The Classroom Conservative

Who's Minding the Shop?

In the middle of a prairie cold snap last winter, my partner found herself stranded just inside the entrance of a department store at closing.  Her car wouldn’t start, and neither of the roadside assistance firms we retain were any assistance at all.  No tow services would help, and she couldn’t hire a cab.  Thankfully, life in the midst of an economic boom usually brings inconvenience and not such real peril.  Tired of dealing with small building firms, I’ve spent the past three months trying to get a large hardware chain to install for me a storm door.  Now, for a fee equal to the price of the door, they deal with the same small building firms I had – but they deal with them by facsimile, and it takes weeks for them even to reach anyone by phone.  In the meantime, when I visit the customer service counter, I am told that the only person who knows about storm doors is unavailable for consultation.  I discuss installation, instead, with a series of teenagers who think doors are things you slam in your parents’ faces.  They are no more enlightened on such varied topics as cars, small appliances, or wood stain.  I know from experience.  It is not that young people lack reasonable authority at work: I was just reprimanded by one at the gas station for forgetting to preauthorize my purchase.  I thought by not having children I would miss out on the experience of being dismissed with a roll of the eyes by someone a third my age.

 

Indeed, good times have brought a variety of unlikely people into the workforce.  Calgary Sun columnist Paul Jackson recently described unemployment in the province of Alberta as “voluntary,” and it is not much of an exaggeration.  I think it might be more practical if establishments that are not hiring might be the ones who advertise this fact: it would save on “help wanted” signs.  Unskilled laborers can now command salaries once reserved for people with a trade, but my concern is that demand has inflated wages beyond the worth of some people’s abilities.  Young people are just finding their way, I appreciate; I remember hiding in the bathroom (at the royal wage of $5.50 an hour) when the monotony of my first job as a warehouse sweeper made work unbearable.  But what about seemingly able-bodied, sentient adults who cannot keep straight a food order, cannot run a cash register?  If an unskilled job is not your first step on the corporate ladder, there has always been the sense that it need not necessarily be your last.  Progress is marked by a mastery of the task at hand and an enthusiastic inquisitiveness for what might be beyond.  People take pride in whatever they do because its execution is a reflection of them.  Getting ahead means doing something, making your break: not simply waiting around sullenly for opportunity to knock.  Though if your disillusionment with your job grows debilitating, that marks the end of meaningful productivity.  It is okay to use restlessness to fuel ambition, but I think intuitively that few employees come back from the abyss of self-loathing.  Unfortunately, if the corporate ladder has become an escalator, perhaps a lack of demonstrable process hastens this disillusionment.

 

I hope it still goes without saying that everyone deserves an opportunity, but it has become a very popular idea to suggest, further, that everyone can succeed.  Maybe this is simply untrue.  Perhaps there are some people who are fundamentally unsuited for the workforce.  What is very clear is that the decay of service in the service industry is pushing this discretionary aspect of our lives to crisis.  And in the boardrooms of our service chains, this is surely being felt.  For no matter how long the lines might be at our national coffee chain, we all know intuitively that business has been turned away there.  When this bothers enough of those suits around the table, how will they respond?  I suspect that some of the people they find they need will be unavailable to them at any price.

Alan Weisman, The World Without Us

I watched with some puzzlement Alan Weisman’s recent appearance on The Daily Show.  My editor at an American university press tells me that discussing a book with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert really helps shift copies, and so Mr. Weisman’s awkward aloofness made no sense to me.  I cannot imagine that he endeared himself to the so-called “slackers” who make up Stewart’s audience, folks whose taste in irony is much more direct.  It’s a shame, really, because Mr. Weisman’s The World Without Us has some things to recommend it.

 

I was drawn to this book because of its promised discussion of how quickly cities would crumble without constant maintenance.  If each of the 753 pumps in the New York City subway system stopped running, rain would fill the tunnels in a day and a half.  In winter, pipes bursting in unheated structures would accelerate the decay of building materials; in summer, lightning strikes would start fires that spread quickly beyond urban parks.  Lime from crumbling concrete would change the acidity of the soil and diversify that which grows there.  Animals that feared us would take up residence, and those creatures with whom we coexisted – from lice and cockroaches to dogs and cats – would have new competition.

   

The conceit at the heart of his book, though, is that humans simply disappear.  Mr. Weisman does not imagine that influenza or nuclear war carries us off; he simply imagines an earth suddenly without people and explains what would happen next.  There is, for me, not enough of this kind of discussion in The World Without Us, as Mr. Weisman spends at least as much time in places humans don’t live.  I suppose these, too, count as a “world without us,” and they help him set up a contrast between places uncontaminated by human activity and places where little of our good will outlive us.  The argument, ultimately, is one of moderation: a smaller population using fewer resources creates a sustainable environment from which humans are less likely to ever disappear.  Unfortunately, birthrates amongst people reading this book are already approaching the levels Mr. Weisman advocates; his pleas will go unheard in the developing world.

   

For many of us, the idea in The World Without Us that art is our only persistent good is not a surprise.  I often teach this idea in my introductory English class with Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

   

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said – “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert…  Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

 

The quick crib: a boastful king argues that the world he has had created in his name will last forever.  All that has survived, the means by which his words are heard, is a broken sculpture, however, which must be attributed only to the skill of its artist.  Even though the work is worse for wear, it holds value; the sculptor has brought the stone to life.  Mr. Weisman argues similarly that pottery has perhaps the best chance of all our physical artifacts to persist, long after the elements creep over the other contents of our museums.  But what will echo into eternity, surprisingly, are the radio waves emanating from our media.  Our television may be heard at the edges of eternity in the moments before the end of time.  I have only started blogging, and perhaps it’s already time for me to consider podcasting.

A Campus to Call Our Own

This autumn marks twenty years since the beginning of my undergraduate education.  With the exception of one fairly unremarkable year as a newspaper reporter, I never really left the university.  But I function well outside the Ivory Tower, and I am not the sort of fellow who thinks that life begins and ends on campus.  I cannot help but observe, however, how difficult it is presently to create a physical space at universities that is appealing to students.  And I think that might be dangerous.

   

When I began studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland in September 1987, my parents' house was a half-hour drive from campus.  My folks fled to Conception Bay South in the 1970s in search of reasonable real estate – and waited there for St. John’s to creep towards them.  (Today, a new highway can whisk you to MUN in mere minutes from all parts of the Avalon Peninsula.)  But whether my parents dropped me off at 7am on their way to work or whether, as was more common, I urged my Dodge Omni towards a clandestine parking spot along Elizabeth Avenue, it was impractical for me to spend much of my time anywhere but on campus.  It was, seemingly, impossible for me to have anything other than a five-day-a-week timetable, and it was equally difficult for me to avoid both early morning or late afternoon classes.  Now, it is fine to say that the way Memorial University organized classes – in the Faculty of Arts, anyway – was inefficient.  But what they created for me was a long day at the university; actually, they created for me many long days.  I seldom skipped class; in this, I may have been unusual.  I ate lunch in the Thompson Students’ Centre with a dwindling group of high school friends who were deciding – or had decided for them – that higher education was not for them.  To protect us from the harsh weather of the North Atlantic, Memorial had (and still has) a marvelous subterranean system of tunnels that could take you from the east side of the Science Building to the basement of the Education Building in minutes flat.  Lockers snaking the length of the tunnel seemed a reassuring remnant of a high school life in which I was secure, if not always confident.

 

The Arts and Administration Building, where the English Department was housed, was a suitably impressive brick structure.  In later years, a space-aged lean-to was grafted to its north side, making it strangely more marvelous: it ushered in a new series of covered walkways that connected buildings in a series of new combinations.  But the jewel for an English student was clearly the library, then the newest and most impressive building on campus.  I was particularly charmed by its sky-lit reading room, where I worked on everything from mathematical proofs to psychology reading assignments alongside hundreds of my fellow undergraduates on its multi-tiered floors.  Graduate students had assigned cubicals, through whose locked doors you could glimpse assembled specialty collections.  The atrium had a bulletin board where students could vent their frustrations and be answered by a librarian who took our abuse with good humour.

 

The point of all this is how I felt a connectedness to the physical space on that campus, a connectedness that rooted me, quite literally, to my various tasks.  Today, campus can feel a little like a shopping mall, taking to the furthest extreme the “consumer” metaphor we use to discuss our “clients.”  Students drop in and attend class, as they might keep an appointment with a hairdresser, and leave again.  Thus, we might argue that students are more efficient with their time; the economics of post-secondary education require students to labour more than the three part-time shifts I worked each week while an undergraduate, and this time is often found in the middle of the day.  But my instincts tell me that all this time away from campus is not helping our students, scholastically.  For most students, undergraduate study is their full-time job, and it is not easy for students to apply themselves piecemeal.

 

Now, I do not want to suggest that universities do not invest in infrastructure to make campuses attractive.  Many universities today boast state-of-the-art recreational facilities, for example.  It is difficult to know what young adults want to do, and it is even more difficult – for a variety of complex reasons – to spend public money to create a space in which they are encouraged to do it.  Sport and fitness appeals as “fun” to a wide constituency and is seen as inherently good for us. But what is clear is that our most successful universities have vibrant communities with which students feel engaged for any number of idiosyncratic reasons.  People, themselves, are most important in fostering a sense of community, and in the case of small universities in very small towns, people spend a lot of time in close quarters, regardless of the bells and whistles.  My point here has been to suggest that in an age in which it is seen as unreasonable to spend money on anything but the most austere and functional space, we are giving our students little with which to connect.  My love for the campus of Memorial University may be idiosyncratic; if you see it or remember it, the campus is not the storied homogeny of the University of Western Ontario or the  University of Saskatechewan.  But it did have something my imagination could engage.  Can this ever again be a consideration when a larger part of every dollar spent must come from rising tuition?