Writing Well

Last night, I witnessed the culminating session of the Senior Seminar for the English Department. It was a great event. Each student prepared a short (4-7 page) statement of what they believe. They read the statements aloud. The essays were personal, poignant, and revealing. It was an honor to be an audience member and hear the truths they were describing. It also reminded me of how hard it is to write well. The essays charmed me because they dug deep to reveal truths about their authors. The writing was personal but universal, always revelling in the messiness of what it means to be human. It really struck me that writers, both students and scholars, take the easy road and substitute cliches and canards for truth. To write well, one must be willing to look at oneself and one's world in unsentimental way. These young writers helped give me a bit more faith in the possibility of writing to reveal and improve truths about humanity and ourselves.

Top Ten Most Played Jazz Tunes

I was playing around with my Ipad and learned that this is mylist of most played Jazz Tunes:

"Money Jungle" by Duke Ellington, Charlie Mingus, and Max Roach
"I'll Play the Blues for You" by Jason Moran
"A Night in Tunisia" by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers
"Street Sounds" by Charlie Hunter
"My Favorite Things" by John Coltrane
"Blue Train" by John Coltrane
"Blue Monk" by Thelonius Monk
"St. James Infirmary" by Hot Lips Page
"There's No You" by Coleman Hawkins
"Testifyin'" by Benny Green

First off, I am surprised who is missing. There are no songs from Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, or Errol Garner.

Second, I am not surprised that Coltrane and Hawkins are on the list as I have been listening to those guys for twenty years!

Third, it confirmed my love for saxophone and piano jazz. The surprise is that Charlie Hunter and Art Blakey snuck in there!

What are your top ten played (not necessarily your favorite) jazz tunes?

Toni Morrison and Snooki: More Evidence of the Decline of Higher Education

The USA today just announced that Rutgers paid Snooki (of Jersey Shore fame) more money for a talk on campus than they will pay Toni Morrison (Nobel Prize winner) to give their commencement address. Both are being paid well (over $30,000) but the very idea that somehow bringing Snooki to a major college costs more than bringing Morrison and that this has happened at a major research university suggests how very wrong things are in higher education! This is not a critique of Rutgers because I think this could happen almost anywhere. It just makes me sigh!

The Irrelevance of Ideas to Education?

In my local newspaper, a columnist observed that tenure used to be a way to protect teachers from being fired for dangerous ideas but it has morphed into merely a way to secure a quasi-permant job.



I don't want to evaluate this claim whether it is true, although I suspect it may be the practical effect of most tenure decisions. Rather, I want to explore a potentially hidden assumption within this comment: Ideas either don't matter or have become irrelevant to teaching and learning. Now, the columnist (a former principal) does not actually make this case anywhere in his article. As is typical, his concern is about creating effective schools.



What confuses me is his sense that we could have good schools without an engagement with potentially controversial ideas. Or, in other words, tenure is no longer needed because teachers should simply teach skills and the fear of getting fired for holding, espousing, or exploring a controversial idea is just plain outdated. Given I live in a fairly conservative part of the country, there is plenty of local concern about governmental intrusions into individual freedoms, especially in terms of guns, religion, and the right to be entreprenurial (ok that last one is not in the Bill of Rights but lots of people think it ought to be). This would suggest to me that folks around here believe the government can and frequently does interfere with our lives but that intervention is just not a pressing issue for education.



All of this suggests that education, as popularly conceived, is no longer about ideas but about skill development and empolyment preparation. As long as education is framed in this way, the defense of tenure on the grounds of intellectual freedom and the need to explore controversial ideas will not be successful.



Perhaps more significantly, if education is "just" skill development and employment preparation (as opposed to training to become engaged and productive citizens), then the argument for public education and public funding for education seems diminished. If students and their families are merely investing in their personal financial futures, then why should society bear this cost?



Moreover, reframing education as vocational training begs the question of where society should debate what needs to be done with all that vocational training. If students are taught how to do things (from engineering to physical therapy to human resource management), where will they explore what they should do? What is their ethical obligations and the role of government, economics, personal responsibility, etc.?



The columnist persuaded me that defenses of tenure cannot rest on job security. Rather, they must emphasize the dangers of taking controversial ideas out of the classroom. Tenure is needed to help students engage dangerous ideas and develop their own ethical voice and their ability to become critical thinkers. Our country depends not only technical know-how about but the freedom to ask questions, especially questions about the nature of the good life and the good society.

A Hiphop Take on What is Going on in Egypt

Great new song about what is going on Egypt!

Check out http://www.hiphopdx.com/index/singles/id.13786/title.freeway-f-amir-sulaiman-ayah-the-narcicyst-and-omar-offendum-january-25th

That opening lyric is awesome!

Derrida interviews Ornette Coleman!

All I can say is wow!

http://http://www.ubu.com/papers/Derrida-Interviews-Coleman_1997.pdf

Hiphop Journalism vs Hiphop Scholarship

I just finished Dan Charnas’s The Big Payback. The book offers a wonderfully rich account of how hiphop went from local party music to becoming a culture linked to music, fashion, movies, comedy, and even water. I would recommend it to any hiphop fan or anyone interested in American popular culture. It is great. Charnas has done a great job, especially all of his contacts to Rick Rubin, Russell Simons, and the editors at The Source. He weaves together dozens of stories of major figures behind the scenes who helped shape hiphop’s rise to popular culture prominence.

The book, however, also made me realize the very different stakes in academic and popular writing. Popular writing seems to offer a bevy of interesting facts and stories. What it does not provide is a review of the contemporary literature, a complete discussion of historical context, much analysis of meaning or philosophy, or a discussion of the political import of the subject. This kind of journalistic writing is mostly descriptive, not analytical, critical or even ethical. Put another way, I learned a lot of facts from The Big Payback but I am not sure if it changed how I viewed hiphop. It left existing narratives about hiphop pretty much intact.

None of this means that Charnas’s book is not good. It is excellent. It will be referenced and taught for a long time. And that is a good thing. However, scholars want to dig deeper and ask more probing questions about the political economy of the contemporary music industry and what that means for the actual content of hiphop we hear.

Education of Martin Luther King

In today's Springfield New's Leader, I published on a piece on King and the Civil Rights movement's connection to the humanities:

http://www.news-leader.com/article/20110117/OPINIONS02/101170308/Schur-Educational-values-aided-civil-rights-movement

I really hope people use the day to think about the ideas and values that shaped King and the entire movement.

Praise for the Kindle

I just purchased my first first e-reader, the Kindle. After two days of playing with it, I already love it. Although I tend to be a bit of a Luddite, this device - which lacks the sizzle of Ipod/Itouch/Ipad and their mutlifunctionality - does so much that I suspect that it or another e-reader will replace physical texts sooner than I thought.

Here is some of what I like it about it:

• lots of free classics - I already have copies of Scarlet Letter, Crime & Punishment, Endichron, and The Illiad on it.
• I love the free samples that Amazon provides of books. It makes me feel like I am browsing at a library or bookstore wherever I am.
• The books download unbelievably quickly
• I purchased the wifi version - no the 3 G one - and found it very easy to connect to the networks at home and work.
• Easy to e-mail pdfs to the kindle. In seconds, I added five reseach articles in pdf. I did not have to print out the articles, thus saving a lot of paper and without having to create a file system either, and will allow me to bring home research in an easy manner.
• It is easy to highlight key passages and very easy to review them.
• I will never be at a loss for a book to read ever again.
• Traveling with the kindle will save me the hassle of bringing books and research articles! I cannot wait.

I am looking forward to buying some newspaper and magazine subscriptions and seeing if that might alway me to get rid of my physical subscriptions. If that would work out, I would love it. I encourage anyone to try it out.