Category Archives: Writing

http://vimeo.com/41351122

It’s a cliché in U.S. politics (and a truism) that presidential candidates are more extreme in primaries, when they are seeking votes from party loyalists and activists, and then more centrist in the election itself, when they must appeal to the broadest possible audience. The incumbent, of course, has to be circumspect, given that his positions are, in effect, policy. So President Obama sounds more or less the same, while Romney has changed dramatically.

What’s new is both the timing– Romney didn’t make a slow shift away from the far-right, he made a sudden, wild lurch in just a few weeks– and the degree: Romney isn’t simply changing position, he is reversing himself completely, saying yes when he would have said no just a few weeks ago. He thought leaving Iraq was premature and the announced date a comfort to our enemies. Now the war had to end and he agrees with the date.

My students and I are studying rhetorical devices this week and it strikes me that the Romney campaign has by all signs decided that even an open lie is just another rhetorical device, like hyperbole or a simile, and as such it has no ethical or moral implications. I think that this has to be related, in some fashion, to that 47% video and to what Romney thinks about the audience for his political arguments. He thinks that we just won’t notice.

I suspect that he and his campaign have calculated that the mainstream media is loath to use the word lie, less it appear nonobjective and partisan. In effect, this means that the real rhetorical device is hidden behind another: euphemism. It’s not that Romney is lying about his position on the automobile industry, it’s just that he is “moderating his position.” It works because it uses the assumptions of journalism against itself.

But this is the first time in my memory when our leaders — presidents and deans and boards of trustees — have so energetically opened the doors of the house of learning to commerce. It is the first time that they’ve shown willingness to insert the entrepreneurs directly into our day-to-day teaching lives. In the past they have stood between us and the market. Though the members of American boards of trustees often come from business, they have understood that the hunger for wealth is not compatible with genuine intellectual life.

“The Internet Agenda,” Mark Edmundson

I hate to disagree with Mr. Edmundson. In fact, I think that his analogy to football is precisely right. Given that business people have an overwhelming presence on university governing boards, money is likely to have a very high priority as the great public tortoise lifts it slow head and begins to face the once fast-moving for-profit hares, now tripped up by their own excesses. It won’t be public service that wakes the administrative beast.

Universities get swallowed up by their football programs, as Mr. Edmundson rightly notes, and some are sure to get swallowed up by their online programs once someone demonstrates the money that can be made. That is, assuming that these programs get off the ground at all, which I believe they will, eventually. I’d qualify his arguments in some ways. MOOC’s are not as potentially profitable and so dangerous as general education courses, for example.

In the medium to long run, I think that the online equivalent of football is more likely to be general education courses such as Freshman English which have long been the steady breadwinners of higher education. That remains to be seen. My real quibble with Mr. Edmundson is his sense of history; the “entrepreneurs” entered our classrooms decades ago. Nothing has shaped higher education more than their labor cost cutting ideology.

In fact, it’s this very labor-saving agenda– the erosion of tenure and the casualization of teaching– that will be the foundation of any program that generates those game-changing revenues. The key to these funds isn’t only technology and ubiquitous broadband, it will be the cheap labor of adjuncts, on the one hand, and the historical blindness of the public, on the other, including, it seems, far too many tenured professors.

Copyright holders lost another battle this week in their legal war with universities over the boundaries of educational “fair use” in the digital age. A district court judge on Wednesday issued a decision in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, a year-long lawsuit over a shared digital repository based at the University of Michigan.

The decision comes on the heels of a similarly disappointing decision for copyright holders in a landmark infringement case involving electronic reserves at libraries; and a second defeat in another copyright case involving online video streaming at the University of California at Los Angeles.

“A Legal Sweep” Steve Kolowich

We tend to think of property as fixed but it isn’t; it’s evolving at a steady pace under contemporary technological and scientific pressures. Commercial interests want to keep private property as narrowly defined as possible to ensure profitability; educators and open science and technology advocates want to use governmental policy and law to make knowledge and information more accessible and so loosen capital’s grip.

If these three legal rulings are any indication, the corporate attempt to define intellectual property narrowly is failing, in very stark contrast to what’s happened in science.”The patent,” as the Center for Responsible Genetics reminds us, “has become the primary mechanism through which the private sector has advanced its claims to ownership over genes, proteins, and entire organisms.” Maybe that light at the end of the tunnel isn’t a train after all.