Textbooks play their own part in this carnival.  For one, it’s not clear what textbooks are for in 2011.  Some students won’t buy them, preferring rent-a-texts, e-books, library reserves, Wikipedia, SparkNotes, et al.  Other students won’t read them because they can pass anyway after a Google click-a-thon.  Thus, M. W. Klymkowsky says, “Clearly, the issue of whether to use a textbook is complex,and it is dependent upon course and curricular goals. Students(and colleagues) expect a textbook; yet often, the textbook is not used, except as a reference.”

Jane Shaw, President of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, goes even further, suggesting that a textbook may often be nothing more than a security blanket for the professor.  In an email, she says, “I think that most faculty members still want a textbook because it provides an instantaneous organization for the course.”

Still, there are some courses students can’t pass without the textbook, and those are the jackpot for publishers and authors.  At $100+ per book, constant revisions and new editions, websites, CDs, and DVDs keep that money pump humming.  James Stewart made so much money from his Calculus textbook that he built a showplace home/performance space for an estimated $30,000,000 after auditioning architects such as Frank Gehry.

In an email, Evergreen Valley College’s Sterling Warner says, “Publishers . . . like the idea of electronic textbooks—not because they will serve students as well or better than paperback texts (or reduced costs per textbook).  No, publishers are asking for paper and electronic rights to reprint works because they can make greater profits.”  Warner continues:

I see publishers rushing after the glitz, bells, and whistles (maybe even clickers!) placing pedagogical substance second. Soon they’ll all be using Go-Daddy girls to use a bit of sex to straighten out slumping sales . . . .”

Enter Zachary Mason, Silicon Valley entrepreneur, computer scientist, artificial intelligence theorist, and author of the celebrated The Lost Books of the Odyssey.   Mr. Mason has just launched a new company in what seems a virtuous attempt to shrink textbook prices by using a mixture of new methods and new technology.  Zach, a very bright and talented man, is interested in hearing from all the players in the textbook casino:  teachers, administrators, students.  If you have ideas and/or needs you would like to share, just shoot me an email at dclemens@mpc.edu and I will forward your contact information to Zach.

Go-Daddy girls need not apply.

The film, now reissued on Blu-Ray for its 40^th anniversary, has a turbulent history.  Originally rated X, Kubrick had to re-cut it for an R but also withdrew the film from distribution in the UK where it was re-released only in 2000, after his death.  The American edition of the book which inspired Kubrick had itself been bowdlerized by the publisher (Norton) who amputated the final chapter creating a dark, ambiguous conclusion where Burgess’s 21^st chapter offered a consoling one.

Once, Kubrick’s opus was required viewing in my class about what a human being is and isn’t.   When Burgess/Kubrick’s sociopathic narrator, Alex, is arrested, he is subjected to aversive conditioning and becomes incapable of violent action (the conditioning also destroys his ability to enjoy “Ludwig Van”).  He is now “a clockwork orange,” what you get when you treat something organic as if it were a programmable machine; Alex’s prison chaplain protests that “When a man cannot choose, he ceases to be a man.”  Voila, Kubrick’s film was perfect for the class, but, like Kubrick, I too withdrew it after one student became hysterical during the viewing, curling into a fetal position and shaking for an hour after class.  Apparently, Alex’s “ultra-violent” acts but ingenuous “of-course-you-understand” intimacy remain disturbing, even dangerous, enhanced by the timeless music, John Alcott’s cinematography, and Kubrick’s notoriously clinical eye.  The opening 90-second dolly back shot still chills the blood. Yet, cold as Kubrick’s films feel, he was an eminently sane man presenting a perennial dilemma–freedom vs. order.  In an interview with film historian Michel Ciment, he said

I think that when Rousseau transferred the concept of original sin from man to society, he was responsible for a lot of misguided social thinking which followed. I don’t think that man is what he is because of an imperfectly structured society, but rather that society is imperfectly structured because of the nature of man. No philosophy based on an incorrect view of the nature of man is likely to produce social good.”

Indeed . . . .  If only the outcomes-and-assessment-addled mandarins who run our “imperfectly structured” education system would take Kubrick’s words to heart, the job of rebuilding the humane studies might finally begin.

Can you really educate or stimulate serious interest in economics with a music video?  I was dubious.  From 1984 to 1994, I wrote a column for Media and Methods analyzing music videos for their use in education (Joan Logue’s dream-like video for Paul Simon’s “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War,” John Mellencamp’s “Authority Song,” Dire Straits’ “Brothers in Arms”).  Back then, the teacher popping in a rare videocassette of a music video was cool, hip, and sexy.

Eventually, however, I decided that in fact there was no educational value in music videos.  At one time, showing INXS’s “Devil Inside” to spice up a “Young Goodman Brown” discussion stimulated students but by 1994, videoland was where students already spent most of their time; no buzz.  So the Keynes vs. Hayek vids looked stale and artifactual to me.

However, since YouTube arrived in 2005, maybe lower production costs and vast accessibility have revived music video with a disruptive potential.  Just last week, The New Republic editor Jonathan (“I hate George W. Bush”) Chait penned a sniffy refutation of “Fear the Boom and Bust.”  Yes, a completely straight-faced fisking of . . . a rap music video.

Yo, J-Chay, it’s two old econ dudes acting like gangsta rappers.  Laffs, namean?  Your sermon to the TNR choir disses the vid but thanks for driving more page views!

So maybe Chait should fear the educative possibilities of YouTube, even if Neil Postman was right that electronic media turn everything into entertainment. Perhaps right now millions of entertained fanboys are reversing their course down the road to serfdom having been schooled up by “Hayek’s” rap

The question I ponder is who plans for whom?
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.”

Mos def.

There is a pervasive attitude that `the kids can’t do it.’ Bullshit. Teachers won’t let them because it’s `easier’ to just read it all aloud in class (since it takes up more time) or just read some of it.  In a meeting today . . . two of my colleagues brought up dropping [Fahrenheit 451] since their students `couldn’t handle it.’  An AP teacher shared an assignment for Of Mice and Men. She passed around journal books where the students summarize each chapter on the left side of the page and then draw a picture on the right to represent a ‘theme’ of the chapter.”

This is what passes for reading and for writing, and it’s not just in high school.  Electronica’s erosion of reading ability means that reading books is no longerexpected at any level.  In a presentation last year, the Columbia University Core Curriculum directors sheepishly admitted that even their celebrated and historic program now finds it must resort to having students read excerpts rather than entire books.

Impoverished reading begets impoverished writing.  I also heard from Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review who struggles to preserve the meaningfully-researched high school history essay, a Herculean task when the previously mentioned AP teacher also “doesn’t assign an essay anymore because they are `too painful’ for her to read.”

So if teachers don’t have students read and don’t have students write, what do they do?  In The Intercollegiate Review (print only), R. V. Young writes about the decay of Freshman Comp., using as his example Jonathan Alexander’s composition class at U.C. Irvine devoted to developing “sexual literacy.”  According to his U.C.I. listing, Dr. Alexander “works at the intersection of the fields of writing studies and sexuality studies, where he explores what discursive theories of sexuality have to teach us about literacy and literate practice in pluralistic democracies.”  Dr. Young understandably despairs of reforming what he finds to be not an educational system at all but “a curious and uneven amalgam of job training, indoctrination, and custodial care.”

Amen, brother.

But since the books exhaust all possible verbal representations, on some shelf in the “unimaginably vast” Library sits your own correct biography, including your death.  Unfortunately, the “perhaps infinite” Library also contains a nearly infinite number of slightly or grossly corrupt biographies, and you could never know the difference even should you be so fantastically lucky to find one, a probability that “can be calculated to be zero.”

Blogging this past year, I’ve come to feel like one of Borges’ los hombres de la Biblioteca.  When I post something on a site that allows them, I receive comments, but often on some other composition, no longer what I had written but slightly or grossly false having been filtered through the hermeneutic apparatus of the commenter.  As I read them, like Prufrock, I sigh,

That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.

A word or phrase is plucked from my essay and with it a commenter embroiders a fabulous if irrelevant tapestry.  Or a commenter assumes I have implied something veiled that he alone can perceive.  Or a commenter misreads (overlooking “a single letter” sends some readers into a parallel universe).  Once there, the commenter soapboxes, snarks, pontificates, rants, or vogues, using the post as an occasion for remixing my words into something uncannily familiar but unquestionably or bizarrely different.  It was Karl Popper who said “. . . it is impossible to speak in such a way that you cannot be misunderstood . . . .”

When RCA’s mascot dog Nipper heard “his master’s voice” from the trumpet of an Edison-Bell gramophone, he cocked his head in a bemused “huh?”  And I hear you, my misreaders, though I sometimes tilt my head like Nipper and wonder, “How did you get that?” and “Where did I say that?” and “What are you talking about?”  As Borges’ narrating hombre asks, “You who read me—are you certain you understand my language?”  Blog commenters never doubt that they understand the blogger’s language (even better than the blogger).  Blog posts and comment threads seem to me like volumes added to what will become a Library of Babel.

The signal-to-noise ratio changes constantly and noise is winning.  Today, the Internet frequently seems best at producing and disseminating misinformation (which becomes permanent and searchable). Borges’ notes that “infidels” believe the Library of Babel (like entropy or the Internet) may really be a monstrous temple of dreck since its endless collections “affirm all things, deny all things, and confound and confuse all things, like some mad, hallucinating deity.”

When he was at Monterey Peninsula College, Josh was the midwife who helped deliver a great books program to a college that had been out to axe all its literature courses.  In my Intro. to Lit., class he heard me refer to Robert Hutchins’s metaphor for Western literature as a “Great Conversation,” and in Literary Matters he writes

“Within weeks other members of the class and I were meeting on our own time to discuss the Great Books. We read Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. We read Sappho. We felt and spoke as if we had rediscovered some long-forgotten treasure abandoned by the generation before [my emphasis].”

Josh devoured a copy of Hutchins’s The Great Conversation that he found (where else?) in the college library discard pile.  He says, “. . . the students I came into contact with seemed to react as I had. We felt we’d missed out on something essential by not being exposed to these works earlier.”

An Iraq War veteran, Josh notes that he was

inspired by The Iliad.  I read the Robert Fagles trans­lation and understood, finally, that this poem was not only about the Trojan War, but also about humanity and warfare. It might have been any war. It might be every war.”

In a similar vein, my current student Lisa says that “Before last semester I had never even read a book entirely. I realized how much I really enjoy it. Reading has opened up a whole new world for me. I am glad I finally got introduced into this world . . . .”

That they both say “finally” speaks volumes about K-16 education today.  Thankfully, The Great Conversation lives on, and it’s encouraging that more and more students, such as Josh and Lisa, are growing tired of being excluded from the dialogue.

More people who have been infected by contemporary college education are likely to fall into the Hide camp than people who have been brought up free of higher education.  But among those who have been to college further distinctions can be made.  Business school and science graduates are likely to be Do’s; those in the humanities and most of the social sciences Hides. The Do camp has a moral grandeur wanting in the camp of Hides that comes from taking responsibility for one’s actions.  If one believes that we are what we hide, responsibility drops away because we are hostage to inner demons that, behind the scenes, are really calling the shots.”

Epstein’s dichotomy resonates with something Mark Edmundson said here the other night about higher education, that its goal seems to be “to undermine all aspirations to idealism.”  Reveal, debunk, demystify, revise, expose the Hider in each and all is the postmodern academy’s gloomy project. If becoming therapeutically adjusted to our hidden demons is the best we can hope for, life becomes just the search for jolts of pleasure from briefly-satisfied hungers and desires.  As Philip Rieff suggested, Freud (and the academy) offer man only “how to live with no higher purpose than that of a durable sense of well-being.”

For many Ph.Ds, the Ed.D. represents the ticket to the administrative high life, the white flag to academic scholarship, and the tramp stamp of the compromising careerist.  Back in 1911, Frederick Taylor declared the necessity for an industrial mittlere Führungskraft to deliver the factory owner’s orders to the working proles.  The California State University (CSU) system has a more grandiose, if unintelligible, plan calling for Ed.D. programs that produce

future leaders [who] study and contribute to significant reforms that can result in measurable improvements in student achievement.”

So CSU Sacramento’s Ed.D. program offers a

distinctive interdisciplinary curriculum in which classes have integrative connections focused on transformational leadership, critical policy analysis and action, and strategic, informed decision making.”

CSU East Bay offers an Ed.D. in “Educational Leadership for Social Justice” where students

will be engaged in studies, activities and skill building that fosters courageous school leadership that will demonstrate bold, socially responsible leadership to address and resolve issues that have impacted the achievement and success of students of color, and other marginalized students and communities . . . .”

Yes, that does say “fosters leadership that will demonstrate leadership.”  Maybe the “higher education bubble” is really over-inflated from so much pretentious and vaporous doublespeak.  It is the narrator of Pete Dexter’s Spooner who asks, “Can the world ever have enough doctors of education?”

California certainly doesn’t think so.

It’s not just grants.  The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education lists over 30 cases related to religious liberty.  Then there’s Martin Gaskell, the Christian, University of Kentucky astronomer who sued when he was passed over for a job because some colleagues feared he was “possibly evangelical.”  Eek!  Theophobia!  As UK was writing him a $125,000 settlement check, Gaskell’s attorney said, “. . . what . . . this case disclosed is a kind of endemic, almost knee-jerk reaction in academia towards people, especially scientists, of a strong religious faith.”

Such exquisite administrative sensitivity to the establishment clause raises serious questions about curriculum.  How do you understand history without some knowledge of religion?  How do you understand the American colonization, our founding documents, the Civil War, abolitionists, 9/11, The Reverend Martin Luther King?  Revisionist historians who revile any hint of virtue in American history continue to insist that the Civil War was not about slavery, yet a Civil War history book I own, published in 1865, ends with these words, “GOD REIGNS, AND SLAVERY IS DEAD,” making it 0 for 2 in today’s academy.

In literature, how do you understand the Trojan War, Dante, Milton, Hawthorne, Flannery O’Connor, even Thomas Pynchon?  In 2009, I organized a Great Books panel for the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics Conference in Denver.  Dr. Joshua Pederson, Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies at Marymount Manhattan College, presented a compelling argument in his paper, “Examining the Inquisitor: On the Continuing Importance of Biblical Literacy to Literary Studies.”   If you subtract religious references, Christ, and the Grand Inquisitor from Dostoyevsky’s parable, there’s nothing left but punctuation marks.

Instead of institutional theophobia, perhaps it’s time for a graduation requirement in religious literacy.

1. Pick up your MLA Lingo Bingo card at the Convention desk.
2. Proceed to your first MLA panel.
3. When you hear a Lingo Bingo word, place a green M&M on it.  At five M&Ms in a row, shout “discursive practices” and win an interview for a non-existent job at a fictional university.

I tried, but it is nearly impossible to parody the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention’s yearly orgy of political correctness, anti-capitalism, and Theory, just concluded in Los Angeles.  Rumor was that the MLA had “gotten better,” but if so, I didn’t hear it.  Wondering “why literature matters,” I heard that the possibility that Helen actually sent a double to Troy shows how much “we need simulacra that are then exposed” and how “wars are fought and people die for illusion” and how “they also die for the narrative.”  That’s how you use apparent literary analysis to (wink, nudge) criticize the Iraq War (as though the whole golden apple-Aphrodite  deal was real in the first place).

Worried that students don’t read, I heard that “readers fashion individual identities for themselves at the moment of selection practice.”  It was this kind of language abuse that drove me away from the MLA 30 years ago because nothing of importance can be conveyed in such lingo.  Yet the jargon persists because it can’t be replaced.  The words are so reified and so necessarily opaque that they cannot be paraphrased or defined.  They are simply formulaic, rhythmical iterations that no longer convey “meaning” except as signs of one or another critical theory.

Oh, there were a few straight-faced panels on newer “disciplines” such as Ecocriticism, History of Reading, and Fidelity Criticism, but listen closely and you find that they, too, have just wandered out of Farmer Marx’s barn.

MLA lingo is terribly serious and terribly self-important (“vital,” “crucial”), very “urgent,” very “precise,” always collective, often sexy, and romantically revolutionary.  I had not seen a Che Guevara tee-shirt in years.  In the caverns of the L.A. Convention Center, the tedium was palpable, the outlook was bleak, and the air was stale.