Alan Jacobs

Technology reveals us to ourselves as we always in fact were: networked, distributed, laced with code. I use the laptop for everything. I’m not even properly “awake” until it’s switched on. Word seems like the “natural” programme to write in now: the default, blank page 2.0. Before I got an iPhone, I used to do this daft thing of phoning myself up if I had a thought while out and about, and telling my home answering machine: “OK, write this down…” Now, you can just talk into the voice-memo app, with its retro oversize mic and quivering needle visual. The internet being just a click away is a blessing and a curse at once: you can find out instantly which year Egypt won independence or who Persephone’s mother was, but that essential solitude you need to write gets more and more elusive … While I was writing Remainder I listened to Rachmaninov a lot, just like the hero. And Gorecki and Paart. I like the voicelessness and quasi-repetition. I don’t own a Kindle. It’s strange: I like reading my own stuff on a screen, and other people’s on a page.

A subject that seems dead is just waiting for the right person to bring it to life. Or the right curricular design: more than a few departments in academia hurt themselves by clinging to a forbidding or hostile structure for a program of study. If it were practical, with every single vacancy at a liberal arts college, I’d write an ad that says “Interesting intellectual wanted, must be able to teach, must have an area of specialized competency but also be interested in other subjects and disciplines.” And then we’d sit down and sift through fifty thousand applications–which is why no one could really do it that way. (Hey, St. John’s, how do you handle your hiring?) But for the same reason, you could just as easily say that what you have is just fine, if you have enough intellectual diversity, if what you have is being approached in the right spirit and the problem of traffic management is considered as appropriate.

I’m very open in the way I think about these choices. There are more constrained ways to approach making these decisions. But the worst of all worlds is to be manipulated into throwing stones at some flavor-of-the-month discipline that the news cycle has thrown up as a self-evidently luxurious and pointless activity. What that usually involves is a kind of back-door vocationalism, a not-brand-X utilitarianism that really amounts to nothing more than whatever intellectual prejudices come to hand. Every discipline has its Henry Ford who will declare it bunk. Every discipline has its snake-oil salesman that can insidiously afflict it upon millions as an unwanted hurdle in their daily lives. And every discipline has its messiah who can show countless students how they were waiting all along to think about life in a new way.

Opposition to the growth juggernaut has gathered pace in recent years. Growth, say critics, is not only failing to make us happier; it is also environmentally disastrous. Both claims may well be true, but they fail to capture our deeper objection to endless growth, which is that it is senseless. To found our case against growth on the fact that it is damaging to happiness or the environment is to invite our opponents to show that it is not, in fact, damaging in those ways—an invitation they have been quick to take up. The whole argument then disappears down an academic cul-de-sac. The point to keep in mind is that we know, prior to anything scientists or statisticians can tell us, that the unending pursuit of wealth is madness.

In discussing our ideas with friends and acquaintances, we find that several objections have crop up regularly. The first concerns timing. “Now, of all moments,” we are told, “is not the time to be talking about an end to growth. Wouldn’t Keynes himself, were he alive, urge us to resume growth as rapidly as possible in order to bring down unemployment and pay off government debt?” We do not dispute this. But we need to distinguish between short-term policies for recovery after the worst depression since the 1930s, and long-term policies for realizing the good life.

A few weeks ago, an important document was discovered after more than a century of neglect. It was a medical report on President Lincoln, sent to the Surgeon General by Charles Leale, the first doctor to arrive at Ford’s Theatre after Lincoln was shot. This report, said scholars and pundits, could change the way we think about those harrowing days after Lincoln’s assassination, when an unsettled country kept a deathbed vigil.

So where was this document found? Was it in a suitcase in the attic of Dr. Leale’s great-great-great-great granddaughter? Well, no, it was at the National Archives. Was it in a warped metal filing cabinet down a neglected set of stairs labeled “Beware of the Leopard”? No, it was in a box of other incoming correspondence to the Surgeon General, filed alphabetically under “L” for Leale. In short, this document that had been excavated from the depths of the earth with great physical effort was right where it was supposed to be.

curiositycounts:

If photographer Stephen Wilkes couldn’t decide what time of day NYC was most beautiful, we understand. See his photographic series capturing the magic of Manhattan days and nights combined into one.

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When I feel I am not performing up to my capabilities at work, I review a list of quote [sic] for inspiration.

Unfortunately, Teresa Sullivan falls into the trap of describing her collaborative method as incremental and conservative. This kind of rhetoric allows the Board to define her as slow and inadequate in a time of rapid change, and to justify executive authority as that which is bold and decisive. We simply cannot afford any longer to allow academic work and administration to fall into the innovation trap, which casts as anti-innovation anyone who appears to oppose innovation as defined largely by information technology corporations in their equally turbulent and oligarchic markets. Sullivan fell into this, and still does not seem to realize fully how this mechanism works.

Academics need to concede nothing to the executive-managerial movement Kiernan and the UVa Board principals represent. They need to define university or school organization that reflects data-based, expertise-grounded, deep creativity based in intense knowledge of the complex system one is trying to change. This is what Sullivan had started to do, and it is the core insight of Theory Y as I discussed it recently. Its forms of reciprocal and relatively egalitarian collaboration generate richer, deeper knowledge and more creative and robust solutions than does the thin knowledge and compulsive changes of tack of externally-focused managers who respond to the influence that seems most powerful at a given moment.

Let’s look at other things you (or your parents) might pay for each month and compare.

• Smart phone with data plan: $40-100 a month.
• High speed internet access: $30-60 dollars a month. Wait, but you use the university network? Well, buried in your student fees or tuition you are being charged a fee on the upper end of that scale.
• Tuition at American University, Washington DC (excluding fees, room and board and books): $2,086 a month.
• Car insurance or Metro card? $100 a month?
• Or simply look at the value of the web appliances you use to enjoy music: $2,139.50 = 1 smart phone 1 full size ipod 1 macbook. Why do you pay real money for this other stuff but not music?

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

Rally on the UVA Lawn as Teresa Sullivan arrives; this photo and others by Tom Daly

A dramatic top-down reallocation in our general fund, simply to show that we are “changing,” or that we are not “incremental,” seems to me fiscally imprudent, highly alarming to faculty, and unfair to students who expect to get a broadly inclusive education here. I have chosen a lower-risk and more conservative strategy, because I am accountable to the taxpayers and the tuition payers.

If we were to embark on a course of deep top-down cuts, there would also be difficult questions regarding what to cut. A university that does not teach the full range of arts and sciences will no longer be a university. Certainly it will no longer be respected as such by its former peers.

Faculty collaborate both within disciplines and across disciplines. In the nature of things, many of these collaborations are not even known to the central administration. If we cut from the top down, without consulting the affected faculty, a cut in one department may have wholly unintended consequences in another department that we are trying to build up.

Nor can we always predict which kind of knowledge will be of greatest import in the future. Before September 11, few of us understood just how important Arabic and other Middle Eastern and Central Asian languages would become — to our students, to the nation, and to national security. Suppose we had eliminated some of those languages because of low enrollment or other fiscal considerations before 2001. We would be scrambling to recreate them now.