Eucatastrophe Reader

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

Ivory Tower REVIEW

Sometime next month, I may have the first month in 21 years of not paying a bill for a child. That will be strange. I actually was thinking about that and went out and bought a pair of jeans today.

Ivory Tower opens its narrative by speaking of the crisis in higher education. Over the wandering course of the argument, it is clear that the general solution it offers involves more public funding but … honestly, given the State of contemporary budgets, isn’t that just another way of having students pay through deficit funding? What makes the argument so difficult to make – that today’s college students deserve more help than they are getting and that today’s college administrative personnel deserve less pay than they are charging for, is just how seemingly unaffected by it all so many students seem to be. The opening scenes of the “party culture” at the University of Arizona (somewhat reminiscent of what goes on at UVM) is a bit disheartening.

In so many later scenes, we see students trying to figure out how to pay for their educations and yet in these opening scenes we see so many students whose educations are paid for trying to see how little education they can actually get. Maybe the solution is to have a different way for parents to fund a young person’s education? Maybe when they all graduate from high school, parents with funds should find the children of other people’s kids who would use the tuition money well. Like any other problem in American society, it all goes back to people who do not deserve something getting what people who do deserve it can’t get.

In the course of the documentary, we are constantly presented with dilemmas. There are colleges trying to provide remedial services cheaply, even while their Presidents are reaping six figure salaries. There are schools building football stadiums and million dollar pavilions and resort dorms while telling their students that they must pay more for their “educations.” There are students who are deciding to “hack” a college education, finding ways to learn without paying 50K a year to learn.  The documentary trains its focus on public colleges and private, on big colleges and small, on Harvard, Stanford, and Community Colleges in Kentucky and online options. We are exposed to student protests at the Cooper Union when their administration opts to start charging tuition. We meet students with well over $100,00 in debt who can’t find jobs. The film interviews critics and supporters, victims and beneficiaries of the system as it exists.

I suspect that there is something to make just anyone furious in this rendering of a system gone amok – a system designed sans common sense, I suspect because the “client” – the students – are put in a position where they are entitled to make the decisions while young enough to not have either the resources or the experience to make them wisely.

Can I recommend that anyone interested in my life in higher education read this article from The Atlantic? It is entitled “In the Basement of the Ivory Tower” and describes the experience of a community college remedial English teacher in a way that I can totally relate with (though I do not teach English).

I plan to use the scene where students at Cooper Union take over the President’s office to introduce my discussion of Shay’s Rebellion in U.S. History class this next week. It will be interesting to see what happens when these students start trying to default on these loans in a way similar to the decision of Western Massachusetts farmers started burning down courthouses.

Question for Comment: What is your take on higher education right now? Do you have any anecdotal evidence to support your present opinions?

Baboon Stress and You

Stress: Portrait of a Killer

Robert Saplosky has been studying baboons and you should hear what he has to say about your life. In short, stress is not good for you. It will lower your immune system’s ability to fight disease and it will shorten your life. My favorite part of the documentary is the part where the stress inducing male alpha baboons demand the first cuts of a meat treasure trove in a dumpster and wind up killing themselves off to the great benefit of the whole baboon troop.

HERE is how Saplonsky explains how a troop of baboons can be improved by a reverse Darwinism that kills off the aggressive and strong.

I wonder how stress inducing bullies can be tempted to steal all the meat in human dumpsters in the human community? Mmm … think, think, think …

Question for Comment: What sort of baboon troop do you live in?

"I can speak of the wrongs I have suffered"

12 Years a Slave REVIEW

"He [Epps] thought of nothing but his loss, and cursed me for having been born free." – Solomon Northrup on how his owner responded when he discovered that Solomon was actually a free man.

12 Years a Slave tells the story of a free black man enticed from his home in Saratoga, NY and abducted into slavery from the nation’s capital. Solomon Northrup was to spend 12 years as a slave in the Deep South, eventually recovering his freedom through the help of a Canadian and a few concerned New York abolitionists. The story, originally published a year or two after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is an anthology of the abuse that resulted from the notion that people could be regarded as property. It is the narrative illustration of the conclusion drawn in the Dredd Scott case, namely, that the Constitution gave no rights to black men "that white men were bound to respect.:

It is a story of how denied rights and inflated powers either quickly or eventually leads to brutality. For that reason, it is not an easy story to watch, nor should it be. This is the story of twelve years of one man’s life. It is hard enough. Consider the untold stories of 24 years, 48 years, or 96 years of slavery (not many made it that far). Consider that story retold millions upon millions of times. Solomon Northrup’s life includes so many of the harsh realities of slavery as experienced by those who had to endure it that it hurts the conscience to calculate its being relived in so many millions of different lives. What was it like to discover oneself a slave? What was it like to be sold as a slave? What was it like to be transported as a slave? What was it like to be dehumanized as a slave? What was it like to work as a slave? What was it like to be passed from owner to owner, to be treated well or poorly without recourse to complaint? To consider the risks and rewards of escape? Was Solomon Northrup’s experience typical? Or was his suffering made worse by his knowledge of a different life? Here is his account of waking up in chains.

“The pain in my head had subsided in a measure, but I was very faint and weak. I was sitting upon a low bench, made of rough boards, and without coat or hat. I was hand cuffed. Around my ankles also were a pair of heavy fetters. One end of a chain was fastened to a large ring in the floor, the other to the fetters on my ankles. I tried in vain to stand upon my feet. Waking from such a painful trance, it was some time before I could collect my thoughts. Where was I? What was the meaning of these chains? Where were Brown and Hamilton? What had I done to deserve imprisonment in such a dungeon? I could not comprehend. There was a blank of some indefinite period, preceding my awakening in that lonely place, the events of which the utmost stretch of memory was unable to recall. I listened intently for some sign or sound of life, but nothing broke the oppressive silence, save the clinking of my chains, whenever I chanced to move. I spoke aloud, but the sound of my voice startled me. I felt of my pockets, so far as the fetters would allow—far enough, indeed, to ascertain that I had not only been robbed of liberty, but that my money and free papers were also gone! Then did the idea begin to break upon my mind, at first dim and confused, that I had been kidnapped. But that I thought was incredible.

There must have been some misapprehension—some unfortunate mistake. It could not be that a free citizen of New-York, who had wronged no man, nor violated any law, should be dealt with thus inhumanly. The more I contemplated my situation, however, the more I became confirmed in my suspicions. It was a desolate thought, indeed. I felt there was no trust or mercy in unfeeling man; and commending myself to the God of the oppressed, bowed my head upon my fettered hands, and wept most bitterly.”

I was reminded of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s description of being arrested and sent to a Soviet work camp in Gulag Archipelago.

“Arrest! Need it be said that it is a breaking point in your life, a bolt of lightning which has scored a direct hit on you? That it is an unassimilable spiritual earthquake not every person can cope with, as a result of which people often slip into insanity? The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it. Each of us is a center of the Universe, and that Universe is shattered when they hiss at you: "You are under arrest." If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm? But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis-placements in our universe, and both· the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?" And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer. Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somersault from one state into another.”

In many ways, Solomon Northrup’s story is a therapeutic exercise in truth telling. And I suspect that anyone who has ever been treated unjustly while being forced to remain silent about the injustice and pretend that injustice isn’t injustice knows the feeling. Northrup, in his written account, levels a severe indictment on the character of some of his masters, praising the humanity of others. I hope someone thought to send them all complimentary copies in their own life-times. If not, here’s the just deserts of Mr. Edwin Epps.

“Beyond the reach of his inhuman thong, and standing on the soil of the free State where I was born, thanks be to Heaven, I can raise my head once more among men. I can speak of the wrongs I have suffered, and of those who inflicted them, with upraised eyes. But I have no desire to speak of him or any other one otherwise than truthfully. Yet to speak truthfully of Edwin Epps would be to say—he is a man in whose heart the quality of kindness or of justice is not found. A rough, rude energy, united with an uncultivated mind and an avaricious spirit, are his prominent characteristics. He is known as a "nigger breaker," distinguished for his faculty of subduing the spirit of the slave, and priding himself upon his reputation in this respect, as a jockey boasts of his skill in managing a refractory horse. He looked upon a colored man, not as a human being, responsible to his Creator for the small talent entrusted to him, but as a "chattel personal," as mere live property, no better, except in value, than his mule or dog. When the evidence, clear and indisputable, was laid before him that I was a free man, and as much entitled to my liberty as he —when, on the day I left, he was informed that I had a wife and children, as dear to me as his own babes to him, he only raved and swore, denouncing the law that tore me from him, and declaring he would find out the man who had forwarded the letter that disclosed the place of my captivity, if there was any virtue or power in money, and would take his life. He thought of nothing but his loss, and cursed me for having been born free. He could have stood unmoved and seen the tongues of his poor slaves torn out by the roots—he could have seen them burned to ashes over a slow fire, or gnawed to death by dogs, if it only brought him profit. Such a hard, cruel, unjust man is Edwin Epps.”

“There may be humane masters, as there certainly are inhuman ones—there may be slaves well-clothed, well-fed, and happy, as there surely are those half-clad, half-starved and miserable; nevertheless, the institution that tolerates such wrong and inhumanity as I have witnessed, is a cruel, unjust, and barbarous one. Men may write fictions portraying lowly life as it is, or as it is not—may expatiate with owlish gravity upon the bliss of ignorance—discourse flippantly from arm chairs of the pleasures of slave life; but let them toil with him in the field—sleep with him in the cabin—feed with him on husks; let them behold him scourged, hunted, trampled on, and they will come back with another story in their mouths. Let them know the heart of the poor slave—learn his secret thoughts—thoughts he dare not utter in the hearing of the white man; let them sit by him in the silent watches of the night—converse with him in trustful confidence, of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and they will find that ninety-nine out of every hundred are intelligent enough to understand their situation, and to cherish in their bosoms the love of freedom, as passionately as themselves.”

http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/northup/northup.html

Question for Comment: I wonder what it would be like to be remembered forever in such a unflatering light. Are we who we are remembered to be by the most people?

The Freedom to Think For Ourselves

Citizen Koch REVIEW

In Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the Supreme Court ruled that people in the United States have a right to free speech, that money donated to organizations that promote political outcomes is speech, and that corporations are people. Put those three assertions together and you have a situation where a corporation can pour millions or billions of dollars into ad campaigns and organizations that effectively influence political outcomes. Using this ruling, wealthy financial interests were able to support a Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, who upon entering office, used his office to eliminate collective bargaining in Wisconsin’s public sector economy. As unions were the primary financial competitor in the funding of campaigns, the move effectively sought to neutralize another source of “free speech” in Wisconsin. The interpretation that Citizen Koch places on these events suggests that the Supreme Court handed big money the weapon they needed to compel politicians to respect the wealthy. Whether they use money to support a candidate or to intimidate a candidate is immaterial if in the end, candidates fear offending those who’s resources and treasure chests can be used to misrepresent them in the public or misrepresent their opponents. Or so the documentary explains it. It’s a classic “big-guy-beats-up-little-guy” story.

Citizen Koch sees nothing positive about this development. IT never seeks to engage the discussion on the level of legal principal or logic. It goes about framing it in terms of outcomes. It is as if to say, “Since the results of too much free speech in this case is detrimental to democracy, the reasons for allowing too much free speech must be unconstitutional.”  But this is not necessarily the case. From my perspective, the problem is not that there are too many slick political ads out there. The problem is that there are too many people in the country who do not know how or care how to see through them. Having a serious political debate via ad campaigns is a bit like trying to have a serious theological debate on Twitter. It is, essentially, the wrong forum.

Justice Kennedy articulates the foundational belief of the court in the Citizens United case when he says,  “We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” Justice Scalia defends the decision by saying that the Constitutional framers were the ones that argued that the solution to inaccurate speech was not to limit freedom of speech but to encourage simply more speech. “Can you tell newspaper publishers you can only spend so much money in the publication of your newspaper?” he asks, “Would they not say this is abridging my speech?”

How are corporations different when they use their money to broadcast their positions?

I say if Americans don’t want to be manipulated by people with money during election cycles, they should stop watching their TVs and start actually reading Supreme Court decisions and voting records.  

As Justice Kennedy puts it in the decision,

“When government seeks to use its full power, including the criminal law, to command where a person may get his or her information or what distrusted source he or she may not hear, it uses censorship to control thought. This is unlawful. The First Amendment confirms the freedom to think for ourselves.”

What is needed here is a simple commitment by every American voter: “I _________________ do solemnly swear, that I will not make up my mind about a candidate or an issue by merely watching campaign ads for or against them.”

Case closed.

Question for Comment: What is your method for determining who to vote for and why?