Category: <span>War</span>

Nodding Like Stanley Fish

August 31, 2009 5:00 am \ 1 Comment \ by Ray Watkins

Founded by Lynne Cheney and Jerry Martin in 1995, ACTA (I quote from its website) is “an independent, non-profit organization committed to academic freedom, excellence and accountability at America’s colleges.” Sounds good, but that “commitment” takes the form of mobilizing trustees and alumni in an effort to pressure colleges and universities to make changes in their curricula and requirements. Academic institutions, the ACTA website declares, “need checks and balances” because “internal constituencies” — which means professors — cannot be trusted to be responsive to public concerns about the state of higher education.

The battle between those who actually work in the academy and those who would monitor academic work from the outside has been going on for well over 100 years and I am on record (in “Save The World On Your Own Time” and elsewhere ) as being against external regulation of classroom practices if only because the impulse animating the effort to regulate is always political rather than intellectual.

August 24, 2009, 9:30 pm, What Should Colleges Teach?, Stanley Fish

I’ve been watching ACTA for a year or more simply because they are a very reliable guide to the reactionary academic mind. Increasingly, too, they are a great guide to the way conservative thinking is going undercover, attempting to hide its messages beneath a veneer of common sense thinking. The latest manifestation of the emerging agenda is www.whatwilltheylearn.com.

I am not sure I like “nodding along” with Stanley Fish, but I was. (I’m not surprised to find that he would feign surprise when he agrees with a very conservative organization.) I don’t agree with everything he says, of course. It’s not so easy to create a course that is “only about writing.” I am suspicious of a list of goals for a writing course that begins with “grammar.”

On other hand Fish seems to see the ACTA’s agenda pretty clearly. They use a modern sounding rhetoric focusing on creating and or maintaining communities when in fact the goal is to disrupt or even disband communities in the name of a restoration of what was supposed to be an American golden age. Pre-homosexuality, pre-feminist, pre-minority and so on.

American democracy matured, at least to some extent, and things got complicated and messy and the ACTA would like universities to take up the goal of making things simple again. I think Fish is also right when he suggests that ACTA’s not so hidden agenda is the autonomy of the university, particularly the academic freedom of individual professors.

Fish and the ACTA are exaggerating, of course. Most people who teach at colleges are not tenured professors and so do not have the sort of academic freedom that Fish seems to suggest is the norm. So Fish is being as nostalgic as the ACTA. Fish seems to see the ACTA as a vanguard instead of a gesture that seeks to consolidate goals already achieved.

What’s at stake here is not so much ‘general education’ as the leadership of U.S. education and the system of privileges accorded to the academic elite. Neither Fish nor the ACTA are much concerned that writing, for example, is by and large taught by adjuncts and graduate students. It’s not about the rest of us. They are fighting over the power of top-of-the-pyramid professors.

Posted in: Professional, War

Ours and Mine

April 10, 2009 7:42 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

I use roads that I don’t own. I have immediate access to 99% of the roads and highways of the world (with a few exceptions) because they are a public commons. We are all granted this street access via our payment of local taxes. For almost any purpose I can think of, the roads of the world serve me as if I owned them. Even better than if I owned them since I am not in charge of maintaining them. The bulk of public infrastructure offers the same “better than owning” benefits.

The web is also a social common good. The web is not the same as public roads, which are “owned” by the public, but in terms of public access and use, the web is a type of community good. The good of the web serves me as if I owned it. I can summon it in full, anytime, with the snap of a finger. Libraries share some of these qualities. The content of the books are not public domain, but their displays (the books) grant public access to their knowledge and information, which is in some ways better than owning them.

Kevin Kelly, The Technium, Better than Owning

I continue to be fascinated by the ways in which the economic impasse is eating away at older property forms and creating the possibility for new forms. The textbook industry is a good example. Suddenly, materially privileged professors and administrators are ‘discovering’ that textbooks are expensive.

“We can fix it,” they say, as if they were not, in part, responsible for this inaccessibility. Still, whatever the origins, online textbooks are going to kill off the textbook industry– of course, something equally awful might arise in its place. In any case, this might be one of those silver linings in the dark recession clouds.

These musings and potentials are complicated and unpredictable. The CD may disappear but the LP seems to be back, complete with free digital download of the music so you can play it on your MP3 player as well as your turntable. Some of the musing, however, doesn’t make much sense.

I like the way Kevin Kelly mulls over the things he, personally, does not own but uses daily. These are our collective wealth: the highways, much of the internet, and so on. He’s less persuasive when he linke these forms of ownership and rent-to-own schemes or leasing. These are mostly confidence games.

The root problem, I think, lies in the lack of a critical economics in popular culture. Economics as commonly discussed, is business economics, that is, discussions of how to make capitalism work better. You have to venture fairly far out to the periphery to find anti-capitalist economics.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Online Places, War

Wishful Thinking

March 30, 2009 6:43 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

The Millennium Villages project offers a bold, innovative model for helping rural African communities lift themselves out of extreme poverty. The Millennium Villages are proving that by fighting poverty at the village level through community-led development, rural Africa can achieve the Millennium Development Goals—global targets for reducing extreme poverty and hunger by half and improving education, health, gender equality and environmental sustainability—by 2015, and escape the extreme poverty that traps hundreds of millions of people throughout the continent.

With the help of new advances in science and technology, project personnel work with villages to create and facilitate sustainable, community-led action plans that are tailored to the villages’ specific needs and designed to achieve the the Millennium Development Goals.

About the Villages

Positive thinking can be a bad thing if it blinds you to criticism and ongoing problems. Pessimism, though, can be just as bad if it prevents you from seeing potential and the possibility of change. So when someone, person or organization, makes large claims it’s important to try to find some balance between skepticism and wishful thinking.

That’s why it can be so difficult to think though the idea that poverty could be eliminated in the same way that certain diseases have been eliminated over the last century. A century ago, of course, we did not know enough about the origins of diseases to really understand how we might prevent them. And, of course, we have only eliminated a few.

In fact, the very techniques we developed to fight diseases caused their own problems; bacterial resistance to antibiotics, for example. And new diseases have arisen, such as the AIDS pandemic, that may not be resolved, much less controlled, for decades or more. So when we say we can eliminate poverty we have to be cautious about what we mean.

Still, projects like the Millennium Villages illustrate that there is a lot of common sense yet to be applied to the problem of eliminating hunger and poverty. We save an enormous amount of energy– in every sense– if we buy food aide regionally rather than shipping it from the United States. African farmers are willing and able to grow their own crops.

Similarly, it makes sense to apply some sort of systemic thinking to poverty. That means considerations of sustainability and scale, as well as a focus on agriculture, education, health, and infrastructure. This is not your father’s Care Package, dropped by parachute when famine strikes. I think there is every reason to be hopeful about this new model.

Posted in: Autobiographical, Economics, Language, Online Places, War, Writing

Capitalism 101: Market Think

March 9, 2009 7:47 am \ Leave a Comment \ by Ray Watkins

“Mixed Drive for Autovehicles.”

“Be it known that I, Henri Pieper, a subject of the King of Belgium, residing at 18 Rue des Bayards, in Liege, Belgium, have invented new and useful Improvements in Mixed Drives for Autovehicles…The invention…comprises an internal combustion or similar engine, a dynamo motor direct connected therewith, and a storage battery or accumulator in circuit with the dynamo motor, these elements being cooperatively related so that the dynamo motor may be run as a motor by the electrical energy stored in the accumulator to start the engine or to furnish a portion of the power delivered by the set, or may be run as a generator by the engine, when the power of the latter is in excess of that demanded of the set, and caused to store energy in the accumulator.”

Henri Pieper, quoted in Hybrid Cars, March 1, 2009

This is one of those choice little fragments of information that should become the set piece for any introductory study of capitalist economics. It’s so rich it’s hard to figure out what to say. It’s a good way to start deflating the myth of capitalist innovation and the market.

The hybrid car is still not common a hundred years after it was patented because there was so little profit it. It didn’t matter if it was or was not a good idea, a practical idea, or even an ingenious idea, or a visionary idea. The market takes up the innovation only money can be made.

The market doesn’t drive innovation, it drives profitable innovation. That’s why the idea that the market can fix the energy problem, to cite only one example, is so misleading. As the president makes clear, the government has to push and nudge and often shove the market to make it move in any reasonable direction.