Censors to the Right of Them, Censors to the Left Volley and Thunder

      I've participated lately in some ListServ and Facebook discussions of what a professor can get into trouble for teaching nowadays, and two closely related works that came to mind were Anthony Burgess's novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Stanley Kubrick's 1971 CLOCKWORK ORANGE film, at least as I taught them at conservative Miami University at Oxford (Ohio) — in John Boehner's Congressional District, alma mater for Paul Ryan — in the late 20th and very early 21st centuries.

      They are interesting works to teach.

      In my classes, the film was much more controversial than the novel even though Burgess cheerfully admits in his preface to the reprint we used that his novel is heretical in Christian terms and most of my students were pretty orthodox Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants (with a few theologically radical evangelicals thrown in). The 21-chapter British version of the novel — unlike the initial 20-chapter US edition and the film — is "Pelagian," Burgess says, claiming for human beings an essential goodness and the freedom to choose the good. St. Augustine of Hippo would not have approved, and Augustinian views on Original Sin and a variety of innate, essential depravity are orthodox in Christian tradition — and my generally pious students didn't give a rat's ass. What concerned those who disapproved were the images of sex and violence in the film, and Burgess's once damnable, burn-at-the-stake heresy was no big deal.

      As I said: interesting.

      Also interesting and highly instructive were my students' fairly typical perceptions of the sex and violence in the film.

      To start with something memorable, the Rape Scene in the film and how my students remembered the rape but sometimes forgot that this is also the Crippling Scene. Kubrick's camera pays a lot of attention to the rape of Mrs. Alexander, a woman in young middle age, but it also shows in graphic detail the beating of Mr. Alexander, a man entering a vigorous old age — until that crippling beating and being forced to watch the rape. (Adding to the trauma, Mr. Alexander tells us that the rape killed his wife, but we only have his word for that, plus the problematic trope of rape being lethal to virtuous women. We can be confident, however, that Mrs. Alexander has died.)

     My students' attenuated concern for Mr. Alexander got me asking myself for A CLOCKWORK ORANGE a question from studies of Christopher Marlowe's plays on how audience's perceive violence. So I sat down with a stopwatch and timed the on-screen violence in the film and asked my students for their estimates of how much time we got to see violence against various characters.

      One of the reasons I'd probably get into trouble teaching Kubrick's film is that I think it ethical for a critic to sit with a stopwatch and get some numbers on who on screen is messing over whom and to what degree and for how long. Period. However much in Trumpian times the Left has endorsed fact-base studies, there were academic attacks on Empiricism in the late 20th/early 21st, and I suspect some of that ill-will toward number-crunching horrors still remains.

      It depends on how you evaluate such things, but the major victim of violence in A Clockwork Orange (novel and film) is its nasty antihero, Alex. My students were surprised with this because (I would argue),
            * In the tradition of audiences going back to that of the first English theatrical blockbuster, Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, my students judged violence to a large degree in terms of the victims' worth, and Alex was an attractive but still violent, dangerous, and misogynistic little shit who had it coming. Except with Tamburlaine most of the audience apparently identified with a noble superman, the serial mass murderer Tamburlaine, and not his banal victims.
            * My students sometimes didn't see violence committed by the State and other authorities as violence. I told them that the State's claim was a monopoly on legitimate violence, but that the traditional idea was to allow that violence is violence, and they didn't argue the point; still, they didn't see justified violence as violence. Alex's acts of violence were violence; the violence of State authorities against him were in some sort of unnamed limbo.
            * Etc.

      My students' attitude was something like that mocked in the 1960s with the joke, "I hate violence and them violent demonstrators. Violent people should be taken out and shot!"

      Returning to A Clockwork Orange as novel and film would be interesting nowadays for how different groups would value the value put upon freedom by the story and the question of how much freedom should be restricted to protect decent folk from young monsters like Alex and his drugs. Not to mention how much young readers should identify with decent older people as opposed to guys nearer their age, however despicable those guys — or how much old teens and 20-somethings should be on the lookout for, and push back against, youth-bashing. And it would be fascinating in terms of victims.

      US President Donald J. Trump at least claimed to be appalled by the violence of killing babies with poison gas in Syria, so he blew up property and (enemy) people with Tomahawk missiles, and then went on to use in a related battle the MOAB ordnance: a very large explosive device. Justified or not we can argue about; what I find downright fascinating is the many Americans would not see Mr. Trump's actions as violent. It's unlikely Americans generally could have a rational argument about the actions of the all-too-real Mr. Trump; it's possible we could have one about Burgess's and Kubrick's fictional Alex.

      Or not: I'm not sure one could nowadays — or at least not this off-White male "one" — could teach A Clockwork Orange; and that would be unfortunate.  

"Excellent Sheep": One Side of the Collegiate Coin

William Deresiewicz: The most interesting thing about that phrase ["excellent sheep"] is that I didn’t write it myself. It came out of the mouth of a student of mine, and just seemed perfect. They’re “excellent” because they have fulfilled all the requirements for getting into an elite college, but it’s very narrow excellence. These are kids who will perform to the specifications you define, and they will do that without particularly thinking about why they’re doing it. They just know that they will jump the next hoop.

— From "The Ivy League, Mental Illness, and the Meaning of Life,"

The Atlantic on line, with the subhead,

William Deresiewicz explains how an elite education can lead

to a cycle of grandiosity and depression.

             <http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/qa-the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524/>

The quotation above elicited a response from me in the Comments section for the article in The Atlantic. I immodestly repost it below, with two additions.

--------------------------------------------

            Ahem, from Jerry Farber discussing students at Cal State LA in 1968: "Even more discouraging [...] is the fact that the students take it. They haven't gone through twelve years of public school for nothing. They've learned one thing and perhaps only one thing during those twelve years. They've forgotten their algebra. They're hopelessly vague about chemistry and physics. They've grown to fear and resent literature. They write like they've been lobotomized. But, Jesus, can they follow orders!"

            Get rid of the "public school" reference — or take "public school" in the British sense — and you have your Ivy League sheep.

            My experience in 40 years teaching at a Big Ten school (briefly) and then at whatever the hell Miami University is (Oxford, OH), is that entering undergrads are pretty much telling the truth on the annual national surveys indicating that most are on campus for "the full collegiate experience" — or what one of my students called "College: The Four Year Vacation" — or for the paper. Education as a goal always came in a distant third behind getting useful credentials and having their last chance for a decent experience of a social life and community before going off to the alienation of even the elite American workplace, and the suburbs.

            And such attitudes are pretty much what all the politically potent groups want except some trouble-makers (including me) that think that as long as students are spending time on campus or at least taking classes on line, they might also try to get some education. (See Murray Sperber, Beer And Circus.)

            Things have gotten worse the last couple decades because it was a particularly bright and cynical student of mine who'd come up with the essay title, "College: Half-Way House to Adulthood" as opposed to nowadays when it's generally accepted that we can talk without condescending disrespect about "college kids." My slogan as a teacher was "College is for grownups," and so I see as a major reason for increasing problems in higher ed the socially-invited arrested development that renders far too many college students *kids* — and kids, of course, *should* follow orders.

            I'll throw in that talking about college kids makes clear that booklarnin' is childish and not really work for grownups (and incidentally reminds professors that what I used to do wasn't really "man's work" [the sexism on The Life of the Mind is complicated and contradictory]).

So also: Harrumph! Some of us curmudgeons have been griping in this fashion for decades. Meanwhile, though: Thanks for the article; as we used to say, "Keep the faith."

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            Addition #1 is a quick clarification that I understand that Miami University is a "MAC school," where the Miami "RedHawks compete in the NCAA Division I Mid-American Conference," and, since Miami has invested heavily in athletics on ice, also compete in "the National Collegiate Hockey Conference, and the U.S. Figure Skating Association." It's just that the phrase "an Ivy League school" indicates a whole lot other than athletics stuff, and "a Big Ten school" gives information about athletics and also other things. Big Ten schools usually run big-time professional (sic) sports operations, but equally usually can be found in respectable places in world ranking; there are Big Ten schools in the top 500; Miami University hasn't yet made the cut.

         Addition #2 is repeating a story of my first year teaching, at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in the mid-1960s.

         I was 22- or 23-years old, 5'2" tall (I've since shrunk as I've lost spinal discs), some place between 135 and 140 pounds in weight, and greeted by one of my students the first day with "You're the teacher?!" When my students and I went out for some beers on the last day of class, my students got pitchers with no problems and nearly pissed themselves laughing when I went to buy my round and was held up at the bar with demands for additional I.D.

         Get the picture? I wasn't exactly intimidating.

         Pretty much all my students were 18-year old frosh, and my experience working with 18-year old First-Years had most recently been as a fraternity officer in a house with a newly-strict pledge policy, a policy kept threateningly vague about what horrors an officer might visit upon pledges individually and/or collectively. So I was used to "positional authority" and receiving at least nominal respect from teenagers. What I wasn't used to was servility.

         More often than I found comfortable, I was asked, sometimes with just a hint of a whine, "What do you want," usually meaning — or the question was finished with — "What do you want me to write in my essay?" I eventually ventured to answer, "What do you want?" with "Let's start with some integrity. What is it you want to say?"

         I graded blind throughout my career — not looking at students' names — and pretty frequently had Departmental jobs where I dealt with issues of the ethics of teaching. I tried to be good, and I somewhat resented thinking my students would think I'd down-grade them if they didn't give me what I wanted in terms of what they had to say. (I damn well would downgrade for unambiguous errors in grammar, punctuation, and spelling; and in College Comp classes, issues of style aren't often ambiguous — but agreeing with the instructor wasn't a criterion for grades.)

         Anyway, I was one of the teachers who taught Farber's satiric essay, "The Student as Nigger" when it got circulated underground toward the end of the 1960s, and I asked my students now and then to consider carefully what was impled in the imagery of "brownnosing" or "sucking up" for a grade. Indeed, one of the more poignant moments in class was when a student said he'd "say anything for an 'A'", then paused and said softly, "I guess that makes me a grade-whore."

So: We have over time and in a significant number of places an instance of The Partial Karmic Balancing of Nastiness. Even as far, far too many students show disdain and contempt for their teachers, verily, even so, too many are "excellent sheep."

         That's only a very partial balancing, however: "sucking up to" is manipulation, and if a student is acting like a whore s/he reduces the instructor to a "john."

Boycott! (Orientation, O Parents of Undergrads)

      When I started college in 1961, the University of Illinois at Urbana ran an orientation for frosh (which I didn't bother with), but certainly felt no necessity to attempt to orient our parents.
        In my years at Illinois as an undergrad, the University claimed to be "in loco parentis" — i.e., in a parental relationship with students who could be seen as "legal infants" when convenient for Big U officials — but generally left us alone. There was, though, one custom that cut different ways, and interesting ways on matters parental. The Big U would accept payment for tuition and fees only from the student: no checks from the students' parents or guardians; students wrote the checks.
      Or the students paid cash. My memory of tuition and fees at the time was maybe $150 a semester or year for in-state students: a service charge, plus some important symbolism.
      When teaching (briefly) at the University of Illinois, I sometimes handled parental complaints — not necessarily against me — and found it really good to have a ready answer to the line, as an appeal for some benefit for some student, "I'm paying for my kids' education!" We could usually answer, "No, the people of the State of Illinois are paying for your offspring's education, with the taxpayers chipping in even for students from out of state. And for who's paying our service fees — well that you are is more than we know. It's the student's name on the class roster, and it's the student's check for tuition and fees."
      Nowadays, I'm sure, billing at the U of I is set up to get money from the deepest pockets around, and I'm very sure without checking that the great majority of payments are made by parents: cash, check, or maybe even PayPal, wire, or automatic deductions, but whenever the Big U can arrange it, by the parents.
       And that's too bad.
       When I worked at Miami University, Oxford, OH, I used to say that Miami U succeeded financially by "getting our fair share of young adults who go to college in Ohio and way more than our fair share of children who are sent." To repeat one of my main mantras as a university professor, College is for grownups, and it doesn't help that philosophy when colleges and universities aid and abet keeping young adults financially dependent upon their parents and encourage not just firmly-tied apron strings but what we used to call "the two-hundred-mile-long umbilical cord" and add, "And that really must be really uncomfortable 'cause the parent calling me is a guy."
       So parents of America unite in this: Next fall, drop your offspring off at college, do a little schlepping to help them move in, and then get the hell out, go home and enjoy the extra space and quiet around the house. Boycott orientation, and burn the glossy handout for heat and light.
       Then send a bit of that time you saved lobbying for more sensible ways of funding US higher ed. than the current weirdness of having the State offer (nearly) free schooling to parents' children while they're children, and then asking — demanding? — that parents pay huge amounts on education for offspring who should be adults.
       Tuition and fees should be paid directly by the students, and payment should be structured so that even working-class 18-year-olds can afford to pay.

Yesterday's Solution is Today's Problem (17 Sept. 2013)

            For a while during my academic career, before the Reagan Revolution stomped into submission the American labor movement, I was among a small group of activists trying to organize a faculty union at Miami University in. As we neared the vote on collective bargaining, one of my conservative colleagues said to me, "Come on, Rich! You know that five years after we get a union, you'll be fighting it"; and I said, "Probably," and quoted the old saying I may've just made up, "Yesterday's solution is today's problem."

            Less good as a comeback but more exact would be, "Yesterday's solutions are often today's issues, and, enacted improperly, tomorrow's problems."

            If you have heard of Robert Michels and "The Iron Law of Oligarchy" you know the basic rules with any large organization, snarkily but accurately summarized by Darcy K. Leach —as Wikipedia on Michels saith — as, "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts." A union would definitely have been a good idea for the Miami University faculty, but, yeah, after a few years it probably would've grown bureaucratic, at least mildly corrupt, and I'd have had my problems with it.

            Indeed, an arresting irony on solutions and problems is the fact that early bureaucracies were formed in order to increase efficiency and fairness. Think about that: a sentence with the words "bureaucracy," "efficiency," and "fairness," and not a single "not" or other negation. Efficient, effective, and fair bureaucracy: what a concept! Or maybe, we'd think, a perverse fantasy. Ah, but if your choice was either (a) some royal autocrat or his semi-literate second-cousin once removed finally getting around to handling your petition and deciding whether or not he liked you and whether or not you'd sucked up enough and bribed enough, on the one hand, or (b) on the other hand a more or less trained, more or less disinterested professional government official following set rules — hell, yes, go with the bureaucrat.

            The system of bureaucracy — complex administrative organization —solved a number of problems and still solves problems; but we don't often hear praise for bureaucratic efficiency, effectiveness, and fairness.

            Another example, from both earlier and later.

            When I was growing up, we increasingly heard horror stories of large state-run mental institutions as incarnations of The Snake Pit (a movie title from 1948) or some "Hotel California" where people were more gently, but permanently,  trapped. Large state mental hospitals, we were told, and some private ones, too, were hell-holes and abominations on the face of the Earth (including the asylum in Camarillo, California, just down he road from where I live). And after the perfecting, sort of, of a range of anti-psychotic drugs, various do-gooders could argue persuasively to close down the large mental hospitals and distribute most of the patients to small local treatment centers and hostels and half-way houses, where they could heal and learn to function in American society.

            By the time I was a young adult, state legislators were thrilled and delighted to vote to shut down the large mental hospitals and did so: there was little political cost from the closings, and the State saved money. More exactly, the State saved money closing down the large hospitals; setting up a large-scale system of local treatment centers and hostels and halfway houses would have cost figurative political capital and a lot of money. The first times I recall hearing the acronym NIMBY — "Not in My Back Yard" — was with resistance to setting up mini-asylums in anyone's neighborhood; and, of course, extensive, labor-intensive, humane care of small groups of crazy people is expensive.

            The upshot over the next few years was that the large institutions were shut down, the patients given their meds and some referrals, and then pretty much sent away.

            I'm overgeneralizing and oversimplifying here, but fuck it: the upshot for us today includes substantial numbers of insane people living with family and among friends unable to take care of them adequately — or homeless and on the streets.

            A major example comes from the excellent research of David Eisenman, a very bright young man at the time who, among other things, served as a number-crunching analyst for Richard Ogilvie, Gov. of the State of Illinois in the late 1960s. As John W. McCarter, Jr. recounts in an oral-history memoir of his years at the University of Illinois, "David worked the tuition issue very hard [… concluding] that low tuitions are a massive subsidy to middle class and upper middle class families. If you really wanted to assure equal access to educational opportunity, what you should be doing is charging high tuitions and then using the Scholarship Commission as a vehicle for providing assistance above tuition and fees to low income families to get their kids in the university system. And really all that the low tuition was doing was providing […] a massive subsidy to the middle class, and secondly it was creating a market system where you had private institutions with extremely high tuition and public institutions with low ones and it was driving the private institutions out of business."

            Variations on this analysis and subsequent policy recommendation replaced scholarship commissions with mechanisms for students to borrow money for college and then repay the loan through a Pay As You Earn (PAYE) program, in what was known as "the Yale Plan" or, in honor or Ohio Governor John J. Gilligan — who pushed for the program — "The Gilligan Plan."

            PAYE currently exists in the US in miniscule form, and there are significant programs in Australia and the UK, and suggestions for private versions for the US.

            Ideally, such a plan would operate on the Federal level, with loans paid back as a surtax on one's income tax, and such an approach would offer a number of advantages.

                        * As a surtax on income tax, people would pay back what they could when they could, through a system that's already established — the IRS — and highly efficient at collecting money. Those who went on to make good money could pay back a bit more than they borrowed, making up for those who couldn't pay back much, or at all. The system could be set up to not quite break even, with the Federal Government and the States pitching in a bit as a public investment. (And "State and Society" would pay for capital expenditures and the research and service functions of the system: the non-educational expenses that serve the public generally.)
                        * Making student pay for their educations would encourage them to take their schooling more seriously.
                        * Cutting parents out of the equation would get rid of a real weirdness in US funding for schools. It's at best odd for the State to pay for educating minor children and then expect parents to pay to school their adult offspring.
                        * PAYE programs would allow more people to go to school fairly easily later in life than "traditional college age." Eighteen to twenty-two is a fine age for school for many people but clearly not for all, not if you believe "College is for grownups."
                        * Most important, one of the results of the upheavals of the 1960s, was that older folk became much less willing to pay for college for "kids" who weren't theirs; increasingly, older folk came to see college students as privileged, ungrateful White children, or (increasingly) not White. PAYE would put the onus of paying for college on what angry White old people (and others) saw as those ungrateful, increasingly darker and more alien undergraduate thugs and graduate-school parasites.

            Anyway, Eisenman and his fellow policy wonks demonstrated quite convincingly that in any State with a regressive tax system — pretty much all of them —low-cost public higher education transferred money from richer people to poorer people. Obviously, this needed to be reformed; and there were several obvious ways such reforms could be accomplished.

            As things turned out, of course, as with mental health, so with education.

            State governments have indeed reduced sharply their subsidies to public higher education. Indeed, faculty and administrators used to joke at Miami U that as the subsidy per student decreased we went from a State University to State Supported to State Subsidized to State Assisted to State Located to "State Annoyed": with the wise and sovereign People of Ohio chipping in only a small percentage of what it cost to run the University.

            And, as Eisenman et al. wanted — and was and is right and just — tuition and fees increased, and increased far more and far faster than the reformers intended.

            What has not happened is compensating increases in no-strings scholarship money nor nation-wide PAYE nor anything like it.

            The 1970s solution to the unjust wealth transfers of low-tuition higher education became the issue of overly rapid increases in tuition in the years following, moving into today's problem and tomorrow's crisis of student debt.

            High student debt lacks the outright cruelty of pretty much throwing large numbers of mentally ill people onto the street, but crushing debt is bad enough.

            Even with the best of will, in a complex world, yesterday's solutions will often become problems. With stingy aging voters, avaricious bankers, and irresponsible legislators getting into the act, attempts at reform can be twisted into low-key horror shows.