Alan Jacobs

Flood Lite: Apple’s Attention to Detail

Franz Xaver Messerschmidt

There are, of course, many other, less prominent reasons for the current anti-faculty climate. But perhaps it is enough to say that the reason we feel more ‘hated’ than ever is that we deserve it. Instead of collaborating, we competed with each other. We focused on our research instead of on the needs of undergraduates. We even exploited our graduate students, using their labor to underwrite our privileges, and then we relegated most of them to marginal positions as adjuncts. We waited too long to institute reforms to our profession, and now—after 40 years of inaction—the reforms are going to be forced upon us.

College costs a lot. I teach at BC, where a year’s tuition, fees, room, and board currently add up to $52,624. What are the students paying for? What can’t they get online for free? In my end of the academy, the humanities, it comes down to one thing, in essence: the other people in the room, teachers, and fellow students. We can debate whether that’s worth the price tag, and we can debate the relative value of lectures and seminars (I think the best mix in the humanities is some of the former and a lot of the latter), but you’re paying for the exclusive company of fellow thinkers who made it through the screening processes of admissions and faculty hiring. That’s it. You can get everything else online, and you can of course do the reading on your own.

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

You can spend the rest of your life surfing the web, emailing, texting. You’ve got one shot at college. So, at least until the novelty wears off (probably not in my lifetime), that means no laptops in my classroom.

This is pretty much what drives me up the wall about the cottage industry that’s grown up in development circles that aims to identify the magic variables that have allowed Botswana to have a positive trend line in so many areas. Here’s how I see it: you can list all the variables you like, test them out in the data, and probably identify many valid contributing factors. But as a historian, I have to tell you that a lot of it goes back to subtle contingencies involved in the manner of Botswana’s incorporation into the British Empire, the particular political and cultural leadership of certain 19th Century Tswana chiefs, the complicated social history of many Tswana communities in relation to Christianity, and the proximity of industrializing South Africa. And then from that, diamonds and a single major ethnicity and a rather enlightened postcolonial elite and so on.

So: history. And non-reproducible history at that. Not a strategy chosen off of a menu of options in an abstract setting.

This is why historians aren’t generally a big presence at the policy-makers’ table.

Quantification in most professions is being used to keep us from having to shoulder the messy burden of making human, intimate judgments, or explaining why we value what we value. They usually end up being the architectural equivalent of trying to build a cathedral without arches, stained glass, multiple sizes of stone, gargoyles or any other idiosyncratic part that deviates from the standard stone block used in a standard stone wall.

A school that’s all about rewarding people who teach to the tests or who look good even on a robust, multivariable scale, is almost certainly going to overlook good teaching that misses the metric, teaching which a humane, sensitive supervisor might notice and reward.

Because we know that humane, sensitive supervisors are relatively rare, we look to the numbers as insurance against that rarity. I’d rather figure out how to make humane sensitivity the first requirement of institutional leadership.

Ramelli’s wheel

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