‘this is a movement now’: middlesex protest videos

The event is viewable in seven parts at YouTube. Here is part one.

This is an amazing piece of culture and creativity, displaying the simultaneity of art and politics.

larval subjects on corporate personhood

Levi Bryant has a good point about the culpability of BP in the oil leakage in the Gulf. If corporations want to be treated like persons, shouldn’t they be punished like persons too?

college grads unprepared for work

NPR has the story, which is related to my earlier post on PowerPoint. The piece mentions the myth of multitasking and, in an ironic twist, discusses this myth as presented in a PowerPoint slideshow.

It seems to me that the solution to the lack of professionalism observed in college graduates is not to institute a new curriculum or course in professionalism, but to integrate professionalism into the liberal arts. Why can’t professionalism be a component of a course in the humanities? It can, quite easily, by reinforcing the notion that the liberal arts are preparing students for a profession just as much as the law and business schools. And, the entitlement issue can be met head-on by decreasing the level of tolerance for grade inflation, plagiarism, and the view that higher education is just a more challenging version of high school.

petition to boycott middlesex ‘university’

Is here.

The petition is drafted by John Protevi and has nearly 1,000 signatures. If you’re appalled at the closing of Middlesex’s philosophy department and suspension of staff and students, please consider putting your name on the petition. There’s enough energy behind this cause to actually get the decision reversed.

powerpoint in philosophy classroom?

One of the most common replies I get on student evaluations when the students are asked about what they would like to see more of in class: ‘Powerpoints’. Sometimes they suggest that we watch more movies. I typically show two films in a semester and use some other form of audio/visual (YouTube clips, TV episodes on hulu.com) a couple times. My courses are run, for the most part, as discussions. Some students like the discussion approach; others complain and indicate that the discussion expects too much of them–they’d rather listen to lectures.

Unless I’ve misread the message, the academy encourages student engagement and class discussions. Straight lectures are frowned upon because they treat students like passive recipients of knowledge, they’re ‘boring’, and students tend to doze off more frequently when the professor simply lectures. The preference for discussion is more intense in the humanities, philosophy in particular, but there is no reason it must be confined to that branch of academe.

There’s something polemical at the heart of students’ request for more PowerPoint presentations. Contemporary pedagogy is always asking instructors to engage students, make them active learners, get them involved. But slideshows often allow them to sit back and listen, anticipate where and how the next bullet point on the slide is going to appear. Is it going to fly in from the side or materialize as if it’s been transported from another location? Now, if students are asked to take notes on the show, then at least they’re engaged that way. But wouldn’t they rather just get a printout of the notes instead? Or have access to the presentation online or in Blackboard? I’m told that this is a typical approach. And yet, this is not discouraged by the pedagogy sage. Somehow this kind of PowerPoint classroom is compatible with the perpetual cry of Engage the students!

PowerPoint seems like an efficient way to deliver material. It also seems like a nice way to map arguments. Of course, if you’re teaching art history or aesthetics it is a nice way to get the images in front of students. If you want to encourage dialogue, however, I would have to be convinced that PowerPoint is the way to go. Yes, it’s efficient and gets the material delivered. But that’s not what we want, right? We want students to come and get the material. And we want them working while they’re at their desks: listening, thinking, writing, and debating. Everyone knows that young people are good at multitasking these days. But are they really? It’s often difficult for them to listen to a lecture/discussion and take accurate notes and reflect on the material under discussion. If they’re not actually good multitaskers, but merely good at dividing their time up into micro-units and task-switching, then one of the objectives of the instructor is to help them become good at multitasking. That is, help them think while at the same time standing on their feet.

Perhaps discussions in the classroom are inefficient, occasionally tangential, and sometimes frustrating for students. But these are old problems with readymade solutions. Unless we’re thinking relatively: then the discussion will almost always be less efficient than the lecture or PowerPoint show. No one ever said that theory could or should be easily accessed, or digested in a single sitting. Isn’t the struggle part of the point?

audio: dundee objects/material conference

There is audio of the recent ‘Real Objects or Material Subjects?’ conference at Dundee (March 2010) available at Daily Humiliation. Hallward, Harman, Johnston, and Williams talk about objects, matter, subjects, and related metaphysical issues.

Thanks to Graham Harman for alerting me.

middlesex staff/students suspended

Saw this via Protevi’s blog.

from tech school to university

As a kid, whenever I took the day off from school I would spend a good portion of it on the couch watching game shows, talk shows, Sportscenter, and shows that seemed to be about real court but somehow never quite had that real-life feel. Between this junk food diet, there would be commercials for technical schools. The two schools I remember most vividly are ITT Technical Institute and Devry (“We’re serious about success”). Here’s one of the commercials for Devry:

I have never been good working on cars, or with tools, or welding things, so I was never attracted to these commercials. Plus, I was just a kid, so I wasn’t looking for a job. In any case, the commercials have been lodged in my psyche and the school-day memories come rushing back whenever I hear ITT or Devry spoken of. This is why I was so surprised to hear that Devry is now known as Devry University. Surprised, saddened, and angered.

It’s surprising that Devry is still operational. Is the International Correspondence School advertised by Sally Struthers still around too? What saddens me is that yet another for-profit technical school has been allowed to take on the ‘University’ title. The meaning and existence of the University is already under threat, as the humanities continue to have funding cut and my home discipline, philosophy, is gradually squeezed out of some ‘Universities’. What’s also sad is the fact that a technical school feels like it needs to be a university. Why not keep doing what you already do well: training handy persons into well-paid technical jobs? Part of the problem is that our culture doesn’t regard technical school with the respect that university students are paid. Think about the class division in high school.

I’m angered that the meaning of ‘university’ has effectively been emptied. What exactly do the Ivy League and Devry have in common? And with the recent assault on Middlesex philosophy still a sensitive issue…not to mention the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education threatening to cut philosophy as a major for, er, financial reasons…

But now I’m rambling. Many universities grant PhDs in a number of fields. A PhD denotes a Doctor of Philosophy in Subject X. Basically, a PhD entails a specialization in applied philosophy: philosophy of sociology, philosophy of literature, philosophy of mathematics, etc. So why is it that applied philosophy remains a valued asset, but philosophy as such has been devalued, or become superfluous to the needs of the University? Certainly one cannot learn applied philosophy without first learning philosophy? Or have I got his wrong?

Finally, I want to return to Devry’s slogan: ‘We’re serious about success’. Fine, you’ve got a slogan. I wonder whether this draws people in or raises enrollment rates. I’ve noticed that in the last decade, perhaps earlier, universities and colleges have jumped on the slogan bandwagon. Everyone’s ‘serious about success’ or ‘the place where the classroom meets the real world’. We get it: you are the bridge from academe to reality. Universities have emblazoned virtues on their flags for ages. The slogan is the new triptych of virtues. It signals the evolution of the university into the business, the need to attract costumers with a catchy phrase that they can’t help but recall. Utter the word Devry and I’ll know you’re serious about success. I can’t help it; the memory overpowers me.

[Update: as The University of Phoenix points out, it has the same accreditation as Harvard. Check out this story in the Chronicle on college branding.]

mere opinion

It’s important for students to realize that when they’re composing papers for philosophy courses they’re not just laying down their opinions. Provided they give reasons to support their assertions, their papers are made up of arguments, not opinions. The reasons are what make an assertion more than mere opinion.

This is why it’s unfortunate that the new philosophy series, The Stone, in The New York Times is under the Opinion banner, as Postural Thinking notes in his latest entry. Of course, many of the the pieces in the Opinion page of the newspaper are more than mere opinion. But the newspaper maintains the myth that personal views are nothing more than mere opinion, just as the cable news shows keep viewers believing that there are always two sides to every story and that, furthermore, neither of these sides is better than the other.  All opinion is equal. You believe what you believe and I’ll believe what I believe. We’re both right.

john berger’s ‘ways of seeing’

The BBC series-turned-book can be seen in its entirety at YouTube. Berger covers a lot of ground and pithily captures a lot of difficult theory, thus enabling the viewer to come away from the series with a breadth of critical insight.

View it here.