Posts by Noted

September 1, 2011, 03:58 PM ET

Epic Failure in Covering College, Punk Rock

By Noted

When I wrote a piece for The New Republic a couple of months ago noting that The New York Times and The Washington Post have an ignoble decades-long history of writing essentially bogus articles about the woes of unemployed college graduates, I didn't mean to create a blueprint for future such articles. And yet, here are some excerpts from the TNR piece, published in June, and a new Times piece, published yesterday. TNR: "The formula has been carefully refined over the years: Start with a grim headline, like “Grimly, Graduates are Finding Few Jobs.” (Times, 1991)" Times: "Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out" TNR: "Two things about these stories have remained constant: They always feature an over-educated bartender, and they are always wrong." Times: "Sarah Weinstein, 25, a 2008 graduate of Boston University, manages a bar in Austin because she couldn’t find an advertising job." (The lead ...

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August 25, 2011, 10:30 PM ET

Campus Anti-Zionism

By Noted

This episode of Faith Complex features my colleague Dr. Sarah Fainberg interviewing David Friedman of the Anti-Defamation League about anti-Zionism on campus today. The interview begins by reviewing the shameful mistreatment of Israeli ambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine last year. Mr. Friedman described the incivility of some audience members as "chilling." I concur and would add that it is equally difficult for me to watch that footage. Before he served as ambassador, Dr. Oren taught for us at the Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. I can think of few scholars more open-minded or amenable to true dialogue than he was; the attempt to shout him down undermines everything we stand for as educators. Readers of this blog know that I can be very critical of the Religious Right but let me be clear that in my experience attempts to silence dialogue on campus... Read More

August 12, 2011, 07:41 AM ET

Against Relevance

By Noted

In recent years, I’ve spent many hours in committee rooms and academic conferences in which people there talked about how important critical thinking is to the English Language Arts curriculum. Many reasons came forward, but one of the more pressing ones is this: young people need to analyze critically the messages they receive in contemporary life. They are saturated with media—with advertising, with value-laden songs and videos, and with television shows that bear implicit values and attitudes. They tend to consume them mindlessly, feeding on the ideologies buried within, unless teachers show them how to interpret them critically, to unmask those values and attitudes. The outlook translates into a curriculum. Critical thinking advocates believe that the best way to inculcate enlightened, analytical mindsets is, precisely, to bring the materials of mass culture into the ...

August 5, 2011, 09:25 AM ET

Neoliberal Economic Policies Are Still Eating Our Brains

By Noted

I was scarred by George Romero's Dawn of the Dead as a child. I somehow was allowed to tag along with an older sister and a date to a drive-in and I cringed in the back seat as zombies tried to eat the brains of Americans. As an adult watching this film, I was less scared by the cheesy visuals and amused that the "victims" were already mindless as they moved around a shopping mall buying stuff they didn't need. But I still have nightmares about zombies. Now, however, those nightmares are real. The neoliberal economic policies of our government, like Romero's zombies, continue to eat our brains when they should have been dead long ago. And the fact that no matter how clear it is that neoliberal economic policies should have been killed because they didn't work and they brought the U.S. and the world to financial ruin, they just keep popping up, alive, ready to eat our brains. Today's... Read More

July 28, 2011, 10:04 AM ET

Where Have All the Hikers Gone?

By Noted

Long time passing. Where have all the hikers gone? Long time ago. Where have all the hikers gone? Gone to video games (and yuppie gyms) every one … or many of them anyhow. When will they ever return? And does it matter? I fear that it does. I’ve been an ardent hiker and backpacker (formerly, also a climber) for decades, and well recall at least a hint of anxiety when it came to finding a campsite on the more popular places, such as the Wonderland Trail on Mount Rainier, or the Enchantment Lakes in Washington’s Cascades. No longer. Parks in the western states, at least ( I don’t know about the east) report that back-country use is consistently and dramatically down. To be sure, parking lots and visitor’s centers are often crowded, but venture more than &frac; mile on nearly any trail, and the only hikers you’re likely to encounter are wide-eyed wanderers from Germany or possibly the UK....

July 26, 2011, 04:36 PM ET

How the Dickens Universe Shaped My Great Expectations

By Noted

I’m pretty sure I'd just finished course work when I went to The Dickens Universe at UC Santa Cruz for the first time in 1983, but I can’t find the journal and so I can’t be sure. I wanted to grab that notebook, too, so that I could refer to the experience in the words I used back then. I know it amazed me; I know it shaped, immediately and forever, how I thought about myself and about the profession. The Dickens Universe is part of the Dickens Project. As their Web site will tell you, “The Dickens Project of the University of California is a Scholarly Consortium devoted to promoting the study and enjoyment of the life, times, and work of Charles Dickens,” and the Universe is their annual conference, held on the Santa Cruz campus since 1981 (read more here ). There’s nothing like it. I’ve attended five Universes and, except for the MLA, this is the only conference I’ve ... Read More

July 26, 2011, 09:35 AM ET

Psychodrama in Washington or in New York?

By Noted

I don't have the stomach to watch the psychodrama that is the Obama-Boehner bromance gone wrong. It is far too depressing to imagine that these two men are going to actually bring the U.S. economy and possibly the world economy to its knees because one cannot compromise and the other cannot man up enough to use his constitutional power to raise the debt-ceiling on his own. Instead I am focusing on that other American psychodrama that will also come to fruition on August 1: the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case. Yesterday, his accuser, Nafissatou Diallo, went public and gave interviews to ABC News and Newsweek to argue her case. Normally alleged rape victims do not come forward and publicly make their case, but Ms. Diallo has had to endure the kind of smear campaign in the press that normally doesn't happen. Indeed, every aspect of her personal life has been scrutinized and then some... Read More

July 12, 2011, 11:27 PM ET

Whatever You Do, Don't Call Them Fuddy-Duddies

By Noted

In my countless discussions with faculty and administrators about tenure in the past few years, many professors and administrators suggested to me that the problems with tenure started with the end of mandatory retirement. If only faculty were forced to leave at 65, the argument goes, we wouldn't have all these incompetent or burnt out hangers-on. And I have also had a number of good professors I met tell me that teaching is a young person's game and that they fear they are losing their touch. I appreciate the honesty, certainly, but I have to say that in my own academic experience, this was not the case. Most of my best professors in college were over the age of 65 and a number were significantly older. In fact, when people ask me about which faculty members I recommend at my alma mater, I am saddened to say that quite a few have died or retired since I graduated. I was thinking about...

July 5, 2011, 03:01 PM ET

Born This Way?

By Noted

The following is a guest blog by Suzanna Danuta Walters, Professor of Gender Studies, Indiana University* Spending time in Provincetown – Cape Cod’s mecca of all things homosexual – is both a thrilling inversion of everyday life where queerness is the banal majority and a depressing reminder that normative ideologies can seep into even the most festive of gay milieu. As New York made history by approving same-sex marriage, Ptown vacationers congratulated each other as they slathered sunscreen on their finely chiseled bodies and circuit-partied until the sun came up. But pro-marriage T-shirts (“Put a ring on it”) were soon eclipsed by the T-shirt slogan de jour “Born this Way.” Now, I’m the last person to dis the wondrous Lady Gaga, but her well-meaning ode to immutability is less helpful to gay rights than Guiliani in drag. If marriage and military access are conjured as the Oz of...

July 1, 2011, 10:57 AM ET

The Manuscript Beard

By Noted

Yesterday, a chance encounter in the washroom with a Georgetown colleague and a fellow secular Member of the Tribe got me thinking about the beards we male academics grow when manuscripting. "Son, Mennonite-Americans don't got nothin' on you!" I enthused while thrusting my hands in mock desperation at the automatic towel dispenser which always seems slow to respond to my solicitations. "I firmly believe," he replied while turning to the urinal and unzipping his fly, "that I would have never written as good a book about Proust had I shaved the beard. The whole pivotal section on Bloch for example—" But the forceful flow of urine, quickened by the joyful recollection of his truly seminal Proust monograph, drowned out the rest of his remarks. No matter. The whole episode was like a madeleine, reminding me of the complex psychic emotions which accompany growing out a beard when... Read More