesn't count. Current postmodern scholars have easily collapsed distinctions between so-called "high" and "low" cultural products, distinctions that were only ever really enforced by repetition.

Further, before the advent of Modernism and New Criticism in literature, the PRIMARY "product" of literary scholars was a form of criticism known as "traditional-biographical."

That means if you wanted to be a literary scholar back in that time, you had two routes to follow:

1. catalog and link the author's works against a careful biographical analysis of events or aspects of the author's life, OR

2. catalog and carefully establish the exact chronology and literary development of various textual versions of the author's works, those first drafts that establish dates, the variorum editions that attempt to argue that Emily Dickinson used male and female pronouns interchangably in her love poems, or that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night BEFORE Hamlet.

Oh yeah, and along the way, they'd argue over and create lexicons for specialized terms and metaphors, which, for authors such as Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll, mean unusual and otherworldly terms and situations, and the potential political points that were made through allegory.

Granted, literary criticism has evolved considerably since then, to the point of subjecting live and dead authors to psychological high colonics in order to analyze the symbolic systems that go along with the works (ala' Freud or Jung). Or they take apart the imperialist or foundationalist cultural assumptions an author makes (like Tim Wu above), or even just to do a micro-minutia focus on a single literary work alone, as if it doesn't even have an author, or better yet, treat it as if the work itself doesn't exist and only the reader does!

All of which FANS of ANY work can engage in and profit from just as viably as tenured academics, because the Commons is free for anyone to engage in independent and unaffiliated research, even ordinary fans, even (gasp) ordinary journalists, even ANYONE who gets up in the morning and puts her underwear on one leg at a time.

Imagine that. Shhhh. Don't tell J.K. Rowling's ambitious lawyers. Think of the field day they could have, if they were turned loose in academia.

JK Rowling outs Dumbledore... and reveals tantilizing Harry Potter back stories

Oh man, I am LOVING this stuff! See, I always knew Dumbledore was gay. I am a total Harry Potter series nut, and I suppose at my age I should be embarrassed by that, but I never have been. I know why that series grabbed me and never let go (besides the phenomenal talents of Jim Dale, who brings the audio books alive even better than the films).

It was Dumbledore. I was always reading the Harry Potter series for Dumbledore. He was Harry's hero, but he was the reason I was reading the series, Dumbledore and hoggy woggy Hogwarts, which was my secret dream of utopia. There, I said it.

It's like, if you get to choose where you go when you die, the landscape of the afterlife, for me, it will be Hogwarts. Ooh, and I need Dumbledore to be there. The last few books were hard for me that way (no spoilers yet, don't worry), but in the end, JK gave me what I needed by the end of the last book.

And in her talk below, makes me realize why the Harry Potter series also makes me want to sit and watch Donnie Darko over and over. It's not the literary stuff I'm valuing (cuz high literature/film, it ain't), but the same thing is drawing me, just like, also maybe, Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness.

Anyway, let's pull out some juicy bits below! Watch out. SPOILER ALERT!

Link: The Leaky Cauldron: J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More.

J. K. Rowling at Carnegie Hall Reveals Dumbledore is Gay; Neville Marries Hannah Abbott, and Much More
J.K. Rowling
Posted by: Edward
October 19, 2007, 09:17 PM

Note: A preliminary transcript is now at the end of this post; please note that there may be some small errors in phrasing, and all questions have been paraphrased to save time; this is not a final transcript, but the accuracy of the questions and answers have been maintained.

[...]

Tonight, the one thousand grand prize winners (and their guests) of the Scholastic's Open Book Tour Sweepstakes along with a companion got the chance to see Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling read from "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," answer questions and sign books at New York City's Carnegie Hall. We have exclusive information this evening on the myriad of "Deathly Hallows" questions she answered as well as in-depth details on a number of subjects she spoke about.

A caution now. Parts of the following WILL contain book seven SPOILERS.

[...]
First, the biggest revelation of the night came when Jo revealed to her audience the fact that Albus Dumbledore is gay and had fallen in love with fellow wizard and friend, Gellert Grindelwald. This elicited a huge reaction and prolonged ovation. So much so, it promoted Jo to say:

"If I had known this would have made you this happy, I would have announced it years ago."

The question was: Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

JKR: My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how i always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] "If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!"
Jo also said after revelation: "You needed something to keep you going for the next 10 years! ...Oh, my god, the fan fiction now, eh?"

[heh. That would about be the understatement of the year. hoo-eee.]

Jo also revealed that Neville Longbottom married Hufflepuff Hannah Abbott and she was to become the landlady at the iconic Leaky Cauldron Pub. She thought that people would find the fact of Neville's living over a pub particularly cool.

[Actually, I was more interested in Neville becoming Herbology teacher at Hogwarts. 19 years later, the other faculty had retired, but Hagrid was still going strong. Maybe half-giants live longer too, but big dogs don't live longer than small dogs. I was at least wishing Hagrid could have hooked up with Madame Maxime. And I expected Hermione to be Headmistress at Hogwarts, not running the Wizengamont (sp?)]

Equally large revelations were made concerning Petunia Dursley when Jo answered the question of what Petunia could not bring herself to say when Harry and the Dursleys parted ways before his seventeenth birthday. She would have wished him luck, saying:

"I do know what you're up against and I hope it's okay."

[Yeah, but how does she know? More backstory there? Hmmm. Not from listening to Lily and Snape through the bushes, that's for sure. The milk of human kindness still curdles in Aunt Petunia's breast.]

Information on the original Order members was also revealed during tonight's event. Jo related the fact that Remus Lupin, prior to the third book, was unemployable because he was a werewolf and upon his graduation from Hogwarts along with James and Lily, was supported by James using their own money. In addition to this she shed more light on the early days of the Order, saying James, Sirius, Remus and Lily were full time Order members. "Full Time Fighters," as Jo put it.

Jo also went into further detail about the many portraits in the wizarding world and their occupants. An occupant can only move freely to other portraits in their dwelling or to another portrait in which they are depicted. She also revealed that Harry himself made sure that the portrait of Snape made it into the Headmasters Office, but doubts that he ever went to speak to it.

[I dunno. He named his kid after Snape. I always figured either Harry or Hermione would be in that office one day, and neither would mind if Snape's portrait was there, even if it were as unpleasant as the other Slytherin former headmaster, Phineas Nigelis (it's so hard when you're addicted more to the audio books, you hear words, but can't spell them!).

Then there's the rule, I think, for getting to be a portrait in the headmaster's office. You have to swear an oath of allegiance to support the current headmaster, whoever that is. I think that they said something about that one time when Phineas Nigelis was pretending to be sleeping and didn't want to do what Dumbledore had asked him to do. So even if Snape's portrait were in there and ornery, he'd have to support the headmaster. But wasn't there something else, about abdicating his post, which may have disqualified Snape from being in there?

On yet a third hand, Harry could never do well in a class with Snape in it. I mean, geez, the guy defeats the Dark Lord, but cowers when Snape sneers at his potions? I mean, come on, Harry, get over it.]

[...]

Finally, speaking about her personal feelings and experiences of the past seventeen years with the boy wizard, Jo said finishing the first book and the seventh book produced very similar feelings. She also admits that she was very difficult to live with for the weeks following her completing the last book in the "Harry Potter" series.

A full transcript of this evening's event will be available on TLC soon. TLC will update throughout the evening with the latest from this event.

Some highlights have been transcribed:
[...]

How did you decide that Molly Weasley would be the one to finish off Bellatrix?

I always knew Molly was going to finish her off. I think there was some speculation that Neville would do it, because Neville obviously has a particular reason to hate Bellatrix. ..So there were lots of optios for Bellatrix, but I never deviated. I wanted it to be Molly, and I wanted it to be Molly for two reasons.

The first reason was I always saw Molly as a very good witch but someone whose light is necessarily hidden under a bushel, because she isn't in the kitchen a lot and she has had to raise, among others, and [Arthur?] which is like, enough... I wanted Molly to have her moment and to show that because a woman had dedicated herself to her family does not mean that she doesn't have a lot of other talents.
Second reason: It was the meeting of two kinds of - if you call what Bellatrix feels for Voldemort love, I guess we'll call it love, she has a kind of obsession with him, it's a very sick obsession ... and I wanted to match that kind of obsession with maternal love... the power that you give someone by loving them. So Molly was really an amazing exemplar of maternal love. ... There was something very satisfying about putting those two women together.

[I was actually sure of the rightness of Molly facing off with Bellatrix from the moment I saw what Molly's buggart was. That's how I knew she had to have her moment to step up and stand up to her fears. I just wish she were more of a full member of the order, instead of its mommy-cliche mad she-bear. After all, Charlie and the twins take after her more than dad. Of course she is a formidable witch.

As for this next one... oh dear, I knew this was coming. What a wonderful question! From the mouths of babes...]

[...]

Q: In the Goblet of Fire Dumbledore said his brother was prosecuted for practicing inappropriate charms [JKR buries her head, to laughter] on a goat; what were the inappropriate charms he was practicing on that goat?

JKR: How old are you?

Eight.

JKR: I think that he was trying to make a goat that was easy to keep clean [laughter], curly horns. That's a joke that works on a couple of levels. I really like Aberforth and his goats. But you know Aberforth having this strange fondness for goats if you've read book seven, came in really useful to Harry, later on, because a goat, a stag, you know. If you're a stupid Death Eater, what's the difference. So, that is my answer to YOU.

[loud applause]

Did Dumbledore, who believed in the prevailing power of love, ever fall in love himself?

My truthful answer to you... I always thought of Dumbledore as gay. [ovation.] ... Dumbledore fell in love with Grindelwald, and that that added to his horror when Grindelwald showed himself to be what he was. To an extent, do we say it excused Dumbledore a little more because falling in love can blind us to an extent? But, he met someone as brilliant as he was, and rather like Bellatrix he was very drawn to this brilliant person, and horribly, terribly let down by him. Yeah, that's how I always saw Dumbledore. In fact, recently I was in a script read through for the sixth film, and they had Dumbledore saying a line to Harry early in the script saying I knew a girl once, whose hair... [laughter]. I had to write a little note in the margin and slide it along to the scriptwriter, "Dumbledore's gay!" [laughter] If I'd known it would make you so happy, I would have announced it years ago!

[...]

Q: What did Dumbledore write in the letter to make the Dursleys take Harry?

JKR: Very, very good question. As you know, as we find out in book seven, Petunia once really wanted to be part of that world. And you discover that Dumbledore has written to her prior to the Howler...Dumbledore wrote to her very kindly and explained why he couldn't let her come to Hogwarts to become a witch. So, Petunia, much as she denies it afterwards, much as she turns against that world when she met Uncle Vernon, who is the biggest anti-wizard you could ever met in your life, a tiny part of her, and that's the part that almost wished Harry luck when she said goodbye to him in this book, she just teetered on the verge of saying, I do know what you're up against and I hope it's OK. But she couldn't bring herself to say it. Years of pretending she doesn't care have hardened her. But Dumbledore appealed in the letter you're asking about, so that part of Petunia that did remember wanting desperately to be part of the world and he appealed to her sense of fair play to a sister that she had hated because Lily had what she couldn't have. So that's how she persuaded Petunia to keep Harry. Good question.

[...]

[This next question the core for me, and I guess that means I identify as an older reader, but more, this is is where I owe my biggest thank you to JK Rowling. I'm just a sucker for people who can point out the bankruptcy of fascist, authoritarian thinking with such flair. I mean, it is troubling, she gives us Muggles, and yet in the wizarding world, there's the equivalent of Muggles too, like Fudge or Umbridge (I still love the names).

But maybe the lesson of the wizard fascists is that power corrupts, no matter what the source of that power may be.]

Q: Many of us older readers have noticed over the years similarities between the Death Eaters tactics and the Nazis from the 30s and 40s. Did you use that historical era as a model for Voldemort's reign and what were the lessons that you hope to impart to the next generation?

It was conscious. I think that if you're, I think most of us if you were asked to name a very evil regime we would think Nazi Germany. There were parallels in the ideology. I wanted Harry to leave our world and find exactly the same problems in the wizarding world. So you have the intent to impose a hierarchy, you have bigotry, and this notion of purity, which is this great fallacy, but it crops up all over the world. People like to think themselves superior and that if they can pride themselves in nothing else they can pride themselves on perceived purity. So yeah that follows a parallel. It wasn't really exclusively that. I think you can see in the Ministry even before it's taken over, there are parallels to regimes we all know and love.

[Laughter and applause.]

So you ask what lessons, I suppose. The Potter books in general are a prolonged argument for tolerance, a prolonged plea for an end to bigotry, and I think ti's one of the reasons that some people don't like the books, but I think that's it's a very healthy message to pass on to younger people that you should question authority and you should not assume that the establishment or the press tells you all of the truth.

[Loud applause.]

Q: What did it feel like completing your first Harry Potter book versus completing the last.

JKR: What a great question. It felt strangely similar actually. Both feelings were more alike than with any of the other books. When I finished the first book, there was this incredible sense of achievement that i'd actually written a novel, i"d actually finished my book. And it was after seven years of writing and making notes and rewriting. And then when I finished the seventh book, that was 17 years. WIth the seventh book there was a huge feeling of loss as well. I couldn't believe I was done. And it took me weeks, as my poor, long-suffering husband will attest. He's here. [applause] Yes, you should clap him, he's very patient! [ovation] He's not the type to stand up and take about but trust me. Toward the end of a book i'm not that easy to live with. Yes Neil would bear witness to the fact that for weeks, really... it felt like a bereavement. I knew it was coming. I was prepared, I knew it would hurt, and it was huge. So, that's why I'm glad to be here and talk about it. Thank you.

[...]

Q: Harry often wondered about his parents lives before he died. What did Lily, James, Remus, Lupin and Sirius do after Hogwarts?

JKR: To take Remus first, Remus was unemployable. Poor Lupin, prior to Dumbledore taking him in, lead a really impoverished life because no one wanted to employ a werewolf. The other three were full-time members of the Order of the Phoenix. If you remember when Lily, James and co. were at school, the first war was raging. It never reached the heights that the second war reached, because the Ministry was never infiltrated to that extend but it was a very bad time, the same disappearances, the same deaths. So that's what they did, they left school. James has gold, enough to support Sirius and Lily. So I suppose they lived foff a private income. But they were full-time fighters, that's what they did, until Lily fell pregnant with Harry. So then they went into hiding.

[Hmmm, I'm going to say something sarcastic here. So Dumbledore and the original Order of the Phoenix took in James, Lily, Sirius, and (we presume the Order would not discriminate against Lupin, would they?). If so, those are some pretty young wizards to be putting to work right off like that, just out of school, even if Lily and James were head girl and head boy. If Mrs. Weasley were around, she would have pitched a fit!

I mean, weren't there any older wizards who could be daring fighters in the Order? I'm sure there were, the names of the folks Mad Eye listed off, from that picture. Maybe they were just killed off first, the McKinnons and all that. Like Madame Bones, like Neville's grandmother.

I was just thinking, maybe Dumbledore was recruiting his army right out of school, maybe he'd been doing it for decades, just another version of Slughorn, eh? Maybe there was a good reason Fudge was so scared that's what Dumbledore was up to. Dumbledore's track record wasn't that good.
Also kind of illuminates Voldemort's goal in wanting to run Hogwarts. An innocuous little wizarding school it was not. It was prime recruiting grounds. Andover? Skull and Bones of the wizarding world?

I jokes! Psych!]

Ditching the Laptops: What are the implications for computer-assisted pedagogies?

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

This is a secondary-school level problem, but supposedly it propagates out to the post-secondary schools as well. I've taught in laptop programs for many years, and encountered at one time or another every issue raised in the article below.

The question is: are these obstacles enough to justify ditching the programs? And perhaps a bigger issue (one for a great academic study in a secondary school setting): WHAT is causing the biggest roadblock? I mean, is there a McLuhan-esque cognitive ratio shift going on in the classrooms, or are the one-to-one laptops simply the wrong technological tool at the wrong time? Is it a flawed tool, or is the pedagogical model itself flawed?

The kids appear to be doing precisely what we knew kids would do. And technophobic teachers are also doing precisely what we knew they would do. But my mom taught third graders with Apple II's in the 1980s, and had them programming in Logos, making books, doing all kinds of really neat stuff. She was so pissed in the 1990s when they took the machines out of her classroom and made the students take "computer classes."

I think that's when the problems started. The the teachers who were coming up with neat projects (self-selected, integrated) to incorporate them into regular classrooms were taken out of the loop (or else roped into teaching those "how-to" classes), and then moved into separate (segregated, if you will) "computer classrooms" (not integrated with other class topics). THEN administrators tried to re-integrate computers into ALL classrooms (one-to-one laptops). You completely lose control of pedagogical innovation, and try to make the laptops into just another classroom tool, like a piece of chalk.

Obviously, some teachers will respond better to technology in the classroom than others, so there are also issues in HOW the programs are being evaluated. Are they studying the programs across the board, or looking at the cool things that are being done?

That said, I've done such an evaluation of a university laptop program, a pilot I participated in, with original student research. I have mixed feelings about the entire endeavor, related to some issues I raised in this CNN.com column. I'm not saying these are definitive takes on the project, but I'm highly suspicious of the evaluations reported below, of the methods by which the programs are judged, as well as the methods by which the programs were implemented. I suspect both were flawed, and ditching the programs risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Meaning, I DON'T like the way the programs were set up in the first place. I'd say they were set up to fail. And while I would not teach with laptops exactly as I have in the past (I still don't want the machines on and part of the process 100% of the time, nor do I want to DENY ACCESS in the classroom either, for specific projects), I don't think schools are going about this the right way at all.

Link: Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times.

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops

Narayan Mahon for The New York Times

John Gabriel, 18, left, Jeff Hendel, 17, and Mary Grace Van Ness, 17, used a school-issued laptop for fun during lunch at Liverpool High.

By WINNIE HU

Published: May 4, 2007
LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Liverpool’s turnabout comes as more and more school districts nationwide continue to bring laptops into the classroom.

[...]

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards. Districts have dropped laptop programs after resistance from teachers, logistical and technical problems, and escalating maintenance costs.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums. Last month, the United States Department of Education released a study showing no difference in academic achievement between students who used educational software programs for math and reading and those who did not.

[I don't know about you, but I don't give a lot of credence to most of what has come out of the current administration's Department of Education, esp. under the current secretary. The programs (No Child Left Behind), the secretly paid shills masquerading as journalists, and other agendas (like Neal Bush's computer educational materials being foisted on Katrina victims) all tend to leave the department with about as much credibility as FEMA, or the Department of Justice, or even NASA or the Department of Interior, where scientists' work is doctored for a political agenda.

So I don't see the study above as something I'd set total stock in. My guess is that this administration is just looking for a handy excuse to deny funding for some project to low income and minority school districts. I mean, if the tech project money is taken away, I doubt it would be replaced with anything else, for those districts. Unless there were some rabid right-wing "faith-based" outfit looking to seize control of it and start doing Chuck Colson-style indoctrination or something.]

[...]

Two years ago, school officials in Broward County, Fla., the sixth-largest district in the country, shelved a $275 million proposal to issue laptops to each of their more than 260,000 students after re-evaluating the costs of a pilot project. The district, which paid $7.2 million to lease 6,000 laptops for the pilot at four schools, was spending more than $100,000 a year for repairs to screens and keyboards that are not covered by warranties. “It’s cost prohibitive, so we have actually moved away from it,” said Vijay Sonty, chief information officer for the district, whose enrollment is 37 percent black, 31 percent white and 25 percent Hispanic.

Here in Liverpool, parents have long criticized the cost of the laptop program: about $300,000 a year from the state, plus individual student leases of $25 a month, or $900 from 10th to 12th grades, for the take-home privilege.

“I feel like I was ripped off,” said Richard Ferrante, explaining that his son, Peter, used his laptop to become a master at the Super Mario Brothers video game. “And every time I write my check for school taxes, I get mad all over again.”

Students like Eddie McCarthy, 18, a Liverpool senior, said his laptop made him “a lot better at typing,” as he used it to take notes in class, but not a better student. “I think it’s better to wait and buy one for college,” he said.

[...]

Many school administrators and teachers say laptops in the classroom have motivated even reluctant students to learn, resulting in higher attendance and lower detention and dropout rates.

But it is less clear whether one-to-one computing has improved academic performance — as measured through standardized test scores and grades — because the programs are still new, and most schools have lacked the money and resources to evaluate them rigorously.

In one of the largest ongoing studies, the Texas Center for Educational Research, a nonprofit group, has so far found no overall difference on state test scores between 21 middle schools where students received laptops in 2004, and 21 schools where they did not, though some data suggest that high-achieving students with laptops may perform better in math than their counterparts without. When six of the schools in the study that do not have laptops were given the option of getting them this year, they opted against.

Mark Warschauer, an education professor at the University of California at Irvine and author of “Laptops and Literacy: Learning in the Wireless Classroom” (Teachers College Press, 2006), also found no evidence that laptops increased state test scores in a study of 10 schools in California and Maine from 2003 to 2005. Two of the schools, including Rea Elementary, have since eliminated the laptops.

[Yeah, if that's the sole measure of success, "increase test scores"? Good god, I could drill and skill any class to death and increase test scores in two weeks, if that's all they want from education. Such teaching is merely indoctrination, and it produces good little robots. I'll give this guy credit, tho. He understands the study is limited.]

But Mr. Warschauer, who supports laptop programs, said schools like Liverpool might be giving up too soon because it takes time to train teachers to use the new technology and integrate it into their classes. For instance, he pointed to students at a middle school in Yarmouth, Me., who used their laptops to create a Spanish book for poor children in Guatemala and debate Supreme Court cases found online.

“Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research,” he said. “If the goal is to get kids up to basic standard levels, then maybe laptops are not the tool. But if the goal is to create the George Lucas and Steve Jobs of the future, then laptops are extremely useful.”

[...]

I disagree with nearly everything in this article, except this bit I quote here...

Joan Smith goes on a righteous feminist rant against misogynists on the Internet, and while I treasure a good feminist rant as much as the next person, I have to say that her rant is mis-targeted; her aim is bad.

Yes, there are misogynist nutjobs online, racist bigots online, fully-armed right-wing militia supporters online, Brown Shirts and goose-steppers galore. Without a doubt.

And hey, the tendency to flame, for rhetoric to escalate into polemic, to reach for higher or lower extremes in online contexts was actually the impetus that started me reading the scholarship that led to my dissertation ethnography of a politically-active online community. So of course I can relate to the issues she raises.

But blaming the Internet for the nutjobs, that seems off-course. I do argue in the conclusion of my diss that there are elements online that do allow like-minded nutjobs to find each other and be bolstered in their nut-jobbiness, more than they might otherwise. But I also point out that the ease of interactivity, the quick hit of the return key, also fosters the interactive challenge to too much preaching to the choir, with just as many flames challenging any choir's status quo as there are flames in favor of its party line.

And I argue that also escalates the rhetorical extremism, in what I called "the paradox of insularity and interactivity."

But EVEN WITH THAT, I won't go as far as the author below in blaming the Internets for the nutjobs who live there. Yes, death threats are bad, and people tend to go off the deep end. But blame that on the Blogosphere? Give me a break. The Blogosphere is the one thing that may single-handedly save us from a descent into authoritarian corporatism and fascism, and Joan Smith wants to blame the bloggers because somebody got a death threat? Like people never get death threats from nutters in real life?

OK, so aside from that, there's a bit in this article that I think is just spot on, so much so that I feel compelled to quote it in its entirety below, to remember when I may need it again. So here it is, the bit about the Internet's effects on writing intended to stand the test of time.

Link: Joan Smith: Stand up to the bullies and stop this online abuse - Independent Online Edition > Joan Smith.

Joan Smith: Stand up to the bullies and stop this online abuse

Misogyny, while not obligatory, is one of the most persistent themes of the blogger

Published: 29 March 2007

[...]

If anyone can write, and much of what they produce is either information or complete rubbish, it's no wonder that the public is losing respect for writers who spend literally years finding the right form of words for a poem or a novel. The act of writing is being de-skilled to a point where it is no longer regarded as work, and what follows is a demand that all written material should be available to anyone who wants it without charge.

In this pseudo-democratic universe, the novel that has just taken me nearly five years to finish has no more value than a blog that someone dashed off in 10 minutes. The sheer quantity of words available on the internet has prompted a false analogy with the enclosures of common land in the 18th century, in which novelists, poets and historians are cast in the role of wicked landlords.

People who argue that the written word should be freely available on the net, regardless of its origin, behave as though the world is littered with glittering sentences and paragraphs, occurring as naturally as semi-precious stones. But what they are demanding, in reality, is the right to roam in my brain and my bank account.

[...]

I dunno. I mean, there are always voices threatened by any increase in populist or democratized art/literature, from Sir Philip Sidney, poet in the 1500s who refused to see his work in print because somehow that new printing press technology diminished poetry (and wasn't nearly aristocratic and elitist enough for poetry, not something a "real" gentleman would do) to those who reacted against the Romantics, with all their attention to idealized pastorals and rustics or chimney sweeps, to those who reacted against the Enlightenment and Renaissance, against Modernism, against any new movement that appears to cheapen anything some group in society holds dear.

I mean, which is better? The explosion of artwork that grew out of the great societal transformation and strife of the Renaissance and Enlightenment? Or the hermetically-sealed closed worlds of artistic and literary elites, with plenty of money and time to lavish on art and its production?

I've shared Smith's lament, as a photojournalist, knowing I was busting my ass every day for a throwaway front page photo, a clip that would yellow in my file, the anachronistic daily fishwrap. Nobody likes their best work to be cheapened. But should it be hidden in vaults, or should it circulate among greater and greater masses? I vote for the distributive model, and with greater democratization.

I'd also ask Smith which is worth more in the long run, the super-dooper powerful mainframe computer that nobody gets to touch, or learn how to code or use except a handful of people, or a bunch of weak, underpowered personal computers, sitting on every desktop?

Oh, and for what it's worth dept? This bit below, from the top of Smith's article, about the dramatic event of a popular blogger announcing that the abuse had gone too far and that she pulling out of the game and "never going to post a word online again!" appears over and over in my data, from the Xenaverse, from chat rooms, and yes, even back in the early 1990s, from studies on the life cycle of listservs that survive listserv flame wars.

In other words, it's a tired and overworn trope, the first resort of the Internet newbie who hits his or her first flame war and isn't up to flaming back. Anybody with any experience online has heard that expression over and over, usually with much dramatic flouncing, the removal of popular web pages, all manner of attention-getting behavior that ranks right up there with a teenager burning all his or her rock-n-roll records after a sudden religious conversion, because it is the "devil's music."

And then a few weeks after the conversion experience wears off, they have to go back out and repurchase all those records all over again. Just classic. The dramatic exits in the throes of flame wars, with equally dramatic returns, happened at least a dozen times in the Xenaverse alone.

[...]

Three days ago, a well-known American blogger launched an unprecedented attack on the forum she helped to create. Revealing that she had been the target of vicious personal remarks and death threats for the past four weeks, Kathy Sierra said she had cancelled an appearance at a conference in San Diego and was staying at home, terrified, with the doors locked.

"I do not want to be part of a culture - the Blogosphere - where this is considered acceptable," she wrote, adding that she wasn't certain whether she would ever post again.

What finally drove Ms Sierra over the edge was a picture of a noose, posted anonymously by a blogger who wrote that all he wanted to know about her was her neck size. Someone else posted a photograph of Ms Sierra, her nose and mouth obscured by a device which transformed her into "nothing more than an objectified sexual orifice".

[...]

Human Subjects Review Boards gone mad?

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

I ran into this kind of ridiculousness in grad school as well. The thing is, my study was massively attentive to research ethics, and I went far beyond whatever ethical requirements a review board might make, because the theoretical frame of my study took a strong position against the exploitation that comes with colonialist thinking, even with scholarly "territories."

But even so, I ducked out on the Human Subjects review with one quick trick. It may not have been the best solution, and, as the absurd issues pointed up in the article below highlight, the Review Board probably could have still taken an insanity pill and come after me.

Basically, even though I was technically conducting an ethnography in cyberspace, I chose to ONLY collect texts that would have otherwise existed in the public domain, a linguistic fiction that worked because communication in cyberspace domains is a hybrid of both published texts and live communication.

The article below accurately points out, such restrictions certainly limit the kinds of findings that can come from any research. To my end, I still did "informal" research, and just removed it from any connection to my formal data-gathering process, through forming personal and private relationships in the group I was studying, but keeping them out of the study. But they surely did inform my larger breadth of knowledge on my subject.

Another reason why this is just nuts occurred to me when working back in the field of journalism the last five years.

Since the journalistic enterprise is not constructed as formal "research," journalists can do many more things to gather information from human subjects than academic researchers can. How does this affect how knowledge is made, how truths are constructed, when academic censorship becomes a major influence in the social construction of that knowledge?

Journalists operate with a Jeffersonian epistemology of sorts, where the supposedly free flow of ideas helps them arrive at the best-guess contingent truths. Yet, by default, because academics stay in their disciplinary walled gardens and rarely participate in public knowledge-making as public intellectuals, the journalistic research methods construct more of our common truths than anything else, simply because academics have ceded the Commons to them.

Meanwhile, Human Subjects Review Boards seem to have morphed into Cotton Mather and the good folk of Salem, Massachusetts, seeing evil lurking in every nuance and human interaction, every specter, every hint of a specter.

And do you know why? It's because I've been coming into their homes in the night, during their dreams, and pinching them, over and over. Pinch, pinch.

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 28, 2007

Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone.

Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Bernadette McCauley, a historian who was temporarily banned by an ethics panel from doing any research.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands.

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.

Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.”

Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process.

[...]

But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research.

According to a stack of reports, symposiums and studies by academic associations and scholars, the system’s “mission creep” is having a pernicious and widespread effect on humanities and social science research. Legal scholars also argue the boards violate the First Amendment.

The growing number of complaints in recent years apparently stems from an overall crackdown after a series of medical-research blunders beginning with the death of an 18-year-old in a gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

[...]

In the past year, discussions about what some call the “I.R.B. wars” have sprung up in specialty publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, conferences, scholarly journals and blogs. Although research proposals are rarely rejected, scholars argue that the requested changes in the wording of questions and consent forms can alter the nature of the study and scare off participants.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

[...]

Ms. Dougherty, an associate professor of communications at Missouri, said review boards were needed because “historically, social science has done things abhorrent to human subjects.” Unfortunately the current process “obliterates a lot of research,” she said, because untenured faculty and graduate students on a timetable cannot afford to spend months waiting for approval. So, for example, “instead of talking to people who are victims of violence, you might look at newspaper articles,” she said, echoing a common complaint that the requirements cause academics to steer clear of controversial topics. Research decisions “should be guided by science,” she said, “not whether or not it’s going to get through the board.”

Ms. Dougherty said she was willing to speak openly, unlike many graduate students and faculty, because she had tenure.

[...]

Mr. Schwetz said there was no chance that some subjects like oral history and journalism would be altogether excluded from review, as some academic organizations have urged. “If we were just to say, ‘Assume you don’t have to take them before an I.R.B.,’ I think we would regret that,” he said. But he said the new guidelines “will give a lot of examples and will give more guidance on how to make the decision on what is research and what is not.”

Some critics fault the universities, placing blame either with overzealous panels or with university administrations that have not done enough to differentiate between research that receives federal money and research that does not.

Mr. Freeman of City University said that within the humanities “most faculty members don’t know these rules exist.” He added, “If they in fact followed these rules, the whole I.R.B. system would grind to a halt.”

Radical Geological Survey Scientists?

Those USGS folks. Wild-eyed nutjobs, you know? Keen on rocks and all that. Earthquakes, faultlines, platetechtonics. Oh yeah, and probably minerals, fossil fuels, stuff like that. Earth scientists. Gotta keep a tight rein on them.

What do they do at those geology conferences, anyway? Plot sedition with rocks? Don't they need physicists do that?

Election? What election?

Link: Scientists Worried about Bush Clampdown at Publication.

Published on Thursday, December 14, 2006 by the Associated Press

Scientists Worried about Bush Clampdown at Publication

by John Heilprin

The U.S. administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, who study everything from caribou mating to global warming, subjecting them to controls on research that might go against official policy.

New rules require screening of all facts and interpretations by agency scientists. The rules apply to all scientific papers and other public documents, even minor reports or prepared talks, documents show.

Top officials at the Interior Department's scientific arm said the rules only standardize what scientists must do to ensure the quality of their work and give a heads-up to the agency's public relations staff.

"This is not about stifling or suppressing our science, or politicizing our science in any way," Barbara Wainman, the agency's director of communications, said Wednesday.

"I don't have approval authority. What it was designed to do is to improve our product flow."

Some agency scientists, who until now have felt free from any political interference, worry the objectivity of their work could be compromised.

"I feel as though we've got someone looking over our shoulder at every damn thing we do," said Jim Estes, an internationally recognized marine biologist who works for the geological unit.

"And to me that's a very scary thing. I worry that it borders on censorship."

[...]

The changes amount to an overhaul of commonly accepted procedures for all scientists, not just those in government, based on anonymous peer reviews. In that process, scientists critique each other's findings to determine whether they deserve to be published.

From now on, USGS supervisors will demand to see the comments of outside peer reviewers' as well any exchanges between the scientists who are seeking to publish their findings and the reviewers.

President George W. Bush's administration has been criticized for scientific integrity issues. In 2002, the USGS was forced to reverse course after warning oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would harm the Porcupine caribou herd. One week later a new report followed, this time saying the caribou would not be affected.

Having some fun with Stanley Fish on the NYTimes Blog

Link: Stanley Fish - Think Again - Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses - Opinion - TimesSelect - New York Times Blog.

I must confess: an evil streak came over me just the other day. Maybe it was all those planets in Scorpio, Mars in Scorpio, and then Mercury rolling retrograde.

The real reason is that the New York Times left the barn door open and the cows got out.

I am vehemently boycotting all the content on TimesSelect, you see. I hate that firewall and the price, and what it does to the quality of the debate in the public commons of the Internet. I ranted on this topic a bit in a recent post on my other blog. I mean, truly, I can't live without Frank Rich, and if I could have Frank, I'd want Paul Krugman and Bob Herbert too. My life is messed up without them in it, and it is all the Times's fault.

So, the Times offered me a free week to play in the TimesSelect playground, that walled garden that I find to be a purely evil place where Rich and Herbert and Krugman are being held prisoner, and there's no one to rescue them. (Thank goodness they didn't trap David Pogue, or I might have to storm the castle!)

I knew I should never have entered the rich kids' private playground, but I couldn't resist. And wouldn't you know it, they're keeping Stanley Fish in there too! You know, the noted academic and dean and distinguished professor? His provocative writings have shaped a great deal of recent theory in academia. He's associated with reader-response theories, interpretive communities, and anti-foundationalism.

Which is why, in private company, over a few beers, I like to pick on him. That's a safe thing to do, usually. Anti-foundationalism is such an easy target, sort of like the Star Trek time-travel paradoxes. Just a few quick moves, and everyone is all tied in knots.

Turns out there are some other academics, or former academics, or academic defenders, playing in TimesSelect too, either because they got a free week like I did, or maybe they like that elitist feeling of being a paid subscriber to TimesSelect. Pooh on that. E-vile, I'm telling you. TimesSelect is a sign of the apocalypse!

So it doesn't do me much good to quote too much of Stanley Fish's blog post, "Always Academicize," spinning off Frederick Jameson's "Always Historicize" maxim of a number of years ago. There's really no comparison between the two, because Jameson was making an academic argument, and Fish is just throwing out a quick hit blog post to the pseudo-masses behind the TimesSelect firewall.

He's also jumping off another post he did on a related topic in October, which I guess generated a bunch of sound and fury from pointy-headed people in the comments area as well. I wouldn't know about that, because technically, TimesSelect wasn't free to me at the time he wrote that piece, so I shouldn't be responsible for taking those argument threads into full consideration anyway, right?

Right now there are 104 comments on this Stanley Fish post. My anonymous comment is #39. I posted semi-anonymously because grad school conditioned me well. I figured I'd come off as a Fish dilettante, and some real Fish scholar would show up and wipe the floor with me.

Looks like some of them showed up and half-way liked what I had to say, tho. I had too much fun writing it to let the little piece rot in some secret TimeSelect walled garden blog comments field, so I've got a wild hair to share it, along with a few of the other commenters I admire. I also save it here for no other reason than because I don't know when my free week runs out, and I won't be able to access my own writing. Oh dear.

It raises some fun issues to think about, even if there is no way I can take Fish's thesis in the main blog text seriously, ever. It's just absurd, on the face of it. But that's OK, because there isn't a text in this class.

I'll just quote a bit of it here, to give you the gist, and then put my rant down below. I mean, how often do you get to do an academic-style flame on Stanley Fish, you know? It was just too much fun, and maybe I didn't embarrass myself after all.

Ah hell, I probably did.

Link: Stanley Fish - Think Again - Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses - Allison Arieff - Opinion - TimesSelect - New York Times Blog.

November 5, 2006, 10:00 pm

Always Academicize: My Response to the Responses

By Stanley Fish

In my post of October 22, I argued that college and university teachers should not take it upon themselves to cure the ills of the world, but should instead do the job they are trained and paid to do — the job, first, of introducing students to areas of knowledge they were not acquainted with before, and second, of equipping those same students with the analytic skills that will enable them to assess and evaluate the materials they are asked to read. I made the further point that the moment an instructor tries to do something more, he or she has crossed a line and ventured into territory that belongs properly to some other enterprise. It doesn’t matter whether the line is crossed by someone on the left who wants to enroll students in a progressive agenda dedicated to the redress of injustice, or by someone on the right who is concerned that students be taught to be patriotic, God-fearing, family oriented, and respectful of tradition. To be sure, the redress of injustice and the inculcation of patriotic and family values are worthy activities, but they are not academic activities, and they are not activities academics have the credentials to perform. Academics are not legislators, or political leaders or therapists or ministers; they are academics, and as academics they have contracted to do only one thing – to discuss whatever subject is introduced into the classroom in academic terms.

And what are academic terms? The list is long and includes looking into a history of a topic, studying and mastering the technical language that comes along with it, examining the controversies that have grown up around it and surveying the most significant contributions to its development. The list of academic terms would, however, not include coming to a resolution about a political or moral issue raised by the materials under discussion. This does not mean that political and moral questions are banned from the classroom, but that they should be regarded as objects of study – Where did they come from? How have they been answered at different times in different cultures? – rather than as invitations to take a vote (that’s what you do at the ballot box) or make a life decision (that’s what you do in the private recesses of your heart). No subject is out of bounds; what is out of bounds is using it as an occasion to move students in some political or ideological direction. The imperative, as I said in the earlier post, is to “academicize” the subject; that is, to remove it from whatever context of urgency it inhabits in the world and insert it into a context of academic urgency where the question being asked is not “What is the right thing to do?” but “Is this account of the matter attentive to the complexity of the issue?” [emphasis mine...cb]

Those who commented on the post raised many sharp and helpful objections to it. Some of those objections give me the opportunity to make my point again. I happily plead guilty to not asking the question Dr. James Cook would have me (and all teachers) ask when a “social/political” issue comes up in the classroom: “Does silence contribute to the victory of people who espouse values akin to those of Hitler?” The question confuses and conflates political silence – you decide not to speak up as a citizen against what you consider an outrage – with an academic silence that is neither culpable nor praiseworthy because it goes without saying if you understand the nature of academic work. When, as a teacher, you are silent about your ethical and political commitments, you are not making a positive choice – Should I or shouldn’t I? is not an academic question — but simply performing your pedagogical role.

[...]

In fact, my stance is aggressively ethical: it demands that we take the ethics of the classroom – everything that belongs to pedagogy including preparation, giving assignments, grading papers, keeping discussions on point, etc.– seriously and not allow the scene of instruction to become a scene of indoctrination. Were the ethics appropriate to the classroom no different from the ethics appropriate to the arena of political action or the ethics of democratic citizenry, there would be nothing distinctive about the academic experience – it would be politics by another name – and no reason for anyone to support the enterprise. For if its politics you want, you might as well get right to it and skip the entire academic apparatus entirely.

My argument, then, rests on the conviction that academic work is unlike other forms of work — if it isn’t, it has no shape of its own and no claim on our attention — and that fidelity to it demands respect for its difference, a difference defined by its removal from the decision-making pressures of the larger world. And that finally may be the point underlying the objections to my position: in a world so beset with problems, some of my critics seem to be asking, is it either possible or desirable to remain aloof from the fray? Thus Fred Moramarco declares, “It’s clearly not easy to ‘just do your job’ where genocide, aggression, moral superiority, and hatred of opposing views are ordinary, everyday occurrences.”

[...]

Of course, there will also be excitement in your class if you give it over to a discussion of what your students think about this or that hot-button issue. Lots of people will talk, and the talk will be heated, and everyone will go away feeling satisfied. But the satisfaction will be temporary as will its effects, for the long-lasting pleasure of learning something will have been sacrificed to the ephemeral pleasure of exchanging uninformed opinions. You can glorify that exercise in self-indulgence by calling it interactive learning or engaged learning or ethical learning, but in the end it will be nothing more than a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And here is my response to Dr Fish:
(I call him Mr. Fish in my post because that was NYTimes style, or appeared so. Later I realized I was speaking in affected Times Stylebook style, and he should have been Dr. My apologies, Dr. Fish.)

39.
November 6th, 2006 12:15 pm

I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around Mr. Fish’s position here, as I know him to be a prominent academic anti-foundationalist. So I’m trying to figure out how his advocacy of a particular classroom practice jives with anti-foundationalism.

If academicizing things means teaching things that you don’t practice, that is problematic to me. Mr. Fish’s thesis above appears to advocate a number of foundational values. Perhaps he teaches foundational anti-foundationalism.

The bigger problem, I think, rests in Mr. Fish’s assumption that there is ANYTHING, any discourse, any position, any field of study, that is NOT political, in that it advocates certain positions and points of view with certain consequences, and as such, it excludes other interpretations, or it refutes those other interpretations with rigorous argumentation, or it simply contains a political slant or bias by non-deliberate selective focus– the way some things make it on the syllabus and others do not, just because of semester time limits.

One of the deepest characterizations of postmodernism is that it exposes the political tilt of EVERYTHING, which is why postmodernists so strongly advocate anti-foundationalism.

Postmodernism assumes radical critique. It seeks to expose the deep structural biases of the keys to the kingdom, by looking at how rhetorical frames created the Western culture that created the very idea of logic and a syllogism on which most Western logic is based.

A classroom cannot focus on traditional academic pursuits without adopting a political position favoring the Western culture frame of logic, a foundationalist assumption.

And that’s the problem with postmodernism. In deconstructing deep foundations, it becomes a DE FACTO CONSERVATIVE movement in that all forms of advocacy for change (or critique) break down, leading to the net effect of NO CHANGE, a conservative position.

You get so lost in the crumbling foundations, you can never justifiably advocate anything.

So it appears above that Mr. Fish is promoting a conservative political position, and presuming to tell other foundationalists (on the right, left, or middle) who advocate political positions in response to the logical conclusions of social or hard science studies that they should only engage in intellectual exercises and not take action for change, or even discuss what action could be taken for change.

Change is evidently not on the curriculum. The status quo is. Even if logic reveals the house is on fire, or that it is raining outside. Mr. Fish would tell us that calling in a fire alarm or opening an umbrella is a political act that has no place in intellectual instruction.

My response to his taking this foundationalist position is to say that telling us NOT to teach students to open an umbrella when it is raining (or to take steps when hard science studies reveal that global warming will cause dire consequences) is itself a highly CONSERVATIVE political position, and to take such a stance in the classroom is to bring politics into that space.

— Posted by C.B.

And here are a few pithy and valuable bits that were also posted by other commenters, which will soon be lost to posterity forever so long as TimesSelect is restricted access.

You know, as I go through and re-read these (and you will see a theme emerging, as I picked along my favorite angle), I was just struck by how many smart people are out there running around, thinking wonderful thoughts, and expressing them with eloquence and creativity, with no apparent reward or reason, just for the joy of doing it (I am struck too by De Certeau's "la perrique," "the wig," which I've written of before).

But most importantly, what I see in the comments below, what stirs me about the comments below to the point that I want to SAVE these words, these thoughts, this dialogue, is that they are thrashing around with an idea that is about as close to first principles (or foundations) as things get for committed teachers and scholars, people who are driven to do this work for reasons other than professional and career advancement. People who are passionately "other-directed" and can't live in a world where these humanistic (and to some extent Enlightenment) values cut through artificial surfaces and spin, through disciplinary boundaries and institutionalized social constructs, not because there's a capital "T" Truth we're seeking, but precisely because there isn't, and it's still a Grail Quest anyway.

Most of the commenters below are so riled up (like myself as well) because they're really close to where Dr. Fish is coming from, but his conclusions seem so utterly wrong for our common starting point that it appears he is deliberately ignoring the fact that he's doing the very thing he's condemning, out of a lack of self-reflexivity. It feels almost maddening.

But the comments below say it far better than I could. I'll put my favorite bits in bold. More than anything, I love the passion with which they speak. We're drinking this Kool-Aid together, we all are. Kumbayah.

7. November 6th, 2006 7:22 am
I thought the discussion about your first ‘academicizing’ column was truly interesting and I read a good part of it. Unfortunately your reply is not. There is general agreement among most of your critics that striving for as objective a view as possible of any matter is a central part of the academic mission. Harvard states just that by simply putting ‘veritas’ into its seal. So most of the critics don’t argue that we should instead give the classroom over to polemic debate or exchanges of uninformed opinions as you seem to imply with your line of defense. Rather, one essential issue raised was that there are certain truths that are by nature political. Banning those from the classroom would be as much a sin against the academic mission as demagoguery or cheap polemicizing. This criticism is plain and simple, but you fail to address it.

The other is more philosophical: that it’s impossible to position yourself outside of political or moral or ethical questions because no matter how impartial a position you try to assume, it constitutes a political/moral/ethical position in its own right. This second criticism you even brush off saying it’s a piece of cake.

My assessment would be: your reply is not at the level of the (academic) debate you started. From someone so fond of academicizing that’s a bit disappointing.

— Posted by Leonardo Montecervo
9. November 6th, 2006 7:54 am

The problem with people who have dealt with fiction all of their lives is that they tend to become the most perfectly self-deceived. The classroom is the most highly politized place in the world, nor can it be otherwise. Be aware of your assumptions, your values, and admit them. State them baldly. Ask your students to do the same. Then let the games begin. What is the game? Well, you have total policy-making power. You are the ultimate despotic politico. Start play and watch what happens, but do not ever delude yourself so totally that you truly begin to believe that you are above politics. You as professor are the purest intellectual incarnation of it. If you set the agenda, define the terms, conceptualize the problem, then you are a politico. It cannot be otherwise. Do not take that charge lightly.

— Posted by J. Landrum Kelly, Jr., Ph.D.
14. November 6th, 2006 8:36 am

Stanley Fish is a critic whose work I respect, but here seems to have forgotten that “arguing about whether Satan is the hero of _Paradise Lost_ or whether John Rawls is correctly classified as a Neo-Kantian” means that the instructor has selected those texts and framed those arguments. Are those choices apolitical? I would answer that they are not. Another fine critic, Kenneth Burke, said it best: “Whenever you find a doctrine of ‘nonpolitical’ esthetics affirmed with fervor, look for its politics.”
— Posted by Peter Gardner
15. November 6th, 2006 8:44 am

Stanley Fish’s classrooms must exist in some utopia of neutral knowledge, with teachers instruments or dispensers of pure or unbiased knowledge to thirsty, uncommitted minds. But even the name for what we do, professors, intimates a commitment. For what do we profess?
The illusion of an enlightening neutrality that Fish maintains falls apart as soon as we begin to write a syllabus. We select some texts for our students to read, but not others; we choose some topics to discuss and present some opposing views -but not just any topic and not just any view. The decision to teach Milton’s epic poem and encourage a discussion of whether or not Satan is the hero of the poem, to use Fish’s own example and area of scholarly expertise, already puts an ideological load on the boat we are floating. Milton himself was fiercely independent, an old-world republican (just explaining the difference of old-world from new involves an interpretive stance), and to read his poem is to be surprised by this independence of mind. Would we not have to make some decisions in how we teach this poem were we, say, confronted by a student who wanted to argue that Milton was secretly a royalist rather than secretly of the devil’s party as the romantics claimed?

To my mind, the best teachers identify their own situatedness, their own ideology, and how it may influence - and limit - their own views of things. They ‘fess up to what they profess, without proselytizing for it or denying that they have a position. No - the less acknowledged an ideology, the more blinding it is. We need to show students how to be their own gadfly, as Socrates encouraged his interlocutors, by showing them how we are our own.

— Posted by anthony dimatteo
17. November 6th, 2006 9:11 am

Even though Fish is trying to obfuscate and confuse the issue, let’s make one thing clear: he knows very well that complaints about a “politicized” class room will be made even if, for example, a teacher in a class on the history of the Middle East, just “sticks to the facts” (witness his mention of Campus Watch in the original post). Fish agrees that teaching “facts” is politicizing - in his view, such a thing as objective facts do not exist; claiming they do is showing preference for one interpretation over another based on a supposed external standard of objectivity, hence un-academic.
This is a fundamental philosophical distinction, not a question of (un)professional behavior.

Fish’s understanding of what constitutes academic work demonstrates how reactionary extreme forms of postmodern relativism - like those espoused by Fish - really are, in effect if not in intent. Make no mistake: in a world where truth is simply a matter of competing interpretation, the powerful have the upper hand.

— Posted by Christian Haesemeyer
29.
November 6th, 2006 9:33 am

I suppose I was too subtle in my first set of comments. But Dr. Fish’s “response to the responses” allows me an opportunity to be less timid.
Dr. Fish oversimplifies his subject. He ignores countless years of scholarly analysis of the complex web of politics that surround and undergird nearly everything in the scholarly enterprise. There are politics, both explicit and implicit, in the choice of books for classroom study, an academic issue according to Dr. Fish, and there are politics that shape how many and what kinds of resources that same classroom has at its disposal, which are “real world” issues, like salary, desks, audio-visual equipment, etc.

There are politics that ground Dr. Fish’s view that the academy is separate from the “real world.” He avoids or erases his own politics by arguing that any engagement with our collective or individual citizenship in the real world will end badly, our best bet is that we will “know you’re doing your job if you have no comeback at all to the charge that, aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”

All objects and activities have latent usefulness, and many have explicit usefulness. Maintaining an “head-in-the-sand” approach to these questions is, ironically, a less useful act than acknowledging and negotiating the politics that surround our work. The Ivory Tower has never been secure from the ravages of politics. However, it has been, from time to time, a bastion of intellectual honesty and accountability. We are intellectually useful because we demand of ourselves and our students a high level of intellectual accountability, though not all political persuasions would agree how useful an independent, intellectually curious, engaged citizenry actually is.

It is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability, especially when such accountability seems absent from our current politics. Further, it is a political act to advocate for intellectual accountability within a sub-set of any given disciplinary boundaries. One need not see the world through Dr. Fish’s binaries of left and right, political or academic, to realize that his lines are porous.

Dr. Fish is failing to do his job if he cannot or does not examine the web of money, politics, and other “real world” forces that encourage, limit, or constrain his academic enterprises, or more to the point, the academic work of his less well known colleagues, like Byzantine Studies or Classics. Our job is to be intellectually accountable, engaged, and rigorous in our work, which inevitably forces us to be accountable to, engaged in, and leaders in the real world.
— Posted by Michael M. O'Hara Ph.D.
31. November 6th, 2006 10:47 am

Stanley Fish writes, “aside from the pleasures it offers you and your students, the academic study of materials and problems is absolutely useless.”
The kind of classroom Fish describes, one in which the students are, among other things, never made aware of the political predilections of their instructor, is the kind of classroom that I was running at the end of my career as an all-but-unpaid adjunct “professor” of English. But I do not believe that what I was doing was without any purpose except pleasure. For one thing, there was little pleasure to be had in an environment in which the salaries of professors such as Fish are subsidized by the labor of adjuncts.

But more to the point, unlike Fish, I believed and continue to believe in truth.

I believe that in the midst of a discussion by two young people on the topic, “Is it worthwhile to go to college?” I was in the right when I said, “Yes, it’s worthwhile because the point of going to college is to learn to distinguish between truth and hogwash and few people learn that anywhere else.”

I did not add that the distinction should have been taught to them in high school, that high schools have failed and continue to fail to teach anything at all, including the most important thing.

In the English 102 courses I was continually given because no one else wanted them (since they involve more work than most tenured professors willingly accept), I taught students to distinguish between facts and gradations of facts, between expert opinions based on facts and analysis, and unsupported opinions that actually constituted arguments from authority. I made it clear that the research paper that was the object of the course was to be based on a close analysis of texts written by people of divergent points of view.

I said, “If you have made your mind up about abortion, you may not write about abortion.”

I said, “If you have made your mind up about the death penalty, you may not write about the death penalty.”

I demanded intellectual honesty. I demanded a true reading, not just cut and paste quotation, of texts cited in papers.

I now realize that it was my demand for intellectual honesty that brought me down in flames. This was prior to the year 2000, prior to a judge’s telling the citizens of the United States that the President they were going to have was not the one they had voted for, and they should “get over it.”

But these students were born and raised in a culture of lies, in which they understood that whatever career they chose—including and especially the teaching of English—they would be forced to compromise their ideals, to say they thought things they didn’t think, to profess belief in goals that would, in the dark night of their souls, disgust them, and to kiss up a lot.

These were students raised by people who once smoked, snorted and dropped, and, in the 1990’s, sat on fat couches in their half-million dollar houses, telling the kids to “just say no.”

These were students raised by people who skinny-dipped and engaged in free love, and, in the 1990’s, carted them to expansive houses of worship in overpriced, gas-guzzling SUV’s.

These were students raised by people who said they didn’t want to pay higher taxes, as they grew enormously fat, swilling four-dollar coffee drinks in front of their computers.

These were students raised by people who wanted them to read, but who never read much of anything themselves, except light entertainment and information they needed in order to make more money.

I told students they would look at an issue from various sides, then and only then formulating a belief about that issue, and supporting it with facts and the opinions of experts who had analyzed the facts.

Because college teaching has become a popularity contest, in which students are allowed to publicly post their opinions of a professor, anonymously and without any support whatsoever, they ran me out. What I asked them to do “was, like, too much work”, as more than one student wrote.

Yes, Professor, at the end of the semester, any student whose only encounter with your thinking has been in the classroom should not be able to answer these questions: “How does Fish feel about abortion?” “What is Fish’s stance on the death penalty?” “What does Fish think of Bush?” “Is Fish a religious man?”

If they can answer those kinds of questions, they will work to please you and get better grades, not to find the truth.

The object of this activity is not pleasing you. It’s about recognizing that there is a difference between truth, or its “best available version” as Carl Bernstein called it, and hogwash.

The means, especially in the classroom of a master, may be pleasurable. But the end is political, always has been, and always will be. It is especially political in these times.

— Posted by L. A. Marland of Austin, Texas
40. November 6th, 2006 12:25 pm

If Prof Fish applied the analytical reasoning he so passionately advocates to his own position, he would realize that it is itself eminently political and susceptible to the very criticisms he aims at those he accuses of insufficient ‘academicization’.

For one thing, he draws a distinction between the academy, where dispassionate inquiry is supposed to occur, from the rest of society, where anything goes. In reality, sound analytical reasoning skills are required in just about every walk of life and the academy is and has always been a locus not only for training the intellect, but also for imparting such mundane occupational skills as law, medicine, accounting, engineering, etc.

Perhaps more importantly, it is a transparently political process that leads to the systematic exclusion of those from less privileged backgrounds from entry to the academy in the first place, and from the kind of academic life that he seems to glorify. That a few counterexamples exist to this general principle is actually further evidence of how political the process actually is, as it endeavors to cover its tracks.

Decisions about how knowledge of the universe is divided up into ‘disciplines’ is intensely political, as is the segmentation into courses. Reality is not so neat. What is the analytical process that distinguishes a literary work from, say, a technical work? May a technical treatise not possess literary merit?

The nature of the academic process he describes, where ‘professors’ impart information and analytical skills to students and students impart, if anything, frustration or satisfaction to their professor, is thoroughly political, and Professor Fish betrays his commitment to a particular model of society by assuming that this is not subject to question.

The idea that university teachers can - whether they are unique in the respect, as Prof Fish suggests, or not - divorce their academic life entirely from their life as a whole is profoundly political and demands support from evidence and argument, which he declines to provide.

Finally, when professors refuse to divulge their political positions, as Professor Fish enjoins them to do, the true outcome is dishonesty and unfairness to students. By restricting his criticism to those who articulate their views Prof Fish establishes that he is firmly on the side of the status quo. What goes without saying is never contentious and doesn’t drive the thought police into a frenzy. So those who sneak their views in surreptitiously, whether because they are accomplished propagandists, or more likely, because they have, like Stanley Fish himself, never bothered to question their own cherished assumptions, are off the hook.
— Posted by Cikarmak
49. November 6th, 2006 2:01 pm

How does his a-political position apply to courses like those I teach whose academic subject is expressly argumentative rhetoric? An intrinsic element of such courses is the tradition of Socratic opposition to sophistical attempts to make the weaker argument appear the stronger one. That is, students should learn to distinguish sound arguments from unsound ones, especially those that resort to fallacious reasoning, factitious evidence, and outright lies–often deliberately produced by propaganda agencies including government officials and spin doctors, think tanks, lobbies, public relations and advertising agents. These are the very stuff of the dominant rhetoric of politics and mass media, so don’t academic discourse and making political judgments converge in their study?
— Posted by Donald Lazere
54. November 6th, 2006 2:48 pm

Where I take issue with Mr. Fish’s idea of “academic purity” (or puritanicism) is that it is more theoretical than practical.
Higher education in the US today is increasingly influenced and polluted by corporate/capitalist forces, and these forces generally have a predictable (rightward-leaning) political position.

Sanitizing the classroom of any political tone whatsoever, in my view, would in today’s society largely cede the development of students political thoughts to the influence of the economically powerful entities which increasingly influence staffing, curriculum, admissions policies, research and development at their university of choice - not to mention increasingly funding the whole student experience as governmental support continues to erode. I don’t see that as a better alternative.

Lastly, my sense is that more often than not, academics are by definition liberal because the fundamental basis of questioning the existing body of knowledge flies in the face of what conservatism essentially stands for: social stasis. To decry “liberal bias” in these institutions (and insist on some sort of theoretical utopian objectivism) is like complaining that a man’s body is “polluted by female estrogen”. It’s just the nature of the beast.
— Posted by Phil Koenig
56. November 6th, 2006 2:54 pm

Regarding C.B.’s commment (38.): my impression is that Fish’s anti-foundationalism is precisely what informs his advocacy of what he calls academicizing. Reading the original post, I understand that “academicizing” a la Fish is a process that rejects the very notion of objectivity, or empiricism, or, generally, of foundational beliefs; it turns the classroom into a space where competing interpretations (which, as far as I can ascertain, are the basic objects of study - it is not that they interpret some underlying truth or observation, but rather, they are all there is) are analyzed in what I consider to be a formal manner (e.g., “how coherent are they?” is a legitimate question in that classroom, but “is there any truth in them?” is not).
I completely agree with C.B.’s conclusion, though: the approach advocated by Fish is, in effect, upholding the power structure currently in place. In fact, any approach that claims to remove the political pressure on academia by its very nature has to support that power structure, because the reactionary critique of “politicized classrooms” is based on the perception that the academic endeavour undermines it much more than on any specific complaints (as Francois Cornilliat remarks).

And Ari: “distasteful, insulting, heated”? I’ll try to keep it down in the future…

— Posted by Christian Haesemeyer
66. November 6th, 2006 7:55 pm

I will make fish a trade. I’ll swap the politics out of my classroom when he gives me the corporate media.
Politically democratic people are driven into the academy because it’s a good place to hide and make better survival money. It’s easy and cheap for him to say we should academicize. But he’s just taking a political position.

I understand that this weakens the academic community, but I don’t think we have much of an alternative at the moment.
— Posted by Evan
74. November 6th, 2006 10:08 pm

I sincerely hope that everyone who cares about this debate has read, or will take the time to read, “The Glass Bead Game” by Hermann Hesse and think about it in context of the questions raised here. On all sides, you’ll learn a lot from this gratifying work of the novelist’s art which lampoons - albeit subtly - academics and the academic world.
— Posted by Christopher Carter Sanderson
76. November 6th, 2006 10:37 pm

As a teacher, I understand Dr. Fish’s frustration with over-arching ideologies in the liberal arts, but it’s important to say this: Dr. Fish is essentially a right-wing apologist.
In a vacuum, it is possible to argue that there is a risk that critical analysis and logical thinking could be under-emphasized in the presence of a liberal agenda, but consider this: all of the hard sciences, social sciences and humanities stand as a damning confrontation to the advance of absolutism and militarism in Western society. In short, the academic space is a moral space, a last stand against the dehumanizing force of purely predatory capitalism, a force that has no place for academics. Academics are under attack.

For instance, in order to justify the teaching of psychology, you must first justify that statistical and critical analysis of human behavior has a value equal to or greater than the value of taking the same funds that would be allocated towards psychological research and spending those funds, instead, on military outreach and technology. At present, the vast majority of our fund-allocating politicians would prefer that Americans spend their money on military technology, firming up their political futures and expanding that infrastructure. By choosing to be an academic, psychologist or English teacher, rather than a military fundraiser, you are taking a risky ideological stand, and your mission is only preserved if you can maintain a type of morally-based critical analysis that preserves a space for liberal inquiry. Dismiss the liberal arts as over-priced and purely academic and higher education becomes nothing more than learning how to program computers and build bombs.

My students would prefer to discuss the war in Iraq along the lines of what interests them: high-tech vehicles, powerful weapons and ghoulish human destruction. Introduce critical thinking into that body of knowledge and all you get is comparison of a Black Hawk helicopter and laser-guided missile . . . which is more deadly? Which is more fun? The historical premises of the situation hold no interest to them until the matter becomes politically oriented.

Academics are essentially the activity of the individual mind. In today’s world individual critique is under attack, disparaged by our politicians as unpatriotic and weak, and therefore, academics are under attack. Fail to realize that or advocate a neutral point of view and your goal as a teacher is simply planned obsolescence.
— Posted by William H. Payne, M.A.
81. November 7th, 2006 1:16 am

The problem with keeping opinions out of the classroom is that there is no theory free data. A philosopher of science named Hanson pointed this out in the 1950s. So whatever we teach embodies or expresses or supports some view or other. I think it makes more sense to present both sides of an issue and then examine them in light of values that we hold. For example, there are some strong reasons for opposing torture. I have not problem expressing an opinion opposing torture. If you do, I feel you may be a moral cripple. The germ of truth in what you say is that teachers should not abuse their power over students by insisting that students agree. So it helps to make clear that you are not infallible and that other opinions could be right and yours wrong. But I think to abjure ethical positions is to abjure our basic human responsibilities to choose and act. We really have no choice. Even sitting down and shutting up is a position. Getting up and saying anything is one too. Better to be up front and promote the dialogue. As the bronze plaque at my university (Wisconsin) says, “Whatever may be the limits that trammel inquiry elsewhere, the great State University of Wisconsin must ever encourage that endless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth may be found.”
— Posted by Max Kummerow
83. November 7th, 2006 2:19 am

Let’s assume for a moment that what classical scholars tell us about most of the surviving works of Aristotle is correct, namely that they represent more or less notes generated out of the pedagogical situation at the Lyceum in 4th century BCE Athens.

Let’s now consider the Nichomachean Ethics. The most casual perusal of this work reveals that Aristotle very much has a material – and not merely some meta-ethical – agenda going in the Nichomachean Ethics. He really does think – and argue for the fact – that some modes of human behavior are superior to others.

Hmm.

It would seem that on his value neutral classroom model, if Mr. Fish were the Dean of the Lyceum, to be consistent he would have to take Aristotle aside and let him know in no uncertain terms that there will not be a Nichomachean Ethics II taught next semester.

Why? Well isn’t it obvious that the benighted Stagirite has pretty clearly violated many of the Fish norms for proper academic treatment of a subject?

Let’s also try not to focus too much on the fact that Dean’ Fish’s norms, poked at with just a modicum of critical scrutiny, reveal themselves to be more in the nature of somewhat arbitrary and fairly ahistorical obiter dicta than critically grounded principles. Thus, when you note that if the span of pedagogical history from the ancient Greeks to the present were a 24 hour clock, the Fish view of the role of material — indeed advocated — values in the classroom would put us somewhere a bit after 11:00. And that’s PM, Dean Fish.

I’m not saying that Aristotle had it all right. I would just like to get a bit clearer on why, at least on my understanding of Mr. Fish, he did get it right enough when he decided to teach the Nichomachean Ethics the way he apparently did.

And when Mr. Fish has tired of trying to spin Aristotle back into the orbit of his own view of the nature of true pedagogy, I have a few questions I’d like to ask him about Plato and Socrates – at least Plato’s Socrates.

In a proleptic mood, let me quickly add that there are few Platonic scholars today who would seriously try to maintain that the so-called early, aporetic dialogues (don’t even bother getting into, say, The Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, etc., etc.) are principally values neutral exercises in teaching critical logical skills, rather than attempts critically to ground some very material choices as far as values are concerned. I offer this implied argument from authority caution about the Platonic corpus not because I think an argument from authority – Mr. Fish’s, mine, or anybody else’s – is the best form of argument. It is not. But just in case he has been too busy to reacquaint himself with Plato – not mention Aristotle – Mr. Fish might want to do himself a favor and accept that this is the current state of the scholarship, a state that is pretty much consistent with what it has been for the past 2400 or so years.

Of course, time has marched on, and our concept of the proper relationship between values and pedagogy is something which, if it had not changed over the course of 2400 years, probably should have. But the issue is not whether it has changed. It’s a question of how much it has changed and, indeed, how much it ought to have changed. And also whether such changes, however great or small, have changed the basic center of gravity in the “liberal” arts from what it very clearly used to be, at least among some reasonably well-established sectors of the “curriculum.”

— Posted by Ed Reno
99. November 7th, 2006 3:26 pm

Being disturbed by an earlier Fish article, I searched the Internet and found his article “Why we built the Ivory Tower.” The first paragraph gave three rules for success in Academia: “Do your job; don’t do anyone else’s job; don’t let anyone else do your job.” That is a powerful self-protective mechanism for faculty; turf, turf and turf. Indeed, faculty embrace these rules; Inside your turf you’re unchallengable; you don’t challenge any one else; and you don’t let anyone else challenge you. Unfortunately, it’s not so good for the student. It divides knowledge up into ever-smaller non-commicating package, making it exceedingly difficult to deal with the world as a whole.
In short, Fish’s view of academia protects the academics from outside criticism, even within the university, at the expense of teaching the students how to think when confronted with a multi-faceted problem. Good for the academics; bad for the rest of us.

Roger Bacon once said “I have taken all knowledge to be my province.” Pity that academics today do not.

— Posted by Dr. William Siler

Designing for Blogs: A Brief Manifesto

I'm an unabashed fan of working smarter, not harder.

In 1999, before I first happened on blog software or even the precursor called "EditThisPage," I was working with a few student programmers on a similar system in PHP, for classroom uses, collaborative projects, and portfolio-based active learning. What I really wanted to do was get away from the limitations of WebCT and Blackboard for more student-centered learning, instead of reproducing traditional classroom structures online. And I didn't want to have to keep teaching students HTML in classes that had other work to do.

When I saw that EditThisPage, Radio Userland and other applications were already doing what I was attempting to build from scratch in my dining room, I realized that the idea was so simple and such a logical next step, hundreds of people were probably doing exactly what I was doing, in different arenas, to make publishing accessible to more people. I saw that I could use blog tools for just about anything I could imagine with HTML and Flash, and save myself a whole lot of work.

And why did the blog idea catch fire as the killer app, when content management systems on the corporate side were plentiful? I strongly believe the answer is a timely combination of the rise of Google along with RSS.

Even though feed readers are having difficulty reaching non-tech users, feeds and tags are becoming an intrinsic structure in nearly everything we build. Quite simply, I won't build another freelance/contract web site that is not RSS/Atom-enabled. It's a no-brainer. Blogs are the display and feeds give the display legs. Technorati.com would not exist without feeds. And the massive social movement that is the blogosphere would not exist at all without RSS behind it.

So these days, rather than endlessly re-inventing the wheel, I'm primarily designing for CSS and the content-management shell blog software provides, a shell I can pour nearly anything into. Do I ever wish for the old blank-slate, starting fresh with a new audience/user interaction model every time?

Sometimes, but Web functionality is so crucial to interactive communities and a public commons that solo work in Flash feels empty to me, like an essential piece is missing. I think we'll end up one day defining "interactivity" as something that essentially must have more than one author, perhaps even many authors.

And lately, when I want to push on the limits of what interactivity can do, I find myself reaching for an even more robust system, pmachine's Expression Engine, where I can situate multiple blog modules in different contexts on the same page, and still retain my permalink archives and flexible CSS designs.

My only complaint so far is that I want some of the features I find in Scoop, features of audience-driven, "self-organizing" sites.

Not too long ago, someone asked me to predict where interactive media and the Internet would be five years from now. I refused to give an answer, because I don't get to decide. The beauty of a grassroots, bottom-up social movement like in the blogosphere is that the social structures provide an organic kind of direction and structure, and the social structure is the authority, not "industry leaders" or "futurists" or any other professional prognosticators striving for control or a first-mover advantage.

Interactivity is about giving up control.

What I strive to do as a designer and a participant in this grassroots social movement is to create tools that empower the most people with enough freedom to set their own directions. I'm not interested in herding cats. I am interested in watching and learning inductively from where cats go.

That's what Web 2.0 is about. That's why it rose from the ashes of the top-down corporate- and VC-driven creations that crashed and burned after all the money turned to vapor. What we valued most was what remained. Communities, interactions, strong ties, weak ties. Rich relationships over time. Rabid flame wars. Not endlessly pitching widgets while dropping names to bugger your Google/Technorati rank.

That's also why, in what some are calling a Web boomlet, I see business people desperately trying to appropriate blogs for various business models, proclaiming themselves authorities on their blog content niche as if they were following a stock professional copywriting formula, many diluting content in search engine-optimized blog sites that literally suck all the life out of the real reasons for blogging, the real reasons for writing and communicating online.

They claim they are dispensing value in a kind of knowledge-log "how-to" format, but as this genre of blogging multiplies, the sites look to me like little more than human-written, SEO-focused link farms, one step away from machine-generated link farms. Where is the real value in that?

Where I will stand in this new wash-out is with the commons, the spaces where real people talk, where conversations are alive with an energy of their own. The interfaces I will build for these communities and cybercultures will be interfaces that allow patterns of use to co-create the interface structures themselves.

The most creative, edgy projects I want to work on compulsively on my own time will not just employ user-centered design. They will allow social network structures to literally create their own designs.

Breaking the silence on discrimination against women in academic science and engineering

An interesting report out today from the National Academies, and it's a terrific counter to that odious garbage spewed by the former president of Harvard, Lawrence Summers. (Hey, Derek Bok's been doing some cool things since coming in in the interim! I didn't get a chance to post about it, but it is worth watching, his getting rid of Harvard's Early Admissions bias to the hoity toity set)

I'll offer the National Academies Press a kick in the slats for charging $44 to get a copy of the super secret elitist report, however!

Link: Broad National Effort Urgently Needed To Maximize Potential of Women Scientists and Engineers in Academia.

Link: The National Academies | News | Effort Needed to Maximize Potential of Women in Academic S&T.

Such a radical idea, criticizing the "depriving the U.S. of an important source of talent." I went to an engineering school and have taught at what was largely an engineering school, and I know my fellow women colleagues in science and engineering faced a TON of discrimination, and they told me so many horror stories.

At least with my own specialty in technology and interactive media, things are far more open and interdisciplinary than in the more established fields, even if women still are vastly underrepresented. I'm afraid to admit too much of that is self-selection, even with prominent women represented in so many areas of cybercultures, from Mena Trott to Donna Haraway.

But since being outside of that environment, an environment that at least paid lip service to the idea that talent should be rewarded, used as a valuable resource, I've been out in the corporate world, where the Peter Principle is in active force and people who "know too much" are considered trouble-makers who run the risk of commiting the cardinal sin, actually knowing more in their areas of specialty than their bosses do (the horror, the horror!). So interesting it is, to watch a reverse merit system in force, one that seeks out and tries to promote those who strive for greater and greater mediocrity.

Link: Institutions Hinder Female Academics, Panel Says - New York Times.

Institutions Hinder Female Academics, Panel Says

By CORNELIA DEAN

Published: September 18, 2006
Women in science and engineering are hindered not by lack of ability but by bias and “outmoded institutional structures” in academia, an expert panel reported today.

The panel, convened by the National Academy of Sciences, said that in an era of global competition the nation could not afford “such underuse of precious human capital.” Among other steps, the report recommends that universities alter procedures for hiring and evaluation, change typical timetables for tenure and promotion, and provide more support for working parents.

“Unless a deeper talent pool is tapped, it will be difficult for our country to maintain our competitiveness in science and engineering,” the panel’s chairwoman, Donna E. Shalala, said at a news conference at which the report, “Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering,” was made public.

Dr. Shalala, a former secretary of health and human services who is now president of the University of Miami, said part of the problem was insufficient effort on the part of college and university administrators. “Many of us spend more energy enforcing the law on our sports teams than we have in have in our academic halls,” she said.

The panel dismissed the idea, notably advanced last year by Lawrence H. Summers, then the president of Harvard, that the relative dearth of women in the upper ranks of science might be the result of “innate” intellectual deficiencies, particularly in mathematics.

If there are any cognitive differences, the report says, they are small and irrelevant. In any event, the much-studied gender gap in math performance has all but disappeared as more and more girls enroll in demanding classes. Even among very high achievers, the gap is narrowing, the panelists said.

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Nor is the problem a lack of women in the academic pipeline, the report says. Though women leave science and engineering more often than men “at every educational transition” from high school through college professorships, the number of women studying science and engineering has sharply increased at all levels.

For 30 years, the report says, women have earned at least 30 percent of the nation’s doctorates in social and behavioral sciences, and at least 20 percent of the doctorates in life sciences. Yet they appear among full professors in those fields at less than half those levels. Women from minorities are “virtually absent,” it adds.

The report also dismissed other commonly held beliefs — that women are uncompetitive or less productive, that they take too much time off for their families, and so on. Their real problems, it says, are unconscious but pervasive bias, “arbitrary and subjective” evaluation processes, and a work environment in which “anyone lacking the work and family support traditionally provided by a ‘wife’ is at a serious disadvantage.”

Along with Dr. Shalala, the panel included Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard who has long challenged the “innate differences” view, and Ruth Simmons, the president of Brown University, who established a widely praised program for aspiring engineers when she was president of the all-female Smith College.

The report was dedicated to another panelist, Denice Denton, an electrical engineer who until her suicide this summer was chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a forceful advocate for women, gays and minority members in science and engineering.

The 18-member panel had only one man: Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley. But Dr. Shalala noted that the National Academy of Sciences committee that reviewed the report had 10 men.

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Library Porn...

You know you want it. I surely do. Things of beauty. The smell of bindings. And my favorites have those seductive little catwalks that hug the curves of those high shelves of the more classic designs.

Link: Hot Library Smut.

Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut

Now, coming upon this post as you are, unawares, I feel I ought to clarify the title (which was alternately going to be sex libris) straight away by telling you what this post is not, in fact, about. By “library smut” I am in no way referring to the photo books on native peoples, or the illustrated health manuals, or any of the other volumes which, in your childhood, you lurked about the library aisle to find with the sole purpose of sneaking guilty glances at naked bodies. Nor am I referring to the “risqué” novels by Miller, Cleland, Réage, or Lawrence you leafed impatiently through as a teenager. No. What I’m talking about here is the full-frontal objectification of the library itself. Oh yeah.

Yesterday I came across a truly gorgeous book of photographs by Candida Höfer titled, Libraries, a title which pretty much says it all, because that is just exactly what it is, one rich, sumptuous, photo of a library interior after another. It’s like porn for book nerds. Seriously. They are gorgeous photos, nearly all without visitors and just begging to be entered. (ha. sorry.)

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Here are a few of my favs... but go to the link above to see more than what I've picked.

BNF PARIS

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BRITISH LIBRARY LONDON

REAL GABINETE PORTUGUES DE LEITURA RIO DE JANEIRO

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RIJKMUSEUM AMSTERDAM

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STIFTSBIBLIOTHEK ST. GALLEN

HANDELINGENKAMER TWEEDE KAMER DER STATEN-GENERAAL DEN HAAG

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TRINITY COLLEGE LIBRARY DUBLIN

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