Monthly Archives: March 2017

The Marketplace of Ideas

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The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (Issues of Our Time)The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University by Louis Menand

Our greatest fear as academics might be the fear of being proven futile. We know we’re probably in some respect self-serving and that perhaps we magnify our own importance in the face of what we consider a hostile, indifferent, or Philistine public. But we like to maintain the fiction that we are free from parochialism to pursue the search for truth or something like it (maybe call it “free inquiry”) in a value-free arena. Or at least that’s the ideal, though I don’t think anyone would go so far as to say this is ever actualized or even completely possible. These are ideals, and Louis Menand’s slim volume offers insightful and sometimes piercing examinations of at least three aspects of these ideals: ideas about general education, interdisciplinarity, and the self-selecting nature of how we train PhDs and what we get as results.

This is not a comprehensive critique or “state of the academy” study, though as a recognized scholar Menand has done his homework. Rather, it’s a collection of thoughts from someone who has made a career in the academy and who has passion and respect for what it can be. As he states near the work’s conclusion:

It is the academic’s job in a free society to serve the public culture by asking questions the public doesn’t want to ask, investigating subjects it cannot or will not investigate, and accommodating voices it fails or refuses to accommodate.

Amen. So what’s the problem? As valuable as academic endeavors are, Menand feels certain claims about higher education are not true or have been taken out of their correct context, and he’s biting in his critique when he feels we need to be disabused of such claims. Because some of the chapters in this work were originally speeches, they are for the most part easy reading, even when what he is saying is difficult.

Menand begins with what has become something of a cause in higher education over the past few decades: the idea of general education. Like all of us, he’s sat through seemingly endless meetings of faculty trying to decide what general education actually is and how to provide it to students, whether in shared common core courses or in a system of electives. “General education, he explains, “is where colleges connect what professors do with who their students are and what they will become after they graduate—where colleges actually think about the outcome of the experience they provide. General education is, historically, the public face of liberal education.” Despite a clear importance though, Menand feels that what these conversations at universities across the country lack is a historical context of where this idea came from and why it’s a distinctly American ideal. From its origins at the nation’s oldest and most prestigious colleges and its evolution in response to broader societal changes, Menand argues against a perceived antiquity or changelessness in general education. Rather, he seems to be saying, general education is historically contingent– not unimportant, but neither as uniform, enduring, or timeless as some might argue.

Another topic Menand examines involves another contemporary buzzword (or, depending on your perspective, bugbear): the idea of interdisciplinarity or teaching across the disciplines. Menand argues here, by providing another historical analysis– this time of professionalization of the academic disciplines– that the concept of interdisciplinarity in actuality serves to magnify and cement disciplinary distinctions and divides that are already problematic and largely artificial. The whole discussion of teaching across disciplines, he argues, masks an anxiety of scholars who realize on some level that their disciplinary divisions and structures are at least partially vacuous. “Is my relationship to the living culture,” Menand asks us, “that of a creator or that of a packager?”

All of which brings us back to the fear of futility and Menand’s final and most damning critique. “It takes three years to become a lawyer,” Menand points out. “It takes four years to become a doctor. But it takes from six to nine years, and sometimes longer, to be eligible to teach poetry to college students for a living.” Why is our method of creating PhDs so time-consuming and inefficient? More importantly though, what does this cost the field? Institutions gain cheap graduate student labor, but students labor for years gaining knowledge and expertise that quite possibly will never land them a job or even a completed degree. It’s hard to argue with his views here that in at least some respects the academy has become another professionalized bureaucracy that exists to propagate itself and churn out clones already committed to its ideals and modes of thought.

“Possibly,” Menand argues, “there should be a lot more PhDs, and they should be much easier to get. The non-academic world would be enriched if more people in it had exposure to academic modes of thought, and had thereby acquired a little understanding of the issues that scare terms like “deconstruction” and “postmodernism” are attempts to deal with. And the academic world would be livelier if it conceived of its purpose as something larger and more various than professional reproduction.” What begins as an inquiry into why most college professors tend to lean the same direction politically becomes a critique of the system that produces them and that may actually be counterproductive to fostering the very free-thinking the system enshrines.

At just over one hundred fifty pages, there is a lot to chew on here. Whether or not you agree with all Menand’s claims or buy his arguments, if you’re part of the academic machine this is a book to consider seriously.

There Are Stories in the Wood

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I’m accustomed to my wife having the grand visions for our home as far as decorating, re-decorating, renovating, re-renovating, etc. My strategy when she begins one of these projects is usually to keep my head down and stay out of the way. Of course, this is largely impossible, because her projects often involve me building something. There was the dining room table, a while back, and then the built-in bed, more recently.

Her current project has been the renovating/repurposing of our sunroom. The room has always been a bit awkward, a late 50s addition that apparently turned an external porch into a long, narrow space we never quite knew what to do with. It held a tiny desk that I used for what passed as my home workspace, as well as a piano, a couple dog kennels, and assorted randomness.

My wife’s Pinterest-inspired vision for the room was to turn it into a more functional office/study/library, and my portion of this would involve the construction of a custom desk running the length of the room. I love the idea of a mammoth desk, and the skill level didn’t seem to exceed my standard: putting large pieces of wood together in a fashion that would keep them from falling apart over extended usage.

We measured the corner where we wanted it to fit, and I got to work. I had grand ideas of getting beautiful ten-foot planks of some kind of lovely hardwood, and then I saw the prices at Lowe’s. I settled for three ten-foot pieces of regular untreated lumber, which I assume were pine but know from their labels were grown in Idaho forests.

building desk

The trick was finding three pieces that didn’t look like they had fallen off the back of the truck multiple times on the way from the sawmill. I dug through the piles until I found a few that were good on at least one side and relatively straight, and then I stared at them for ten minutes trying to figure out the math. Did I want three that were ten inches wide (which would have made the desk too wide) or three that were only eight inches wide (which would have been too narrow)?

My son, who was helping me out that day, finally sighed and said, “Dad, why don’t you just get a mix so the measurement comes out right?”

Genius. So the middle plank is an 8-inch and the outer two are 10-inchers.

stained desk

I joined them with the magic of a kreg-jig and only modest cussing (actually, it went together pretty easily) and then put 1 x 1 braces underneath and at the far lip. No fancy finishes here. This is going to be a workhorse. My wife reminded me that she wanted a hole drilled in the middle to run cords for those who don’t pen their epics in ink and blood, so I used a 2 1/4-inch hole saw inherited from my dad to make the whole thing look like a doorway for skinny giants.

My wife used witchcraft to find a stain that matched the engineered hardwood floor I installed in the room a couple weekends ago, and she filled in some of the more noticeable cracks with wood filler. On top of that went three coats of a water-based polycrylic, and then it was good to go.

finished desk

Here it is, ready for work. You can see one of the brackets that I used to mount this on the far wall lying on the floor in the middle image above. The brackets I used were probably overkill, but if you know anything about my projects you know they need to be built to withstand the hostility of four rowdy kids. There are two brackets on the far wall and one in the middle, and as you can see here the near end rests on a salvaged file cabinet that my wife painted a whimsical blue.

It’s level, it’s solid, and I have room to sprawl. I like to think that the grain of wood holds stories, maybe compounded of years of soil and sun and wind. If that’s the case, I hope some of that distills into the work I’ll be writing atop these planks.

Or at the very least that they don’t end up crushing my legs.

Writing update: Reviews

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I sent out a writing update to my mailing list last night. You can see it here. If you follow my blog, please consider joining my mailing list to get updates on when I have fiction and reviews appearing online!

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything

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How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the PentagonHow Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales from the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

Each year at my university’s academic commencement, there’s a portion of the ceremony that I never quite know how to respond to. At some point, once all the faculty are up on stage and we’ve sung the Alma Mater and maybe after the awarding of the degrees (everything tends to blur together after a while) the graduating class of ROTC officers are sworn in. Upon walking onto the stage, before even a word is spoken in explanation, these young men and women invariably receive a standing ovation from the audience. Then, when they have taken their oath, the crowd is again on their feet with applause. This happens every year, and every year I remain seated in the back of the faculty seating with a few other junior faculty members, unsure of what to make of this. Surprised? Dismayed? Affronted?

I’ve been trying to puzzle out my reaction to this for a few years now. Part of it, I know, is simply my reactionary nature: I don’t like going along with spontaneous acclamations, and giving a group of anyone a standing ovation when nothing in particular has happened yet seems silly. But in addition to this, there’s a feeling of wanting to resisting a creeping militarization of everything. This is an academic ceremony, I find myself arguing. We’re not giving special recognition to the class of new pastors or nurses or teachers or engineers or social workers. Churches can have jingoistic fourth of July services waving the flag over the altar and equating love for God with love of county if they like, but I would prefer the culminating academic ceremony of my university to try to keep these things separate. How can you train young thinkers to evaluate and critique the military-industrial complex when we’re all so quick to jump to our feet and cheer the brave, young, new soldiers more loudly than we cheer anything or anyone else?

I thought this book would help me understand my own reaction better and that perhaps even give me ammunition in arguing against the militarization of everything in a post-9/11 world. Of course, to the author’s credit, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything was a good deal more complicated than that and forced me to evaluate my own feelings toward the military and its role in the world.

The best way to explain this book might be to talk a bit about the author’s background. Rosa Brooks was raised by two anti-war activists. She was trained in international law, spent time working with human rights groups around the world, and has written columns and articles on public policy. She worked as a civilian in the Pentagon and so has first-hand experience both with the functioning of the military. Finally, she married a career soldier and so has even deeper insights into the strange and somewhat insular world of the military. If this sounds like a complicated background that would make it hard to pin a simple “pro-military” or “anti-war” label on her, that is exactly correct—and it’s one of the things that make this work so compelling. Despite the book’s title, this is not a polemic either for a US interventionist policy or against war and the continued growth of the military.

Brooks does two separate but related things in this work. First of all, she’s providing perspective from her time spent working in the Pentagon to offer insight into the military’s expanding role in the world today. From building infrastructure to combating pirates to conducting drone strikes of dubious legality in nations at which we are not formally at war, she makes the point that actual fighting, the classical view of what the military does, is in reality becoming a very small portion of its mandate. The role of the military is expanding into policing and nation building, often at the cost of other civilian government agencies. Underfunded civilian agencies like the State Department are often passed over and their work given to the only agency whose budget has remained constant. More and more often, the military is given broader and larger tasks.

This is symptomatic of the post-9/11 world, and Brooks gives perspective not just on the dizzying administrative military complex and the bloated and often inefficient realities it entails but also a sympathetic image of a service trying to cope with a broader and broader mission in the new grey area between peace and an enduring state of war.

This portion of the book is not a memoir, though portions of it read like one. Brooks writes about her experiences in Uganda seeing the results of the Lord’s Resistance Army’s conflict on villagers and children. She gives a fascinating view of how things function (or don’t function) in the Pentagon and the relationship between military and civilian officers in the government, a tour of Guantanamo Bay, and stories of Iraq from just after the invasion. She talks about what it’s like living on a military base and the surreality of a separate society esteemed and valued but also misunderstood by the rest of the population. All of this though, while fascinating, seems partially intended to build credibility for what she wants to argue in the second portion of the book.

In the second portion, Brooks is making a legal case that the laws governing international conflicts need to change to address the changing nature of war. Laws are created to serve a certain purpose, and the laws of war have been created to keep war “boxed off” from the rest of life. But war since globalization and 9/11 puts us in a new era, a grey zone between peace (which, she says, is arguably as artificial a construct as the idea of sovereign states) and war, and we as a global society have the responsibility to change our laws so that they make conflict against a stateless enemy possible but also protect and enshrine human rights. She doesn’t make this claim immediately though. First she has to build up to it with some history.

Along the way, for instance, Brooks spells out the origins and the implications of the international law that has been in place in the UN Charter since the conclusion of World War II. This set of laws was designed to keep atrocities like the Second World War from happening again and is built around concepts of national sovereignty with a Security Council as a check against conflicts between states. She argues that this has been, despite notable exceptions such as Rwanda and Syria, largely successful but that it is beginning to fail in light of the new realities of warfare. In particular, Brooks examines the historical development of the concept of sovereignty and points out that often this is an artificial construct, imposed upon nations that never actually had cohesive boundaries or the ability to effect policy within those boundaries. Failed states, she argues, are more often examples of states that were never truly states to begin with, proxy states propped up by external colonial powers. More problematically though, she claims there is a contradiction at the heart of the UN Charter: the enshrining of sovereignty on the one hand and the protection of human rights on the other. This, she says, gives rise to contractions when a sovereign state is violating human rights. Do you respect sovereignty or human dignity?

Even more problematically, Brooks argues that since 9/11 the United States has been continually undermining the spirit of the UN Charter by either ignoring it or justifying US actions by legally stretching the laws of war into actions that are not against sovereign states, for instance striking combatants of a stateless enemy within the territories of states at which we are not formally at war. The problem is that this continually blurs the line between warfare (during which things like execution or detention without trial are legally permissible) and policing (where such things are not). As Brooks points out, the reaction to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was not a given. Our leaders chose to respond to it as an act of war, perpetrated by a stateless enemy but giving rise to all issues in which we find ourselves as a nation embroiled today. But it could have been responded to as a crime, in which an entirely different set of legal paradigms would have come into play.

In the end, the book doesn’t offer any easy answers about what to do about the fact that everything is becoming war and the military is becoming everything, that we’re sliding down a slope toward more intervention and further blurring of the lines between police action and military operations in the nebulous, expanding, and un-winnable war on terror. She offers no clear solutions. Rather, her pragmatic response may be off-putting to those who were hoping (like me, I admit) this book would be a call to arms to resist the creep of the military into all aspects of life.

This is the new reality, Brooks admits. The nature of warfare is changing, and for better or worse she believes the military is going to continue to expand into new roles. But Brooks argues for a more difficult solution than simply resisting this. For one thing, she argues the military needs to change to become more adept and more effective at navigating its new roles. If it’s going to be about more than soldiers carrying guns, it needs to change how it recruits and how it operates. Secondly, and more compellingly, Brooks argues that the laws governing international conflicts need to change. If we’re going to live in a new world where technology and globalization have created a spectrum between peace and all-out war that includes grey areas like the war on terror or cyber-attacks, then we need to build new laws to guide us through this, new laws that focus on accountability and protecting human rights, instead of simply bending or disregarding laws that no longer fit the realities with which we’re faced.

Some might see this as a grim account, but Brooks is a law scholar, so she puts a great deal of faith in the nature of law itself. At its best, laws are meant to define and protect what we value. Brooks feels that the thing that should ultimately be valued are globally-defined human rights.

Yet as much as I value her argument, I feel she makes a large interventionist assumption in her work. She takes it as a given that the United States will have an invasive presence around the world, that we will continue to be active to protect our own interests and to police and enforce human rights abroad. It’s not clear why this is a given though, why we couldn’t have an approach that was active in international policy and law-making but that lacked a large military force. Do we need to have a defense budget larger than that of the next seven nations combined to lead the way in transparent international law that values human rights? Or does our extremely big stick undermine any attempt to do so? As she argues herself, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when all you have is the world’s largest military, than every problem looks like one to solve with military intervention (read: war).

Which brings me back to commencement and the standing ovation for the ROTC students. I love some of these students. I respect them all. I’m sure they’ll be great officers. And if the military will have a larger and broader role in the world in which we live, don’t I want its officers trained in a liberal arts setting, given tools for cultural literacy and understanding diversity and history and critical thinking? If nothing else, Brooks’ book makes a compelling case for the diversity of situations and challenges these young men and women will face. The audience is not just applauding potential “boots on the ground,” Brooks would say. They’re applauding officers who are going to be called upon to do tasks yesterday’s military never even considered. Whether or not that’s a good thing is irrelevant, Brooks would argue. It’s the way things are now, so the best response is to make sure we’re creating effective international law that can help guide them in their work.