AFTER THE ELECTION

President-elect Trump did not spend much time on the question of higher education (unlike Bernie Sanders or even Hillary Clinton) during his campaign.  But some things seem clear.  As articulated by Virginia Foxx, likely to be the new Chair of the House Higher Education and Workforce Committee, there will likely be reduced oversight of for-profit colleges and universities, increased emphasis on college completion, decreased regulatory oversight, and little if any expansion of Federal funding for higher education.   We can also expect the Republicans push to give banks greater control over student loans, and to cut federal support for research.

The most immediate issue concerns the support and protection of students.  President-elect Trump has made no secret of his desire to increase deportations and is likely to attempt to eliminate the "Consideration for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals" (DACA) program.  Over 1.5 Million people are presented under the DACA program, not surprisingly with a large percentage in California.  It is essential that Colleges and Universities find ways to honor their commitments to these students and work to enable them to complete their education in peace.  Faculty and students at many institutions are pushing for their colleges and universities to declare themselves sanctuary campuses.  In California CSU Chancellor Timothy White has already declared that CSU will not cooperate with Federal efforts to identify and deport undocumented students (if they occur).  At yesterday's Regents' Meeting President Napolitano indicated that she had appointed a task force to prepare the University to help protect and support undocumented students.  But unlike White she has not committed to non-participation with any Federal immigration crackdown.  This is an issue that the Faculty needs to take up.

We must also recognize that the Trump Administration will likely show little interest in supporting Title IX efforts.  Already we have seen multiple incidents of both racial and sexual harrasment on campuses since the election.  As Hank Reichman has recently observed, it is time to reconsider the debate over so-called "safe spaces."  The concept of safe spaces has been denigrated by many purporting to defend academic freedom over the last few years.  Implicit in these criticisms has been the idea that minority and female students have overstated the extent to which they have not been granted equal access to the civic and intellectual space of colleges and universities.  Critics of safe spaces have too often conjured up fantasies of a Kantian space of equals and ignored the real disparity in the situations that different sorts of students face on campuses.  It is not a denial of individual or free thought to recognize that institutions and faculty have a responsibility to create the conditions that will enable students to grow as scholars.  In that sense, as Brad DeLong has put it "a university is: first of all, a safe space for ideas. second a safe space for scholars."  I would only add that it can only be the first if it is the second and that we must explicitly recognize students as scholars.

The Trump Administration, combined with the ascendancy of Republican power in Congress and the States poses longer term challenges for the very idea of the university.  The Presidency will be held by an authoritarian populist, one house of Congress will be led by an acolyte of Ayn Rand while the other is directed by a walking embodiment of what the eighteenth century would have thought of as "Old Corruption."  Controlling the Presidency and Congress means that the Antonin Scalia's replacement on the Supreme Court will be a representative of the Right.  Given the age of both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer it is possible the Court will move even further to the Right in the near future.  On the level of the states a similar pattern is in place.

Mr. Trump's campaign articulated a vision of a nationalist America focused on whites, in which the market was liberated from the regulation of the state,  and in which women and minorities were deferential and subordinate.  Indeed, Trump's movement combined with Brexit and the rise of authoritarian nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere reveal a deep alienation from the universities and colleges.  It is that vision, combined with his administration's political power that must be addressed.

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DHQ Review // Silicon Valley and Silicon Slopes

My review of Alice Marwick's Status Update is now available on Digital Humanities Quarterly.  Marwick's book is in many ways an ethnography of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture as it's lived through social media and it's an illuminating description of life lived in a distinct time and in a distinct place.  Living here in Utah in 2015 I keep asking: do her descriptions have applicability here and now as well?

Apropos of the above question long term I would like the Weber State Center For Technology Outreach to invite in a few speakers who can talk about Silicon Valley culture and compare it to Utah's own indigenous entrepreneurial culture (which is sometimes called Silicon Slopes).  A couple of years ago Vauhini Vara at the New Yorker ran a piece called How Utah Became The Next Silicon Valley.  It's time for some followup reflections.

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All Is Vanity - Denigration of Selfies as a Form of Social Regulation (or: "iphone, iphone in my hand, who is the fairest in the land?)

In Ann Burns' Self(ie)-Discipline: Social Regulation as Enacted Through the Discussion of Photographic Practice (discussed also in Nathan Jurgenson' s What is a Selfie?)  Burns argues that commentary about selfies has "a regulatory function" that not only " acts as a cloaked expression of sexist attitudes but also defines and stigmatizes a specific group of subjects."  Whether this is true or not it reminds me a bit of Charles Allen Gilbert's 1892 drawing titled "All Is Vanity:"



I came across the above in Claire Tanner's Vanity, 21st Century Selves ( MacMillan, 2013).

Toward the end of "What Is A Selfie?"  Jurgenson suggests that the term "selfie" is somewhat fluid and that we should study those changing meanings since the "fluid meaning of selfie tracks the fluid meaning of the self."  As we continue our own research on "whether the internet makes people narcissistic" (and other present day anxieties about the internet) this seems like a worthy investigation.  And one that could also be complimented by investigating the fluid significance of words like vanity, humility, narcissism and self-promotion.

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Early Telegraph Key Ergonomics

I came across this photo serendipitously, while doing some follow up research for the book Susan and I are finishing. The photo is hosted on the Smithsonian Web site and the caption reads:

This 1844 telegraph key by Alfred Vail, improving on Morse’s original design, is believed to be from the first Baltimore-Washington telegraph line.

What strikes me about the design is that it has some ergonomic features built in.  The left hand screw controls how far off the desk the key sits and the right hand screw controls the amount of travel the operator wants.  Pretty nifty!

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A Surfing Bildungsroman: William Finnegan's Barbarian Days

Once a long time ago when I dabbled briefly in art I tried to paint a breaking wave as various hues of blue rushing up a face and then curling over itself to form the tube that surfers dream of.   My effort to represent what I imagine to be one of the finer experiences of life wasn't much.  But William Finnegan's Barbarian Days is.  The book is a memoir documenting the author's attempt to find and ride the perfect wave.  I can't say that he succeeds entirely at this task because no book possibly could; the experience belies textual description.  But he does about a good a job as one could, given the limitations of the printed word.

The core of the memoir is a bildungsroman in the classic sense of the word.  Finnegan graduates from University of California at Santa Cruz in 1974 and soon thereafter sets out across the southern hemisphere on a multiyear quest for the perfect wave stopping along the way to work as a dishwasher in Australia and a teacher in a South African ghetto.   Through it all Finnegan attempts to understand how to indulge his obsession while at the same time becoming a political journalist who is mindful of the welfare of others.

On one level this is a familiar framing:  a hippie going through an extended mid-twenties adolescence struggles to reconcile his selfish and hedonistic passions with the vocational and familial responsibilities that loom as one contemplates adulthood.  And to some extent the memoir is that.  Finnegan drops acid in Honolua Bay.  He avails himself of the hospitality of Pacific islanders without repaying them in kind.  He defrauds American Express in Thailand to extend his idyll.   He dates (and ultimately discards) a series of woman who, had he been less irresolute, might have married him.  He assumes physical and mortal risks in the surf that would make any mother turn over in her grave.  In short, he riots in the excesses of the 70s and all of the privileges that were extended to a certain socio-economic segment of that American generation.  And yet, instead of giving into this life, Finnegan emerges at the other end as a father in a stable marriage and as a renowned political journalist reporting on social injustices across the globe.

What is less familiar about this bildungsroman is that while Finnegan grows up he never leaves the beach behind.   To this day, he continues to make surfing forays from his home in New York City to various spots along the New Jersey and Long Island shores.  And he finds time to surf in exotic foreign locales as well.  Do these forays represent a lapse?  A signal that he hasn't grown up and that irrepressible adolescent inclinations peek out from behind the veneer of his adult gravitas?  That is one way to portray it.  But I want to be more charitable.  It's not just Finnegan vacillating between the pull of a selfish individualism and the push of a more communitarian and selfless nature.   It's not just the sensibilities of the “me decade” dueling with those of the “we decade.”  Rather, it's Finnegan realizing that a life well lived can (and should) have room for both activities.  Reporting on social injustices as Finnegan does deserves the highest accolades.  It's what Aristotle was talking about when he argued that the telos of being human is to be political.  But those adult virtues, celebrated as they are, don't need to eclipse the virtues of immersing oneself in nature and bearing witness to its sublime beauty. Both define the good life.  And both, in their proper measure, are worthy of pursuit. In Barbarian Days Finnegan shows how he found those measures. 

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Slanting Toward Sociability In Ogden

An opinion piece I co-authored with David Ferro titled "Utah's Silicon Slopes should slant to sociability" just came out in yesterday's Standard Examiner.  Below is the piece in it's entirety:

Head to Ogden’s 25th Street any evening, and you will see individuals and groups staring at their phones while simultaneously navigating obstacles and people on city sidewalks. You’re witnessing this summer’s Pokémon Go craze. Meanwhile, a couple of blocks away, on the east side of Washington Boulevard, almost directly across from Five Guys Burgers, there’s the three-story Weber State Downtown building.
WSU Downtown, a partnership between the campus and the community, contains the offices of Startup Ogden, where a number of small companies are developing web and mobile-phone apps. The center is another initiative helping the university and Ogden City contribute to the tech revolution happening up and down the Wasatch Front.

As an engine driving regional economic growth, this revolution is creating Utah’s equivalent of Silicon Valley — our own, so-called Silicon Slopes. A properly directed revolution can’t, however, barrel into the future on the premise that technological progress leads inevitably to economic and social progress. For that reason, all tech initiatives, including those through Ogden and Weber State, should take time to distinguish when the technological innovations they are incubating and adopting are a social boon or a social bane. Has Pokémon Go enhanced or inhibited sociability among Ogdenites?
If mobile devices were exclusively dedicated to running Pokémon Go, the answer would seem pretty clear: the game has nudged people off their basement couches and into the public sphere. A full month after the game’s release, the sidewalks of 25th Street abound with players on the hunt for Pokémon. On the Weber State campus, usually quiet on summer evenings, players prowl the grounds late into the night.
For the young, who don’t remember, or for the technology enthusiasts who conflate technical progress with social progress, these effects might be taken as a matter of course. After all, why else would social media be called social media? And yet, in the long, intertwined history of American sociability and technical innovation, positive outcomes are anything but guaranteed. For example, when the telegraph debuted 150 years ago, Henry Thoreau wondered on the side of Walden Pond whether it was all a frivolous distraction:
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end … We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Modern sociologists have perceived even darker outcomes. For many of them the technological advancements of the 20th century have isolated Americans from each other. Instead of congregating on the city commons to hear a summer band, Americans hole up in their air-conditioned, suburban homes, watching television by themselves. Instead of walking to work or riding on buses, Americans drive alone. And instead of hanging out on their front porches greeting their neighbors, Americans have built so-called “snout houses” with jutting garages that displace their porches and discourage street-side neighborly interactions.
If these 20th century technologies led to increased social isolation and the desertion of public spaces, tech critics lament that smartphones have worsened the problem. Sociologist Sherry Turkle described it as people who are “alone together.” The greatest illustration of this phrase is the couple sitting together at dinner, each distracted by the siren call of his or her respective phone.
To the outsider, Pokémon Go might look the same: Couples, families and groups of teenagers wandering the streets busily interacting with the game instead of with each other. But that is a caricature of what is usually going on. Between capturing Pokémon, people are communicating about the game, commiserating about the slow server speeds and getting into public spaces in ways they definitely did not in the past. If much of modern technology seems to be indulging individualism and amplifying social isolation, there are also modern tools such as Pokémon Go that encourage the opposite tendencies.
This doesn’t mean we should confuse technological progress with social progress, or that we should settle on the idea our communication devices are “just tools” that can be used for good or ill. Clearly different technologies have different characteristics. Some encourage more sociability where others discourage it. In imagining the next app invented by town/gown and “Startup Ogden,” we should consider these characteristics. In so doing, we’ll enrich Silicon Slopes and our local economy. But even more importantly we’ll ensure the vitality of our own public sphere.

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