Alan Jacobs

Bradley Palmer State Park

Harold Parker State Forest (5)

I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.

brief hiatus

I’ll be traveling for a few days, folks, so no new posts until late next week.

There is no shortage of places in Manhattan where visitors can spend the night. Luxury hotels offer lavish suites that can run thousands of dollars, and youth hostels have beds for as little as $20. At least one flophouse survives on the Bowery. And, of course, there is couch-surfing — countless travelers bunk with old friends or near-strangers for little more than an owed favor.

Cory and Dana Foht have taken another route. On some 20 nights over the past two months, the Fohts, 25-year-old twins from Florida, have climbed about 25 feet up the side of a tall American elm tree in Central Park, stretched nylon hammocks between its branches, unrolled sleeping bags and, with a few acrobatic moves, squirmed into their makeshift beds.

‘It’s kind of like its own ecosystem up here,’ Cory said one recent night as he lay in his hammock. 'You’re definitely aware that you are sleeping in something and attached to something that’s alive.’

Of all the defenses of online I’ve read, the most pathetic - and one of the most frequent - is that it’s great for students who are so shy, so introverted, that they will never open their mouths in class… Yes, with online we can make sure that no mean professor ever gets a chance to bring that introvert out of herself and incorporate her into a verbal as well as intellectual world! Bravo, online! … Do you know how many students UD has had over her years of university teaching who said nothing in the first few weeks of her classes, and then, gradually, began to contribute, began to come up to her after class with ideas, etc? Do you know that these awakenings constitute perhaps UD’s proudest teaching moments? But by all means nip this problem in the bud by leaving those students at home and putting them in front of screens! What a favor online is doing them!

education as a public good

Curiously enough, in the midst of all this gloom and doom and sounding of various alarms, the high-humanist conviction that liberal arts education can fashion good character and alter outcomes in the world persists. Roche thinks that paying respectful atte ntion to authors in an academic setting teaches ‘generosity of spirit’ and a 'level of modesty.’ (I see no evidence of this, on campus or in these books.) Nussbaum asserts that 'an education process can strengthen the sense of personal accountability, the tendency to see others as distinct individuals, and the willingness to raise a critical voice.’

And, most surprising, Taylor, the tech guru and hard-eyed apostle of the most up-to-date university one could imagine, declares that 'I would bet my retirement that if Wall Streeters had read and understood Herman Melville’s “The Confidence Man,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug,” William Gaddis’s “JR,” Georg Simmel’s “The Philosophy of Money” and Karl Marx’s “Early Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” we would not find ourselves in this economic mess.’ (In short, if they had only taken my course.) I would take that bet in a heartbeat and so would Hacker and Dreifus, who observe drily (and correctly) that 'the verbal fluency students attain will [not] necessarily led them to lead more selfless lives’; the most we can say is that 'holders of bachelor’s degrees tend to be … more adept at crafting paragraphs to justify what they want to do,’ but what they want to do might very well be bad.

Having myself grown up in Berkeley, where Nobel laureates are a dime a dozen, I certainly know the syndrome: the mismatched socks, the spectacles repaired with duct tape, the forgotten anniversaries and missed appointments, the valise left absentmindedly on the park bench. Yet hometown experience did not prepare me completely for Dyson. In my interviews with the physicist, he would sometimes depart the conversation mid-sentence, his face vacant for a minute or two while he followed some intricate thought or polished an equation, and then he would return to complete the sentence as if he had never been away. I have observed similar departures in other deep thinkers, but never for nearly so long.

Yet our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.