Wendy Videlock, "Spin"

Hi all –

I want to talk about Jonathan Zimmerman's Inquirer op-ed, "Three-year degrees won’t save higher ed. Better teaching will" (original link here: if you can support the Inquirer, please do so). I know what you're thinking. You've seen this sort of thing so many times, e.g. "X won't save education but Y will." Why do we need to engage another take like this? It never ends. Everyone has something about higher learning they're against. Then they propose a solution which may or may not have anything to do with the problem they discussed. It's as if higher education is a concept where you can yell about anything you wish. Let's blame schools that we don't have flying cars yet.

The headline does tell us what Zimmerman says in the piece. Zimmerman correctly holds that three-year degrees are dangerous. And I do believe in giving more emphasis to and resources for teaching. But the op-ed is, like many of these commentaries, oblivious. Higher ed is very plainly under attack and nothing a college or university does to strengthen teaching will stop that. The HHS secretary bringing back measles and giving everyone diarrhea is only one part of what we're up against. The people who love this kind of thing want to end science and replace it with their wellness grift. They want public education in any serious sense to be destroyed. Yes, we should strengthen teaching in the academy, but you must be careful in making this argument. Passages like these are highly irresponsible:

College is expensive. Families are strapped. And a lot of general education courses are – as the students correctly perceive – a waste of time and money.

This is a set of sentences steeped in extremely bad faith. It ignores why college costs anything at all. Yes, there were economic circumstances, but the primary culprit was Ronald Reagan screaming about "law and order" on college campuses. The attack on higher ed has been coming for years from a very specific direction, one not unrelated to the current political climate. We charge tuition at public colleges and universities and that helps delegitimize them, as the money is prohibitive. The general education courses are also delegitimized, as they are considered "a waste of time" by people sometimes invested in attacking the very concept of germs.

I didn't always like my general education courses but I learned a lot from them. Biology had a section on how delicate ecosystems were. Physics made me sensitive to the forces involved in a collision. I needed to do more with how math classes were trying to teach me to reason through a problem. History, American Government, and English obviously changed my life. OK, someone might say, that's you, but other people aren't learning anything and are spending too much money.

I can't emphasize enough how bad faith all this is. It depends on imagining time in a classroom to be no less than apocalyptic. Someone is going broke doing math problems while everything is collapsing around them. The truth is that many jobs can be incredibly exploitative, that rising costs require political awareness, and that schools are good places to learn something, meet those who want to do more for others, and bring into being the future. All the statistics about how "no one learns anything in gen ed courses" are missing how well college works. The statistics work to blind you against advances in cancer research or the scholars who can show a close relation between crime and poverty. Zimmerman points to a survey showing that a considerable number of people have no idea what the legislative branch is. That a lot of people have no idea what Congress is – sure, that's a problem, but it isn't necessarily one solved in a classroom. I'm happy to teach it, but I'm pretty sure that the barest idea of being a citizen should lead you to want to know what Congress is.

On a larger level, we're not in an increasingly ignorant society because of higher ed. Higher ed has many faults, but that simply ascribes too much blame to an easy target. A major reason we are ignorant is because our culture centers on running a crude debate club instead of identifying root causes. We use data to distract. To understand why no one knows what Congress is, you only need ask the current President of the United States what Congress is. See how that explanation goes; he wasn't elected because of demonstrated expertise in public policy. When we consider the ignorance of the United States as a whole, it is intentional. We believe power lies in pretending to know, in making someone else subordinate to our "facts."

Wendy Videlock, "Spin"

Wendy Videlock's poem calls to mind an annoying type of person and a larger problem related to their existence. She tells us she has "a friend in possession of / a philosophic spin." She'd love to talk to him about "art," "theology," "the universe," or "whim," but he only hears himself. This is not a terribly pleasant experience:

Spin (from Poetry)
Wendy Videlock
  
I’ve a friend in possession of
a philosophic spin;
if should I speak of art,
theology,
the universe,
or whim,

he thinks I speak of him.

This enduring tic, indicative
of universal spins,
theology, art
and whim,
nonetheless
makes

conversation grim.

I used to know more people like this, those with a "philosophic spin" that always pointed back to them. I would be in a classroom on an obscure topic, eager to hear more and wanting to see what my peers asked. And then one guy (it was always a guy) would try to take over the classroom to show how smart they were. No one else could talk because they had to demonstrate their genius. Or I'd deal with deeply insecure individuals who saw criticism fired at them no matter what we talked about. They thought they were being criticized at all times except one: when they were actually called out for bad behavior. You'd think these are distinctly different vices, but these are two sides of the same coin. One wants to know because it's a way of making a space all about them, another hears themselves in every word said, because they are the main character.

The trap: sometimes these sorts of people know things. They may read serious criticism about an artist and have gone to see the show. Or they went to the lecture on the finer points of conceiving providence. Sometimes they even write the essay about the joys of laundry, and everyone reads it.

What do we do with a certain obtuseness, a narrow-mindedness which is off-putting yet productive (for them)? Often, we're dependent on those who merely have familiarity with our interests.

The larger problem is visible, but it is weird. I think a lot of people grow intellectually and as a person at the same time. If right now I really want to know something, it will probably involve admitting I was wrong about some issue in which I have a deep investment. I have to acknowledge that what's at stake is far larger than I thought and step aside. But it is possible to have a voracious desire for knowledge and completely fail to grow. Sometimes, this will be visible as a certain kind of insecurity, but this need not be the case. You can find people everywhere writing books that barely say anything because they've never really heard another person talk. And, to make things even weirder, sometimes people will write the book that says everything you need to hear, but they have no idea what they made.

It's important to affirm that intellectual growth is only one sort of growth. A massively important one, to be sure. If you do it right, you appreciate that much more, see problems before they have even arisen, and give everyone better chances. But you can grow intellectually and not know how to listen to anyone. In a strange way, this is one of the worst of all possible worlds. You're out there, you're a big shot, everyone's listening to you and telling you how brilliant you are, your ideas are spreading, and you're trapped. Art, theology, the universe, and whim spin around you, but you have no idea what's happening. I don't know what to term that step beyond the self which isn't strictly intellectual growth but marks any serious intellect. Maybe we could call it wisdom, the examined life. I don't know. I am worried that nowadays we can only listen to the worst people, with no idea how to listen to someone with an earnest curiosity.