news – Samuel Cohen

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

So they’re destroying higher education in the US. It was maybe the thing we should have been proudest of. For decades after the Baby Boom filled campuses to bursting and the National Defense Education Act of 1958 responded to Sputnik by pouring billions of dollars into research, American universities were the envy of the world. They were envied for the research they produced and for the mass provision of a quality post-secondary education. US higher education was the engine of local and state economies, returning many times on investment, and it made the much-touted American dream at least plausible for generations of students.

Aside from demographic explosions and geopolitical anxiety, another thing that made this system possible was shared governance. No, really. When a few American college presidents caught the German research university bug and the professoriate professionalized along with the other nascent professions, the deal was that the disciplines would determine for each what counted as scholarship and who counted as a scholar and how best the material should be taught. And together, the faculty across these disciplines would be in charge of who got hired and promoted and what got taught on their campuses. They would share in the governance of their campus. This is where the freedom students and scholars have to learn and research and teach, academic freedom, comes from. Just as there had always been, university administrations would be in charge of the money, prostrate themselves at the stone steps to the state house, man their boards with the rich, but the idea was that those parties could not have influence beyond the board room. Of course, that ideal was tested and often forgotten in times of high national stress; as soon as the AAUP was founded to protect the line between the classroom and lab on one hand and the board and the state on the other, it found itself bowing under the pressure of Great War jingoism. Likewise during McCarthyism. But the ideal of that line, on the whole, even during the late 20th/early 21st century battles of the Culture Wars, survived.

Thank god that’s over.

And we have the super-rich to thank for it, the multibillionaires, rich people the likes of which we’ve never seen (to borrow a phrase from Trump that is creeping into the vocabulary of regular people in a way that gives me nausea the likes of which I have never felt except maybe before I learned I have a cod allergy). They are able to wield influence on universities in a way their forebears could not do from the golf course or the boardroom, and they have brought that influence to bear in a way that obliterates that line between campus and outside influence.

As CEO investor multibillionaire Marc Rowan, who drove Penn’s president from office, is quoted as saying in today’s New York Times, the problem is shared governance:

Universities can’t fix themselves, Rowan says, because they’re burdened with ancient and outmoded structures of authority–universities come from medieval guilds, for god’s sake, guilds not even of faculty but of students, as Rowan surely does not know–structures that keep them from responding to the times the way he thinks they should. So he must bring his influence to bear to make sure they respond correctly.

What’s to blame for this increased influence? On the list, put the legislative and policy victories of the old kind of rich people, victories that made the new kind of super rich people possible; the Citizens United decision (for which I will never forgive the ACLU), for making those victories possible; the unprecedented occupation of seats in the Capitol by the wealthy; the occupation of the chair behind the Resolute Desk by a billionaire as crooked as they come. The list goes on.

The results? The resignations of university presidents under fire for not sufficiently condemning Gaza protests or not eradicating “DEI” from their campuses ruthlessly enough are the showiest results, but the much more widespread chilling effect is that felt at universities that aren’t Harvard or Penn or NYU, public universities where administrations are bending over backward to comply in advance of legal requirements and in obeisance to executive orders not worth the magic marker ink they’re signed with. The “Compact” the Trump administration tried to get the presidents of nine top universities to sign was a failure only in the absence of compliant signatories. The message was heard loud and clear. The administrations of public and private colleges and universities, leaders of a whole range of institutions, rushed to comply in advance, to anticipatorily obey, and to do so in ways that violated shared governance. Faculty have been fired. Centers doing diversity work have been shuttered. Websites have even been scrubbed of offending words.

None of this would be possible if these schools were following their own bylaws and the long-established principles of American higher education. So put these administrations on the list too. And put many of the faculty on the list too, for not standing up tall enough, not yelling loudly enough, not risking our necks to oppose these violations of faculty governance and basic decency. Not because we would have been defending ourselves. Because we would have been defending higher education.

Add to this the Trump administration’s attacks on foreign students, cheered on by the self-appointed billionaire champions of [checks notes] whiteness, patriarchy, and Benjamin Netanyahu, and even more significant, the administration’s illegal refusal to release research funds due to institutions, and you’ve got a recipe for great, maybe irreversible damage to American higher education. Who would want to come study here? Who will write the biting campus satire of the future, possible only because of the greatness of the idea and the institutions? You can’t be disappointed in something if it’s not worth believing in.

So we’ve sold our campuses to the highest bidders. We’re letting something of the greatest value be diminished, something all of us should be fighting harder for–not just faculty, not just alumni, not just anyone who lives in a college town or a state where the university system is one of the biggest employers or in a country where innovation comes from university labs and seminar rooms energized by students who came here to get an education. Once the billionaires have finally taken over our schools, and our country, maybe it will be a blessing that there will be nobody around with the time and resources to write the history of how we lost everything.

Gulf of America

With help from Merriam-Webster:

gulf

noun

1. A part of the ocean or sea extending into the land

The U.S. has a few gulfs, among them the Gulf of Alaska, the Gulf of Maine, and the Gulf of Mexico. California has a couple more gulfs. The country’s also got plenty of sounds and bays and inlets (and even ten fjords), but only a few gulfs. If you look them up in a reference book (if you’re old and like books) or a reputable website, you’ll find pictures like the one above.

However, if you look them up on Google Maps, a formerly reputable website, you will find that the Gulf of Mexico has a different name. The Goniff in Chief* had a big idea, and he was so excited about this Big Idea that he made a proclamation, like a little King. And he decided there should be a day dedicated to his Big Idea.

Why did Google go along with this? According to the BBC, “Google said it was making the change as part of ‘a longstanding practice’ of following name changes when updated by official government sources.” A cynic might suggest that the real answer lies in the tech CEO tableau below, taken at the inauguration.

Since the Gulf is just a big giant stretch of water and has no government to object, apparently our President, if that’s what you want to call him and who am I to stop you, can just call it whatever he wants and that somehow has the force of law, or enough force to bring a Master of the Tech Universe (shout out to Tom Wolfe) to heel. Greenland, on the other hand, has, unfortunately from only this one point of view, a government and even people living there, so if we want it renamed, we have to buy it. But how? As of yesterday, there’s a bill for that:

Thanks, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter (R-GA). What do you get an authoritarian with the mind of a child who’s already got everything? Asked and answered.

2. A deep chasm: ABYSS

This hemispheric mislabeling/conquest misheggos is only one small part of the abyss that is opening up before us as a result of the country’s losing its misinformed, social media-misshapen mind and electing the GIC. Impending financial crash? Check. Full-blown constitutional crisis? Check. Crippling of scientific research, social services, and higher education? Check. Explicit bigotry enshrined in a flurry of deadly policies? Check. Loss of faith in our national project, always fallen short of but never just thrown out and lit on fire? Check. Will we fall into this abyss, this chasm, this Gulf of America, where we rename things because we want to Own Everything and Don’t Care About Other People? Can we stop it now? When the Vice President says judges can’t tell members of the executive or legislative branch what to do or more importantly what not to do, what is there to do?

3. WHIRLPOOL

Odysseus, just trying to get home to see his faithful dog, had to sail between Scylla and Charybdis, the man-eating monster and the ship-swallowing whirlpool. The rotating waters of the Strait of Messina, off Sicily, are only dangerous to small craft, a still-reputable website tells me, but that’s what experts think inspired the Charybdis of Greek mythology.

To be between Scylla and Charybdis, a saying still known by the kind of people who consult reference books, is to be between a rock and a hard place. I don’t know if that’s the right saying to capture where we are right now. What are our two impossible choices? Do we have any choices? Wouldn’t it be nice to have some?

4. A wide gap; the gulf between generations

The Gulf of America that bothers many of us the most about what’s happened in the last three weeks–it’s only been three weeks!– is the widening gaps being driven between already divided Americans. The greatest gap is one that’s not so much between the Haves and the Have Nots but between the Have Everythings and Everyone Else, a divide that “gap” and “abyss” and “chasm” don’t begin to capture. There’s the gaps between the right kind of Christian and everyone else, between white and Black, straight and not, right and left, American and foreigner, but all of these gaps, these gulfs, as significant as they are, aren’t just preexisting conditions worsened by people in power who don’t care. They are the gaps exploited by the Have Everythings so they can have more: more money, more power, more control to remake the country as they want it. They’re not just widening our gulfs; they’re using them, feeding off of them.

Renaming the Gulf of Mexico in itself is just silly. But it stands for the ascendancy of jingoistic bullying, of xenophobic hatred, of disregard and even disdain for following the rules that animates our current rulers. It’s what swept them into power and it’s what so many of your neighbors share with them, if you’re being honest. There’s your Gulf of America. You’re standing in it.

*goniff, as defined in Leo Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish. Number 6 does not apply, as no proof of him loving fun is in evidence

1/6/2025

If you’re not the kind of person who watches C-SPAN, you might have missed this scene today: Bruce Fisher, the husband of brand-newly re-sworn-in U.S. senator Deb Fischer (R-NE), refusing to shake the hand of Vice President Kamala Harris. He offered a curt nod and returned her “thank you,” but could not manage the handshake. Just couldn’t do it, for reasons, none of which could possibly include misogyny or racism or anti-wokeism, which it hurts even to type, it’s so stupid.

I offer this:

Is it ungenerous to call this guy a piece of shit
— Sam Cohen (@samcohen.bsky.social) 2025-01-06T19:49:55.035Z

Do I regret my response? Do I really wonder if it is ungenerous? I do not and I do not. (Do I regret the absence of a question mark? I also do not. It’s a convention of online style, grandpa.) On the 6th of January, four years to the day that Deb and Bruce’s Grand Oligarchy Party stormed the building that they were standing in this morning, bent on derailing the certification of the election of the other party’s nominee, the spouse of a senator Was Going to Show Them.

Deb Fisher is not a new senator. She defeated Bob Kerry in 2012 to win her seat, won another six year term in 2018, and won a third in November. I don’t know what her husband did the other times she was sworn in. I do know that his family owns a very large ranching operation in Nebraska, large enough for the family’s children to own the majority of the stock in the family corporation, while Deb and Bruce, who moved to Nebraska five years ago, have held on to a minority share. I don’t want to judge people for owning a giant cattle ranch in Nebraska, where I am sure they are very nice to their employees, the environment, their neighbors, and the cows and I am sure their politics have nothing to do with any of that.

I also know that in 2021, Deb condemned what happened on January 6. In a statement, she said, “These rioters have no constitutional right to harm law enforcement and storm our Capitol. We are a nation of laws, not some banana republic. This must end now.” She also said that although she didn’t like the outcome of the election, fraud had not been proven, and she voted to certify the results. I also know that by May, she voted against the creation of an independent commission to investigate the riot, and that three years after the riot, she endorsed the man behind the riot. Did she ever vote to impeach that man? She did not.

Do I know how Deb feels about her husband’s little tantrum this morning? I do not. But she married him and had no visible reaction to what he did, or didn’t do, though I do imagine she will be answering questions about it for a few days.

I do know that Deb doesn’t like abortion, so much so that she’s all for a ban without exceptions. Things she’s not for? The ACA, restrictions on gun ownership, or the scientific consensus on climate change (through an aide, she has said it’s happening but it’s due to “natural cycles,” which, thanks for sharing your expertise, Dr. Fischer).

To what does this all add up? I don’t know. I do know that this senator, whose generally execrable positions are standard for today’s GOP, still on one occasion–the events of four years ago today–stood up to the con man to whom her party sold whatever tiny soul it had. For about five minutes. I also know that her husband stood in the building attacked by rioters sent in by that con man and refused to shake the hand of half of the ticket they were trying to deny the White House to. I know that people died and our democracy will never be the same. I know that, as reported today, the amount of ammunition confiscated on that day was enough to have shot every sitting member of the House and Senate five times each.

Rioter smashes Capitol window with police riot shield

Not shaking someone’s hand is the definition of petty. There’s a picture in the dictionary next to “petty” of someone not shaking someone else’s hand. I know it’s petty to not shake someone’s hand because I’m a petty person and have fantasized, repeatedly and lamely, about not shaking the hands of public figures I find awful, if given the chance. But to do it for real, today, there, at the scene of the crime? It’s still petty, but it’s also a reminder of something big–that the people who will be in charge in two weeks, the people who support them, the aggressive, sometimes violent movement of fake victims who shall not be tread upon unless it’s by the boot they choose, is big on ignoring the norms that hold democracies, however flawed and rigged and deeply undemocratic, together.

Do I think Harris should have called out Bruce Fischer? Delivered a sharp slap to his impressively pasty chops? I do not. She did what people do when they respect other people, occasions, norms. Do I think those of us who are not willing marks of the once and future con man in chief can afford to keep relying on norms and precedents and procedures and institutions and courts when the people we hope they’ll protect us from could manifestly give a shit about them?

I do not. On this fourth anniversary of the attempted insurrection of January 6, 2025, we should promise each other that we won’t comply in advance, that we won’t rely on norms, that we’ll fight Project 2025 and all the little local and state projects designed to support the GOP agenda in any way we have to. We can’t shake hands with the devil, the way any number of Democratic politicians seem eager to. There’s no working with a man like this man or with people who would help him do what he wants to do to us and for himself. Maybe Bruce Fischer has shown us something after all.

First lady of Poland skipping handshake opportunity

In the Homestretch

One of the worst things about US politics is our campaigns–the incredible length, the obscene amounts of money, the pandering both to the base and to the ever-shrinking number of somehow, unbelievably, inexplicably undecided. The horse race coverage by journalists doesn’t help, milking the drama for clicks, leaving their obligation to inform by the wayside, save for scandals and gaffes. Following the metaphor of the campaign as something to be handicapped and bet on, we’re in the homestretch. We’ve rounded the final turn, we’re headed to the finish line.

So this campaign season is over in a day or so, and it couldn’t end soon enough. As my future state senator put it yesterday:

Absolutely furious at whoever decided to move clocks back this weekend and add an extra hour to the election
— Stephen Webber 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@s_webber) November 2, 2024

I knocked a few doors yesterday, just supporting my wife, who’s knocked a million. I have been mostly reading too much, giving what I can, worrying, blogging into the void. I’ve been going to some campaign events and, as always, have been impressed by the hard-working, heart-in-the-right place state politicians I’ve encountered. Yesterday I met Crystal Quade, the Democratic candidate for governor, who Missourians, if they knew what was good for them, would elect, but if there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that people have been voting against their own interests every two years for decades.

Thomas Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas was published the summer we moved to “the real America,” as one Missourian described the Midwest to us after finding we’d just moved here from New York City. For the past twenty years, we’ve watched gerrymandering, culture wars, and the nimble weaponizing of bigotry and xenophobia turn our new home state from purple to ostensibly red; as a result, we’ve watched the politics and the governing get meaner, we’ve watched support of public goods and private rights erode, and we’ve tried to do what we can to fight it. It’s been tempting to give up on Missouri, just as watching the national GOP elevate its worst to the top of their party has made it easy to despair for the country, but we can’t. We have to hope.

One hope is that what’s the matter with the undecideds of Kansas, Missouri, and the country is that they just don’t have all the information they need, and that the armies of people out knocking doors and making calls can get that information to them in time. The other, more realistic hope is that the decided but under-motivated will be moved to turn out and do their part to get the right people past the finish line first so they can move on and do the actual work of public service.

Of course it’s not a race, it’s not a sport, it’s not a game, it’s not even very much fun. It’s staving off the worst of the current GOP agenda and doing it for women, people of color, people from elsewhere, queer people, people who value public education and the Constitution and all of the better ideas and impulses we have. Nobody needs me to tell them about it this close to election day:

1730829600

days

hours minutes seconds

until

Election Day

Nobody needs me to tell them anything, probably. Sometimes it just makes me feel better, in the midst of all of this anxiety and all of this outrage, to say some things. Sometimes it makes me feel better to say that in spite of this country’s mixed history and all of the hate and bigotry and selfishness we’ve seemed happy to display over the past few centuries, we can be better. We’re not better than this–we are all we’ve done and all we continue to do–but we could be better. One of the ways we can is to vote for people who want that. And help get the information to others that might help them do it too.

I’ll see you on the other side of election day.

& & &

A young visitor to my house on Halloween used our sticky “blood” letters to spell out this message on our porch door. Knowing that I can’t ask him what his intent was in crafting this message, and aware of the intentional fallacy, I choose to interpret it as a comment on the election. It says, to the clever Republican politicians who know better and the idiots who don’t, to the liars of the alternate reality universe, to the spineless and/or craven oligarchs, and to the saps who have fallen for the Man Who Will Say What We Were Thinking But Wouldn’t Say in Public, thinking he gives a shit about them: we won’t let you put him in office again. That’s what I think it says. Say it with me.

Driving Meaningful Engagements: On AI, ET, and TU

Ever feel like you’re being sold a bill of goods?

Excerpts from two emails that landed in my inbox yesterday:

The first is from an email helpfully sent to me by McGraw Hill GO, which as the name shouts, is raring to GO to sell me a product that will help me teach, ostensibly. I mean look!

It’s an eBook+! It lives within my LMS! It makes it easier to keep up with student progress and direct attention where it matters most, which is apparently somewhere other than whether my students are learning! I guess I should be grateful for that assurance of knowing my students are completing the reading, but instead I’m checking to see if I still have my wallet. Can I drive this eBook+ off the lot right now?

It’s the AI that I should apparently be most grateful for, though. The embedded generative AI learning tool, I am told, will create a more flexible learning environment! And that environment will drive meaningful engagements! It will also drive a deeper conceptual understanding, as opposed to some other kind of understanding, of my course content! So much driving! So much cause and effect! Instead of the hard and messy work of trying to help my students understand the things they read, the world around them, and themselves and their place in it, all I have to do is sit back and let GO drive. Whew. What a relief.

The second email comes from the Teaching for Learning (?) Center at my employer, This University in Canada, You’ve Never Heard of It. A featured speaker at an upcoming event will be the AI expert whose identity I have tried to disguise for some reason. This person will be coming to This University (TU, go fight win) to share with us the Good News of AI, sharing the εὐαγγέλιον, the gospel, that artificial intelligence has risen and will be our salvation. Do you believe in the Good News? It believes in you!

It’s the end of a long and cranky week, so forgive me the sarcasm. I’m not here to impugn motives of publishers, staff, or administrators or to criticize fellow instructors for wanting a break from the difficult work of teaching. I’m sensitive to the privilege I am lucky to enjoy of working at a research-intensive university, where, if I want, on a Friday afternoon during under-attended office hours, I can take a half hour and blog my thoughts into the abyss, and I’m sensitive to the four-four or more load of many instructors, for whom in my textbooks I have selected readings (and written apparatus supporting them) in order to lessen that load.

My first ever AI generated images
(prompt: “teacher being buried by papers”)

What I’m doing here with this spare half hour is saying that these claims of AI’s salvific power makes me feel like I’m being sold a bill of goods. The educational publishing company is in the business of selling things to help educators, and can hardly be faulted. It’s what it does. It has to keep swimming or it dies, or something. The whole world of ed tech (ET, by decree and henceforth) is in the same business. TU and by extension higher education are most emphatically not in the same business as EdTechpreneurs, and should not be the gullible rubes who snap up its latest products. Universities have been busy establishing a sorry track record of diving headfirst into the latest ET innovations–remember MOOCs?–and moving on from them once their promise went unrealized, leaving behind a trail littered with spent money and damaged morale.

I don’t want to overstate. I wouldn’t be so rash as to condemn everything about LMSes (how do you pluralize an acronym that ends in S? Why are my office hours today so quiet? Does it have anything to do with it being homecoming weekend?). As we learned during the pandemic, they make some things easier. But they can’t be used to replace us.

There is considerable pressure on higher ed administrators to cut costs, and as anybody who’s looked at university finances knows, one of the only places they can cut is instructor pay and benefits. It’s why you see departments shrinking as retired tenured faculty go unreplaced; it’s why you see whole departments razed if administrators can’t wait patiently for faculty to die off or at least go away. Contingent laborers cost less. ET promises lower costs. Humanities instruction, at least, what I do, is labor intensive. Human labor intensive. Humanities departments are forever being berated for the high costs of small classes (discussions which seem never to touch on the rarely mentioned high overhead incurred by the research grants given the big-lecture-teaching faculty in other disciplines, but that’s another discussion). The value of what we do lies in helping students learn to think, creatively and critically. We want to help them learn to be able to process large amounts of complicated information, to grapple with sophisticated concepts, to know when they’re being sold a bill of goods.

I don’t want resource-gobbling AI to transform the images in my head. I want to do it myself because part of the reward of creative thought and expression lies in the doing of it. I want my students to learn this. I don’t want TU or any other institution of higher learning to try to save money by outsourcing the work of education; in the end it will waste both the money it spends and the opportunity for students to learn to want to come up with interpretations, solutions, expressions. I got my first AI generated assignment this week. I read it. I knew instantly where it came from, and it was confirmed by an abashed student, and it sucked. It didn’t know anything, and it didn’t think anything, and it didn’t express anything.

My office hours are over. Monday morning I’ll come back to campus. At noon, my students and I will discuss the upsetting ending of Toni Morrison’s upsetting and beautiful novel The Bluest Eye, and we will talk about the history of it being banned around the country and in the town some of them come from by people who don’t value the kind of education that involves reading upsetting and beautiful things, and we will probably also talk about homecoming weekend and think about what universities are for, which I am always trying to get them to do because the whole point is to get them to look around and think about where they are, whether “there” is their classroom or university or state or country or planet. (They will also get good paying jobs because they know how to read and think and express their thoughts but can we please not let that be the only reason we do this?) I will try to drive meaningful engagements, if you want to put it that way, and appreciate the opportunity I have been given to do this important work the way I think most effective. Also I use much less water.