Sustain our future, Evergreen

A friend of mine is taking a course on propaganda at The Evergreen State College, Tacoma campus. Students created propaganda posters for whatever cause or idea they wanted to for one of the projects. The posters are displayed in the hallway outside the classroom for other students and faculty to see.

I recently went to the Evergreen Tacoma campus for a community group meeting, Food Not Bombs. Afterward I perused the different posters students designed and drafted. Some of them are ironic, some are artsy, all of them are creative. I think the creativity which Evergreen campuses inspire students to develop is one of the school's greatest successes. One of the posters, a very simply one, I wanted to blog on here because it made me laugh.

Look at the kid picking his nose!

The Evergreen State College, however, is in a perilous situation since Washington State began a massive budget cut that dipped severely into education funds. Evergreen, a public institution, will loose $3.5 billion in public school funding. Tacoma public schools are supposed to be hit harder than other cities in the state. Higher education will experience large budget cuts too. The administration at Evergreen has decided how it will spend its new budget, and the planners decided to eliminate the following programs, according to a budget leak which was emailed and sent to Evergreen students.

Among the programs are: the entire Evergreen Tacoma campus (which is a valuable resource to the mainly poor, inner-city African American community in Tacoma), the Olympia Labor Center (which is a center for unionization and labor justice in Olympia), some or all of the Reservation-Based Programs (which work with the indigenous populations), the NW Indian Research Center, The Longhouse (another native tribe project), and the Center for Community-Based Learning and Action. There is a larger list floating around.

There is no doubt in my mind that this school has been an incredible and valuable resource for justice movements and community-building, capacity-building, not to mention a school that provides resources and space for labor, native tribes and poor communities. Having visited the school plenty of times and attended functions, I say Evergreen is more broadly a place where students set their minds free, vigorously pursue their passions and interests, and take courses that always spark my interest. And if you want to pick your nose, it's okay because social norms were meant to be deconstructed. To see these resources disappear would hurt the communities already most effected by financial imbalances.

Evergreen aims the brunt of its budget cut at the poor and excluded. This would make matters worse. These groups obviously rank very low in the TESC administration's priorities, which does not come as a surprise. The staff have increasingly adopted a more "business model" approach to education matters in recent years. Instead of hiring educators with degrees in political science or education, Evergreen increasingly hires MBA graduates to take care of business things.

The Evergreen State College should take the advice of the propaganda poster, stop cutting community programs which are viewed as unnecessary accessories, and embrace real change: "Sustain your future - Invest in a child". Build up the communities which will be crushed by the wobbly situation, instead of sweeping the rug out from under them.

Business Film Instructor

This is the latest documentary I put together at the Instructional Technology office, where I work and have just finished training the next generation how to make propaganda for the university communications office. The university wants invitational and student life videos to come from the students instead of the media relations board. (Student-led propaganda would also give the impression that students have more control over the university than they in fact do.)

The video above, however, focuses on an instructor in the School of Business and Leadership who uses documentary filmmaking as an instructional device in her Entrepreneurship class.

My thoughts on business schools aside, film is an increasingly effective way to reach wider audiences. I have found that people will often watch a video before they read an article or a review. That is a rhetorical aspect. (Obviously for business students, having an understanding of film can help sell products and ideas.) But working with film also gives different insights in comparison to other instructional media since it focuses easily on emotions, moral dilemmas, and inter-personal relationships.

Violins

(I wouldn't normally be posting stuff like this, but since I made this video I'm linking it here.)


A violin instructor and alumna from the University of Puget Sound, Janet Utterback-Peck, teaches violin students (ages 6 - 14) by recording them and posting their videos on a private YouTube account. She and her community of violin instructors have found that video-taping their students increases the students' self-efficacy, and opens them to a wide range of violinists over the internet.

"I think the physical part - looking - and connecting - what physical motions make certain sounds is key," she says. Janet also uses YouTube to learn tricks from the professionals in her own work as a violinist with the Tacoma and Northwest Symphony Orchestras.

Staci Elliott and I created this short documentary video through Instructional Technology, which is the department that administers a BlackBoard content management system, tutorializes university software, and offers to students and educators regarding technological and pedagogical combinations. In the video I featured a documentary about Jascha Heifetz, which can be seen here, and a rendition of "Last Rose of Summer" by Hilary Hahn (which happens to be one of Janet's favorites). That video can be seen separately here.

How Dramaturgs Use Wikis

I produced another instructional technology video, this time about Professor Geoff Proehl's Theatre Arts Department Wiki, which you can find at Oberon.ups.edu. Their department uses MediaWiki software, the same software Wikipedia uses, to work collaboratively on dramaturgical texts and share ideas. The first text that wiki was used for was A Midsummer Night's Dream in 2006. The American dramaturgy community, working across the nation from Seattle and Los Angeles to New York on such texts, is finding wikis helpful for many of its collaborations, so this is an important trend. I use Wikispaces for various collaborations of my own - Wikispaces is free and incredibly easy to setup. My friend Daniel is in China at the moment and we're using wikispaces to write a zine article together.

Dramaturgy Northwest is the other website featured in the video. It hosts an important chronology and history archive for the Literary Managers & Dramaturgs of America (or LMDA.)

Oppositional Rhetoric

My campus is currently in debate over a document that a coalition of students presented to the University president about making the campus more racially inclusive. We are are mainly a white, upper-middle class private campus. The original document had worrisome features. Being largely in agreement with the structural analysis that the students provided, I thought the majority of students would be put off by the authoritarian rhetoric used in the document - and this has largely been the case. Except that, with this language, it sparked campus-wide debates and discussions about racism in America that might not have taken place if the language was prettified, flowery and easier to dismiss as pansy liberal pouting. And it needs to be reassessed in light of its democratic influence.

I assumed at first that the coalition was less interested in opening up discussion and more interested in throwing a list of demands at the administration and then turning their backs until they had been fulfilled. In this sense it would have appealed strictly to authority, while using no authority of its own to increase its influence on the administration. Most importantly, it would not have used popular support as a necessary component of that authority to have a legitimate democratic influence on the campus. I was worried that this model was more akin to what D.C. politics has been reduced to, what economists call "rent-seeking", and what the ordoliberals call the "re-feudalization" of democratic societies, and what might make more sense to call the lobbyist industrial complex.

But the group is interested in using more diffused methods of power to influence the University administration, by hosting discussions and talks about racism and structural inequalities in American society, by getting students involved. Presenting its case very radically may mean it ends up settling somewhere in the middle, yet without this radical presentation perhaps nothing at all would have been achieved. One of the coalition supporters commented today that the other students were so imbibed with white privilege that they feel they need to be approached in exactly the right way in order to address systemic racism in American society, that they needed to be appeased in order to take action and negate their own privilege. I think this is largely true, and is a better justification for the affirmative language, for jarring students from complacency, rather than appeasing students with flimsy support groups and head-nodding committees.

Politics and Government Video Blog

This video blog essentially is about another blog, the UPS Politics and Government blog.

I filmed this video not too long ago at my university for a series of videos to introduce more students and faculty to other professors and the kinds of technology we can use to stay in touch with them.

Bourgeois university at war

Every once in a while I have a startling impromptu conversation with someone that I think is worth sharing. I ran into a student outside the cafe who asked me what I thought about the war in Iraq. The student said he gets a "sadistic" pleasure from asking students at the university why they were against the invasion of Iraq, because most students aren't challenging enough for him. He said he hasn't met one student who can convince him that there weren't weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

"That's an awful assumption," I said, "to assume that students walking to class are going to be able to defend themselves against your gadfly criticisms right on the spot. It sounds like you're more interested in making them feel uncomfortable than you are interested in what they're verbal responses will be."

"I find that most people don't know what they believe. Saddam had weapons of mass destruction because we gave them to him," he said.

I fired back, "chemical weapons like sarin nerve gas really only have a shelf life of about five years. So if he obtained them in 91 or 92 from us, they would have been useless by 2003 anyway. But why do you think that just saying he has WMDs is a good enough justification to invade their country anyway? Pakistan and Israel have WMDs too you know."

"But they're our allies and they wouldn't attack us."

I decided at this point that his Socratic method was falling apart and decided to turn the questions on him. "So you setup a criterion where anyone who is possibly a threat is invaded and overthrown? Couldn't the foreign policy hawks just fabricate all kinds of threats and you would fall for every single one them and become a mouthpiece for their imperialism?"

It was interesting that after this point we started talking about what the student had believed at various points during the timeline of the war in Iraq. He gave me a short history of his changing political beliefs. And rather than being angry at the "liberal" college campus setting, it seemed that this student was actually fishing for reasons to accept himself as a member the very liberal college campus setting he was rebelling against.

Now, I don't consider myself "liberal", but a radical, a libertarian, and an anarchist. "Liberal" and "conservative" are binaries that the mainstream promulgate. It's incredibly inconsistent, and that's why the student had such a difficult time consulting his American-style pragmatism regarding when threats are formidable enough to warrant military force. Pragmatism is only consistent in the sense that it is consistently pragmatic, but there are no deeper principles involved. I find that radicalism in general has much more consistent reasons for its oppositions, and our analysis is better than either of the mainstream views.

This confusion and this anger about the war seems to have been produced by disgust at the social environment of the campus. Many students get quite angry at the bourgeois liberals on campus, and then amazingly backfire and become its mainstream binary opposite: conservative. They don't, however, take their critique of the liberal bourgeoisie further to be able to explain better why they're actually part of the reason Iraq was invaded. Bourgeois liberal college students did relatively little to stop the run up to the war in Iraq. They've done nothing but talk about elections in between television show parties. They criticize the direct actions and the lobbying that others are doing. They laugh to themselves as if they're too good for that. It's a way of "outsourcing" your political opposition while maintaining your liberal bourgeois sensibility.

The liberal bourgeoisie are the people who cannot satisfy this student's eagerness to feel politically satisfied in the college setting. He cannot think of himself as being similar to them in any way, so he becomes the opposite of them in every way. Secretly, he would like to be like them, but he would only want to be like the best of them. And the ugliest of them prevent him from doing that. It is an inner ideological struggle over his own self-identity.

Why Philosophy Students are Demonstrably Elite

In my student union building, a big green sign reads "Fact 6, 85% of the Fortune 500 were Greek--Go Greek!" This is evidence of the tremendous level of performativity, the criterion of success in our age, inherent in the structure of the business community and Greek Life community. I use the word "performance" in that special, discursive way, not in the commonsensical, evaluative way. But performativity has indeed become an evaluation unto itself.

I have found that unlike philosophy students business students in particular use their degrees instrumentally. They are interested in becoming successful businesspeople in the future, and thus they study business and join the Greek societies. Business students seek that elite status in society and use personal networks and Greek or business contacts to propel themselves into the business world.

Tonight I went to a bar with two of my philosophy professors and a group of other philosophy students to celebrate the end of the semester, (and hence the beginning of finals week.) We talked about a lot of things over some locally-brewed Tacoma beers.

We discussed the philosophy department itself, and the various quirks and fetishisms of our professors. We talked about philosophy students and what makes them different from other students at the university.

Many of us have varied backgrounds. Some major in philosophy and mathematics, some philosophy and theater, others combine English and philosophy, and as for myself: economics and philosophy. Some major in philosophy alone.

We are public speakers, we are mathematicians, we are charismatic and thought-provoking. But what attracted us all to philosophy? Intellectual curiosity is what brings most. And compared to those who major in business, for example, we are a very curious bunch -- or "cohen" (i.e. a group of philosophers.)

Generally, Business students are generally bereft of curiosity or intellectualism. The performative students like obnoxious parties and loud people and Greek activities which sustain all the dominant social decrepitudes in popular culture. I have attended some of the Business and Leadership functions at my school, in fact, and personally concluded that their activities are boring intellectual black holes. Boring, that is, unless one considers it as an anthropological experiment.

What is also elite about philosophy majors, however, is that we outperform all the other humanities majors even in their own areas of expertise. We received higher scores on the LSAT than students in all other humanities areas, higher scores than all social and natural science majors except economics and mathematics, and higher scores than all applied majors. And we scored 10% better than political science majors.

Philosophy majors outperform business majors by a margin of 15% on the GMAT--the admission test for many graduate business schools--and outperformed every other undergraduate major except mathematics.

Our scores on the verbal portion of the GRE are higher than in any other major, even English. We scored substantially higher on the GRE than all other humanities majors and were alone among humanities majors in scoring above the overall average.

Philosophy students have an inherently elite status, which is not based on the performativity of the business world, but on our intellectual character and our charming curiosity, not to mention the performances on admissions tests. If calculable, we might even demonstrably outperform business students at establishing contacts and impressing others with our charisma at cocktail parties, given the right circumstances.

What does this demonstrate about us? In a performative-based system, such as the very business world that Greek Life glorifies, the students least concerned with performativity outperform those that are most concerned with it. This demonstrates quite a bit.

We either learned these superior skills while studying philosophy itself, or we perfected these skills but our intelligence was based on our inherent interest in nearly all subjects. Either way, the philosophy majors have outperformed the other majors based on their own criterion, and thus we are in a demonstrably elitist position.

One of my philosophy professors remarked that philosophy students should be recognized as being the important members we are of a supposedly intellectual institution, the university, and not dismissed as puffed-up intellectual elitists, (as if that were a convincing way to dismiss any elitist). It is unfortunate that the business, politics, and government students capture the university's attention foremost, but since it is their explicit aim to do so we cannot blame them.

They propel themselves into student government chairs so they can use them as resume-builders later. They join Greek societies where they pay to have friends that they will compete with later. To them the university system is the ultimate investment, albeit, not for the same reasons the philosophy student has. Students who use the university system as a means to another end, i.e. elite status later, do not realize that they are being surpassed by those who fashion elite status now.

Perhaps it is the greatest academic slap in the face when someone whose practical interests are so explicitly aimed at performative achievement is outperformed by someone whose practical interests are aimed merely at personal or intellectual achievements. If only the sound of that elitist slap could be more audible.

Race and Pedagogy

I returned tonight from the first night of the annual Race and Pedagogy Conference, and with a renewed sense of community. The problems in our society which exacerbate the racial Achievement Gap are foremost community problems, and I am glad most of the community leaders of color share this belief. It is true that the social cohesion of African American communities in 1967 was stronger (albeit much more oppressed) than communities today in 2007. Why is this exactly? American culture in general has distanced itself from community. Minorities are distanced even further from community centers through renaissance development projects. Hilltop Tacoma, for example. And furthermore, most American cities lack substantive community centers. Again, Tacoma, for example. After spending the summer in European city centers, the differences in urban development are powerful.

Another part of the reason is due the expansion of the welfare state during the Great Society period. Since welfare's reform into the TANF, program, however, communities of "needy families" have begun taking initiative instead of being characterized as a helpless situation under a system of oppression. This is my ideological position, of course. But it seems apparent that to ask government to solve achievement problems is unlikely to see successful results. Empowering citizens by granting them the same legal status and liberties to choose their own paths, seems to be the only productive path to development. Government has stepped out and community has begun to thrive once again, where community allies from the "agent groups" (i.e. mostly the white population) are becoming more committed to a new kind of community development.
The focus of the conference is on pedagogical ways to interrogate race: the interrogation of practices and ideologies about racial issues in the classroom. These are very real, and it isn't surprising that it goes unnoticed by many in the agent groups. Target groups, on the other hand, are those who become devalued by racial ideology. Upon hearing these words at the conference, I initially thought of how I had heard this before, and that it wasn't really new information. Yet there is still a great deal to learn from reflecting on this information. All too often, I tend to overlook something dismissively like this. It's not a big problem, I tell myself. But then I understand that, even according to the logic of this analysis, as a European-American male I am supposed to minimize its importance. I am expected to misunderstand. I am expected to not understand that I never see these racial issues lived out, since I my experiences are phenomenologically different from those of an African-American or a woman, etc.

The way White America thinks about race is further promulgated by the evening news. For example, the Virginia Tech shooter was demonized as an Asian student. It was also said simultaneously that this was the largest mass murder in U.S. history, which in fact was false. Yet Virginia Tech, as I've said before, ought to be prevented with greater community measures. To opt for higher 'security' without cohesive communities, is like purchasing an expensive dental insurance plan and never brushing your teeth.

These community, where all these problems arise out of, is in trouble. A community's distancing mechanisms are due, as Psychologist Leticia Nieto pointed out, to oppressive and even "neutral" strategies exhibited by most in the community, from community leaders to smaller players. Members of the agent groups, whites, hardly seem to notice their behaviors. We hardly seem to notice doors that are largely open for us, are in fact closed for other people. The mechanisms manifest themselves in the subtlest ways, such as building a fence to keep the neighbor's children out of your yard. And yet that divide separates the chances of community growth, welcomes crime and, for our purposes, exacerbates low achievement in education. I admit that I am largely completely unaware and unwilling to be aware of racial realities. Sometimes it is uncomfortable, and I know the issues are staring me in the face, and yet I act as if there were no remaining difficult racial issues. Perhaps then I occasionally contribute to this community problem, and I'd like to begin using these opportunities differently.

Homeland Security and FEMA meeting

As the debate about the Virginia Tech incompetence rages over today's anticipated press report, my university held a small seminar for rapid response forces in higher education. My involvement was purely technical, since I offer support through our media technology office. But by chance I happened to sit down next to a bureaucrat from the regional FEMA education branch in Western Washington, which puts money into higher education using "Homeland Security dollars," she explained. I asked her questions about her position and what it means for higher education. She replied vaguely that it's a way for our institutions of higher education to remain safe. I asked about her own education and found out she graduated from the School of Homeland Security in Maryland.

[Silence.]

It was a moment of austere political dichotomy. Readiness, our homeland, and students. Readiness and our homeland, our homeland and students. Students and readiness.

Just a few concepts. Readiness and concepts.

"September is national Readiness month."

The seminar itself was alarmist in tone. Aside from simply preparing our university for Virginia Tech-style incidents, which is -- admittedly -- a real possibility, Homeland Security's presence outlined a culture of fear that is being developed in our midst. Since the seminar was initiated by the Tacoma Police Department, a department that has had several recent run-ins with liberal university students, myself included (watch the "Film is Not a Crime" video), I was suspicious that part of the motivation for the initiation has to do with a creating animosity between students and staff, maybe subconsciously, to break a close bond that exists at our university. Prosecuting students for civilly disobedient activity, which failed in the months after the Port of Tacoma protests and arrests, would be easier if the university distrusted its students and did not support them in their actions. If there is no community, there is no trust, and therefore brave political dissidents are isolated criminals without a proper context.

Perhaps this is an unintended consequence of having a Homeland Security presence on campus. Perhaps the seminar is completely well-intentioned. But I reserve my doubts. The multimedia of the seminar included instructional video clips from the FEMA website regarding subjects along the lines of 'preparing your university for an attack'. The difference between FEMA and Homeland Security seems a bit blurred these days. If FEMA is covering terrorism and school shooters, what is Homeland Security doing? The same things, of course, even hurricanes and tornados. At a Homeland Security satellite website launched just before the Iraq War, ready.gov, which strives to inculcate a culture of "preparedness", one of the first announcements that garnered widespread public attention was one by Tom Ridge in which he stated that in the case of a chemical attack, citizens should use duct tape and plastic sheeting to build a homemade bunker, or "sheltering in place" to protect themselves. As a result, the sales of duct tape skyrocketed. That same culture of fear and "preparedness" for the unexpected still exists today. If you're interested, the various preparedness websites and their satellites offer training in readying your kids, readying your businesses, and readying "America".

As I struggle to understand what "Homeland Security dollars in higher education" means for the student-in-the-street, I can't help but think of the Saudi Arabian students who were supposed to attend our university this year. Thirty Saudi students were scheduled to attend classes this Fall, and unfortunately, a nebulous higher education force prevented this from happening. Even important university staff members, like the University Chaplain, are not supposed to know why.

What is proper prevention?

This seminar impressed upon me that it is largely a matter of surveillance, suspicion, and a common "readiness" language between bureaucracies. For example, if the police were to arrive at our university and give us the code, "Infinite Justice", we are supposed to know that this means they are in charge for the day. Or maybe for the rest of the week. Yet upon reflection, doesn't 'proper prevention' have much more to do with community-building than it does with surveillance and suspicion? I think this is true of all criminal problems, and this underlying reason is why it seems that a "readiness" or "preparedness" consciousness on my campus would have a counter-productive impact on our community and education experience. But security bureaucrats seem to be getting their way in many other areas of influence. Imagine if we all soon understood the readiness-speak of their institutions by second-nature.