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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Here is an article in The Chronicle about moves in Florida to incorporate Texas principles into studies of faculty productivity in the state.  Governor Rick Scott is looking to “revamp higher education in his state,” Audrey Williams June reports, and he has complimented Texas and Governor Rick Perry on their efforts.  No policies have been decided, but the conversation has begun, and the union of public-university professors is worried.

The president of Florida State University, Eric J. Barron, has issued a preemptive response paper entitled “Florida Can Do Better Than Texas,” which can be accessed here.  It is a critique of the Texas plan put forward by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which may be accessed here.  Although a critique, the FSU paper does applaud the Texas plan for aiming to lower costs and strengthen teaching.  It disputes not the aim, but the method…

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This morning in The New York Times, E.D. Hirsch has a commentary on the SAT scores, which showed a drop from last year of three points in reading and two points in writing.  More students took the exam last time (because more students aim to go to college right after graduation), leading some commentators to downplay the decline, treating it as a reflection of a more diverse group of test-takers, not as a general decline in verbal skills.  As Hirsch notes in a longer version of his editorial (found here), however, the SAT trend reflects the trend for NAEP scores in the last four decades.  Also, people who attribute the slide to demographic factors, specifically, poverty levels, overlook the “huge drop in verbal scores across socioeconomic groups in the 1970s,” Hirsch writes.

The main reason for it, he contends, was the loss of a “content-rich elementary school experience,”…

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The Dumbest Generation was a polemical volume, an indictment of digital tools in the hands of teens and 20-somethings that contained piles of survey data, consumer data, test scores, and scientific studies but drew pointed, value-heavy conclusions from them.  I believe every statement in it is true, but I never assumed that it was The Truth.  For one thing, the nature and implications of digital devices are too fluctuating and immediate and new to allow for any certainty about their impact.  Added to that, too many intelligent and knowledgeable individuals believe the opposite about digital tools and young Americans.

That’s why I put this anthology together, The Digital Divide: Arguments For and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking, which is available tomorrow.  (Penguin page here; Amazon page here.  Audiobook is here.)  It contains essays an…

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This week The Chronicle has a forum on productivity and accountability in higher education, and, curiously, not one contributor argues in favor of more measurement, more cost/benefit analysis.  Instead, amidst some solid points about ways and means of measurement, we have lots of disdain and indignation, as in the title of one entry: “The Know-Nothing Assault on Higher Education.”

Cary Nelson puts his position bluntly: “I am opposed to this movement and to everything for which it stands. I offer the example of the humanities at their fiercest as a telling critique of the ideology of outcomes assessment and the mechanized, uniform philosophy it invokes.”

Later on, Cary writes: “For what I teach and what I seek to do—and for the fierce humanities in general—the assessment, accountability, and quantifiable-outcomes movement is nothing less than a benighted Enlightenment fantasy…

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Here’s a distressing trend for college teachers to face.  According to The American Freshman Survey, the percentage of high-school seniors who study six or more hours per week has dropped significantly in the last 20 years.  In the late-80s, the rate stood in the upper 40-percent range.  By late-00s, we had fallen to the low 30-percent range.  At the same time, the percentage of seniors who expected to earn at least a B average in college jumped from the low 40s to the low 60s. (See PowerPoint slides near the end of this list.)

The noncorrelation between effort and expectation may be due not only to grade inflation, but to an unfortunate implication of the current forms of accountability in secondary schooling.  Will Fitzhugh, editor of The Concord Review, makes the point here.  He has two summary quotations in the piece that pinpoint the problem:

One is from Paul Zoch, a…

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This year’s ACT scores came out last week, and as is often the case, the results were met with a mixture of modest hope and firm dismay. (Stories can be found here and here and here.)  The hope comes from the small gain that students made from last year (and from 2007), while the dismay stems from the continued low levels of “college readiness” the test-takers reached. 

On the latter measure, while 66 percent of them reached college readiness in English, only 52 percent reached it in reading, 45 percent in math, and 30 percent in science.  College readiness is defined as the ability of a high school graduate to enter college and “complete a college course successfully, without remediation,” as the College Board puts it.  (See here for a fuller definition.)  ACT identifies the skills and knowledge needed to earn a passing grade in a freshman course, then converts them into…

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In the August 8 New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg reviews the debt ceiling controversy and criticizes President Obama for not pushing harder against the Tea Partiers because of his “all too civilized, all too accommodating negotiating strategy.” Obama ended up, Hertzberg complains, “too readily accept[ing] Republican terms of debate, such as likening the country to a household that must ‘live within its means.’”

True enough on the second point, although to attribute Obama’s weak negotiating performance to an excessively “civilized” temper is mistaken, I believe. Instead, I’d chalk it up to inexperience. Since this is Obama’s first real executive position, he’s still learning (slowly).

Apart from that, though, Hertzberg adds this gloss on the “live within means” axiom, and it’s an astonishing one:

“(For even the most prudent householders, living within one’s means can include…

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