I spent most of Saturday hanging out at Coffman Memorial Union on the University of Minnesota campus at MinneBar 2008. I must say that the union has a pretty nice suite of conference rooms for gatherings like this.
I started the morning at Social Search for the Enterprise. Rich Hoeg from Honeywell discussed a nifty use of ConnectBeam to create an internal social bookmark store that integrates directly with Google search results. So when people go to look up a topic they get a page of Google results and an in-line column of internal Honeywell links. The internal information can also list similar tags and users, thus creating an instant community around a search topic. It was easy to see that this was much more effective than the skills directories or yellow pages that so many knowledge management efforts created in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Jonathan Dahl led an interesting discussion on Consulting for fun and profit. I liked the Jeopary format he used, it got a lot of audience participation.
Over the noon hour the big panel discussion was on the state of the state (of technical development in Minnesota). It had the usual rah-rah, we really are as smart as those people on the coast moments along with some exhortations to stop being afraid of risk and to get out there and form more startups. I thought the most salient point was that Minnesota has plenty of talented developers and designers but the networks between them aren’t as strong as they need to be. Another lack is business talent. Dan Grigsby called for product managers to become CEOs at startups. We shall see.
Curt Prins gave a rundown of the “7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing” from which I left early to see the tale end of the Distributed Teams panel.
Charles Gimon led a very interesting discussion about reputation. I’m not sure we were even able to define what reputation is, but we all agreed that it is transforming in the online world. I jotted down a bunch of interesting questions: do we have multiple reputations? how about reputations from inside and outside of networks/communities? is disemvowelling create liability for site owners because it is a type of editing? A couple of sites were mentioned: Naymze, iKarma, claim-id.
Jeramey Jannene talked about making money from blogging. He cited most of the typical ideas: stay focused, get ads, jobboards, sponsored posts, etc. I heard one person ask about investigative journalism techniques. Might be worthwhile as a niche blog topic.
Tim Erickson concluded the day with a discussion about E-Democracy and the challenges of online community building, outreach to under-served communities, and other miscellaneous topics.
I had a good time and had a chance to meet some very interesting people.
The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed.
We make the flying, crying motors,
Clutches, brakes, and axles,
Gears, ignitions, accelerators,
Spokes and springs and shock absorbers.
The silent litany of the workmen goes on –
Speed, speed, we are the makers of speed;
Axles, clutches, levers, shovels,
We make signals and lay the way –
Speed, speed.
The trees come down to our tools,
We carve the wood to the wanted shape.
The whining propeller's song in the sky,
The steady drone of the overland truck,
Comes from our hands; us; the makers of speed.
Speed; the turbines crossing the Big Pond,
Every nut and bolt, every bar and screw,
Every fitted and whirring shaft,
They came from us, the makers,
Us, who know how,
Us, the high designers and the automatic feeders,
Us, with heads,
Us, with hands,
Us on the long haul, the short flight,
We are the makers; lay the blame on us –
The makers of speed.
— from Good Morning, America
Contrast the silent litany of the workmen to the noise of the engines they create. The gears, the clutches, the axles, and brakes. And the litany is a repetition of speed - the word.
Then the connection to we. Who is it that makes this thing called speed? The workers are "we" - the makers of speed. We lay the way and make the signals that propel this speed.
To the environment - the trees and the wood carved by our wants into the desired shapes. Something is wrong, something is destroyed by this thirst for speed, by our wants and desires. Drones and whines now fill the world built by us, the makers of speed.
Speed, a colloquialism for meth-amphetamine. It's a drug now, that we can't deny or relinquish.
Crossing the Big Pond two new words - "every" and "us". The point of the stanza - speed is everywhere, inside and outside of us. Us has a spectrum from the high designers to the automatic feeders, the long haul to the short flight. We're all encompassed now; we're all to the blame. And the blame is laid on us - the makers of speed.
I went to the University of MN today to see Mary Poovey speak in the last lecture of the IMPACTS series. Her book, A History of the Modern Fact, was one of the standout readings in my science, technology, and society class last spring.
Her topic tonight was “Reflections of a Worried Feminist, 30 years on.” She outlined the impact of feminist theory and activism on literary studies since the late 1970s and questioned how much benefit it has really had on the disciplines, especially the humanities.
She started with a personal anecdote about her first job at Yale. Soon after her arrival, a colleague pulled her aside and told her she needed to publish a book quickly if she had any hope of getting tenure. She panicked; she had never thought about publishing while she was a graduate student. Today that attitude would be naive. Graduate study has become very professionalized since the 1970s.
Her first project was a study of Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the late 1970s and 1980s writing about women was a novel approach to scholarship. But throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s the women’s studies movement, feminism, French literary theory, and liberal politics pushed gender into the center of literary studies. And by the end of the 1980s and early 1990s the cultural wars were in full swing.
I saw Donald Kaagn fire one of the major volleys in the PC wars at my freshman convocation in 1990. I remember thinking the speech was a bit of a shock to the system, what did we know about the cultural wars raging in the academy. Some background on the “Great Political Correctness Panic.”
According to Poovey the theory wave of the 1980s had two outlets during the next 15 years. One outlet was a broadening of literary scholarship that began to look critically at institutions. Her book on the modern fact was one of the outcomes of this wave and moved away from direct literary sources to examine broader cultural trends. The other outlet was an elaboration of the leftist critique of gender. Gender became the central ideological issue for some literary scholars. She cited Epistemology of the Closet by Eve Sedgwick and Colonial Desire by Robert Young as two examples of this second outlet.
The two groups had different scholarly approaches and outlooks. The first group - the culturalists - tended to work on 18th and early 19th century topics and focus their literary arguments on broad changes to large categories, such as genre. The second group - the politicists (my terminology for both camps) - tended to focus on the later 19th century and the early 20th century when the problems of colonialism began to come to the fore and would often use literary scholarship to discover the telling allegory that confirmed their existing theoretic positions on the importance of gender.
During the same time period there has been a continual decline in the institutional power of the humanities within the university. The humanities don’t make money or bring in grants like the sciences and so they are marginalized by administrators.
Recently, Poovey has begun to question her belief in the transformative politics of the classroom. She and many others believed that the wave of ethnic and women’s studies departments started during the 1970s would have a liberalizing effect on student politics. If only we taught students how to think like the liberal professorate then the world would become a better place. But this didn’t happen. During the Q&A this was described by an audience member as the “narcissism of the classroom.” Today she has turned her teaching away from political topics to studies about the development of genre and the history of the discipline.
She concluded that we are faced with a choice between teaching as a political activity, which doesn’t seem effective and contributes to the marginalization of imaginative studies, or teaching as a disciplinary act.
In another anecdote she described a recent forum at NYU on the close reading requirement for undergraduate courses. Almost everyone agreed that close reading was useful. But near the end of the discussion one of the graduate students spoke up and said that everything that was said up to that point was useless to her as a radical lesbian teacher. The spirit of the discussion quickly chilled. Many of those who supported the political form of teaching were 20th century Americanists. During the Q&A this bias toward recent American studies seemed to be indicative of a general arrogance on the part of Americans seeing the world and literary studies through their own ideological blinders.
She said that the humanities are being squeezed between an antithetical administration that sees no value in them and a diffuse politics of identity that has no lasting effects. Politics in the classroom, a place that is already highly privileged, does not equal politics in Chinatown or Bed-Stuy. If we continue to politicize the classroom then the discipline of literary studies will lose its value.
For further reading and evidence I offer this commentary at Evolving Thoughts and two recent columns by Stanley Fish on French Theory in America.
I just finished reading a wonderful short novel 
"The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy " by Jeanne Birdsall It is about the summer vacation of a family of four, very independent sisters and their widowed father. They rent a cabin on a large estate in the Berkshire Mountains. During their stay they meet a young boy who lives on the neighboring estate. The boy keeps trying to tell his domineering mother that he wants to study music instead of going to a military academy, but the rambunctious adventures of the four girls keep getting in the way and convince his mother to send him to military school a year early. The boy finally gets his mother to pay attention thanks to the help of the girls and their father. There are strong overtones of Little Women and Madeline L’Engle.
The interesting thing about this choice in novels was how I discovered it. I found it by looking through a list of award winning young adult novels. Over the past six months almost all of my leisure fiction reading has come from the shelves of the young adult section. First there was Philip Pullman’s brilliant Sally Lockhart novels about the steely adventures of a young woman trying to get ahead on her own in Victorian London, then it was Pete Hautman’s Invisible, No Limit, and Godless. I’ve read a few young adult novels on and off over the past 15 years but the bulk of my leisure fiction has been science fiction and fantasy. So what prompted the change?
Whenever I walk into a second hand bookstore, especially one with a good sf/f section that goes back a few decades I’m struck by the slimness of the mass-market paperbacks published during the 1970s and into the early 1980s. Authors like Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, John Brunner, Barry Malzberg, and Phil Dick churned out short novels on an annual basis. As with all things the quality varied but the time it took to discover the quality of a piece of work was smaller than it is today.
A few months ago I tried to wade through Pandora’s Star by Peter Hamilton, which is over 1000 pages long in paperback and is the first part of a two book series. This is insane. Granted there were some good passages in the book but most of it was endless transporting of characters from one planet to the next in order to setup another confrontation or scene. But the confrontations never amounted to anything, everything was build up. At least until I gave up about 400 pages in. I wasn’t going to spend the hours needed to read 2000 pages for a conclusion that may on may not justify the buildup.
So I’ve left mainstream SF behind and delved into the YA world where I can read a book in a single evening and still get a thrill out of well-crafted characters and interesting plots. Philip Pullman is especially good; his plots in the Sally Lockheart series are easily as baroque as those by Peter Hamilton but they take place in less than half the total verbiage. See John Clute on Hamilton’s latest, The Dreaming Void.
There is a certain style of argument that has been bothering me lately and I think I may finally have a name for it.
It started at the beginning of this month over at Scienceblogs when the issue of framing science reared up again and created a blog tempest. Matthew Nisbet complained that critics of the anti-evolution movie Expelled were damaging their own cause by drawing too much attention to the movie.
What really irked me was the suggestion that some criticism was better than others. In particular, the strident denunciations of atheists like PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins damaged the cause of evolution, while milder criticisms that appealed to the ideological frames of the proverbial moderates was alright.
Over the weekend I read a sizable chunk of The Middle Way by Lou Marinoff. The first section of the book starts well, with a precis of the key ideas in the philosophy of the ABCs — Aristotle, Buddha, and Confucius. Marinoff argues that all of them shared a common theme of moderation in ethics, politics, belief, and thinking. So far so good.
The second section, and about ⅔ of the whole book, criticizes the extremists in our midst who are spoiling the wonderful world of moderation we could all enjoy. This is where the book falls down. Any book that caricatures Derrida and calls Ayn Rand “author of the monumental classic Atlas Shrugged” has some questionable definitions of moderation.
But even worse is the hectoring tone — the belief that if we just didn’t have these bad people on the extremes, these postmodernists, politicians, feminists, economists, teachers, racists, globalists, economists, and terrorists — then everything would be right with the world. It is a hopeful incantation — “I expel thee from my house” — in search of an enemy. It’s those people, the ones over there, who are causing all the problems. If we throw them out, get them to be quiet, reign in their anger, ask them to just shut up, then the moderates will come in and show us the way to utopia.
Moreover both Nisbet and Marinoff are self-proclaimed moderates. They may agree with the extremists, at least Nisbet appears to oppose Expelled, but the screechy behavior of the extremists concerns them. Why would anyone oppose the voices of moderation? Moderation is a good thing, right?
Nisbet and Marinoff are making the same rhetorical move. You, the reader, and them are the same; you both believe in evolution or moderation. How could a rational person, a philosopher, think otherwise? And up to this point I agree with both of them.
But lurking among the rationalists and philosophers are people whose viewpoints are too extreme. These dangerous people might get to the microphone and shape public opinion so we need protection from these extremists, and thus we have enemies within who must be ignored or silenced.
First, create a questionnaire that asks increasingly private questions. Surely some social psychologist somewhere has developed an instrument or rubric that measures privacy or the perception of privacy. Make two versions of this questionnaire, one for individuals and another for organizations or businesses.
Second, sample two groups of people. One group is given/asked questions about their personal private life. Ask people questions until they feel uncomfortable or refuse to answer further questions. Then follow up to find out reasons why they felt uncomfortable. In the second group do the same thing but with questions about an organization or company that subject works for.
Hypothesis, people will be generally more protective or wary of violating the privacy of the organization/group they work with than they would be for their own, personal privacy.
Possible explanation:
- People are reluctant to violate the privacy of a group or company they belong to because they have less personal agency over the group as a whole then they do over themselves or their close family.
- There is an economic reason as well: disclosing information about the company one works for could result in losing one’s job, whereas disclosing information about oneself through search engine histories, social networking sites, etc. has an ambiguous economic outcome. This is supported by prospect theory and the general aversion to probable losses than gains.
- Finally there is a social aversion to sharing private information about another person without their permission. People are willing to share private information about themselves because they perceive that information as being within their sphere of control. Information about others is not in that sphere of personal control. This might be bolstered or denied by research on gossip. When are people willing to versus reluctant to gossip about another person? How far will gossip travel outside of the core social group?
A recent forum on information ethics for the Minnesota Special Libraries Association prompted me to think about privacy.
Assume that individual privacy is undergoing a massive shift because of the advent of large aggregate databases, technical innovations like the web, and, perhaps, a changing attitude among younger generations. The discussion at the meeting centered on social web applications like Facebook, Google, and LibraryThing. A lot of people are sacrificing privacy for the perceived value of a service like GMail, LinkedIn, or Facebook. Librarians have long defended the privacy of patrons by destroying circulation records as soon as possible but in the new social web world patrons are sharing the information librarians protected by posting it on LibraryThing or elsewhere. In order to compete on services libraries may have to reconsider the bedrock ethical principles surrounding the analysis and storage of patron information.
But the even bigger question I wonder about is how organizations will respond in this brave new privacy world. So far most of the erosion of privacy has taken place on the part of individuals. But the organizations and institutions that we all interact with continue to profit from that data and zealously guardt data from being used openly by others.
From a commons perspective this might be another form of enclosure. Individuals choose to contribute to the public commons and then that information is enclosed and “monetized” by companies. Leading to ideas like digital sharecropping and crowdsourcing.
A countervailing trend for public companies are the securities regulations promulgated by the SEC. Here the explicit bargain is in exchange for access to capital markets the company must disclose a certain amount of information to the public. After the Enron scandals the Sarbanes-Oxley bill increased the requirements for public disclosure. But there was, and continues to be, a lot of opposition to that.
It seems we may be headed into a world where privacy becomes more and more a matter of financial resources. Companies can afford to pay the lawyers and technicians needed to keep information locked up behind closed doors. Individuals don’t have that luxury.
When it comes to professional responsibility SLA and other organizations are in a bind. A lot of professional ethics statements protect the privacy of the organizations where people work. Should this continue to be the case? If a significant part of the public gives up its privacy to organizations then why can’t we expect the same openness in return?
I didn’t make it to the final day of Rethinking the University. But here are some concluding notes from day 2. I hope to have more to say about this topic during the upcoming days.
Panel - Surplus Value And The University In Crisis
Morgan Adamson - “Student debt and the finacialization of academic life” Since the early 1970s students have been at the center of experiments in financial life. This trend is in direct reaction to the student movements of the 1960s. with the goal of moving funding for education from state to student. In response to the student activism of the 1960s financial institutions and government created Sallie Mae in 1972. Today this quasi-private company gets an almost 37% profit from student loans. Since the 1970s the university has built an infrastructure to facilitate connections between students and lenders. Moreover, student debtors are exceptional because they can never get away from debt through bankruptcy.
Ellen Messer Davidow - “Situating higher education” Not much to add here. My notes are too sketchy because I was starting to get tired. Will academics ever stop reading papers in front of large audiences? Do these same people read their lectures to students in classrooms?
Elizabeth Kissling - Branding is what you do when there is no difference between your product and others. Kissling is from Eastern Washington University. A few years ago they introduced a new branding campaign - “Start something big and the big red box.” She showed the video to much laughter. She then showed a great editorial cartoon of a student talking to the big red box - “what are you”, “im a metaphor for all your dreams and expectations…”, “man my dreams suck ass.” At the same time as the marketing campaign was being unveiled the university was in protracted contract negotiations with faculty. So the end result of these years is more continget faculty, a costly branding campaign that is an embarrassment, and hiring practices that diminish the distinctiveness the branding campaign promoted.
Jeffrey Williams - “Debt Education” in Dissent 2006. 1982 avg debt $2000, 1992 avg debt $9200, 2002 $18900 from the National Council of Education Statistics, project on student debt. Academia justifies teaching as a progressive endeavor but the rise in student debt teaches different lessons. Two possible solutions might be free higher education which would take a little more than $30 billion to cover all current students or income contingent loans. What academics need to do about debt: develop new methods - ethnography, statistics (ah, methodology, the clarion cry of the academic) ; analyze; propose solutions. Williams concluded by comparing student debt to indentured servitude in early American history.
qa - frameworks: middle of a shift between episteme (Foucault), enveloped by global capital; enfolding of big science by military/industrial complex after ww2 - mentioned from Andrew Pickering; indebting is a political strategy; trilateral commission 1975 - governability, how to control citizen students
The conference continues on from yesterday. I got here late today, in the middle of the second morning session.
Roundtable - inside/outside: the university and the public intellectual
I arrived in time to hear Naomi Scheman make some interesting comments about objectivity as the creation of trust in expertise. But before my thoughts could rush through Galison, Daston, and Giddens her comments were over and it was time for Q&A. There was some interesting back and forth about open access and academic publishing. How are we going to get beyond the current publishing regimen?
Roundtable - labor in neoliberal university
Paula Rabinowitz - Addresses her experience as a department chair during the recent strikes and how it intersected with academic freedom. Academic freedom for research is largely unquestioned, but the current challenge to freedom is in the classroom. Three anecdotes from the strike: she told her dean that she would not cross the picket line so he told her to work from home, she compromised by working at an off-campus cafe — but in one of her classes she got a complaint from a student in her lecture class who staged a sit-in protesting the class being off-campus; then there was a creative writing professor who was challenged with an ethics complaint for teaching/reading literature about work during the strike; and finally a graduate student getting grief for teaching off-campus from another department chair.
Jess Sundin - union worker at UM for 9 years. Neoliberalism is savage capitalism = global capitalism. The tax payers fund plenty of private endeavors - 10 year coca-cola franchise, TCF bank stadium, 3m - guidant - medtronic make billions based on research from the UofM, food services run by aramark, sale of the university hospital, pharmacy benefits make money for self-insured university health plans. Maximizing the profit of the university by eliminating general college, top-3 research university. 2003 strike in the wake of massive layoffs, wage freeze, and health care cuts. 1. workers unwilling to accept terms 2. no way to compel work 3. union willing to fight. Lessons: timing of strike in October was too late, better to walk out at start of school year. 2007 walked out early meant there was less time to build coalitions on campus. 2003 afscme walked lines alone, only union on strike. 2007 coalition of unions. 2003 worked with community partners, this work was fearful to other unions in 2007. Universities will not work with labor, we need to go outside the structure of the university to make change.
Jeff Pilacinski - What will it take to win? We suffer from a failure to organize ourselves. What is the disconnect between academics and activists? Product for activists is also education and the divisions between groups are established by the state and the employer. And they only come together when there is a labor stoppage, between strikes there isn’t much working together. In 2007 more groups participated but still the strike was crushed. We must change how we fight together. What is the difference between on and off campus classes? The production of education continues despite the strike.
Eric Jensen - steward from the teamsters. Mobilizing the neoliberal ideology against the workers by the administration see health care, wage bargaining. In 2003 there was a massive assault by the state government against workers. The university administration complained at the time, by appealing that the university is a public good. It’s not the employers fault, something in the environment causes the problem. Examples from 2003 - claim by administration that the U has no ‘free’ health care, claim that copays are “behavioral modification” to keep people from abusing doctor visits despite the fact that Americans visit doctor’s less than other countries.
QA - product of university is credentialing; teaching during the strike - learning from the struggle. in class teach-ins. faculty governance is meaningless. ; professors conceive of their jobs as a calling, end of the goal is tenured position, a lifetime position — this makes it harder for professors to strike, academics have bought into meritocracy from the start ; most academics do not think of themselves as workers but academics are asked to work more and more today, we are willing to expand our work because we (academics) realize that their lifetime job is a rarity and is in jeopardy ; living wage avengers - trying to build coalitions on a regular basis ; need to defeat the idea of collegiality in faculty governance.
The after lunch panels and discussions.
Roundtable 3 - Valuing the Liberal Arts
Jigna Desai kicked things off with “no time for fancy titles” about her experience in Asian and Women’s studies. She made a few good points about knowledge production as a form of social change, the “driven to discover” U of Mn branding campaign that subscribes to the positivist goal of more creating more facts, and the fact that marketing campaigns always have pictures of diversity. She also observed that the College of Liberal Arts is the center of teaching activity at the University of MN but it is furthest from the the areas of massive financial support. c.f. the recent donation to the medical school by the Masons, and the massive Carlson School of Management where the first day of the conference took place.
Margarat Werry discussed “value, liberalism, the arts: arguments for a viable future.” Arts have historically been underfunded, counter to the central work of university. Arts are activities as opposed to the creation of knowledge. Performance art, especially, is ephemeral and difficult to commodify. The arts appears in the public relations materials for universities but this doesn’t result in increased budgets or salaries. There seems to be an ornamental logic at work, arts add to the capitalist university by showing prospective students, donors, and alumni that self-fashioning can happen in the corporate university. Arts = collective inquiry through doing/action. The arts may be at “vanguard of the neo-liberal university” through the employment paradigms of the creative industries: performance epitomizes the service, or “experience economy,” artists are the ultimate flexible labor, modulating themselves to the current conditions.
Jani Scandura made some general comments about the value of the humanities and mentioned a recent column by Stanley Fish Will the humanities save us?. I particularly liked her comment during the question period about the faculty no longer being a monolithic class or interest of its own. Nowadays the differences in salary between professors can be 5 to 10 times depending on discipline.
Panel 4 - Radical Re-framings
Isaac Kamolo and Eli Meyerhoff on “Creating Commons: divided governance, participatory management, and the enclosure of the university.” Meyerhoff began with a description of the commons as those things that are recognized as accessible to all members. He proposed three types of commons: non-capitalist, capitalist, and anti-capitalist. Enclosure of the commons occurs through the identification of limits to capital, destabilization of commons, struggles over restablization, and the failure of political recomposition. Kamolo applied these ideas to the university. In the 1910s the AAUP reached a bargain with the administration to leave professors alone to publish any work they wished in return for professors leaving the management of the university to the administrations. Today the mantra is participatory governance in which a huge number of committees are created to give the faculty and students the illusion of input into the processes of the university. Some responses to this problem might be to create deeper alliances between workers at the university. So instead of saying “we support university workers” during a strike we should say “we are university workers.” A lot of interesting material here to think about. I didn’t have a chance to ask about open courseware or other technological/electronic commons that are beginning to develop.
Tim ?? from the Counter-Cartographies Collective presented “Mapping the 21st century university.” What does it mean to be a great, 21c, global university? We need to critique corporatization and knowledge factory metaphors. Consider research triangle park in North Carolina, conceived as literally a knowledge factory. During the development of RTP in 1960s university administrators criticized the plan by claiming that corporations wanted universities to be prostitutes for research. The plan was to create a route from pure research, to applied knowledge, to factory floor. Look at the RTP website 4 years ago, focused upon maps, research, triangular geographies. Today the website is focused on people, a transition from factory to affective labor. Companies are now after relationship goals - getting updates at local universities, working over time with grad students. Patent incentives are less salient, they’ve never really made much money for universities and have functioned mostly as a management technique. The largest growth in physical office space on campus has been administrative. Consider Tony Waldrop, whose job description has changed from promoting individual scholarly activities (the knowledge factory model original to research triangle), to a new mission to support interdisciplinary activity and promote economic progress. New spaces are being created that allow collaboration and show, through photos or large open windows into conference rooms, collaboration in process. These photos of students working together end up in marketing brochures, raising enrollment, and pushing the whole edifice forward.
Jack Jackson concluded on “Imperial Knowledge” but I’m afraid my mind was beginning to wander. I did catch some intriguing comparisons between the perceptions of suicide bombers today as terrorists and the writings of Winston Churchill celebrating the sacrifices of potential sticky bombers during WW2.
I had to leave before the day conclude. The rest of the schedule can be seen online.
