Creative destruction.

I feel like I visited most of the abandoned malls in this photo-essay when they were still operating. Or maybe not. It’s hard to say. I suppose that’s the point.

Via.

Good job.

A fantastic depiction of spreading unemployment. A better version is here.

Emergency powers?

Aaron Bady, aka zunguzungu, has a long post up about the crisis facing the UC.

He argues that:

One of the myths about the UC system crisis is the idea that “Sacramento” is the real villain, and that protesting the UC administration is a waste of time. The legislature is the actual problem, people say, because they‘re the ones who have allocated less money to the University system. Instead of occupying the Office of the President of the UC system, such people argue, students should really be protesting politicians in Sacramento.

This seems to me to be both wrongheaded and misinformed. The president (and the regents who appoint him) are Sacramento, while the university community itself has not only had very little role in the massive top-down restructuring of the university that got under way in July, but they have been quite actively shut out of it, by the Regents and by President Mark Yudof, who are doing the job Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed them to do. Which is to say, when students from the university protest against the regents and the President, they are protesting Sacramento. The legislature in Sacramento may have created the problem by cutting funding for higher education, but it’s the representatives and appointees of our Sacramento-based governor who have turned the problem into an opportunity to privatize higher education in California.

This is an important point, because — and this needs to be emphasized — the scandal of the administration’s conduct is not the fact that they’re cutting services while raising fees, at least not in and of itself. In bad economic times, some kind of response is necessary. The scandal is that Mark Yudof and the regents are using the crisis of the moment to push forward a plan to privatize the UC system that has long been in the works and is geared to be permanent. And they are doing it by assuming “emergency powers” which allow them to arbitrarily overturn the precedents and policy that would otherwise explicitly prevent them from doing so, everything from caps on the amount that student fees can be raised to the contracts they’ve signed with university employees to the “Master Plan” for higher education that the state of California established fifty years ago. So if we want to talk about “Sacramento,” then let’s do so. But we need, then, to talk about two things: first, how the Republicans that run California through the governor’s mansion have been trying to privatize the state’s public education for a very long time, and, second, how the regents and Mark Yudof have been using the rhetoric of “crisis” to push that agenda through, bit by bit and step by step, replacing the UC’s traditional system of shared governance with a system of top-down corporate management.

The whole post is worth your time. So click on over and have a look.

Heckuva job, DU.

I note with some amusement that my former employer, the University of Denver, has hired Michael Brown, one of the few miscreants pathetic enough to have failed out of the Bush administration. Brown will teach a class on the Patriot Act at DU’s law school. That said, given that John Yoo is still a member in good standing of the University of California’s faculty, there’s only so much chuckling to be done here.

On a more serious note, Fred Cheever, the associate dean quoted in the linked story above, is actually a great guy and very progressive politically. (He may also be John Cheever’s son. That was the rumor, at least, though I never had the guts to ask him.) I can’t imagine how much all of this pains him. Which suggests that one lesson here is about the Faustian bargains made along the administrative track. They’ll offer you a nice office and a salary bump, sure, but next thing you know, you’re defending the decision to hire Dick Cheney to teach a class on the rule of law.

Historical analogies are deprecated, but…

…Bill Moyers has first-hand experience with things like this:

BILL MOYERS: Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

That’s it for the Journal. I’m Bill Moyers. See you next time.

Yeah, see you next time, Bill. And thanks for ruining my day.

Not privatized yet.

As frustrating as California’s ongoing self-immolation performance piece has been to watch, spending time at the most beautiful beach I’ve ever seen had a certain palliative quality last week. So what did you do during the break?

(More pics below the fold.)

The banality of book reviews.

Does this (here and here) happen often? Does the Times often review the same book twice? I can’t think of another instance like this, I have to admit, but I don’t pay much attention to the Sunday Book Review anymore, so I can’t say for certain.

Regardless, in this case, if you don’t feel like clicking on links, the book in question is Sir John Keegan’s The American Civil War: A Military History. Which book, I should say, I haven’t read and won’t be reading. And not just because the second review linked above, authored by the normally genial James McPherson, savages Keegan’s efforts as terribly sloppy, but also because, coincidentally, just last week Eric and I taught Richard Evans’s Lying About Hitler in our graduate seminar.

Is that a *pledge pin*?

A young woman in one of my classes stopped by my office yesterday to interview me, an assignment from the pre-med sorority (Really? There are such things?) she’s pledging. In the course of our chat, she asked me about hobbies, and I admitted that I don’t really have any and haven’t since my kids were born.

My typical day, I explained, goes something like this: I rise with the sun, spend a bit of time with my family, take the older boy to school, trundle off to work, embrace the life of the mind for a few hours, head home at day’s end, spend a bit more time with my family, get the kids to sleep, read a bit (usually something related to work) or write for awhile, and then fall into the fitful slumber of the middle-aged, knowing that I’ll do it all again the next day. The excitement never ends.

She seemed somewhat horrified by this and wasn’t entirely convinced when I revealed that I’m actually quite happy with my life (“life”?). Even still, she wouldn’t let it go, insisting that I must have had hobbies once upon a time. So I reassured her that, yes, I used to ride my bike a lot, read novels, go to the movies, and listen to the latest record albums. (Which reminds me, I know I’m late to the party, but Fleet Foxes ftw.) In the end, the whole conversation was quite pleasant, but it was also a useful reminder that, although I share time with with my students in class each week, I have very little in common with most of them.

Sis, boom, bah. With an emphasis on the bah.

If de-emphasizing intercollegiate athletics is one of the ancillary effects of the economic crisis gripping college campuses around the country, my sense is that would very likely be a good thing. And I don’t just mean at the highest level, at those places like my first employer, the University of Oklahoma, where the athletic department provides de facto minor league teams for NFL and NBA franchises, but also at institutions like UC Davis, where the school’s move to Division I seems like an unmitigated disaster. And so, as we’re being asked to make budget cuts deep enough that we’re going to see the glint of bone now and again, we should insist that fielding teams capable of competing for national championships, at least in so-called revenue sports, shouldn’t be part of a university’s core mission.

For some reason I feel like I should note that I rowed crew — I stunk — at the University of Wisconsin for two years and that I remain a somewhat passionate fan of college sports. This caveat, I suppose, is the equivalent of foregrounding my Judaism before criticizing Israel. Don’t hate me, jocks, I’m one of you!

Who’s hot now?

Back when I was in grad school, lots of people were buzzing about Foucault.* But the really hip kids were deep into Walter Benjamin. And being hip**, I hopped on the bandwagon and never jumped off. Benjamin’s work has become especially important for me recently, as I’ve tried to finish my book on the politics of memory surrounding the Sand Creek massacre. Which is all just a long way of pointing out that Terry Eagleton’s study of Benjamin has been re-released (though maybe not in the States). Regardless, it’s worth a read. And now, having said all of that, I find myself wondering: which theorists are the kewl kidz*** reading these days?

* Yes, I’m that old. And also washed-up, but that’s a story for another day.

** Well, not really. But some of my best friends were Europeanists.

*** I know, I know, historians can never really be kewl kidz. Except for Marc Bloch, bitchez, who was kewler than Elvis and Beeker combined.

40 is the new 20.

Happy Birthday Sesame Street! And many more! For a wonderful series of posts marking the occasion, see here, here, here, and here. Also, if you’d like to share your favorite Sesame Street moment(s) in the comments, with or without links, that would be lovely. And finally, yes, I know the above clip isn’t exactly celebratory (and that we’ve talked about it here before), but for me it represents the essence of the show. Put another way: it’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Numbers.

The Times has an interactive graphic up that breaks out the unemployment numbers for different groups of people. It turns out that only 3.9% of college-educated white men between the ages of 25 and 44 are unemployed. Compare that to nearly 50% for young black men who haven’t graduated from high school (I think that’s the group with the highest rate). Nothing here is especially surprising, and I wish The Times had included more variables, but it’s fascinating nevertheless.

Ricky Gervais would teach a first-year seminar for free. For the fun of it. So there, haters.

“Get off Elmo! You’re not supposed to touch Elmo!” Seriously.

The past: kinda sucky.

Speaking of period dramas on television, John Rogers recently told me to watch Life on Mars. So I am. And so far it’s really quite good: early Hill Street Blues meets A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (or something).

Anyway, the thing I’m enjoying most is the show’s relentless critique of nostalgia. The main character, a contemporary British detective who finds himself transported back in time to Manchester in 1973, can’t seem to decide if he misses his friends or his cell phone more. When he’s at his most despairing, in the early episodes at least, he focuses on the dearth of creature comforts available to him. Even if you weren’t trained as an environmental historian, the emphasis on material conditions — a lack of central heat, spotty electricity, a studio apartment appointed with a twin bed — is pretty obvious. It’s a healthy reminder that the past, even the recent past — forget the damp and drafty castles of the Middle Ages — was pretty grim.

The point may be that our current age is wondrous, filled with innovations straight out of science fiction, especially in the realm of policing and medicine. Regardless, though I suspect historians are especially cranky about the emptiness of nostalgia, I think the show gets its view of the historical city just right: unlike Mad Men, which makes the early 60s built environment seem awfully appealing — that furniture! that color palette! — Life on Mars suggests that urban life used to suck.

Speaking of university administrators who aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are…

…I give you UC President Mark Yudof. A sample of his comedic stylings:

Question — U.C. is facing a budget shortfall of at least $753 million, largely because of cuts in state financing. Do you blame Governor Schwarzenegger for your troubles?

Mark Yudof — I do not. This is a long-term secular trend across the entire country. Higher education is being squeezed out. It’s systemic. We have an aging population nationally. We have a lot of concern, as we should, with health care.

Question — And education?

Mark Yudof — The shine is off of it. It’s really a question of being crowded out by other priorities.*

Question — Already professors on all 10 U.C. campuses are taking required “furloughs,” to use a buzzword.

Mark Yudof — Let me tell you why we used it. The faculty said “furlough” sounds more temporary than “salary cut,” and being president of the University of California is like being manager of a cemetery: there are many people under you, but no one is listening. I listen to them.

And here’s some bonus anti-intellectualism:

Question — The word “furlough,” I recently read, comes from the Dutch word “verlof,” which means permission, as in soldiers’ getting permission to take a few days off. How has it come to be a euphemism for salary cuts?

Mark Yudof — Look, I’m from West Philadelphia. My dad was an electrician. We didn’t look up stuff like this. It wasn’t part of what we did. When I was growing up we didn’t debate the finer points of what the word “furlough” meant.

Question — How did you get into education?

Mark Yudof — I don’t know. It’s all an accident. I thought I’d go work for a law firm.

Oh, President Yudof, you’re such a card! Look, I know he’s being glib and that humor’s a coping mechanism. But comedy’s all about timing. And his stinks.

* Emphasis added. For emphasis.

Via pf in the comments.

The specter of online education: it looms.

I once saw Joel Garreau give a talk in which he promised (promised!) that brick-and-mortar stores would soon be gone (gone!) because everybody (everybody!) would be doing all their shopping online. Big boxes, especially, were dinosaurs (dinosaurs!), he claimed. And one of the major challenges facing urbanists would be what to do with the empty shell of the discarded consumer landscape after all of the consumers had moved to Internet. Garreau told his rapt audience that this process of creative destruction would take less than a decade.*

That was eleven years ago. And Davis’s gigantic new Target, a palace to hyper-modern consumer culture, is slated to open in less than a month.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve long had doubts about the idea that online education will spell the death of brick-and-mortar colleges and universities. But this article, coupled with the University of California’s decision to try to raise fees by A LOT over the next two years, gives me pause. My sense is that the children of relatively well-off parents will continue to go to traditional colleges and universities for the foreseeable future: to learn, for credentials, to network, for finishing school, etc. What I don’t know, though, is what will happen when some significant chunk of non-traditional students, coupled with the children of not-especially-affluent families, decide that higher education for $99/month sounds pretty darned good. What will that do to the revenue stream that colleges and universities now rely upon for survival? What will it do to the economies of scale that currently make higher education viable? And what will the ripple effects be? I guess I could give Joel Garreau a call and ask him what he thinks.

* Word to the wise: elements of this paragraph may be slightly exaggerated for effect. But only slightly. The talk, by the way, happened at a conference on cultural landscape studies held at the University of New Mexico in 1998. As part of that conference, I got to tour J.B. Jackson’s house, which was cool.

Jealous?

Of other people’s career arcs, you mean? Well, yes, occasionally I am. Look, I’m not proud of my covetous nature, particularly not with the Day of Atonement fast approaching (note to self: get right with God). But there it is. And this interview with Jill Lepore didn’t exactly make me feel better. An endowed chair at Harvard, a published novelist, a staff writer for the New Yorker, sigh, it is to want.

Anyway, the interview is interesting. And you should read it. But the part that caught my eye was where Lepore talks about why she became a historian. Oddly enough, someone asked me that question over the weekend. Usually the issue doesn’t come up, because when people ask me what I do for a living, I say that I’m a teacher. Or a shepherd*. Anyway, before my older boy’s soccer game on Saturday, one of the other parents wanted to know why I became a historian. And I totally fumbled the answer, pointing to various teachers**; an untold number of childhood Shabbat dinners, during which my grandparents screamed**** at each other about their experiences during World War II; and my rather extraordinary success at National History Day*****. Thinking more deeply about it, I think the answer is probably some combination of those things. Regardless, I need a stock reply that I can get out in 30 seconds or less. And you? Why are you in this line of work?

* A guy can dream, right?
** Thanks Dr. Newby, Mrs. Stout, and Professor Sewell.***
*** This list is not exhaustive.
**** Always with love. Seriously, my grandfather insisted, ’til his dying day, that he and my grandmother never had an argument. They simply had loud discussions.
***** Ask me! Oh please, ask me!

Via Ralph.

I don’t think those words mean what you think they mean.

The State of Texas is in the process of defining new social studies standards for its public schools. And if the above video is any indication, we can look forward to a much more appealing version of American history going forward. I say that because Texas is a huge market for textbooks. So if Texans want happy history, the rest of the nation will just have to go along for the ride.

Which news, I have to say, comes as a bit of a relief. I mean, history can be such a downer. Things will be much better when we focus, relentlessly, on how exceptional our country is. Also: if we delete all mention of isolationism. Because that topic is pernicious and depressing. And U.S. history should be a celebration of us. Heck, us is right there in the title of the course.

More here and here.

“You know the Faust story?”

Alice Cooper tries to convince Kermit to sell his soul in exchange for fame as a rock star. From a list of the ten weirdest moments on the Muppets. Number 6, Alan Arkin on a bunny killing spree, is pretty odd. Also, Peter Sellers! That’s all.

Thanks to B for sending this along and brightening up my day.

That’s how it’s done.

Chuck Klosterman’s review of the newly released Beatles boxed set is a thing of beauty. Imagine trying to review the Beatles’ collected works. Nearly everyone knows the material. Nearly everything that can be said has already been said. There are no superlatives left. So Klosterman employs an ingenious gimmick.

From the first paragraph:

Like most people, I was initially confused by EMI’s decision to release remastered versions of all 13 albums by the Liverpool pop group Beatles, a 1960s band so obscure that their music is not even available on iTunes. The entire proposition seems like a boondoggle. I mean, who is interested in old music? And who would want to listen to anything so inconveniently delivered on massive four-inch metal discs with sharp, dangerous edges? The answer: no one.

And it goes on from there. Klosterman, with this deft move, allows himself to make the key point — that the Beatles are the most important pop band ever — by pretending to discover the joys of listening to their body of work for the first time. I kept waiting to get bored and annoyed. But I didn’t. The stunt never became trite.

For example:

It is not easy to categorize the Beatles’ music; more than any other group, their sound can be described as “Beatlesque.” It’s akin to a combination of Badfinger, Oasis, Corner Shop, and everyother rock band that’s ever existed.

It helps that he uses humor to make larger points:

The clandestine power derived from the autonomy of the group’s composition—each Beatle has his own distinct persona, even though their given names are almost impossible to remember. There was John Lennon (the mean one), Paul McCartney (the hummus eater), George Harrison (the best dancer), and drummer Ringo Starr (The Cat). Even the most casual consumers will be overwhelmed by the level of invention and the degree of change displayed over their scant eight-year recording career, a span complicated by McCartney’s tragic 1966 death and the 1968 addition of Lennon’s wife Yoko Ono, a woman so beloved by the band that they requested her physical presence in the studio during the making of Let It Be.

And again:

After Mr. McCartney was buried near Beaconsfield Road in Liverpool, Beatles bass-playing duties were secretly assigned to William Campbell, a McCartney sound-alike and an NBA-caliber smokehound. This lineup change resulted in the companion albums Rubber Soul and Revolver, both of which are okay. Despite its commercial failure, Rubber Soul allegedly caused half-deaf Brian Wilson to make Pet Sounds. (I assume this is also why EMI released a mono version of the catalogue—it allows consumers to experience this album the same way Wilson did.) If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals, you will probably sleep with these records on the first date. Rubber Soul gets an A- because I don’t speak French. Revolver gets an A+, mostly because of “She Said She Said” and “For No One,” but partially because I hate filing my taxes.

Not to mention, he’s unafraid to wield a knife when he finds himself in close quarters. Of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he writes:

It mostly seems like a slightly superior incarnation of The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request, a record that (ironically) came out seven months after this one. Pop archivists might be intrigued by this strange parallel between the Beatles and the Stones catalogue—it often seems as if every interesting thing The Rolling Stones ever did was directly preceded by something the Beatles had already accomplished, and it almost feels like the Stones completely stopped evolving once the Beatles broke up in 1970. But this, of course, is simply a coincidence. I mean, what kind of bozo would compare the Beatles to The Rolling Stones?

And you have to love a guy who finishes by telling everyone to get off his lawn:

I’ve noticed that this EMI box also includes the gratuitously titled singles collection Past Masters, but I’m not even going to play it. How could a song called “Rain” not be boring? I feel like I’ve already heard enough. These are nice little albums, but I can’t imagine anyone actually shelling out $260 to buy these discs. There’s just too much great free music on the Internet, you know? You might find the instructional, third-person perspective of “Sie Leibt Dich” charming and snappy (particularly if you’re trying to learn German the hard way), but first check out “myspace.org,” a popular website with a forward-thinking musical flavor. That, my rockers, is the future. That, and videogames.

I think this is one of the smartest reviews I’ve ever read. I’m trying to think of others that I’ve particularly liked. Well, Alan Taylor on Sean Wilentz was pretty good. Share your favorite reviews in the comments, if you don’t mind.