The phrase has become a watchword in liberal thinking in the last year, from President Obama’s speeches to Todd Gitlin’s entry this week at Brainstorm.  It stands as the colloquial encapsulation of a capitalist survival-of-the-fittest system that runs on greed and heartlessness.  The opposite is, precisely, state policies that help the unfortunate and disadvantaged.

But “you’re on your own” isn’t necessarily a statement of cruelty.  Given a little background in American classics, we can open it to the opposite interpretation.  In this version, which comes out of classical liberalism (which is closer to today’s libertarian conservatism than to today’s liberalism), to be on your own is to be freed from social and biological ties of fate, as well as state restrictions.  It isn’t an abandonment of people, but rather an empowerment of them.  People are not forever defined by class or…

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…Only 58 percent of students starting their first year of higher education last year believe that there is a good chance they will be satisfied with their college.

That’s a mighty disappointing rate of expectation.  Where’s the optimism?  They have applied and won admission.  High school is over, a new chapter of life has begun, new friends and new freedoms, the world is all before them . . . and yet, more than two out of five have meager hopes.

That’s just one illuminating result of the 2011 American Freshman Survey, which last year got 204,000 entering students to answer a lengthy questionnaire on background, habits, and ambitions.  More significant findings:

• While in their last year of high school, 88.9 percent of respondents “frequently” or “occasionally” studied with other students.  That high rate is a measure of two things: one, the extension of teen social…

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When I was in 7th Grade, I first heard the terms “definite article” and “indefinite article”–or rather, “l’article indefini” and “l’article defini.”  It was in the first French class I took.  I hadn’t learned about articles in English Language Arts courses in elementary school, and when I did diagrams of sentences and other grammar exercises in English in 7th and 8th Grade, the basics didn’t stick as well as they did in French class, which I took for the next five years and in college as well.

There’s a lesson.  Foreign language study helps with the understanding of native language.  It also deepens one’s sense of philology, etymology, phonetics, and idiomatic, slang, and formalized expression in general.  To pinpoint a curious word in a text under study in a college literature class such as “deliberate” or “fabulous” and ask the students, “What is the etymology of that word?” a…

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Some miscellaneous news reports with implications for higher ed–

The Wall Street Journal reports today on a study by Stanford researchers showing a strong correlation between media multitasking and social and emotional development for pre-teen girls.  The study by Clifford Nass and Roy Pea found that the more the subjects (sample size 3,461) watched videos, emailed, texted, etc., the more they experienced “low social confidence, not feeling normal, having more friends whom parents perceive as poor influences, and even sleeping less.”  It’s only a correlation, the authors warn, but they proceed to identify a common and simple antidote: face time.  The direct encounter with faces, they say, teaches young girls to develop social awareness, to learn body language, to read other people’s facial expressions.  Face-to-face communication is “just enormously important,” Nass asserts….

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Here is a story in the New York Times about an issue in higher education writing assignments.  It begins with Duke professor Cathy Davidson’s aim “to eradicate the term paper and replace it with the blog.”  To Cathy, the long research paper is a “mechanistic” practice that “is a real disincentive to creative but untrained writers.”

Others weigh in and defend the term paper, such as Douglas Reeves, founder of Harcourt’s Leadership and Learning Center, who says,

“Writing term papers is a dying art, but those who do write them have a dramatic leg up in terms of critical thinking, argumentation and the sort of expression required not only in college, but in the job market.  It doesn’t mean there aren’t interesting blogs. But nobody would conflate interesting writing with premise, evidence, argument and conclusion.”

And Will Fitzhugh of the Concord Review, who…

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Here is a story in the New York Times about a case that may have far-reaching implications for higher education.  It could also form a significant chapter in the chronicle of political bias in higher education, an issue that has diminished in recent years (for various reasons).

The Times piece opens: “Teresa R. Wagner is a conservative Republican who wants to teach law. Her politics may have hurt her career.”  Wagner alleges that the University of Iowa Law School rejected her job application because of her politics, which are vocally social conservative.  The story quotes a 2007 letter from the associate dean to the dean stating, ““Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it).”

The latest episode is this: “Late last month, a…

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A GUEST POST BY DANIEL DECKNER

[Daniel Deckner is a German graduate student of literature at the Philipps-Universität Marburg and is currently enrolled as a visiting student at the University of Alberta.]

Mark Bauerlein’s essay “The Research Bust” poses questions about productivity policies in literary studies at research universities, but before we revise policies, we need to ask a fundamental question about the purpose and focus of literary research.

How are we supposed to select worthwhile subjects for our research if we haven’t determined the role that literature plays in people’s lives? I believe that the lack of such knowledge is one of the main reasons for the meager impact of literary scholarship. The real problem with this scholarship is not that its reception is meager within its own field, but that its reception anywhere else is virtually nonexistent….

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In this week’s New Yorker is a short update on Heather Donahue, the woman who played in the 1999 hit film, The Blair Witch Project.  Because the film was such a success (“Shot in eight days, for twenty-five thousand dollars, the film had a creepy, do-it-yourself plausibility that made it a worldwide, two-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar hit”), it typecast her so much that it prevented other acting jobs coming her way.  After a few years in Los Angeles, she packed up and became a medical marijuana grower with boyfriend “Judah” in the Sierra Nevada mountains.  Later, she left and wrote a book about her experiences, entitled “Growgirl.”  Now she lives in New York City (apparently), where the reporter met her for lunch to gather her thoughts about her life.  Here is the concluding paragraph:

Now, having left Judah, marijuana husbandry, and acting–if not Blair Witch–behind, she’s…

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Readers of Brainstorm may recall an exchange with Bill Moyers, the renowned television journalist. The skirmish began when I cited current discussions in early 2009 of a dirty trick Moyers had played while serving in LBJ’s administration, specifically, a search for any homosexual scandal among Barry Goldwater’s staff. The act certainly undermined Moyers’ persona as a figure of conscience and justice, a character he had successfully presented in many years of television work.

Moyers fired back, sending The Chronicle an indignant response which, I published in my space, though it links me to a “right-wing noise machine” and calls my post a “shameful performance.” He voiced strong replies to other statements on the same case in Slate and The Wall Street Journal, taking the offensive against what he considered partisan and cheap allegations.

In light of his aggressiveness, it is odd …

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In the 2011 report by the National Survey of Student Engagement, the trends outlined by, among others, Academically Adrift, remain firmly in place.  Homework time is still low:

• Sixty percent of first-year students completed 15 hours or less per week of “preparing for class.” Only 12 percent of them exceeded the 25 hours customarily expected of students taking a full load.

• Seniors performed only slightly better, 58 percent of them standing at 15 hours or less per week, 14 percent of them at the 25-plus level.

Also, the right kind of engagement with professors still happens far too infrequently.

• Fully 42 percent of first-year students “never” speak with teachers about ideas and readings outside of class, and 37 percent only do it “sometimes.”

• On the other hand, only 8 percent “never” spoke to faculty members about grades.

Don’t blame the students too much…

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I have an article in The Chronicle Review this week that condenses findings from a research study I did last year and was published just two weeks ago. The main point is that while research universities pay professors in literary studies to publish books and articles, and professors generally respond well by remaining productive and up-to-date, evidence for the reception of those pieces is, to say the least, disappointing.  The vast majority of them sink into virtual oblivion once they are published.

The debate over the validity and implications of that conclusion may proceed, but in one area I believe we can all agree.  Research does NOT advance the cause of literary studies in material terms.  It does not draw more money, more undergraduates, and more teaching lines to English and foreign language departments, and it does not build bridges to off-campus audiences.  In fact, I…

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The other day, on a flight from Charleston to Atlanta, I was in the middle of grading papers when the man sitting next to me leaned over and mumbled, “Those aren’t final student papers, are they?”  He asked the question because the pages had comments and emendations and line edits all over them once I finished each one.

I laughed and replied, “Yeah, but they’re good students.  They’re bright, but they just don’t take enough care with their prose.”

“Tell me about it,” he nodded.  It turned out he has an engineering firm that just expanded in Charleston and he can’t find enough skilled and disciplined younger workers to fill his slots.  We’ve heard a lot recently about manufacturers and STEM firms starved for younger workers with sufficient skills and knowledge for open positions (such as here and here and here), and he certainly complained about the…

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Anybody who argues for the arts and humanities in the secondary and college curricula has to admit a cardinal conservative idea into the argument, namely, tradition.  Without tradition, arts and humanities deteriorate in two directions.  One, they focus on skills, as when the English class turns into a composition/reading comprehension class with more and more “informational” texts as the subject.  And two, there is no common core of books and artworks selected for study.  Instead of literary and artistic tradition forming the syllabus, teachers select works on grounds of topicality, relevance, and extra-disciplinary pressures such as state tests.

The result is an enfeebled discipline.  The STEM fields have a more or less consistent content across high schools and basic college courses.  Most people agree on what calculus must contain.  But freshman composition, 12^th-grade …

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When I worked at the National Endowment for the Arts, I attended dozens of small and large meetings that brought together arts/humanities educators and non-arts/humanities people–state and local officials, foundation personnel, and, occasionally, business people.  I watched Chairman Dana Gioia, Deputy chairman Eileen Mason, and Education Director David Steiner make the case for arts in the curriculum and in out-of-school programs on multiple grounds, and the audience responded sympathetically every time.  In one episode, Gioia gathered some 5th graders from Rafe Esquith’s famed Shakespeare program in Los Angeles to perform pieces from the Bard for members of Congress on Capitol Hill, Republicans and Democrats, who in turn donned costume themselves and relived their days of high school drama class.  In another meeting in the Senate office building, then-PA senator Rick Santorum and th…

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A GUEST POST BY HASSAN MELEHY

Hassan Melehy is Associate Professor of French at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he has taught since 2004. His principal research on the Anglo-French Renaissance is complemented by continuing interests in and scholarship on cinema, critical theory, and the Beat Generation. He also publishes poetry.

Art Pope, Western Civilization, and the Beat Generation

When Jane Mayer’s superb New Yorker profile of Art Pope placed him in the national news, he became a front-page sensation in North Carolina. Of course, here in the Tar Heel State, his name has been in the press for many years, a result of his status as major donor and ideological guiding light for the Republican Party. For a faculty member at UNC–Chapel Hill such as myself, Pope holds a particular interest: this is mainly because of his steady attention to his alma…

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Two weeks ago, I did a post on Jane Mayer’s New Yorker profile of Art Pope.  In the article, Mayer mentions the Pope-supported organization that has the closest bearing on higher education, the  John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.  The following is a guest post by George Leef, the director of research at the Center.  Next week, a guest post by a professor in the State of North Carolina will appear.

On The Pope Center, by George Leef

The John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy appears in a few paragraphs of Jane Mayer’s New Yorker article on Art Pope, and her representation of and others’ statements about the Pope Center deserve some clarification.  In particular, I wish to comment here on the assertions that Mr. Pope’s philanthropy has been harmful to the University of North Carolina.

Here are the relevant sentences from the article:

…

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I took out a student loan when I was an undergraduate back in 1980, but it was only for a few thousand dollars. I could have borrowed more and lived better, but I was scared to pile up any more debt than I had to in order to pay enrollment fees and pick up the rent for the next couple of months. Back then, tuition in the University of California system was still only around $1,000 a year, and I could cover much of it with the part-time job I had for all five years (it took me 15 quarters and three summer-school sessions to graduate).

I can’t imagine racking up the student debt that one hears about these days—not because of any moral superiority to today’s borrowers, but precisely because of the fear I would have had of doing so at age 22.  The Los Angeles Times portrays one of those big borrowers here in a story on the Occupy Wall Street gatherings. He’s a recent graduate of …

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If you type “Occupy Wall Street” into Google Video, 43,600 results come up.  On Google Images, a sublime 518,000,000 results pop up.  Civic action has changed, and so has the accompanying reportage.  So many people involved in the action wield devices to film and photograph themselves, their camps, the cops, and post the result instantly.

Compare that publicity to the Civil Rights protests 50 years ago, when people across the country encountered few images of the Movement–which is one reason why those images of dogs and water hoses had so powerful an impact when they showed up on television.  None of the youths integrating lunch counters had a camera or a phone in hand, and when they were hustled away they had to rely mainly on local reporters to recount their story to an audience.

Before, that is, the protesters were the object, and journalists represented them to the public….

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With so much discussion right now of the 99 percent vs. 1 percent, The New Yorker has a timely profile by Jane Mayer of Art Pope, businessman, philanthropist, and political funder in the state of North Carolina.  The title and subtitle indicate the gist: “State for Sale: A conservative multimillionaire has taken control in North Carolina, one of 2012’s top battlegrounds.”  As with her earlier portrait of the Koch brothers, Mayer presents Pope as a rich ideologue using foundations, think tanks, and political contributions to put Republicans in office and eliminate liberal policies—successfully enough that one of Mayer’s interviewees, a Democrat who was the target of GOP ads, declares, “for an individual to have so much power is frightening.  The government of North Carolina is for sale.”

Demonstrating Pope’s tactics and ascent, along with the personality behind them,…

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One of the unfortunate effects of academia’s strong slant to the left is that academics infrequently encounter intelligent, patient, and well-argued conservative argument and opinion.  The publications important to their professional lives don’t begin with conservative premises, and professors do not track discussions in Commentary, New Criterion, First Things, and other semi-popular periodicals with some sort of conservative bent, not to mention Modern Age, Academic Questions, and the few other conservative academic publications.

As a result, most academics’ sense of conservative thought comes from its most publicized instances–Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, Republican politicians . . .  Those are the voices that reach into their arena of attention, in part because they are the ones that show up in The New York Times, Chris Matthews, and The Daily Show.  Rush and Sarah and O’Reilly are…

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