... on students today. I'm sure if pressed he would acknowledge there are plenty of exceptions to his rule. He's probably taught people whose dedication and commitment and eagerness to learn are exceptional. Most teachers have. But at the same time, it's instructive to hear him distill his teaching experiences into a characterization of collective youth entitlement. No doubt his comments will offend some, and some will argue that he's overstating his case or irresponsibly generalizing. But at the same time, he's attempting to characterize the overall tenor of his teaching experiences--and, quite self-consciously, to pinpoint truths we as a culture are reluctant to face. You can't come to grips with anything unless you generalize--nor can you judge. And informed judgement, as unpleasant as it may be, is a vital process of learning, problem-solving, and constructive change.

I adore Francine Prose. Blue Angel is a remarkable account of mutual manipulation within an academic setting--a student and a teacher both use one another sexually and otherwise ... but it's the student who wins (by casting herself as a victim) and the professor who loses (by being dumb enough--or horny enough--to forget that students do tend to hold the trump cards after they've slept with their professors). It was not always thus -- but it sure is now. And that's what Prose examines in Blue Angel, which avoids cheap moralizing (student-teacher sex is bad!) while still exploring how, well, student-teacher sex is really pretty bad. If there is a moral to the story, it's about campus policies that oversimplify such things through binary caricatures of victim and victimizer. Prose does lovely suggestive things with this idea, connecting it, for example, to deep and abiding Puritanical impulses to judge and punish. For Prose, our sex-saturated culture is still a very Puritanical one, and she sees the contemporary campus as one place where that can be lavishly staged. Prose knows whereof she speaks--the inspiration for the novel came from her own experiences watching a campus witch hunt centered on a friend who was accused of sexual harassment. Read Blue Angel if you haven't, and read, too, Prose's essay about watching her friend go through the campus morality wringer.

But that doesn't mean you need to read her latest. I spent the weekend with Goldengrove, Prose's new novel about a thirteen-year-old girl whose world is turned upside down after her sister Margaret drowns. Built around the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem "Spring and Fall (to a young child)," the novel sets out to think about mourning, youth, memory, and poetry -- and it does do all these things. But it does them in a bored and disaffected way. The novel is flat where it should be moving, bland where it ought to surprise, and, in the end, it reads rather like writing it was a slog. The idea is great, many of the plot elements have great potential ... but the spark just wasn't there.

If you don't know the Hopkins poem, by the way, you should. Here it is:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

I was going to do a post about this Inside Higher Ed piece about a panel at the 2008 MLA convention entitled "Conference Sex." But then I realized that I had nothing to say. The non-seriousness narcissism of the panel speaks for itself--as does the aggressiveness with which the panelists seek to dignify their masturbatory ruminations as thoughtful commentary on the State of the Profession. Plus, I wasn't there--I only read about the panel online--and I don't really want to get into one of those predictable, snotty, culture-war declensions about how if you weren't there to see the panel, you can't have any sort of opinion about it. So I'll just leave it at that, and note that articles like this remind me why I left academia; my revulsion at this sort of self-indulgent academic posturing is intense and personal--once upon a time, I was producing "scholarship" in rather a similar vein, believing I was doing something valuable and real, but really only functioning as a sort of one-trick pony (first as grad student pleasing professors, then as assistant professor seeking promotion) in a self-indulgent discipline that treasures its diverting, shallow sideshows and rewards them as legitimate academic work. It's embarrassing to think back on. But it's been instructive indeed to recognize the one-trick pony thing for what it was, and to move on from it.

So. Let us turn from from callow panels to good questions. In the same issue of IHE, below the fold, here is the Pope Center's Jane Shaw on higher ed's efforts to get hold of a piece of the forthcoming federal stimulus package:

I'm sure that the 51 presidents, chancellors, regents, and heads of university associations who signed an open letter to President-elect Obama believe that their request for a share of the expected federal stimulus package is in the country's best interests. Although I personally cringe at what I view as self-serving pleas, I am confident that they believe in what they are doing.

At the same time, it might be helpful to look at just how narrow a vision guides this request and why satisfying the plea is unlikely to achieve the noble goals that the letter alludes to.

Specifically, the signatories, convened by the Carnegie Corporation of New York, are asking the federal government to spend $40-45 billion in the form of capital investment--direct expenditures on "shovel-ready" construction projects, mostly at public universities. The federal funds would be distributed to the states on the basis of population and would be channeled through governors, bypassing state legislatures.

Their request is wrapped in rather elevated rhetoric that stresses several things: the need to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, the need to have a strong university system, and the fact that the nation is "losing ground" as measured by a number of educational indicators. The letter invokes historic events such as the Morrill Act, the National Academy of Sciences, and the GI Bill as precedents.

Let's look at this proposal more closely.

Why did these educators choose capital funding--that is, constructing "essential classroom and research buildings and equipping them with the latest technologies"? Wouldn't tuition discounts, tax credits, more scholarships, or even faculty salaries be more directly related to the problems that they decry? After all, they justify the request on the grounds that the United States is slipping against other countries in the percentage of the population with higher education degrees; that minorities have poor graduation rates; and that college tuitions have been rising nearly three times as fast as median family income.

FIRE reports that 74 percent of American colleges and universities have speech codes on the books. Apologists for those codes argue that they aren't enforced--or that they are necessary from a liability standpoint. Don't listen to them. This short film documents what such codes produce.

I suspect I am not alone in being beyond tired of the academic culture wars. They really don't solve anything, and they polarize the folks who ought to be working together toward beneficial higher ed reform. If you are sick of the culture wars, too, you may find this recent debate between ACTA president Anne Neal and Penn State English professor Michael Berube refreshing and encouraging.

The occasion: the National Communications Association annual conference, held last month in San Diego. The topic: Bias in the classroom. The back story: Much controversy, and a program that originally featured David Horowitz v. Berube. There was so much controversy, in fact, that the ensuing reasonable, cordial, and constructive exchange between two people who were expected to stage some classic culture war pyrotechnics comes across as a radical and welcome break from the norm. Here's to a new and better norm centered on civility, real intellectual exchange, pragmatic problem solving, and common ground. If we can have more discussions like this one, we might begin to get something done.

The whole thing lasts an hour. So you may have to listen in dribs and drabs. But it's worth it.

UPDATE 12/30: For contrast, see this account of David Horowitz's appearance at this year's annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, currently taking place in San Francisco. At least as Inside Higher Ed recounts it, this was a far less collegial and constructive encounter, with threats of disruption, name-calling happening on both sides, leaflets protesting Horowitz's invitation (and comparing him to Goebbels), security detail, a restive audience that sank more than once into nastiness, and other exciting culture-war-type sideshow attractions. Meanwhile, the article notes, nothing new was said, and the event proceeded according to established, stylized, boring norms ("Horowitz didn't break new ground in his critiques of academe--nor did Horowitz's critics in their analysis of him.") The MLA deserves props for trying. But they just wound up staging another round in a standardized stand-off, and not a dialogue. Maybe next year the MLA can invite Anne Neal and host a real discussion.