Category Archives: education

public intellectuals

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Tim Burke sent me this morning to a good piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. In “Tales of Western Adventure” Particia Nelson Limerick describes a public sphere project of her own and at the same time makes an argument about the role of the humanities in public life that I wish I heard more often. Instead of pursuing “individualistic research, directed at arcane topics detached from real-world needs and written in inaccessible and insular jargon,” humanists should embrace the new world of applied research as Limerick has done at The Center of the American West that she chairs at The University of Colorado.

Limerick’s program reminds me very much of an ambitious program I once had a small part in called The Center for Texas Studies. It should have succeeded, for all the reasons Limerick marshals in describing her program at Colorado. But it didn’t. I think perhaps Texas Studies focused too much on heritage — a new center with the same name at TCU seems to do the same. But the former center also attempted to form alliances with business and non-profit communities, sponsoring programs on water, ecology, and other issue complexes with economic dimensions and attempting to “dissolve the barriers that block the full engagement of professors with the public.” Texas Studies probably failed, though, because of weak institutional support, a particular dean that didn’t see the virtue of it and the constant necessity of translating its work into FTEs. Which are ways of saying that UNT was still too dependent in those days on the traditional funding formulas of a former teachers’ college to accomplish much with generalized public sphere projects.

Today we see more and more academics emerging into the public sphere. I think especially of Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who regularly appears on Bill Moyers Journal. Jamieson and other humanists, such as Stanley Fish, who are making an impact on public discourse, suggest that the growing matrix of partnerships between the academy, government and business is entirely positive. But Moyers Journal recently carried a story that points up a serious problem area — quoting Melody Peterson, a journalist:

A very powerful technique that the drug companies spend millions and millions of dollars on is hiring physicians to give lectures to other physicians on their drugs. It looks like the physician is up there giving his independent position on this drug, but often he’s been trained by an advertising agency. His slide presentation has been created by an ad agency. It looks like independent science, but it’s not… They want to get as many articles published in our medical journals as they can that show their products in favorable lights and will get physicians to prescribe them, so they often hire a Madison Avenue ad agency to write up an article for them or a study. The name of the ad agency rarely appears in the published version; instead, they hire doctors to put their names on as author… It’s gone so far that some independent scientists are starting to view our medical literature as propaganda.

This state of affairs was the subject of a recent New York Times article, but reports like this have been in the news for a good many years now; here’s a 2003 article from the Guardian. Pharma is neither benign nor heroic, in spite of a slick image campaign linking it with white-coat clichés.

And the military–industrial complex isn’t benign either. Recent complicity of medical and psychological practicioners in the torture of so-called enemy combatants and others has caused both the American Medical and American Psychological Associations to reiterate ethical standards that prohibit such complicity. But the complicity goes on, or apparently it does.

The extent to which public discourse and practice have been poisoned not just by politicians but by intellectuals as well during the past quarter century sometimes leads me to wonder if there’s a remedy. Limerick optimistically compares today’s public humanists with Dante’s Virgil, “guiding [scientists and engineers] through the inferno of cultural anxieties, laypeople’s misunderstandings, and political landmines.” One may certainly hope.

But it isn’t Virgil who causes Dante to undertake the journey through hell and purgatory. Virgil is without hope; only his words are salvific. Dante’s true source of hope and the desire to emerge into the realm of the blessed is Beatrice (Inferno ii, 133-142), who is both eros and Christ’s vicar. Maybe I better not pursue that thought too far.

and it’s tempting too

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to comment on the dust-up going on in St. Louis about SLU’s new multi-million-dollar basketball coach, Rick Majerus, and Catholic Archbishop Raymond Burke. The Post-Dispatch has reviewed (and commented on) the story today. And the Post’s quotations from the SLU Faculty Handbook are telling, as are comments by President Biondi, Provost Weixlmann, and various board members who have been interviewed.

Burke is widely regarded as a fascist and a bully here in the gateway to the west, and not just by protestants. His boast that he would deny communion to John Kerry during the 2004 election got him brief national exposure, and he seems to have been looking for more ever since: publicly forcing a Missouri Catholic school to rescind its invitation to Senator Claire McCaskill to speak at her daughter’s commencement because of her views about women’s reproductive rights, attempting on similar grounds to shut down a popular local fundraiser because it featured Cheryl Crow and Billy Crystal, turning the screws on the dissenting Polish congregation at St. Stanislaus church for exercising its legal right to hold on to its property and assets, excommunicating two local Catholic women, who allowed themselves to be ordained priests, and threatening the Jewish congregation that gave them “sanctuary” when local Christian spaces were closed to them.

Burke is a piece of work, but he is much praised around the Catholic blogosphere. The full extent to which Burke and his boss, the former Cardinal Ratzinger, espouse a reactionary social (and geopolitical) agenda ad majorem dei gloriam may perhaps be seen here. If the notion of human family seems innocuous, one might remind oneself that the devil is in the details. Here, not only does the Vatican wrench the discourse of world peace into a reactionary defense of hierarchical family values, but it also yokes the conception of world peace to a retrograde ideological position on the science of global warming.

In this regard I’m also thinking of the Vatican’s recent defense of its suppression of Galileo. There was an interesting discussion of this history at Entangled States a while back. My view pretty much jibes with that of the commentator who remarked that, “the problem wasn’t what Galileo said or thought. The problem was that the Church had the power to punish him for what he said and thought – and that it did. Nobody would care about this incident otherwise.”

And nobody would care about the present dust-up in St. Louis if Majerus weren’t a high profile sports figure. That’s why SLU is defending him, as Bill McClellan implied in a recent column. And sports columnist Brian Burwell carries that general view even further. After recalling Arthur Ashe and other morally heroic sports figures, Burwell defends Majerus thus hopefully: “Imagine the power and influence that many of today’s athletes could carry if they chose to spend as much energy in social and political movements as they invest in shilling sneakers and energy drinks.”

not joining up

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Phyllis Schlafly has published a rant about English departments, which, she claims, “are the most radicalized of all [university] departments, more so than sociology, psychology, anthropology, or even women’s studies.” I know about this because I get news from the English department at SLU, where Schlafly’s “Advice to College Students: Don’t Major in English” is the topic of discussion on a new departmental listserv. I think this is one more thing I’ll not join. Schlafly, like David Horowitz, isn’t worth answering, and besides, I don’t give a flying fuck what Horowitz, Schlafly, and people who agree with them think.

Tim Burke has a couple of nice academic posts heading up his blog right now. I especially like his use of a quote from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger:

In America, the political left and political right have conspired to create a culture and politics of victimization, and all the benefits of resentment and cynicism have accrued to the right. That’s because resentment and apocalypse are weapons that can be used only to advance a politics of resentment and apocalypse. They are the weapons of the reactionary and the conservative — of people who fear and resist the future. Just as environmentalists believe they can create a great ecological politics out of apocalypse, liberals believe they can create a great progressive politics out of resentment; they cannot. Grievance and victimization make us smaller and less generous and can thus serve only reactionaries and conservatives.

I rather think Nordhaus and Shellenberger are correct, but I also think there’s no point in answering pundits on the right who preach resentment and apocalypse. It’s preaching to the choir; and besides, statements such as: “That’s why it was no surprise that Cho Seung-Hui, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, was an English major,” don’t need to dignified by an answer.

On the other hand, one might be grateful that English departments matter enough to be attacked by Schlafly, though she points out that “only 1.6 percent of America’s 19 million undergraduates major in English, according to Department of Education figures.” The late unlamented culture wars were mostly about what was or was not being taught in English departments. I guess that continues to be true, even though the wench is dead. And I think Shakespeare, whom Schlafly brings up as a casualty of the culture wars, is not about to be buried in the off-campus stacks. Shakespeare belongs, more than ever and as much as he always has, to popular culture, which is now giving us a new and kitschy version of the reign of his queen that I’m dying to see.

Tags: http://www.staying-awake.org, http://www.whyhcg.com, http://www.myprovigil.com

university news

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This weekend, the Saint Louis University board of directors voted to support the university administration in its determination to revoke the charter guaranteeing the independence of the eighty-six-year-old University News, the university’s student newspaper. According to the St. Louis Post Dispatch, the board’s vote also established a ten-day period during which student leaders have the opportunity to “express their concerns.”

Students have every right to be concerned, since they will lose the ability to choose their editor and since control of the publication will be placed with the SLU office of student development, an office that has a frankly public-relations mission. Kent Porterfield, who heads that office, has said that the administration only wishes to improve the quality of the paper, but the intent seems clearly to muzzle the student publication, which in the past has been sharply critical of high-handed administration actions. Observers are saying that the board intends the administration to go back and negotiate with the students. How likely the administration is to negotiate in good faith is anybody’s guess, but this is the second time the administration has sought to silence the University News.

This story has generated a good deal of support for the student journalists. In an editorial last week the Post Dispatch wrote that “the administration’s claim that the proposed changes will not affect editorial integrity rings hollow”; and the Saint Louis Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists went on record asking the SLU board to reject the administration proposal, saying:

The St. Louis Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists is troubled by reports concerning the University News, the student newspaper at Saint Louis University. The chapter believes a proposed change to the newspaper’s charter will stifle the publication’s editorial independence and freedom of expression on campus. . . .

A student newspaper is not an instrument that belongs solely to the university. The newspaper is a public forum where students can freely express themselves and exchange ideas about their community and the world. It should reflect the academic and intellectual freedom found in an internationally renowned institution of higher education.

Rather than trampling on students’ First Amendment rights, the St. Louis Chapter invites the university to adopt the SPJ’s Campus Media Statement, which states that campus publications “are designated public forums and free from censorship and advance approval of content.”

How likely it is that Saint Louis University’s present administration will constitute the University News a public forum free from censorship may be gleaned from a few facts. Here is part of University News editor Diana Benanti’s description of the students’ meeting with university provost, Joseph Weixlmann, in which the university’s intentions were announced.

Today, April 30, the Editorial Board of the University News and the current and newly-elected presidents of the Student Government Association met with the Vice President of Student Development Kent Porterfield and Provost Joe Weixlmann. (Dr. Avis Meyer, the “unofficial adviser” of the U.News and my attorney Tim E. Hogan were asked to leave before the meeting began, or Weixlmann refused to conduct the meeting. They waited outside).

And here’s an account of the meeting itself, from the May 4 issue of the News;

. . . On Monday, April 30, the editorial board of The University News met with Provost Joe Weixlmann, Ph.D., and Vice President for Student Development Kent Porterfield, Ed.D. After their adviser emeritus was persuaded to leave the room, students were informed that administrators planned to ask the Board of Trustees to revoke the organization’s charter at the Board’s meeting this weekend. Students were then told that they had two options: as individuals, they could attempt to start a completely independent, off-campus newspaper, without financial assistance and distribution rights, to be determined later. Or, they could join a new, university-sponsored newspaper, accepting a charter written by administrators, which was absolutely devoid of the editorial board’s input. Weixlmann and Porterfield made it clear that, though student input would be considered, no conceptual changes would be made to the administration’s new draft of the charter.

Benanti filed suit against the university when tuition remission she was promised as editor was revoked this past year. Why Weixlmann refused to conduct the meeting with the student’s advocates present, common sense can judge. Weixlmann has also dropped a couple of hints about financial improprieties at the University News, but the paper has been subjected to two recent unanounced audits (for what purpose one can only speculate), and no financial improprieties have been found.

Common sense can also judge what is behind the reorganization of the University News if one remembers the fairly long list of administrative decisions about which the paper has complained over the past few years. Mention of many of these may be found in the Post Dispatch editorial and on the current University News op/ed page. According to the Post Dispatch,

Over the years, the award-winning newspaper occasionally has clashed with Rev. Biondi, criticizing decisions to sell the university’s hospital, raise parking fees and graduation fees and dismiss popular teachers. One recent scathing editorial, reviewing a number of administrative decisions made without substantive student participation, wrote that “SLU resembles an authoritarian regime.”

University president, Lawrence Biondi, the authority in authoritarian, has said regarding the University News that it is “very important” that he help the paper “once again become a student newspaper that offers a respected, responsible voice.” This is the same Lawrence Biondi whom the University News exposed as a plagiarist in 2005 and who has recently fired basketball coach Brad Soderberg. About the firing, one local sportswriter declared, “Multiple sources told me [athletic director Cheryl] Levick had assured the parents of potential recruits that Soderberg’s job was safe — and now SLU’s word is dirt.”

The destruction of the University News shames Saint Louis University similarly–and it shames the Society of Jesus. One may hope that Diana Benanti is right that there is a 50/50 chance that the university will negotiate in good faith with the students. Perhaps one may hope as well that the Jesuits, who have often spoken truth to power, might find the will to remedy this wrong.