Salinas v. Texas

There has been a lot written about the NSA surveillance program because it offends contemporary notions of privacy. My previous blog post addressed how the right to privacy has racial, class, and gender connotations.

I want to follow that up with the relative silence about the United States Supreme Court's recent decision in Salinas v. Texas. The case is about how prosecutors used the defendant's silence before he was in custody and given the Miranda warnings as evidence of his guilt. The facts are that the police asked the Salinas about questions about a murder. He answered some but refused to answer others. The state then argued at trial that his silence suggests guilt.

 Slate has a pretty good piece on the case and why this is both bad reasoning and bad for police.  The majority argued that Salinas did not invoke his rights properly. Scalia and Thomas, siding with the majority, argued that the Fifth Amendment should be merely limited to requiring the defendant to testify and not be applicable if a prosecutor mentions this silence.

It is stunning to see the conservative wing, so-called originalists and textualists, transfer so much power to the state in criminal prosecutions and reduce the scope of the Bill of Rights, given their hostility to government in so many other aspects of our lives (e.g. the NSA surveillance program). However, this decision like so many of the past twenty years have continually sought to roll back the criminal justice revolution of the 1960s and 1970s and give prosecutors, the police, and the state more power and defendants (i.e. ordinary people) fewer rights. The result has been to make the United States the world's leader in incarcerating its own citizens. The Patriot Act and the NSA surveillance program would have been impossible without the erosion of fourth and fifth amendment during the War on Drugs. I find it ironic that most Americans or at least most pundits are horrified when they see how the criminal justice system treats them, like it has been treating criminal defendants. It is just another reminder that we need to defend the rights of even the worst offender if we are to have a robust and meaningful Bill of Rights.

Race, Privacy, and the NSA Prism Scandal

Recent revelations about the NSA's PRISM program has generated alarm about the state of privacy law in the United States. While some writers have begun to question the initial shock, I want to just take a moment to remind everyone that the history of privacy rhetoric has always had class, gender, and racial undertones. In our edited collection, Lovalerie King and I were able to publish Karla Holloway's great essay, "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Right to Privacy." There, she shows how it was two elite white men (Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis) who developed the legal concept, after journalists sought to report about one of their children's birthday parties. What makes Holloway's essay so good is that she shows how Warren and Brandeis basically urged a new constitutional right based on the expectations to which  white wealthy men believed they were entitled. The majority of Americans, then or now, have rarely been able to shut their mansion's gate and keep the world at bay. The rhetoric of privacy has benefitted some groups but more often it has been denied to women, racial minorities, or the poor in service of other supposed national interests. This "scandal" should remind us that there is much work still be to done in achieving the civil rights revolution and making sure the privacy of all peoples are respected and honored.

The Rhetorical Crisis Related to the Humanities

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal published a piece "Humanities Fall From Favor" that looks at the decline in incoming freshmen at Harvard who express interest in majoring in the Humanities. The piece is not all that well-written, nor does the Harvard Humanities Center come off as that well attuned to the world our students face.

The national debate about the humanities seems unusually stuck on the cost of higher education and the "return on investment," rather than the actual content or purpose of the humanities. While there is a strain of criticism that the humanities is too leftist in its orientation, it seems like it is more of a remnant of the culture wars.

A more common set of themes is that college has gotten too costly and humanities majors cannot get jobs. On their own, both are valid concerns. Tuition has grown, while per student aid is down. Students are pushed into loans increasingly. This is a cause of concern. Also, it is true that many humanities students struggle to find their first job and many humanities departments don't do a good job preparing students for the job market. (My department needs to do better on this front and has been making some changes to address this).

Where I think it is worth taking some time to think and reflect is on a few of the potentially false conclusions that tend to follow from these concerns or are implied by the way the objections to humanities education are posed:

(1) the increase in college tuition is the result of an overfunding of the humanities.
(2) the tuition crisis would disappear if humanities majors somehow disappeared.
(3) colleges and universities would not have the humanities if they did not offer humanities majors.
(4) if humanities students majored in other fields, there are ample entry-level jobs out there for them.
(5) other fields and disciplines can teach writing, critical thinking, communication, analytical thinking, etc. as well as the humanities.

What is interesting is that each of these are essentially provable claims with data. My hunch (and unfortunately it is only a hunch at this point) is that all of the statements are probably false.

(1) The increase in college tuition has not gone disproportionately or even overwhelmingly to humanities departments. All the major humanities associations have noted a trend toward more adjuncts and fewer tenure-track jobs.

(2) Even if universities eliminated humanities majors, tuition will not go down.  Now, eliminating tenure-track and full-time faculty would have that effect. However, because humanities faculty members tend to be among the lowest paid faculty on campuses and because they have some of the fewest needs for laboratory and equipment, there is some savings. I am suspicious if it would fundamentally change the curve of tuition.

(3) Most professional majors have accreditation requirements that demand that accountants, engineers, doctors, architects, and teachers must have quite a few humanities courses to graduate and be certified. Universities, as a result, cannot eliminate a humanities classes from their curricula.

(4) All college graduates are struggling to find jobs. While it is marginally easier for some business students to find their first job, many graduates from pre-professional programs struggle too. Because of the ebbs and flows of the economy, it is not uncommon that it is nearly impossible to predict four or five years out, which majors will be in demand when one is an incoming freshmen.

(5) Data from the College Boards is pretty clear that Philosophy, English, History and the humanities teach verbal reasoning and writing much better than other fields. I am sure there is other data as well that shows this. One fallacy is that humanities programs teach nothing, but this data suggests that it conclusion is probably false. If we, as a country, want college graduates who can write and use words and language to think clearly, humanities education is essential.

I think there is a crisis in the humanities and one that needs attention. We cannot, however, fall prey to false narratives that posit the humanities as the antidote for all that is wrong with college tuition or employment rates for college graduates. Until we clarify the nature of the crisis, we will be unable to face it.

Understanding the "Law School is a Scam" Meme

I meet a lot of pre-law students. They think they want to become lawyers. Increasingly my job is to dissuade them, or at least many of them, from attending law school. 

In these advising sessions, I introduce them to the "Law School is a Scam" meme that can be found at a host of websites. Steven Harper has a new book on the topic, Law School Bubble: A Profession in Crisis. Recently, salon.com excerpted portions of his book. While I am not sure if the article's title, "Law School is a Scam,"is Harper or the editors at salon.com, the phrase/sentiment is fairly common and I wanted to analyze the claim, especially for all those pre-law students out there.

First, most students are not aware of the costs associated with attending law school, or any graduate school for that matter, and are equally ignorant about the startling amount of debt many law school students accumulate. The average debt for law graduates is now over $100,000, with the graduates at some schools racking up over $165,000 in debt on average. (Remember that an average means that approximately half the people have more students loans, depending on the distribution!)  To make this real to students, I tell them that most students could purchase a fairly nice 3 bedroom house in Springfield, Missouri for that price and they would have a house after they have paid all that money! Tuition for law school can easily run close to $40,000 per year and that does not include the cost of living. (Remember that you cannot discharge student loans - of any kind - in bankruptcy).

Second, most students do not realize that most attorneys, especially from tier two, three, and four law schools earn less than $70,000 or $80,000 a year. This is especially true for students who want to go into things like criminal law, family law, or legal aid. Many lawyers start their careers with salaries of $30,000, $40,000, or $50,000. That is impossible to do if you have more than $150,000 in student loans.

Third, the unemployment rate has gotten very high for recent law school graduates and trends suggest that those numbers are here to stay because law schools produce more lawyers than jobs and have been doing that for a long time now, meaning that there are a lot of unemployed lawyers looking for work.

Fourth, for too many years, law schools have fostered the illusion that it is a great entry into the professional classes for students who either do not have a professionally-oriented college degree or want to switch fields. This is simply a bad argument and leaves too many people stranded.

Fifth, the bad economy has created even more pressure on college graduates to do something that looks like they are building a career. Attending law school sounds like a good idea, even if they are not that committed to the field.

So far, all the evidence points toward the conclusion that yes, law school is a scam. 

But, I am not willing to go quite that far for a few reasons.

First, I think some law schools are scams. I tell students that right now the question is not if they will get in law school but how much debt they will need to incur to finish. I am particularly leery of third and fourth-tier law schools. They tend to have the least amount of financial resources (e.g. students are forced to rely on loans, not scholarships) and the poorest reputation. Other law schools provide a better return on investment and offer some scholarships. The question here is whether a student is making good choices about taking on debt. Every student should have a plan about how much debt they can stomach, especially during the first year. If students have doubts, I want them to be in a position to leave law school and not be saddled with ridiculous debt for that experience. For many, this means working a few years before going to school or living at home. This also means coming to grips with getting into a law school is not the real goal of the law school admission process. Rather, getting into a good law school that will not cost you too much money.

Second, I think law schools are scams because they do not require students to know anything about law or legal careers before they enter. Traditionally, law schools would tell you that they did not want students to major in pre-law. While this may be great for law schools in their quest for a diverse class, it is a recipe for accepting students who know little, beyond television or film portraits, of what lawyers do. I tell my students to take as many law-related classes as they can. I also demand, yes demand that they complete a legal internship that gets them into contact with lawyers, clients, and courtrooms.  That experience alone persuades quite a few students that law is not the career for them. For others, it builds their resolve and gives them leg up on internships and clerkships. In talking with students, I can tell how much a student knows about law. That really shapes the advice I give them.

Third, I don't think law school is a scam because I learned more during law school than either other time in my life. This is saying something because I also earned a Ph.D. If you read the law school is a scam meme, relatively few folks complain that they did not learn anything. Rather, they are justifiably angry that they cannot find a job putting those skills to work. This, however, is not the same as a saying that law is a scam, like a Ponzi scheme.

Fourth, there are a lot of unmet legal needs out there. One of the paradoxes of our time is that formal legal resolution is beyond the means of most poor, working class, and middle-class people even as we have "too many lawyers." This is not a reason to go into law, but highlights that law is not immune to the current job crisis we have, as a country. 

I don't think that law school is a scam, but way too many people have been attending law school. If you  feel compelled to look into law school, you absolutely be realistic about the costs, the job prospects, and most importantly your reasons for attending and your passion for the law. 

Legal Realism Redux

If you have been paying attention, you probably are aware that the United States Supreme Court is hearing two cases related to gay marriage this week. About ten days ago, we learned that Senator Rob Portman (Ohio - Republican) has made a change of heart on the issue after his son told him he was gay. Just yesterday, the internet was abuzz with the news that Chief Judge John Roberts' lesbian cousin will be attending these hearings. This is on top of the articles, discussing Justice Scalia's "fear" of gays and lesbians.

All these events together cause me to think that perhaps legal realism, the idea that the justices personal values, beliefs, and experiences shape their jurisprudence, maybe is more telling than some of the fancy legal theories that scholars use to explain the Court's decisions. I know that when I was researching legal responses to racial discrimination, it always seemed like Justices never quite knew what to make of race-based claims in part because they drew almost exclusively on their experiences when making decisions. I came to think that judges took "judicial notice" (i.e. took their own perceptions as fact) when faced with racial claims.

It seems like many court-watcher think that may be happening now in these gay marriage cases. Does this signal the return of legal realism? I am not sure, but I do hope that the Chief Justice's cousin is correct when she says she trusts him to make a fair and just decision.

Spring Cleaning

Because my Spring Break and the beginning of Passover coincided this year, I found myself doing a lot  of cleaning over the past few days. While never a fan of cleaning, I nonetheless found that I enjoyed, relatively speaking, this year's efforts. I probably liked it because I found a treasure trove of my old baseball cards. Now, I am able to give my 1970 Pete Rose, 1970 Reggie Jackson, and 1975 Hank Aaron to my boys. 

The ritual, however, also got me thinking about the importance of spring cleaning for maintaining our moral commitments and locating our values. There is something about cleaning out drawers and de-cluttering our houses that seems like a metaphor for the more important effort of re-calibrating our moral compasses each year. It is too easy for our us to loose track of our real values as we surrender to the rush of our ordinary responsibilities. 

In addition to a few days off and a cleaner bathroom, I think I have gained a little bit of needed perspective from my Spring Break.

Fresh Perspectives

This semester I am teaching three new preparations: ENGL 200 Literature Matters: The Evolution of Storytelling, ENGL 219 The Lawyer in Literature and Film, and ENGL 493 Senior Seminar: The Best Writing of 2012.

What I am not teaching is anything related to African American culture, Popular Music, or Ethics. Given those have been mainstays in my course rotation and where most of my research interests lie, it is  a strange semester. Probably more than most semesters, I can relate to students,who are overwhelmed and baffled by so many new ideas.

I am both working harder in the classroom than I have in awhile and less certain of where my classes are going. I feel like I am learning with my students every day. What a great feeling! It is also an absolute pleasure to watch my ENGL 200 students dig into literary analysis with such gusto. So far, they have thoroughly enjoyed 1984 and a unit on classic fairy tales.


On the other hand, I am realizing a few things about the courses and topics I usually teach. First, talking about race every semester is very draining and exhausting. I am constantly dancing on the fine line between pushing students to see how race structures our world and creating a positive environment to do that kind of reflection. It is weird not to be doing that kind of work. I must admit that these other courses seem much more selfish in that they do not push students as much to have a social conscience. This may seem strange but this break from teaching African American literature seems like another example of white privilege. I can get a "break" from the national dis-ease about race and racism, but most African Americans cannot!

Second, teaching about popular music is "easy" in the sense that students always have something to say even if they have not done the reading. They bring their own theories and ideas into the class and have a wide range of musical experiences to discuss. I miss that. I wish students had as much background in other topics and as much passion. The downside to this knowledge and passion, I am realizing, is that students are less willing to hear and think through the theories that scholars have developed to analyze popular music. For some reason, students are a bit more willing to give a literary theory or analysis a fair hearing before evaluating it.

Third, a semester without teaching ethics means that I am missing the opportunity to revisit some of the classic moral issues. I feel less "ethical" simply because I am not thinking about ethical dilemmas and grounding my own habits, actions, and decisions in an ethical theory. I will be excited to teach ethics again next spring.

This semester has been a blessing. It has given me a new perspective and gotten me out of my comfort zone. I am reading different books and thinking about new things. How very liberating!

MOOCS and the Three Year Degree

A few years ago, the Higher Education community was discussing how we could reduce the cost of higher education if we could create three-year degree programs. I remember that Time published articles about it from Lamar Alexander, George Miller, and others. Universities started to draw up plans to create new three-year tracks. As you might guess, the idea fizzled mostly because students were not really interested in working that consistently (i.e. over the summers and through Winter break). For the past 18 months or so, MOOCs are the new three-year College degree program. Actually, this idea has had more energy and financial support. While some of my students have graduated in three years even without the creation of official three-year degree tracts, I anticipate that some of my students will take MOOC courses. For my highly motivated students, this will work out well. For the majority, I don't think the massive online format with minimal instructor contact will satisfy the needs and wants of my students. My students (who are mostly traditional students between the ages of 18 and 24) want faculty-student interaction, student-to-student interaction, and find that the time and spatial demands of the "seated" class are generally more favorable than other formats. None of the above should be read as a full or effective rebuttal to the growing cost of higher education. That, especially as student loans become the primary way students pay for higher education, is a real problem. I just don't see MOOCS as a viable or effective solution to the cost problem, just as the three-year degree track never really met the needs of students.

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.

Popularity of "Rap" and "Hip Hop" as Words

Goolge has created a new tool that allows researchers and law people alike to chart the frequency of word usage in books. (Here is a NYT article describing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/17/books/17words.html?hp)

Goofing around with it (http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=hip+hop&year_start=1970&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=0), I did searches for "rap" and "hip hop"


Here is some of what I learned about "Hip Hop"

• Hip Hop begins to enter books with a spike in 1984 (probably because of Run DMC).
• Hip Hop trails off as a term until 1987 (probably because of the birth of the Golden Age with PE, A Tribe Called Quest, Dr. Dre, etc).
• It trails off again until 1990 and then spikes higher than ever before in 1991 (when sampling and obscenity cases hit)
• Hip Hop slowly rises until 1994, plateaus through 1996.
• It dips in 1998, then rises to new heights in 1999.
• Dips in 2000-2004 and then shoots back up in 2005 and shoots higher in 2007.

Here is what I learned about "rap"

• Unlike Hip Hop, rap has regularly been employed in the English language
• The term increases in popularity (although at modest levels) between 1970 and 1975
• It slides in popularity until 1991 but with peaks in 1981, 1984
• It increases in popularity between 1991 and 1997, dips for a year and then plateaus until 2003.
• Rap spikes in popularity in 2004 and has been decreasing ever since.
• Rap, as a term, is much more popular than hip hop. The only problem with this comparision is that rap can be used in ways that don't reference the music or hip hop culture.

I am not sure what this all teaches us but I found it interesting. Can't wait to see what people do with it!

Things I Have Learned So Far

Today was the last class period for two of my classes. I wanted to give my students a parting gift of wisdom, or the closest thing to it that I could muster.

Here is my list of "Things I Have Learned So Far"* -

1. Follow your passion. Do what gets you excited to get out of bed each day.
2. Be curious about the world.
3. Always bring something to read on a plane.
4. Cultivate only the habits that you are willing to have for the next 30 to 40 years.
5. Balance work and pleasure.
6. Learn to enjoy solitude and peace.
7. Don’t eat lunch at your desk.
8. Save 20% of what you earn, starting as soon as possible.
9. Be nice to everyone. But first, learn what they like or need before assuming that you are being kind to them.
10. Be positive. Try to find the positive at least some of the time.
11. Shopping is not a form of patriotism.
12. Walk as much as possible. You will enjoy the exercise, fresh air, and the perspective of the pedestrian.
13. Integrity (or your reputation) is easy to lose but hard to re-gain.
14. Have pride in your work, but be willing to admit when you have done average or below average work.
15. You should have an opinion but do listen to other people’s point of view and reconsider your opinions based on their perspective and new evidence.
16. Understand your roles (mother, son, employee, student, etc) in life and what they demand from you.
17. Have standards. Live up to them even when you think no one is watching.
18. Being likable can get you farther than being smart or talented .
19. Figure out how you want to live and then do a few things each day that helps you create that life.
20. Whenever possible, take the stairs.
21. Spend some time each day reading or thinking about ideas, morality, and spirituality.
22. Two phrases to avoid: “I don’t care” and “I’m bored.”
23. You are what you do, not what you believe.
24. Technology doesn’t always set you free or make your life easier.
25. When tired, get a good night’s rest.
26. Homework helps the student learn, not the teacher teach. If you don’t do it, you are not harming or hurting the teacher!
27. True freedom means making difficult or unpopular choices.
28. You will not be comfortable with other people until you are comfortable with yourself.
29. A sweater vest is not just an article of clothing, it is philosophical statement.
30. Guidebooks and lists about how to live a better life are usually wrong.

* Knowing these things does not mean that I actually do them . . . yet

The Poetics and Politics of Integrative Learning

Liberal Education, a magazine published by the Association of American Colleges and University, (see http://www.aacu.org/liberaleducation/index.cfm) has recently published an issue dedicated to "Integrative Learning at Home and Abroad." Carol Geary Schneider, in her President's Message, criticizes what she sees as the Cold War Curriculum with its focus on breadth and its heavy reliance on distribution requirements. She also laments the recent philanthropic focus on degree completion and the effort to rely on this Cold War Curriculum to facilitate transfer between institutions. Schneider points out this curriculum and recent reform efforts only exacerbate "the fragmentation of knowledge." She, along with other articles in the issue, call for a more integrated learning experience.



As someone who has spent the last 10 to 15 years dedicated to this proposition and general education, I welcome the conversation and Schneider's critique of recent educational reform efforts (frequently funded by high profile philanthropies). I also applaud Bill Newell's article in which he explains that "the challenge of integrative learning is to make sense of the contrasting or conflicting insights by integrating them into a more comprehensive understanding of the situation in its full complexity" (8). I think he articulates precisely what a good education should accomplish.



This being acknowledged, I am growing increasingly skeptical about the rhetoric behind integrative learning and the ability for general education to achieve these lofty goals. More specifically, I wonder who benefits from this kind of paradigm shift and whether these are general education goals or something that really is the province of the major.

The turn toward integrative learning seems to focus increasingly on learning for a particular professional purpose. In his conclusion, Newell argues that "the best undergraduate education asks students to go back and forth between disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses, since interdisciplinary courses need disciplines for depth and disciplinary courses need interdisciplinarity for real-world application" (11). Hidden beneath this rhetoric or perhaps a key element of it is that learning for learning sake is not really the goal of higher education any longer. Education is not an end in itself, but a means to achieve other ends: specifically getting a job and making money. His model supports and makes more valuable disciplinary learning and helps it find a market for its graduates. I get why this is the goal of business and why perhaps politicians would embrace this model of education. I am not sure why AACU or humanities faculty should apply such market logic to their curricula. If education is merely about job training, I suspect that we can train people for jobs much more cheaply than universities and colleges do. We might even want to go back to the old master-apprentice model.

My philosophy of education emphasizes asking critical questions, exploring ideas, gaining insight into myself, and using what I have learned to gain greater autonomy in my life. It does not simply prepare for a career, but multiple careers (I am paraphrasing Andrew Mills's "What So Good About College?" here). I fear that the rhetoric of integrative learning is abandoning these goals in favor of something that is more politically expedient. That rhetoric may extend the life of some programs or universities or few years but may very well lead to contribute to the ongoing demise of universities in American culture and society