The Classroom Conservative

Morrissey, Years Of Refusal

"Life is very long, when you're lonely," Morrissey sang at the helm of The Smiths in 1986. The title track from the band's greatest album laments, in part, waiting around and around and around some more, answering questions about fulfilling a destiny defined for you by others. I wonder if Morrissey ever feels that way, himself?

One could make the argument that The Queen Is Dead is one of the greatest rock albums ever. After The Smiths blew up following a stellar four-year burst of achievement in the late eighties, Morrissey embarked on a solo career that has, in its output, dwarfed that of his early band. But he has endured a full two decades of Smiths nostalgia where some people have been waiting for him to make a record that rivals in its impact his first work. The key to The Smiths had been timing, of course, as their music was a salve to a generation that came of age amidst of the dreariness of Thatcher's England. Smiths nostalgia takes no account of how Morrissey's pop anthems were the soundtrack of the early nineties, how Smiths retro had little resonance amidst Cool Britannia.

So, now, some early reviews of Years Of Refusal suggest that Morrissey has taken an unprecedented turn to the loud and straightforward. This, too, lacks any historical perspective. Morrissey has turned up the volume before with Your Arsenal (1992) and Maladjusted (1997). In fact, the new record follows a formula to which Moz has adhered for some time. Some of the songs are quite heavy, demonstrating the influence of guitarist Boz Boorer, with whom Morrissey has collaborated much, much longer than he ever collaborated with Johnny Marr. Some of the songs are downright campy, the kind of swooning torchsongs that get his fans to rush the stage at his gigs. (But if, like me, you have ever seen a Morrissey show, you can attest that everyone rushes the stage, anyway.) Some of the songs are perfect pop earworms, the sorts of things you sing to yourself all day. Morrissey has not made an album packed with the third variety since the flood of material that tumbled out of him immediately upon leaving The Smiths, but at least he has here avoided the affectation of the worst camp that has been the ballast of some of his B-sides.

Some of the heavier songs are still remarkably melodic: "That's How People Grow Up," "One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell," and "I'm Ok By Myself." The pure pop of "Sorry Doesn't Help" and "I'm Throwing My Arms Around Paris" is irresistible, and Moz's lyrics swing from the fragility of the former ("In the absence of your touch / And in the absence of loved ones / I have decided I'm throwing my arms around all of Paris because only stone and steel accept my love") to the egotism of "All You Need Is Me" ("There's a soft voice singing in your head / Who could this be? / I do believe it's me / There's a naked man standing, laughing in your dreams / You know who it is / But you don't like what it means"). While he fails here to rise to the heights of Vauxhall and I(1994), the instant classic of moody pop whose opening bars still fill me with my own nostalgia, Morrissey brings forth on Years of Refusal a timely collection of songs that adds at least a half-dozen titles to one of the most impressive outputs of any pop superstar of any era.

Unlike the casual fans who are waiting and waiting for something, or waiting for the return to something, I can always find something vital where Morrissey has taken me over the course of a twenty-five-year career.

In Praise Of Reading Week

You hear it all the time in this business. "You are so lucky," people say. "You have your summers off." Or, perhaps they say, "You are so lucky. You only teach two (or three, or four) classes a term." As we never tire of explaining to people, the time in front of students is just the part of the iceberg above the surface of the water. Summers are filled with research and course design; I have never taken a vacation anywhere that did not have a large research library. (I am waiting for some Caribbean university to open a modernist studies institute. And waiting. And waiting.) Once you factor in preparation, grading, and consultation, you can spend three or four hours working outside the classroom for every hour in it.

But our one genuine luxury is reading week.

While the teen and twentysomething sets have mythologized "spring break," the middle-aged professor longs only for a week to reorganize after the flurry of semester's start. Some of my colleagues will have assigned something due before we broke so that they have time to grade; some of my colleagues will have something due when they return so that their students have a little extra time to attend to it. Students generally prefer the former approach.

Last year, I was able to get out of town for the weekend, but this year I was grateful only to have some more time to devote to the more than one hundred grant applications that must be reviewed before tomorrow. I was also able to catch up on some appeal letters and references that I had not gotten around to writing. I did not make much progress with the book review that is now months late, but it can be ambitious to assume that you will get to actual reading during reading week.

As long as tuitions make up a major part of our budgets, the sound of empty corridors is the death knell for a place of learning. But, for one blessed week in the winter or spring, silence is the sound of catching up.

How do we live without a break in the autumn?

Breaking News: Paul Martin's Old Speechwriter Is Funny... On Purpose

For a long time, the new issue of Maclean's was ushered into my home through a ceremony of sorts: I would physically tear Scott Feschuk's column from the publication, sacrificing "The End" and destabilizing the front of the magazine.

But, lately, between the front door and the birdcage, my eyes have fallen upon passages that are... What is the word for it? Oh, yes. Passages that are actually funny.

"Welcome Mr. Obama. And yes, Harper's hair is real" is laugh-out-loud funny. This week's one-page primer on Canada, penned by the same man who helped Paul Martin dither, is pointed, smart, and totally impenetrable to Americans. Rest assured, Uncle Sam, Flag Day is not marked every year by the Prime Minister "selecting one lucky countryman to strangle in broad daylight." But, sadly, "the playoff beard" has become a Canadian national symbol. I can confirm that Stephen Harper's hair is real: he has it done at the same place as does Rod Blagojevich.

Someone should research whether an object in space actually gets funnier as that object moves further from former Prime Ministers.

Keep Thy Religion To Thyself

In the late 1980s, at the beginning of my short-lived career in journalism, I was given access to the archives of The Newfoundland Herald in St. John's. It was a tiny attic room in the building on Logy Bay Road, and it had in it copies of individual numbers going back many years. I could waste hours reading: one of the reasons journalism never worked out for me. Anyway, I remember vividly the letters to the editor published in the 1970s when concerned citizens objected, for example, to the airing of Three's Company because it dared show a man rooming with two women! I suspect that many of those letter writers never lived to sample the entertainment fare of today, but the tone of their moralizing epistles lives on in community newspapers across the country.

It lives on in my local paper, The Lethbridge Herald.

On any given morning, you can read citizens discussing our city's abysmal snow-clearing policy, explaining how our local government has invested poorly, or using column inches to thank their neighbors for helping when their cars break down. This a valuable use of a public forum. But you must also subject yourself to people from Lethbridge and the surrounding area who set out their barely-considered observations on abortion, evolution, homosexuality, and birth control. A month's worth of newsprint will tell you everything you need to know about using biblical quotations out of context to reinforce personal moral judgments.

I am content to meet my maker having followed the command of the atheist George Carlin: "Keep thy religion to thyself!"

For those of us who have taken nuanced and thoughtful positions on difficult contemporary issues, it is valuable to consider the opinions of our friends and neighbors. I find, however, that a conversation over a cup of coffee or simply observing the quiet examples of those people around me to be far more constructive than allowing myself to be subjected to a sermon over toast each morning. So why do our papers do this? Well, if they are reflecting their reading public, I would say that this is a public that does not deserve to be there reflected. Let those citizens pony up the seventy-five cents a day necessary to start their own blogs. You could blog for what these cranks spend on postage, alone.

I know what you are thinking: public debate is a valuable thing. I would agree that considered public debate is very valuable. But how do you have a meaningful discussion with the truly closed-minded? A few years ago, a historian friend of mine gave a public paper in Lethbridge on comparative murder statistics. His argument was that our crime rates are actually in decline, and they do not compare to American crime rates; therefore, any modeling of our policing on approaches taken in the United States is wrong-headed. What did my friend get for his trouble? A letter to the editor arguing that any count of Canadian murders is incomplete if it does not include abortion statistics. Now, surely, no matter what stand you take on abortion, you would agree that such information will provide no value in determining how many cops we need to combat gang wars raging in Vancouver and Calgary. How did giving this correspondent an airing further public debate?

Certain evangelical Christians maintain that they have a duty to bring forth the good news. I respect that. My paternal grandparents spent a combined ninety-two years as evangelical clergy, and they delivered their share of open air sermons, blared forth into gravel parking lots throughout rural Newfoundland. But I recall that these were people with compassion and understanding, too: they would provide wedding ceremonies for divorced couples turned away from their own churches. My grandfather once told a story about a young man who took on a pentecostal fit during testimony one evening. He flopped around on the church floor shrieking. "What are you doing?" my grandfather asked. "I am just worshiping the Lord," the young man sobbed. "Well, get on your feet," my grandfather countered. "You can worship him better from there."

Even for those people who have to impose their religious views on others, there is an appropriate time and there is an appropriate place. The daily letters column of a local newspaper is neither.

Kenneth Whyte, The Uncrowned King: The Sensational Rise Of William Randolph Hearst

Now just short of his fiftieth birthday, Ken Whyte is probably lodged in your mind as an establishment editor and publisher; The Uncrowned King reminds you that the man can really write, however, and he uses this study of William Randolph Hearst to defy formal expectations as only a firebrand might. Mr. Whyte imagined this book as a study of the fierce New York newspaper wars of the 1890s, and for a scholar of publishing history the discussion of "yellow journalism" and the success of the New York Journal is at the heart of this book. But if that is its true subject, this book must rest uneasily atop a mountain of personal and professional information, and as its title suggest it seeks at some level to right the wrongs of Hearst biographers who have worked before many times much of this same material.

This is called "social history," but you could not blame Random House for marketing it as biography. For much of its early pages, it is. Mr. Whyte is tremendously skilled at bringing his subject and the last decades of the American nineteenth century alive. But it is in his critique of other works about Hearst that he is peerless. You need not have read before a single word about the media titan to follow how The Uncrowned King supplements and corrects the existing record. Mr. Whyte avoids the pitfalls of dwelling too long on Hearst's relationship with his mother, and with the showgirls who captivated his imagination, while still revealing the idiosyncrasies that make Hearst a great subject. But just as you settle in for what you think to be an overview of the man's life, Mr. Whyte expands the discussion to all of Newspaper Row, New York. Was that personal preamble necessary for this public story? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But I was more troubled to see Mr. Whyte treat with almost equal emphasis the early life of Joseph Pulitzer, Hearst's rival. If this is life writing, we have "dual lives" before we have finished one-third of the book, and as important as all that is to establish context, the reader can only be left with divided loyalties. In some ways, this is the best way to approach the story of circulation numbers and single-copy prices, illustration sizes and numbers of editions. These topics are always rooted in personalities, never more so than in the fascinating analysis of how Newspaper Row covered presidential politics in the 1890s. I must admit that for me, though, the grand finale of the text, the extensive discussion of press coverage of (and more direct participation in) the Spanish-American War, left me a little cold. The issues are so removed from those of today, in some ways, in spite of the fact that American relations with Cuba have never been resolved, that I found it less compelling than McKinley out-polling Bryan. When Mr. Whyte here resolved the war, I found that I no longer expected to hear more about Hearst, and in fact The Uncrowned King provides scant attention to the last, say, half-century of Hearst's life.

Perhaps I was overwhelmed. After all, it is a significant achievement to have disinterred Hearst and dismantled the conventions of biography in the course of five hundred pages.

Mr. Monk Is My Father's Name

Over at the Maclean's academic blogs, Scott Dobson-Mitchell has an interesting piece about calling his professors by their first names. Mr. Dobson-Mitchell, a pre-med fresher, was surprised and made a little uncomfortable by his instructors' requests to drop any formality in the classroom. I would not wish to say, definitively, that I have been navigating this issue since Mr. Dobson-Mitchell was in elementary school, but the issue is certainly long-standing.

I suspect that, in North America, it has its roots in campus upheavals of the 1960s. (What does not?) But I felt it, increasingly, as the tuition structure changed and students were encouraged to think of me as their service provider, while I was encouraged to think of them as my customers. I hope to be on friendly terms with "Robert," the nice man who repairs my windshield, so why would I be surprised that students started thinking of me as "Craig," the slightly-less-nice fellow who grades their papers?

As they navigate university politics, you can hardly blame students for being confused. "Professor" is the highest rank we can achieve in our profession, and I certainly know of colleagues who have dropped "Doctor" and assumed "Professor" upon promotion: "Do not call me Dr. Smith; I am Professor Smith." However, we also grant "Professor" to the terminal M.A.s and doctoral students who work with us, allowing them a gracious way in which to address the question of their qualifications: "Do not call me Dr. Smith; I am Professor Smith." Who would not question what to call whom?

So, how do I approach the issue of names? Trained in the United Kingdom, and conscious of the kinds of traditions important to education, I began teaching as "Dr. Monk," and I referred to my students by their surnames. In that "Bennett" or "Mr. Bennett" could become, say, "Jason," over time, I accepted that I could become "Craig." I imagined that this increased familiarity was a mark of longstanding collaboration, used mostly by my best and most frequent students who knew me best. Like many newly-minted D.Phil.s (or Ph.D.s), I used to demand that I was "Dr. Monk," but like all edges these got rubbed off over time. Now. anyone can call me "Craig" out of the spirit of bonhomie I have described above, but I do object to it being used dismissively: "Craig! Where's the refill on my coffee?" If students are my customers, I tell them, they certainly do not get table service. I also object when students whom I do not know write me demanding letters that draw on my administrative function: "Hi, Craig. I wrote you last night about appealing my grade in Chemistry, but you did not write back." These students are likely to get this reply: "Dear Ms Bennett. I am sorry for the formality, but I do not believe we have met. It is unreasonable to expect a reply from the office of the Associate Dean in eight hours, particularly when these eight hours are customarily used for sleep."

There are two situations that always seem to get a disproportionate rise from me, though. First, I do not like being called "Mr. Monk." This is less about an objection to "Mister" than it is about my certainty that people cannot distinguish between what we do and what junior high schools do. You most commonly see this with students who think they are in Grade Fifteen, or from parents who think I am a figure from Ferris Bueller's Day Off, sworn to thwart the ambitions of their kids in Grade Fifteen. Second, I hate being called "Monk." This over-familiarity is not, as with the British interaction between professor and student, a charming reflection of educational tradition. It is brazen disrespect. I accept that it is part of the culture of behind-our-backs hall whispering, the kind of sideswiping that finds its way to ratemyprofessor.com, but I do not have to endure it to my face. There was once a young man who used to yell to "Monk" in the middle of a packed lecture hall, but he soon dropped my class. He did not accept that "Monk" could make any demand of civility upon his manner. I wonder if he ended up providing someone table service?

Hyperlinks And The Color Blind

Jon Wertheim's excellent coverage of the Australian Open men's tennis final last weekend featured a letter from John Webb, a reader from South Carolina who complained about the use of hyperlinks in cnnsi.com stories. Unlike sites like this one that use both font color and underlining to mark hyperlinks, cnnsi.com marks its links only in red. (I think they are red: I, too, am color blind.) The reader suggests choosing another color, but I have to wonder what is the problem with underlining? If that makes an ugly composition, how about adopting bold? The site currently abuses bold to mark proper names that have no links.

With the well-documented difficulties in the newspaper industry, it seems clear that even those of us who now get much of our daily information electronically will only continue to rely more and more on the internet. The ability to reference and cross-reference through hyperlinks is, along with the facility to update frequently, the demonstrable advantage of the form. But who wants to pore over lines and lines of online text in an attempt to discern subtle changes in color? If everyone, short of Kanye West, knows that you do not write in all caps, can we not agree similarly to refrain from relying solely on color to mark those places you would like your readers to click?

What Does Margaret Wente Know About Universities?

As a Newfoundlander, I have long ago forgiven Peg Wente for her ignorance about my home. In her defense, you must acknowledge that since 2005 she has mostly refrained from casting forth again into the murky waters that separate the province from Cape Breton. But knowing nothing about a subject does not always slow her down. She frequently earns her pay by professing about the university, and her latest Globe and Mail column on Saturday would, if not challenged, leave in the minds of readers some serious misconceptions about post-secondary education in Canada. Ms Wente's rhetorical style leads her often to rely on gross generalizations, or to quote people who rely on gross generalizations, and then back away from such comments ever-so-slightly. The lasting impression is still that the Canadian university is on its last legs. Frankly, I find this position rich, coming as it does from an op-ed columnist in a newspaper that could not afford to maintain a stand-alone books sections. Seeking to prove that an unpaid blog commentator can quickly demonstrate the folly of Ms Wente's paid opinions, I offer these comments - free of charge.

1. "Universities are vast credentialing factories whose main function is to certify that their graduates are intelligent enough to hold down jobs in the knowledge economy." There are certainly students who come to university looking for "Cs and degrees," but I have seen too many people complement their inadequate high school training, complete their pre-professional training with the flame of ambition burning more brightly than when they began, to just let this statement stand. We have, in this country, been so spoiled by low unemployment numbers for so long that we assume that anyone can get a job at any time. As the competition heats up during these difficult times, I will back those students who have read a little more, written a little more, argued a little more than their contemporaries without university training. As recent layoffs demonstrate, industry is best positioned to provide vocational training because people are likely to have a number of vocations in their careers. Universities, generally, provide broader instruction that positions employees to take advantage of subsequent vocational training. But whether it is the excellent cooperative education program at a place like Lethbridge or, say, the so-called "Ryerson twist" provided in Toronto, it would be wrong to assume that liberal education pays no mind to Ms Wente's beloved "marketplace." Universities have, over the past ten years, sought "real world" partnerships to maintain their relevance to the contemporary student.

2. "Under increasing financial pressure, universities like York have replaced expensive tenured professors with cheap contract labour." No one can dispute this fact, and the situation at York is terrible. Graduate and sessional instruction is an important part of the apprenticeship of professors, and there is no easy way to keep these people from being abused, or to move these people along when it is clear there is no permanent job for them. They are necessary, as a result of the chronic underfunding of universities. (Now, before you get in a twist about an elitist complaining about money, let me tell you that I am well-acquainted with the world outside the ivory tower, and the universities at which I have worked, by comparison, are run with tremendous efficiency.) But Ms Wente's assertion that Canada is moving towards a model where 65% of the instruction at universities is done by graduate students and sessional is absurd, and it reveals her usual urban bias. Unless you have a large pool of available labor, this is impossible. So, on campuses from Antigonish, Nova Scotia to Prince George, British Columbia, you have huge investments in tenure-track people. Universities in smaller places could not adopt the model Ms Wente imagines exists even if they wanted to do so.

3. "Meantime, professors get ahead by researching, not teaching. They spend shockingly little time in the classroom." Chalk up what truth there is in this statement to the funding model. It is easiest to demonstrate progress through disseminating material to colleagues, to government, to industry. If there was a better way to track the delivery of original research in the classroom, there would not be the disconnect between research and teaching that exists on campus. That said, universities invest a lot in teaching excellence, and I can tell you that I have received more professional benefit (practical and otherwise) from my teaching award here than I have from any research project I have undertaken. It is certainly true that universities must be challenged to integrate research and teaching, but the fallout is a chronic anxiety, a daily struggle, not a "shockingly" rampant neglect of students. In my case, in addition to a full-time administrative appointment, I still teach (undergraduate and graduate students), and I have an active research program. I would nominate Ms Wente for the Order of Canada if she could suggest how universities could attract external research funds, another metric by which we are judged, in support of teaching.

4. "The second problem is that universities are not terribly popular with the public, who tend to see them as a nest of richly subsidized tenured radicals who are overpaid and underworked." Universities are surely the brunt of jokes, but I see no evidence that anyone is turning away from us, in spite of the efforts of people like Margaret Wente. Governments understand capacity, first and foremost, in supporting institutions, and so we grow and will continue to grow. If the Canadian public, in Ms Wente's view, so hates us, we could certainly reorganize in a smaller model with different goals. But I have never heard anyone advocate for that. New universities open every year, and at some institutions many students are turned away. I do not know how else to judge popularity.

5. "[Taped lectures, delivered electronically, for example, represent] sensible ideas... too threatening ever to be adopted." This is Ms Wente's big finish: ceding the training of our youth to online diploma mills that, in the word of one gentleman on the inside, do not "go in for that 'expand their minds' nonsense." Well, there have always been places where one could receive vocational training for one office job, and for some people that is a fine way to go. It is just that you must expect to go back to the beginning when life's big game of "snakes and ladders" hands you a setback. I am not saying that universities should not or, indeed, have not begun to embrace "blended learning." There are wonderful opportunities to use new technology in the delivery of material. But Ms Wente's prized example, taken here (to give proper credit) from Fred Lazar at York University, is actually the worst idea imaginable. The value of a liberal education is in how students engage with their professors and with their contemporaries. This "continuing education for the shut-in" model takes us back to the worst manifestations of university education: the sage on the stage. That Ms Wente does not recognize that this "sensible" embracing of technology has left no role for interaction shows, again, how utterly out of touch she is with the university today.