The MOOC phenomenon has happened very quickly, to put it mildly. Last November, the New York Times declared 2012 to be “the Year of the MOOC,” and while it feels (at least to me) like we’ve been talking about MOOCs for years now, the speed by which the MOOC has become the future of higher education is worth thinking carefully about, both because it’s an important way to frame what is happening, and because that speed warps the narrative we are able to tell about what is happening. Coursera, Udacity, and edX are all less than a year old, and while the first two—which are silicon valley startups out of Stanford, essentially—have already enrolled millions of students, the non-profit consortium edX has grown just as prodigiously. Beginning as a partnership between Harvard and MIT, it now includes a dozen different universities, and that number will surely grow.

The MOOC phenomenon is also a shift in discourse, a shift that’s happened so quickly and so recently, that it fills up our mental rear-view mirror. When the word “MOOC” was first coined in 2008, by a set of Canadian academics who needed a term to describe the experiment in pedogogy they were putting together, the word itself was a niche term that most people in higher education would not hear about, or need to. In the last year, it’s gone from a rather singular experiment in connectivist and distributed learning to a behemoth force that we are told and retold is reshaping the face of higher education. And whether MOOCs are disrupting education through innovation—as Clay Christensen’s model of disruptive innovation in business would have it—or simply representing the disruption of education as it is embedded in the market, the phenomenon under discussion has changed quite dramatically as it has mgrated from Canada to Silicon Valley.

This is why it’s interesting to note that Inside Higher Education’s new booklet of essays, “The MOOC moment,” introduces its subject by writing that:

“The acronym MOOC (for massive open online course) first appeared in Inside Higher Ed in December 2011, in reference to a course offered by a Stanford University professor. These days, the acronym is omnipresent and – to many – needs no definition.”

I would say, in response, that this apparent lack of a need for a definition is exactly why we need to slow things down and figure out what the heck we’re talking about. For one thing, when we start the story in 2011, we forget about the 2008 MOOCs, and if the MOOCs are the future and the future is now, then it tends to have little to do with what was happening at the University of Manitoba in 2008, or why.

The MOOC that debuted in IHE in December 2011 was Sebastian Thrun’s “Artificial Intelligence” MOOC, a course that was offered at Stanford but opened up to anyone with a broadband. The way this story is usually told is that his incredible success—160,000 students, from 190 countries—encouraged Thrun to leave Stanford to try the new mode of pedagogy that he had stumbled upon. He had seen a TED talk given by Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, and when he decided to give it a whirl and it was a huge success, the rest is history. In January, 2012, he would found the startup Udacity.

However, another way to tell the story would be that Thrun was a Google executive—who was already well known for his work on Google’s driverless car project—and that he had already resigned his tenure at Stanford in April 2011, before he even offered that Artifical Intelligence class. Ending his affiliation with Stanford could be described as completing his transition to Silicon Valley proper. In fact, despite IHE’s singular “a Stanford University professor,” Thrun co-taught the famous course with Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

It’s important to tell the story this way, too, because the first story makes us imagine a groundswell of market forces and unmet need, a world of students begging to be taught by a Stanford professor and Google, and the technological marvels that suddenly make it possible. But it’s not education that’s driving this shifting conversation; as the MOOC became something very different in migrating to Silicon Valley, it’s in stories told by the New York Times, the WSJ, and TIME magazine that the MOOC comes to seem like an immanent revolution, whose pace is set by necessity and inevitability.

For example. When the president of UVA was abruptly fired last June, it would be an exaggeration to say that a David Brooks column and a few articles in the WSJ were the cause of it, but it would not be that much of an exaggeration. As we can now roughly reconstruct—from emails which were FOIA-ed by the UVa student paper—UVa’s rector and vice rector essentially engineered Teresa Sullivan’s resignation because they decided she was moving too slowly on online education. And what you get from reading these emails is an overwhelming sense of speed, which they are repeating, verbatim, from the articles they are emailing and forwarding to each other. The rector emailed a WSJ column “Higher Education’s Online Revolution” with the subject line “good piece in WSJ today — why we can’t afford to wait,” for example, an article she had gotten from a major donor, who suggested that it was “a signal that the on-line learning world has now reached the top of the line universities and they need to have strategies or will be left behind.” She immediately replied: “Your timing is impeccable — the BOV is squarely focused on UVa’s developing such a strategy and keenly aware of the rapidly accelerating pace of change.” At a meeting of UVa deans and vice presidents, UVa’s rector said:

“The board believes this environment calls for a much faster pace of change in administrative structure, in governance, in financial resource development and in resource prioritization and allocation…We do not believe we can even maintain our current standard under a model of incremental, marginal change. The world is simply moving too fast.”

Where does such a person get this kind of conviction? You find the best examples of this kind of rhetoric in the New York Times; a few months ago, for example, Thomas Friedman argued that the “MOOCs revolution…is here and is real” and remarked on “how much today’s traditional university has in common with General Motors of the 1960s, just before Toyota used a technology breakthrough to come from nowhere and topple G.M.” This kind of comparison has become a common sense. MOOCs are a “campus tsunami,” to use columnist David Brook’s term, one that we all need to pay attention to, before it’s too late.

Where this urgency comes from, however, might be less important than what it does to our sense of temporality, how experience and talk about the way we we are, right now, in “the MOOC moment.” In the MOOC moment, it seems to me, it’s already too late, always already too late. The world not only will change, but it has changed. In this sense, it’s isn’t simply that “MOOCs are the future,” or online education is changing how we teach,” in the present tense. Those kinds of platitudes are chokingly omnipresent, but the interesting thing is the fact that the future is already now, that it has already changed how we teach. If you don’t get on the MOOC bandwagon, yesterday, you’ll have already been left behind. The world has already changed. To stop and question that fact is to be already belated, behind the times.

The first thing I want to do, then, is slow us down a bit, and go through the last year with a bit more care than we’re usually able to do, to do a “close reading” of the year of the MOOC, as it were. Not only because I have the time, but because, to be blunt, MOOC’s only make sense if you don’t think about it too much, if you’re in too much of a hurry to go deeply into the subject.

I mean that in two different ways. On the one hand, I would put it to you that the logic of the MOOC is a function of shallow thinking, of arguments that go no deeper than a David Brooks or Thomas Friedman column. But they also valorize and reward that level of depth, even make it compulsory. MOOC’s are literally built to cater to the attention span of a distracted and multi-tasking teenager, who pays attention in cycles of 10-15 minutes. This is not a shot at teenagers, however, but an observation about what the form anticipates (and therefore rewards and reproduces) as a normal teenager’s attention span. In place of the 50 minute lectures that are the norm at my university, for example, MOOCs will break a unit of pedagogy down into youtube-length clips that can be more easily digested, whenever and wherever. Much longer than that, and it falls apart; the TED talk is essentially the gold standard. But I want to suggest that the argument in favor of MOOC’s can’t handle all that much complexity either; it makes sense at the speed of a TED talk, or the length a NY Times column, but starts to come apart very quickly if you go any deeper or longer than that.

I’m evoking two kinds of time here. On the one hand, there is the belated temporality where we’re already always behind the times, which is necessary to make the MOOC seem like the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy it has become: if Harvard, Stanford, and MIT are making MOOCs, then anyone who doesn’t jump on board the bandwagon will be left behind. We don’t have to understand why it’s happening, where it’s going, or where it came from; the fact that it’s happening there is all the reason we need. Framed by this temporality, the MOOC becomes a kind of fetish object: because we treat its existence as self-evident fact—or to the extent that we treat its existence as a kind of self-evident fact—its objective reality obscures the contingencies of its production and the ideological formations that make it seem to exist. Why are Harvard, Stanford, and MIT making MOOCs? It doesn’t matter. Only the fact that they are making them is important.

This is a logic that particularly appeals to universities like the University of Virginia, University of Texas, or the University of California, by the way; schools that aren’t in the Ivy league, but who see themselves at the forefront of higher education. But it’s also an argument that only works at the depth (or non-depth) of a David Brooks column, maybe a 6 minute reading time, because its claims only work if you don’t interrogate their foundational premises too much.

For example. On May 3rd of last year, David Brooks began his column “The Campus Tsunami” this way:

“Online education is not new. The University of Phoenix started its online degree program in 1989. Four million college students took at least one online class during the fall of 2007. But, over the past few months, something has changed. The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet. Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments. Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures.”

This is a sophisticated piece of discourse, in its way. By acknowledging that “online education is not new,” Brooks is working to distinguish the thing that is not new (online education) from the form of online education that is new, the MOOC. To re-brand online education—which has generally had a well-deserved bad reputation—he has to conjure forth this distinction, creating space between the old kind of online education (the University of Phoenix) and the new kind, which, because it is new, can shed that baggage. He therefore opens by acknowledging online education’s lack of novelty so he can then re-situate our perspective in a different place, just ahead of the cutting edge: if the University of Phoenix’s online program is decades old—and therefore not cutting edge—the kind of online education that he’s interested in discussing, which is different than the University of Phoenix, IS cutting edge. And the difference is a shift from the bottom to the top, from low prestige to high prestige: “over the past few months, something has changed…The elite, pace-setting universities have embraced the Internet.”

What he’s not saying, of course—what he’s working very hard to un-say—is that Harvard is actually struggling to get where the University of Phoenix already was in 1989. You have to read him against the grain to draw that out, but it’s there: he’s essentially observing the way that Harvard is emulating the University of Phoenix. But, of course, that can’t be, can it? After all, by definition, Harvard, Stanford, MIT are cutting-edge, while the University of Phoenix—a for-profit, low prestige university that markets to non-traditional students and employs a no-name teaching staff—well, they can’t be the cutting edge, by definition.

These definitional “facts” allow Brooks to finesse a truly jaw-dropping rhetorical move: though he began with the statement that “online education is not new,” he manages, in only four sentences, to write the words: “Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments.”

How does he get from “online education is not new” (old hat, established, conventional) to the line “Not long ago, online courses were interesting experiments”? How does online education go from something older than most of our students to a temporality where it’s just on the cusp of being developed, where in very recent memory, it was pure speculative futurity, where it’s the future we hurtling backwards into?

The key to this piece of rhetorical alchemy is that you can’t over-think it, in the way I just have. Brooks is taking something that lacks prestige and cultural capital—a mode of education that is not valuable, only expensive, not innovative or exciting—and placing the name “Harvard” around it makes it into something that suddenly is both valuable and worthwhile, as a function of Harvard’s symbolic role in American higher education, to define the new cutting edge. And when he writes “Now online activity is at the core of how these schools envision their futures,” he means that because these schools are envisioning it—because attached to that brand—online education is now the future we must emulate and pursue. Because it’s at Harvard, it’s “now” instead of being where the University of Phoenix already was the year the Berlin Wall fell, before our students were born.

II.

If I have one overarching takeaway point in this talk, it’s this: there’s almost nothing new about the kind of online education that the word MOOC now describes. It’s been given a great deal of hype and publicity, but that aura of “innovation” poorly describes a technology—or set of technological practices, to be more precise—that is not that distinct from the longer story of online education, and which is designed to reinforce and re-establish the status quo, to make tenable a structure that is falling apart.

If you read the people that were creating MOOCs in 2008, by contrast—as I’ve been doing—you’ll actually see a lot of thinking that’s kind of out there, as far as how we conceptualize what education is for, and what it does. But the innovations in pedagogy that produced the first MOOC in 2008, at the University of Manitoba, had to be forgotten and erased from the historical timeline if the MOOCs that we’re talking about were to become the standard bearer for “cutting edge.” When Inside Higher Education writes about the MOOC moment, after all, that moment has to begin not in 2008, but in December 2011, and in Silicon Valley where and when the hype machine really gets into gear.

Things are moving so fast because if we stopped to think about what we are doing, we’d notice that MOOCs are both not the same thing as normal education, and are being positioned to replace “normal” education. But the pro-MOOC argument is always that it’s cheaper and almost never that it’s better; the most utopian MOOC-boosters will rarely claim that MOOCs are of equivalent educational value, and the most they’ll say is that someday it might be. This point is crucial to unpacking the hype: columnists, politicians, university administrators, educational entrepreneurs, and professors who are hoping to make their name by riding out this wave, they can all talk in such glowing terms about the onrushing future of higher education only because that future hasn’t actually happened yet: it’s still speculative in the sense that we’re all speculating about what it will look like. This means that the MOOC can be all things to all people because it is, literally, a speculation about what it might someday become.

To put my cards on the table, the 2012 MOOC seems to me like a speculative bubble, a product which is being pumped up and overvalued by pro-business legislators, overzealous administrators, and by a lot of hot air in the media. But like all speculative bubbles—especially the ones that originate in Silicon Valley—it will eventually burst; the only question is what things will look like when it does. But if 2012 has been “the year of the MOOC” because it’s been the year of MOOC-hype, 2013 is already something different; so far, a great deal of the MOOC news has been the backlash against it.

Last week, for example, the philosophy department at San Jose State University wrote an open letter to Thomas Friedman’s good friend Michael Sandel, informing him why they were refusing to use his MOOC, a survey course on Justice given at Harvard, and offered through edX. I can’t say it half as well as they did, so I’m going to quote this open letter:

“Anant Agarwal, edX President, has described the standard professor as basically just “pontificating” and “spouting content,” a description he used ten times in a recent press conference here at SJSU. Of course, since philosophy has traditionally been taught using the Socratic method, we are largely in agreement as to the inadequacy of lecture alone. But, after all the rhetoric questioning the effectiveness of the antiquated method of lecturing and note taking, it is telling to discover that the core of edX’s JusticeX is a series of videotaped lectures that include excerpts of Harvard students making comments and taking notes. In spite of our admiration for your ability to lecture in such an engaging way to such a large audience, we believe that having a scholar teach and engage with his or her own students is far superior to having those students watch a video of another scholar engaging his or her students.”

Let me just underscore this point: in order to create the illusion of engagement, Sandel’s MOOC contains footage of Harvard students asking questions, which their Harvard professor answers. But as the open letter from SJSU pointed out,

“what kind of message are we sending our students if we tell them that they should best learn what justice is by listening to the reflections of the largely white student population from a privileged institution like Harvard? Our very diverse students gain far more when their own experience is central to the course and when they are learning from our own very diverse faculty, who bring their varied perspectives to the content of courses that bear on social justice…should one-size-fits-all vendor-designed blended courses become the norm, we fear that two classes of universities will be created: one, well- funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant. Public universities will no longer provide the same quality of education and will not remain on par with well-funded private ones. Teaching justice through an educational model that is spearheading the creation of two social classes in academia thus amounts to a cruel joke.”

San Jose State is the ground zero for the MOOC tsunami, in several senses. It’s literally located in Silicon Valley, but it’s also part of the Cal State system, the largest university system in the country, with almost half a million students. Along with the partnership with edX, SJSU also has a partnership with Udacity to offer slightly lower cost online courses to its own students—and also to local high school and community college students—and they say they hope to eventually replace 20% of the curriculum with online courses from universities like Harvard and MIT. They explicitly hope to do so in a way which can serve as a model for the rest of the Cal State system to follow.

SJSU’s president, by the way, might be the most market-minded university administrator I’ve ever come across, and his contempt for his own university faculty is astonishing; when he was asked about the quality of SJSU’s online courses, for example, he just quipped that “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” He says that kind of thing regularly enough that it’s not a fluke. It’s one thing when you have the President of edX or Thomas Friedman condemning professors as boring pontificators spouting content, but when the calls are coming from inside the building, you have a real problem.

Another tidbit: his Cal State profile page describes “his more than 30 years of experience in the service of higher education and industry,” which is a conflation you rarely here put quite so bluntly. Such a conflation does, however, make a lot of sense in Silicon Valley, where the educational-industrial complex is the foundation on which the valley rests, where it’s pretty normal for a Stanford professor to also be an executive at Google, and for a university president to see his duty as split between working for education and working for industry. But things get weird if that model starts to be the basis from which to transform a public system of higher education. Which is what’s now happening.

III.

Let me turn now to talk about what should be the elephant in the room, Senate Bill 520. This is a bill, which, if it passes, will require all three sectors of California’s public university system to accept MOOCs from a certain approved list as course credit. The details are yet to be determined, and it seems most likely that the final bill will be something different than what was originally introduced. But the assumptions and ambitions of SB520 are a useful way to frame what direction the MOOC tsunami is taking: the capture of public education.

For the 20 Million Minds foundation, one of the drivers behind the bill, SB520 is all about options, opportunity, and choice for students. The bill’s sponsor, Senate Pro-Tem President Darrell Steinberg, cites the very real problems of access to over-enrolled courses—and the fact that students are failing to graduate on time, because they cannot get required courses for their majors—and uses this as a rhetorical wedge to argue that MOOCs should actually be acceptable as replacements for normal college classes. As he put it:

“We want to be the first state in the nation to make this promise: No college student in California will be denied the right to move through their education because they couldn’t get a seat in the course they needed.”

But the irony of his formulation is that even he admits that instead of solving a problem which has a very simple definition—which is basically reducible to a number, the fact that there are more students than there are chairs and classrooms—they are simply redefining the problem, imagining into existence a chairless classroom. The problem is real: years of consistent budget cuts have left the public universities without the money to buy “chairs” (and everything that represents), so public universities have shifted the financial burden onto the backs of individual students, whose tuition now pays much more of the cost. Since educating fewer students would therefore cost money, in effect—and it would also cost money to fully staff the necessary courses—there is no solution to the problem that does not require spending more money on chairs, classrooms, and teachers to teach them. MOOCs enter the picture, then, as a kind of fantasy solution to this unsolvable problem: instead of addressing the problem by either admitting fewer students or adding more courses, we will define the problem differently: chairless classrooms! Everyone is happy.

In this case, the cliche that California is where everything happens first has some truth to it: if SB520 passes, it will define the shape of things to come, not only by creating a model for other states to follow, but by creating a kind of market value for MOOCs that didn’t exist before, and which wouldn’t exist otherwise. By making certain selected MOOC’s convertible into course credit—at CCC’s, CSU’s, and the UC system—the California legislature will quite literally create value where it didn’t exist before, by making MOOCs a thing that are worth paying for. This shift is important. But mandating that a MOOC is the same thing as college—that it can be literally credited as a college class—not only changes what a MOOC is, it changes what college is.

After all, if a MOOC is simply a free educational resource that you can find on the web—which is what MOOCs presently are—then there’s nothing to object to in them, and everything to like. Such a MOOC is an almost wholly good addition to the universe: other than opportunity costs and the costs of a computer—which are not nothing, but they are also not that much—it’s simply a free and useful thing, available to those that want it. But the moment that such a use value becomes legible as a market value, when it becomes something that can be exchanged for the kinds of course credits that students pay very high tuition for, MOOCs become a radically different beast, with a radically different kind of economic value. It’ll be much easier to charge for them, on the one hand, and almost unthinkable that associated costs won’t rise, as they did with the once free California public universities (especially since Udacity and Coursera are literally for-profit enterprises). And on the other hand, they will radically devalue the resource that they can now be used to replace: if you can replace “chairs” (by which I mean, the brick and mortar campus) with a chair-less university—if those things are literally exchangeable—then the market value of “chairs” goes down, at the same time as its actual costs stay the same. If we can’t fully staff our classrooms now, how will we staff them in the future, when they have to compete with free?

To put it slightly differently, pumping up the value of MOOCs in this way—declaring, by legislative fiat, that MOOCs are now convertible with “real courses”—actually does have an important cost. If the platonic ideal of the classroom experience is the gold standard, then declaring that a bunch of other unrelated metals are also gold will lower its value, especially if those metals are freely available, in infinite supplies. Why would someone pay a teacher to give one-on-one attention to students when those students could get the same formal credential from an online course? You can point out that there is an actual and effective difference between a student to professor of 17 to 1 (in the gold standard class) and a ratio of 10,000 to 1, where a student will effectively never have a personalized interaction with the professor. But once market equivalency has entered the equation, once the market recognizes an equivalence between a MOOC and an in-person class, pointing out the difference that is experienced by the student will be trumped by the equivalence of market logic, which will dictate paying the cheaper of the two. An in-person education will become a unnecessary luxury: like gold itself, it will no longer be the “gold standard,” the basis of educational value, but rather, simply, an ornamental marker of elite status.

To Darrel Steinberg, MOOCs can seem like a win-win solution to an otherwise intractable fiscal crisis. Students who are locked out of over-enrolled required courses can complete their degrees by taking those classes with an online provider, possibly even at a lower cost and at no extra cost to the state. Meanwhile, allowing Silicon Valley start-ups like Coursera and Udacity to offer courses that will transfer into the California State and University of California systems will give those companies a legitimacy in the education marketplace that they have never had before. When you see that Sebastian Thrun is one of the people who helped write the bill, and when Darrell Steinberg held his press conference announcing the bill on “Google Hangout” a lot of things become clearer.

If this bill passes, the winners will be Silicon Valley along with the austerity hawks in the California legislature: while the former will have privileged access to the largest student market in the state, the latter will be relieved of the burden of having to educate the state’s young people. And the losers will be teachers and students.

IV.

MOOC boosters live in the future; actually-existing MOOCs are a far cry from what their champions promise they will someday become, which allows us to gloss over any troubling trends in their present day iteration. After all, MOOC boosters like to brag about the thousands of students—even hundreds of thousands—who sign on to learn from super-professors like Harvard University’s Michael Sandel or Sebastian Thrun. But completion rates for these courses consistently hover in the mid single-digits. A Software Engineering MOOC taught by UC Berkeley professor David Patterson in May 2012, for example, may have enrolled over 50,000 students, but less than 4,000 actually completed the course, and this is typical. What’s more, as Patterson himself was quick to observe, his MOOC was a “cheating-rich environment”; it is safe to assume that the number of students who actually completed the course is somewhat lower than even the 7% that received a completion certificate.

This doesn’t mean that MOOCs are without value, of course; just because most of Patterson’s students didn’t complete his course doesn’t mean they didn’t benefit from taking it, and it seems reasonable to assume that many online learners are not interested in completion certificates. Patterson observed, for example, that many of his students already had degrees, and that some were instructors themselves; for learners wishing to brush up skills or keep abreast of new pedagogy, a MOOC might be just the thing. In applied fields like software engineering, where the ability to code is a valuable enough skill that course credit becomes almost irrelevant—and where the material lends itself naturally to online instruction—the free availability of high-quality course materials is an almost pure social good.

It does, however, demonstrate what the technology is not good at: accreditation and mass education. It rewards self-directed learners who have the resources and privilege to allow them to pursue learning for its own sake. But if you want it to function as a gate-keeping mechanism, which is one of the things that universities do, it’s not very good at that; a MOOC is almost designed to make cheating even easier that ever before. And if you want to use it to make educational resources available to underserved and underprivileged communities—which has been the historical mission of public education—MOOCs are also a really poor way to do that. Historically, public systems like California’s provided high quality education to citizens of the state who could not have gotten the equivalent anywhere else. MOOCs promise to see to it that what the public universities are able to provide is not, in every sense, the equivalent of what rich people’s kids get.

The irony is that when the term was first coined in 2008, this was all quite well understood; the MOOC came into existence as something that, by its very nature, could never be used to replace a normal college class. The point of it was that it was something fundamentally different than a college class.

Dave Cormier originally suggested the name for an experiment in open courseware that George Siemens and Stephen Downes were putting together at the University of Manitoba, a class of 25 students that was opened up to over 1,500 online participants; for them, this MOOC was part of a long-running engagement with connectivist principles of education, the idea that we learn best when we learn collaboratively, in networks, because the process of learning is less about acquiring new knowledge—the commodified “content” that a Udacity or edX MOOC tries to reify and market—and much more about building the social and neural connections that will allow knowledge to circulate, be used, evolve, and to grow. A class that’s animated by a contractual agreement, which spells out the costs, requirements, and credential that are to be acquired is one thing, and it may even be a good thing; but the goal of these original MOOCs was to foster an educational process that was something totally different: it would be as exploratory and creative as its participants chose to make it, it was about building a sense of community investment in a particular project, a fundamentally socially-driven enterprise, and its outcomes were to be fluid and open-ended. I would argue that getting a “Grade” for such a thing—or charging money for it—would be to fundamentally change what it is.

I could go on; for those of us who first heard of MOOCs in 2012, reading a document like “The MOOC Model for Digital Practice” from 2010, is a strange experience; the things they said about MOOCs in 2010 are hard to square with what people have been saying about them since “the MOOC moment” happened, and it went mainstream.

The MOOC of 2012 looks very different, starting with the central narrative of “disruption” and “un-bundling”: instead of building social information networks, the neoliberal MOOC is driven by a desire to liberate and empower the individual, breaking apart actually-existing academic communities and refocusing on the individual’s acquisition of knowledge. The MOOC being praised by utopian technologists in the New York Times might be the diametric opposite of what Siemens, Downes, and Cormier said they were trying to create, in this sense, even though it deploys some of the same idealistic rhetoric. Rather than transferring course content from expert to student, the original MOOCs stemmed from a connectivist desire to decentralize and de-institutionalize education, creating fundamentally open and open-ended networks of circulation and collaboration. But the MOOCs which are being developed by Silicon Valley startups Udacity and Coursera, as well as by non-profit initiatives like edX, aim to do exactly the same thing that traditional courses have done—transfer course content from expert to student—only to do so massively more cheaply and on a much larger scale.

This is why, instead of de-institutionalizing education or making learning less hierarchical, we see some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world treating the MOOC as a lifeline in troubled economic waters, leveraging the figure of the “super-professor” to maintain their position of excellence atop the educational field, and even to create new hierarchical arrangements between universities. These MOOCs are just a new way of maintaining the status quo, of re-institutionalizing higher education in an era of budget cuts, sky-rocketing tuition, and unemployed college graduates burdened by student debt. If the MOOC began in the classroom as an experimental pedagogy, it has swiftly morphed into a process driven from the top down, imposed on faculty by university administrators, or even imposed on administrators by university boards of trustees and regents. From within academia, the MOOC phenomenon is all about dollars and cents, about doing more of the same with less funding. And while MOOC-boosters like to deride the “sage on the stage” model of education-delivery—as if crowded lecture halls are literally the only kind of classroom there is—most of the actually-existing MOOCs being marketed are not much more than a massive and online version of that very same “sage on a stage” model. And what could be more hierarchical than a high prestige university like Harvard lecturing to a less prestigious institution like SJSU?

V.

I’ve titled my talk “The End of Reform” because I had to call it something; I couldn’t just say that the MOOCification of Higher Education is a Terrible No Good Very Bad Thing, although I think you have a sense of what I think about it.

But I mean two things by that title. On the one hand, MOOCs are more like an end of something than a beginning. Instead of a transition between old and new, they represent the end of a process of constant change that has defined Higher Education for as long as it has existed. At the micro level, MOOCs are cheap because you record them once and then reuse them. They don’t grow and evolve, and they don’t require the hiring of academic faculty, whose intellectual lives keep intellectual inquiry moving forward. This is what makes them cheap, but it’s also what will make them solidify hierarchy by placing a pantheon of academic superstars at the center of pedagogical practice, reifying knowledge into a commodity which, because it has value, cannot be allowed to change. If academic life is anything, it’s a devotion to endless process: the scientific method tells you how to take the next step, not where to stop. MOOCs are structurally devoted to pinning knowledge down like a butterfly, putting it on file, putting a price on it, and floating it on the market.

It also represents the end of reform at the macro level. The University of California, for example, is a profoundly recent creation; it was basically a two campus university until the 1950’s; today there are eleven campuses; online education dates back to the 80’s, well, this university dates back to the 60’s. Same is true with CSU’s and CCC’s; between 1957 and 1965, California established eight new CSUs—out of an eventual twenty-four—while more than half its present complement of 112 community colleges was built in the period between 1957 and 1978. California’s public university system is, in many ways, the biggest and best expression of a moment in time when futurity was incredibly important and possible; it represented a massive investment of public funds in the state’s collective future. The 1960 Donahoe Act, better known as the Master Plan for Higher Education, was a complex piece of legislation, but at its heart, quite simple, a blanket commitment from the state to educate all the California students who wanted an education. And as society grew, the university was to grow with it, adapting to changing needs by staying in a permanent state of reformulation.

Even though Darrel Steinberg’s SB520 begins by citing the Master Plan, his legislation represents a refusal of futurity: because the future is now, there is nothing to plan for; the only reality is the economic reality that a funding shortfall must be dealt with. And instead of solving this problem, he seeks to institutionalize it, render it permanent. We solve the problem of frustrating ambitions by foreswearing ambition, refusing to have desires that can be frustrated.

(a slightly enriched version of a talk I gave at this lovely symposium, put on by the lovely people at the BABEL working group and at UC Irvine)

I’m interested in thinking about “critique” as disobedience—or disobedience as “critique”—and what that would mean. Disobedience is an interesting concept, because it’s different than opposition or defiance. It can be passive. It can be apathy. It’s not necessarily even an action: the simple absence of obedience has a power all its own, disobedience as inaction or disinterest.

Let me start with an iconic example. In Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Bartleby is not a revolutionary, nor a striking worker. What he does is not even action, because it’s legible only as negation: he disobeys in the sense that he does not obey, registering his negative preference (his preference not to) and declining to comply with a variety of very reasonable suggestions. If he “preferred to”—expressing a positive preference—he could be dealt with, reasoned with, even represented, because he would have made himself legible, giving the narrator access to his subjectivity. In this sense, what Bartleby does is also not civil disobedience, which, as Martin Luther King put it, actually displays “the very highest respect for the law,” seeking and even requiring arrest as its realization. Bartleby is not civil: if the civil disobedient subject can be reconciled with and even celebrated by the state and its agents—because, by seeking arrest, they become legible—the narrator is totally flummoxed by Bartleby’s total illegibility. If he could understand why Bartleby does what he does—if he knew what his preferences were, instead of what they were not—he could relate to him, socialize him, and ultimately be rid of him.

Bartleby’s effect is that he cannot be absorbed into civil discourse; the statement “I would prefer not to” refuses to be made socially legible. In fact, as a disorientingly strange and illegible eruption into normal discourse, it eventually infects even the narrator himself, as well as the other employees; the narrator reports that

“Somehow, of late I had got into the way of involuntarily using this word “prefer” upon all sorts of not exactly suitable occasions. And I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me in a mental way. And what further and deeper aberration might it not yet produce?”

What I want to draw from Melville’s story is the peculiar communicative efficacy of negative affect, the way disobedience not only comes to pervade the story itself, but in a way, also produces the story. The narrator, after all, is not a writer, but a kind of copyist among copyists; a safe and unambitious corporate lawyer, living on patronage, and who lacks personality as a function of his office. He strives to copy documents perfectly, without altering them by any affect of personality. He is very good at removing personality, in fact.

When he is presented with Bartleby, however—that obstinately present absence of affect—he can no longer be a copyist, because there is nothing to copy. He has no choice but to become a writer: he has to invent stories about a character whose apparent subjective core is an absence of subjectivity. Faced with Bartleby—a kind of subjective zero point—the narrator not only finds his own humanity cast into sharp relief, but he discovers that he must improvise, act, invent, and in so doing, becomes a person who, for the first time, also prefers.

Now, I’m not offering Bartleby himself as a model for critical practice, and not only because he starves to death in prison (preferring even not to eat). But “critique” is often not very good at breaking away from its object; critique is dependent on its objects, and its objects will define the meaning and possibilities of critique. Foucault’s persistent critique of power, for example, helps to produce Foucault as a kind of theory of power, and it’s therefore not wholly a misreading of him to see power as omnipresent, all-encompassing, totalizing. In critiquing how power works, he can seem incapable of saying anything other than “this is how power works.”

Closer to home, I find that in trying to critique the corporate university—and the University of California in particular—anti-privatization efforts compulsively adopt the very language of the corporate university itself, arguing that we better serve the customers of the university if we don’t charge them such high tuition, for example, or by arguing that faculty—rather than administrators—better know how to maintain excellence. It’s actually very hard to argue the value-proposition of higher education without, in doing so, conceding the point that education is essentially reducible to its value.

* * *

I started thinking about this because of what happened in November 2011, when Occupy Cal protesters disobeyed an order to disperse and were beaten by campus police at UC Berkeley. Putting up tents where they did, and when they did—during the day—was not actually illegal, nor was it in violation of any campus regulations; sleeping there overnight would have been, though there’s plenty of precedent for that too. Yet when they started to put up tents, they were immediately told that the grassy space they’d chosen was “closed.” Even though it was the middle of the afternoon—and the entire area was thronged with students—they were told that the university was “private property,” and thus, could be opened and closed at the will of the regents.

The specter of the outside agitator was also invoked—particularly by reference to the racialized subject of “Occupy Oakland”—and so the police acted, ostensibly, to protect the infantilized student population from dangerous outsiders. But the perversity of police beating students to protect them is only part of it: the distinction between insiders and outsiders flows out of the fact that the regents’ ownership of the university was being expressed as a property right. Instead of a public university, built for and maintained for the benefit of California, as a whole, the campus was being treated like a gated community, defined by the function to exclude, and to be exclusive.

This may not seem strange or unusual, but in terms of the University’s constituted relationship to the California public, it is. The UC was legally established as a public trust, which is a very particular kind of public property, a property which is not preserved as land, per se, but as the space necessary to realize the enterprises conducted on it. English common law established the principle that the sovereign held waterways “as trustee of a public trust for the benefit of the people,” but only for the purpose of keeping it open to commerce, navigation and fishing. The UC was constituted with the same sense of purpose, on the model of public waterways: the regents of the university—the public’s trustees—are given near absolute authority over the university, but only to keep it open to Californians.

The regents’ ownership of the campus was never a secret, of course. There are signs on campus declaring “Property of the Regents of the University of California; Permission to Enter or Pass Over is Revocable At Any Time.” But Occupy Cal revealed the extent to which that was practically true. Areas of the campus could be declared off limits to certain kinds of people, without deliberation, rationale, or even warning; it was sufficient, simply, to invoke the proprietary right of the Regents (and those who act in their name) to do what they wanted with their property.

I’m not sure whether this counts as “critique,” but if it does, it’s a very particular kind of critique. “Critique” is often synonymous with “speaking truth to power”: the critical attitude of the public sphere—the fourth estate—is meant to check state authority, aid the weak and afflict the powerful, and draw the attention of the public to dysfunction or injustice. Modern “criticism” is understood to begin as a response to the absolutist state; Foucault’s “What is Critique?” sees a developing art of governance in the 16th century on the one hand, and a developing art of, what he names, “how not to be governed” on the other. This understanding of critique is very specifically about using to truth to call power to account; political power must be accountable to law, spiritual authority must be accountable to biblical texts, natural laws must be accountable to scientific method, and so forth. It’s the power of the individual to determine her own truth—to “dare to know” as Kant has it—that makes “the enlightenment” the scene in which “modern” European criticism emerges.

However, “dare to know” very specifically does not imply “dare to disobey.” Critique attempts to temper power, police it, and school it, but this doesn’t makes critique a defiance of power; it can as easily be the effort to counsel and improve it. Critique is “both partner and adversary to the arts of governing”; the art of being governed differently, the art of governing government, is not separate from governance, but a relation of privilege within it.

Critique, in this sense, is less about opposing power with truth—and certainly not about negating it—but, rather, a socio-political relation between established authority and the privileged individual, in which power is defined and augmented by truth, which thereby imbues truth with power.

In this genealogy, then, the idea that speaking “truth to power” is resistance becomes less and less clear. Critique is not only a part of governance—and vice versa—but both are unthinkable without the other. Critique is actually dependent on power; as power over power, it can only alter the terms through which power is exercised. Instead of “how not to be governed like that”—which might be expressive of a desire for the absence of governance—critique describes “how to be governed, BUT how not to be governed not like that.”

After all, Kant ends his “What is Enlightenment?” by approvingly quoting Frederick II’s edict “Argue all you want, but obey.” This is the part of this text that flummoxed me when I read it, as an undergrad; shouldn’t speaking truth to power also imply acting truth to power? But argument, as mental freedom, does not imply or compel freedom to disobey. It might compel the reverse, to counsel power on how to govern better at the cost of acquiescing to being governed. To critique can be to obey: by applying only where obedience is not required, this kind of free speech is just the flip side of power, a kind of supplementary and enabling excess.

* * *

Now, I rehearse this critical genealogy because it presumes a governing authority which actually uses truth to legitimize itself. Critique presumes that an authority uses its power to define truth, and truth to legitimize its power, that its authority is premised on that relationship. To speak truth to such a power is therefore to contest the grounds on which it legitimizes itself, to argue that the truth points towards a different use of power. Truth becomes power, only in that particular sense. Obedience therefore makes sense, in a context where law actually does govern power.

But how does one speak truth to a power that is not dependent on truth?

Last year, I became a connoisseur of a very dull and depressing genre of writing, the various post-mortem documents that UC Berkeley commissioned and produced to investigate how and why police beat students. What’s striking about this genre of writing is that no one ever knows why the police behaved in the ways they did. It’s a thing that happened, obviously, but no one is ever sure who gave the order, nor does anyone defend it. These reports—which are the closest thing we have to the official truth of what happened—focus on student actions and police re-actions, to make it as clear as possible that while the students were excluded from the area on the authority of the regents, no order was ever given to remove them.

This is not only bureaucratic obfuscation, however. In such a situation, we find ourselves confronted by a power that does not justify itself by recourse to truth, does not attempt rationalize its actions. The reverse, in fact, is the case: authority constantly and compulsively disavows its power, refusing to admit or acknowledge that it has acted. It therefore has no reason to justify itself.

The perverse result is that because no actions were taken, no accountability is possible. Chancellors will acknowledge that “mistakes were made,” but by enshrouding the decision-making process in a kind of fog of war—in which everyone is acting on imperfect information in response a time-sensitive crisis—it can be possible, even praiseworthy, for actions to take place without any agency in doing so.

Instead, the governing authority is—both effectively and also quite literally—the force of crisis. The police acted, on that day, because there was a crisis; the chancellor sent the police out there, because there was a crisis; and so on. The only truth we can find is the truth of crisis.

This problem, however, is broadly symptomatic across the system as a whole. No one would deny that the University of California is in a state of crisis; as a baseline assumption about the status quo, and how to think about it, “crisis” is such an uncontroversial proposition that every discussion starts there. It’s also where the discussion effectively end. If you argue against raising tuition, “crisis” is the reason why tuition has to rise. If you argue against closing degree programs, or raising class sizes, or laying off staff, or eliminating benefits, or freezing hiring, or any other seasonal austerity measure, “crisis” is the only truth that austerity hawks need. This is why the president of the UC will say things like “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste”; as he said in an interview:

 [M]y view is that some things we probably should have done 10 years, five years, 20 years ago may get done when you have a crisis.” (sfgate, May 2008)

For an administrator with an agenda, a crisis is useful because it not only empowers executive authority to act (especially if one can call on emergency powers), but because it changes the nature of authority. It suspends process and compromise, the possibility of alternatives recede, and the only truth becomes the terms of the crisis itself: in this case, the economic framework by which you can only look at the UC and see a fiscal problem to be eliminated, or the policing framework by which a protest is a disorder to be removed.

In the misty, etymological past, “critique” and “crisis” originate in the same Greek word, describing a state in which nothing is determined but in which it soon will be, a state of immanent change where the possible and the actual bump together. A moment of crisis is a moment where many different outcomes are possible, and which therefore make it possible to think about alternative possibilities. In its most optimistic form, then, critique is an address to reality which brings it into crisis, not only expressing the possibility that things could be different, but making those latent possibilities manifest and apparent.

The modern sense of crisis, however, is rather different. To invoke “crisis” is to declare an emergency situation, yet one in which nothing actually emerges: the threat is that something might change, to which the response must be a reiteration of the status quo. Instead of a moment of immanent critique—in which alternatives become manifest and change is unavoidable—“crisis” makes criticism “untimely,” as Wendy Brown puts it, unnecessary, unwanted, and impossible. Critique is not possible until the crisis has passed.

I want to close with two observations, then, about November 8th. The first is that while the initial disobedience of erecting tents was rather small—only several hundred people, at most—the tents were eventually put up, after a very long and painful day, because Sproul plaza just kept filling with students, many, many thousands, by any measure. They also preferred not to disperse. But these weren’t activists; I suspect that most of them identified less with the occupy protest, as such, than were appalled and enraged at the suddenly revealed truth of the university, that they could be trespassers on their own campus, and subject to sudden, senseless violence. To say that disobedience was communicative is an understatement.

Even Chancellor Birgeneau was forced to change his language: his initial reaction had been to condemn the students and faculty protesters for being “not nonviolent,” an absurdism that only a bureaucratic mind could love, and which he retracted days later. But it wasn’t being satirized on the Colbert Report that forced him to change his stance, I would suggest, or the outcry expressed in editorials and letters to the editor. It was, ultimately, the social life of disobedience, made manifest when thousands of UC students, faculty, and staff preferred not to respond to the crisis, but to be it.

What is “satire” anyway? When the whole Oscars/Onion fiasco happened, my friend Jonathan vented his frustration to me about what he saw as the term and its misuse; an amateur comedian himself, he had come to decide that “satire” simply isn’t a thing, and that when people say any variation on “Well, it’s clearly satire,” they are talking nonsense. There is nothing clear about satire, he declared to me–at great and convincing length–and this fact is central to what satire is (or, rather, what it isn’t). Because what satire isn’t is: a genre. Novels, tragedies, sonnets, horror movies, musical theater, and so on are all genres which you can identify as such by pointing to a fairly limited set of formal features that identify them, features which can be more or less treated as objective (a novel is a long, fictional, prose narrative, and so forth). But basically, if it resembles a sonnet even a little, it is a sonnet. If it resembles a tragedy, it is one. And so forth.

With these kinds of genres, the glass is always half full, and we always round up: a glass half full of water is a glass of water. Take the novel: “novel-ish” is good enough. The most interesting novels are often the ones that rest in the uncanny valley between resembling a novel and being not-quite a novel, but that fact doesn’t make them not-novels, but the reverse: it makes them more interesting. Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate or Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for example, are written in verse but that’s precisely what makes them interesting evolutions or variations on the novel form. The fact that they are also poetry does not make them less novelistic.

“Satire” is not this kind of thing at all. If something is not taken to be satire, it fails as satire. If the glass is half-empty, it is an empty glass: satire is a bomb that either goes off or doesn’t. In this sense, it’s an effect, and everything depends on how the joke is received, what the author intended, what the circumstances were in which it was made, and so on.

All of which is to say this: if you tell me that Pale Fire isn’t a novel (or even if Nabakov denied that it was), I’ll nod my head, and I will then continue thinking of it as a novel. You can’t convince me that it isn’t a novel; the total set of novels in the universe includes anything that is even the slightest bit novelistic, because being one thing (novel) doesn’t make it not another thing (poetry). It can be both, and I’d venture to say that all interesting writing is more than one thing. And that multiplicity is how genres grow and change; “poetry,” today, includes a lot of things that wouldn’t have fallen under that name a century ago, just as the “novel” includes lots of forms that are were not originally understood by that name.. Not only don’t we police these boundaries, but it would be nonsensical to do so. Pale Fire can be a poem and a novel, and it enriches both forms to see it as both.

The stakes are completely different when we talk about satire, and we do police those boundaries, for good reasons. For one thing, the difference matters. Whether to shelve Pale Fire in the poetry or fiction section of the book store is pretty much the extent of the dilemma. But if a statement is recognized as satire, we treat it differently than if we decide that it is not. When a tea party politician says something “crazy,” we get enraged; when Stephen Colbert says the exact same thing, we laugh. The former is monstrous; the latter is satire. When we read a headline and assume it must be from the Onion—or when an article from The Daily Currant is taken to be real, as seems to happen constantly—we react differently than we would have if we had known what it really was. And when we find out, we adjust our reactions accordingly. Watch the difference between Sarah Palin and Tina Fey saying almost exactly the same words, and note that when Tina Fey says it, it’s funny:

If you thought Tina Fey actually was Sarah Palin, though, you wouldn’t be laughing. The person who is saying those words and the context in which they said it are the things that matter.

This fact becomes a lot more important when we don’t know who the speaker is, or why they are saying what they are saying. When a link comes across your timeline, or someone shares it on facebook, you have to take its authenticity on trust, and you do. That makes it easy to be fooled by satire (or to take something real as satire). We are, in fact, strikingly bad at telling the difference: if you search twitter for “The Daily Currant,” for example, a very large number of the tweets are either clarifications that something is actually satire, or they are people mistaking a TDC article as “real” news. Even a blogger for the Washington Post made that mistake, but it also happens on facebook constantly (and it happened to me just the other day, in fact). The existence of the theon1on is a nice demonstration of the problem this inability to distinguish between reality and satire creates. And even Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” the most classic example of satire one could come up with—I am told, again by my friend Jonathan Shelley—was far from universally understood as satire, at the time. You just can’t know for sure.

What this means, then, is that the statement “it’s clearly satire” is never true, and can never be true. If satire depends on context, audience, intention, and reception—and I put it to you that it does—then it’s impossible to say, of a tweet like the infamous Onion tweet last week, that it’s “clearly satire.” If you don’t take it as satire, it isn’t. Satire is like shooting an apple off someone’s head. If you do it right, it’s pretty cool and no harm done; if you do it wrong, telling people what you meant to do is beside the point, and no one will care. It either works or it doesn’t. And if you hurt someone while doing it, claiming that it was really satire is just special pleading, demanding that your speech-act doesn’t have to abide by the normal rules.

Comparing novels to onion tweets might seem like a stretch, but I do it because if helps clarify the principle at stake in determining how we interpret words, texts, and the entire range of speech acts: the distinction between what is “clearly” there—the words themselves—and the contextual framing around them. When we read a novel or a poem, we often include context (or we can introduce it, to everyone’s benefit, as in “Did you know that Herman Melville was actually a whaler? TRUE STORY!”) but we don’t require it. We can’t. The book stands on its own, and must, or it’s simply not very good. This has been a basic principle for literary criticism since the “new criticism” of the 1940’s, that any reading of a literary text has to be grounded in what’s actually in the text itself; if we found a diary entry from Herman Melville indicating that the whale symbolized his abiding hatred of pineapples, we would look for evidence in the text that this reading was tenable and could stand on its own. If not, we’d pretty much ignore it as a ridiculous misreading. And in such a way, we deny The Author the power to define the meaning of his own novel. We do the same thing when a reader of a text decides that such-and-such a thing in a novel means something, but can’t prove it.

Now, we can easily make this more complicated. When it comes to literary criticism, post-structural theory totally pwned the new critics sometime in the 70’s and 80’s, and the idea that there was anything “in” the text itself becomes much less tenable when you think about how indispensable framing and context and interpretation are to the making of meaning. Texts don’t have objective meaning; all meaning is subjective.

But let’s put that aside, not only because most readers—in practice—do put theory aside, but mostly because it only underscores the point I’m actually trying to make, which is that appeals to what a speech-act clearly is not only rely on some standard for empirically judging what’s there and what isn’t, but it’s impossible to actually find or define that standard, outside of ever-increasingly authoritative assertions that it is so. People have claimed that the stupid Onion tweet was clearly satire, but there is no evidence you can point to in making that claim; you end up, instead, relying on assertions of authority: the joke-teller might claim that it was satire, or a reader might try to explain to you that it was obviously satire. But what they really mean, simply, is that it was satire to them, and that, on that basis, it should be to you as well.

In an interview a few years ago, Norman Rush was talking about the ways he was influenced by African writers, and he mentioned that “No non-African could do what Achebe has done.” And I get what he was saying. But there’s also a back-handedness to this compliment that makes me nervous. Here’s the thing: Achebe was just a great writer, full stop. I’m not sure anyone could do what he did. And while it  may seem like a small point, like complaining that a genuine compliment just isn’t enough of a compliment, there’s an important point of which it’s in service, a larger issue of who gets to “know” what sorts of knowledges and why. It diminishes his achievement to pretend that white writers don’t write about the things he wrote about, because if Rush’s novels (or any post-war white novelist) had to be placed next to Achebe’s, we might have to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that the best practitioner of English literature might be an African.

I am certainly not suggesting we treat novel-writing like a foot race. But there are those who certainly do think of literature as a kind of olympic sport, and for “our” writers to share the same field with “their” writers would be as calamitous as for a black pitcher to throw to a white batter in baseball’s pre-Jackie Robinson era. He might strike him out, after all (or, more complexly, he might not). So, as a result, we get separate events for “race” or “cultural” writers, distinct and cordoned off from the more universal concerns of real writers. And, as widely read as Achebe is, it always irks me that people so rarely revere him in the way that I think he should be revered. I may seem to be making the banal request that people should revere him more, I’m not, not really; I’m saying we should revere him better, doing so for better reasons.

Things Fall Apart, for example, is a very deceptively simple book, and I suspect this apparent simplicity deceives the vast majority of his readers. Okonkwo may be a man who never let thinking get in the way of whatever he wanted to do, but his puppetmaster’s seemingly uncrafted and naïve narration is as tightly plotted and structured as the Greek dramaturgy it both tropes on and defies. It may seem to be the simple story of a man and his destiny, a simply redemptive vision of a romantic lifestyle wiped out by colonialism and a condemnation of the colonialists that did it, but part of its magnificence as a piece of writing is that it manages to be all of this without disturbing its ability to also be about the ways that culture gets politicized, the way that traditionalism manages to express (and, dare I say, sublate) deeper and less coherent political anxieties and desires, particularly different modes of gender practice. And it’s a novel which enacts these conflicting desires with a certain magnificent disdain for resolving them, or moralizing on them. So much of what Okonkwo does gets moralized upon in such spectacularly unsuccessful ways that one can (I would argue) understand Okonkwo only by deferring judgment of him, like a particle in a parable on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. The plot hinges on why Okonkwo kills his stepson, but that act is also the novel’s black box; one can offer any number of explanations for Okonkwo’s act (and the consequences which it provokes in the style of Greek tragedy), but the novel does everything in its power to illustrate the ultimate unknowability of that origination, until one is left only to reflect on the ways that Okonkwo’s unknowability gets known, the ways that fictive truths take the place of a true truth eternally deferred. Precisely because the author refuses to authoritatively know Okonkwo, the novel has a profound and complex double-life, a narrative given shape by the absence at its center.

The simple point is simply that Achebe is not anything but a peer of “great” writers. And of course Rush didn’t deny that. But there is, hidden in the nest of assumptions out of which his aside slithered, a particular claim for the proper spheres inhabited by white writers and the proper sphere inhabited by Africans: what an African knows, a white person cannot, and vice versa. To say that only an African could write what Achebe wrote is to excuse himself for not having done so, and to claim his own little piece of the rock, the white person novel.

Who would waste their breath in asserting that only a white person could really understand what it means to be white? I think of the mystifications of the title character in Esk’ia Mphaphlele’s “Mrs. Plum” as an example of how the eyes of non-white characters (and authors) show us “whiteness” in all its glory. Sometimes those who live outside your world understand you in a way you don’t understand yourself, and this is as important a part of identity as the kind of claims made by a “race” writer. It is largely a white fiction that only Africans can understand Africa, and so too is Rush’s space-clearing gesture for himself a popular kind of white privilege within “African letters”: he is happy to be shielded from competition, to be awarded a tiny, but comfortable corner in which to sit. Rush is as much a race writer in this sense as Achebe. But while Achebe was canny enough to realize that white people were quick to extend him the benefit of the doubt with regards to his subject (being African, he must surely know Africans), he was also aware that he hardly deserved that credit, and made something powerful out of that realization. What, after all, did a Christian-educated Nigerian of the mid-twentieth century really know about the inner life of a late nineteenth century Igbo warrior, a man who never lived to hear the word Nigeria? And so, instead of eliding that knowledge, he built a magnificent literary edifice on top of it. Instead of donning the victory wreath he was awarded for a game he was too good to play, he proclaimed that the center was hollow, and would not hold.

(originally posted on zunguzungu, 2008. Chinua Achebe, 1930-2013, RIP)

Ideology means many things, but one of them is the difference between who gets the maximum benefit of the doubt, and who gets the presumption of guilt. I know what I see, when I see this clip:

I see a law professor shoving a student—shouting “Get away from my space, you prick”—making more threatening movements, attempting to provoke a fight verbally, and grabbing a student’s cell phone out of her hand. I see the student who was pushed and threatened staying calm and passive, even trying to defuse the situation. I see the student whose phone was taken from her hands defending herself verbally and no more. And then the clip ends.

It is clear to me what I see in the video. It is clear to me who, in the video, is turning a political conflict into a physical one, and who it is that is aggressively trespassing into whose space. Mine is an ideological account of what happened, of course. Which is not to say that it’s wrong—yours is ideological too—but simply that any reading of this event, this brief window in time, cannot help but be shaped and contextualized by what you or I expect to see. And it also can’t help but be shaped by the context which we assume into existence, framing the event.

After all: what happened before this video began? What happened after it ended? That context could change how we view what we’ve just seen. In fact, it has to: we’ve already filled in the gaps in our knowledge with assumptions about what we don’t know. One of two things is true: either the law professor was provoked in some way that would justify or mitigate his conduct, or he wasn’t. And before we come to a decision about what we’ve seen, we’ve decided which of those two things are probably true. And how we come to that decision will most likely have everything to do with what our opinions are about Israel/Palestine, border checkpoints, and the meanings of the words Apartheid and Imperialism.

For example, the person who posted the video framed it this way:

“During our solidarity mock check-point/border check point, University of Oregon professor, James Olmsted, physically pushes two students after making very racists remarks to all of us. This was after we had asked him to calm down because he was making us feel intimidated.”

In this video, we see the same confrontation from a different angle, and we see some of what happened after the first video cuts out:

The poster of that video says more or less the same thing as the poster of the first video:

“Seconds before this video was recorded he shoves a student and continues to stir up tension until UOPD arrive on the scene.”

A commenter on the first video asserts:

“there are two sides to everything…people dont just act like this for no reason…I guarantee you the professor was reacting to something that isnt shown in this video”

An a commenter on the second also asserts that they are the aggressors:

“hahaha that girl thinks she’s being harassed. In reality, it’s a group of weirdos surrounding a law professor recording him, and pushing their ideals on him.”

After all: if this confrontation began with the students aggressively encroaching on his space—as he seems to be claiming—thereby impeding his ability to move freely, then our sympathy will naturally gravitate towards his side of the story. If he was simply going about his business, and they provoked him, then at least he isn’t the only asshole in the situation. But if the reverse is the case—if they were simply putting on a campus demonstration, peacefully—then he is obviously the one trying to provoke a confrontation. This is especially the case if, beforehand, he was making racist remarks.

Which is it? Which do you see?

Now, watch this six minute version, which is taken from the phone that he snatches from the students hand and puts in his pocket:

• In-state undergraduates at UC pay in tuition “nearly twice what it cost the University to provide their education”
• Monsanto University
• Oberlin cancellation of classes was demanded by students of color / Oberlin microagressions
• The university as a site of struggle: On occupying in a Midwest college town
• Virginia’s evangelical mega-university
• Education in the streets
• Anatomy of a failed campus: NYU in Asia
• How Washington could make college tuition free without spending a penny more on education
• Abolish the SAT
• The professor, the bikini model, and the suitcase full of trouble
• Student protesters Alfie Meadows and Zak King found not guilty!!!
• How cops became soldiers
• The racist history of the entrapment defense
• The austerity question: Work, welfare, and post-family life

nathan jurgenson

• “The commodity markets of capitalism have made being truly different as difficult as space travel, and being merely different as easy as online shopping“
• “The more labor we pour into our ‘product’—that is, ourselves—the more we value we assign to it“
• “I am trying to see Sean Penn or Nicolas Cage being frisked at an upscale deli, & I find myself laughing in the dark“
• “the technocratic character of political debate is causing the irrationality of science to overflow its bounds“
• “After about 13 minutes of explaining why she is content with people giving her things, Palmer received a standing ovation“
• “Using microchips, proud grandparents threaten to store thousands of images on portable show-and-tell miniscreens”
• “The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else“
• “with Silicon Valley at the helm, our life will become one long California highway“
• “Is a tweet labor? Is a Facebook post labor?”
• “Drone makers have been courting the paparazzi“
• “widespread bigotry and rape culture are just as big if not bigger barriers to a free and open Internet as over-zealous copyright laws and bandwidth caps“
• “there is no good pre-internet metaphor for what it’s trying to do“
• “sources confirmed that the president said “Go get ’em!” and quietly watched the drone fly off into the night sky“
• “Drones permit and accelerate new topographies of warfare“
• “The Auto-Tune or not Auto-Tune debate always seems to turn into a moralistic one, like somehow you have more integrity if you don’t use it“
• “we might someday wonder why our childhood memories are held under DRM“

T. F. Charlton:

• Spectra Speaks: Losing Access to Sisterhood: Tomboys, Masculinity, and the Unmaking of a Girl
• Eddie Izzard on Atheism, Being Transgender, and “The Invisible Bloke Upstairs”
• (by me) On the connections between Evangelical sexual abuse scandals and patriarchal theology
• “Student activists force a historic campus to shut down and nobody notices”
• Mary Robinette Kowal on revising one of her stories after realizing it was racist and colonialist
• Supporting more trans stories: reflections on our healthcare system and the media
• Hugo Chavez’s legacy lies greatly with his efforts on behalf of Afro-Venuzuelans
• Pro MMA Fighter Fallon Fox on being forced to come out as transsexual (+ video)
• New York cops will arrest you for carrying condoms
• Christine Burns on meeting computer science pioneer Lynn Conway
• Forty Years in the Hustle: Margo St. James on the connections between housewives and sex workers’ activism
• Tara Conley reorients whitewashed histories of digital feminism
• Why Linda Hirshman is wrong to declare “Victory” on queer rights

Kerim Friedman:

• The Scariest Jobs Chart Ever Isn’t Scary Enough
• Rand Paul’s constitutional philosophy: “The Constitution grants certain inalienable rights to Americans but not to foreigners.”
• “Bye-bye Radium Brand Creamery Butter. Bye-bye radioactive jockstrap.”
• The conflict over Taiwan’s Longmen facility highlights “the fears surrounding nuclear power in Asia since Japan’s March 2011 nuclear disaster in Fukushima”
• Did you miss the Day of the Dude? It’s not to late to watch “The Dude.”
• Greek To Me: Mapping Mutual Incomprehension.
• Chávez: “it quickly became apparent that the social missions were doing nothing for the arrival city in terms of its most important needs”
• The problem “was not that Chávez was authoritarian but that he wasn’t authoritarian enough.”
• Star Wars Episode VII as directed by the guy who made Amour.
• “Americans… used to sleep in an unconsolidated fashion, that is, in two or more periods throughout the day”
• “Captain Pollard, however, was not as easily forgiven, because he had eaten his cousin.”
• “we live in a culture where dull biological platitudes make headlines and irritating scientific cliches win arguments”
• “Yes, mistakes were made in the name of scientific anthropology.”
• “Spanish, Portugese, Japanese, Russian, Korean, Turkish, Arabic and Italian”
• “I’m not worried about an imminent invasion of ‘rat multiborgs’.”
• “the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat”

Jacob Remes:

• The European rewards and American dangers of free transit.
• Greg Grandin on Hugo Chavez.
• “If we pretend elite college students aren’t sexually assaulting their peers, the rape fairy will make it all disappear.”
• A Quick Blow, Then Lingering Death for Devastated Towns
• The truth about Vikings.

L. E. Long:

• On White Privilege and Museums
• Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering
• The Love of Black Mothers and the Care of Black Children
• The Bitch Manifesto
• Rules for Goddess-Femmes Who Cut (Colonizing) Bitches
• Dependency Culture: Welfare, Women and Work
• This Is Not A Love Story: Armed Struggle Against The Institutions Of Patriarchy
• “May 5, at night, we told a child the story of the maquis and the anarchist struggle against Franco and against democracy.”
• Oakland Might Sue Banks Over Rate-Rigging Conspiracy
• Against nostalgia
• Anarcha Feminist – Bolivia (video) ”Feminism and also anarchism, it’s the tendency we sympathize with.”

Frank Pasquale:

• China model: 83 billionaires in Congress; hand-cranked ventilators for the people; extreme real estate bubble.
• Russian thinking on what to do after an asset grab.
• Thoughts on the surveillance society; Google’s privacy record; Quotations from Chairman Schmidt.
• Google Guinea pigs; part II; Google as future of law enforcement and drug safety determinations.
• Mistaking free information for freedom.
• MOOCS to “enrich a select class of content aggregators;” beware infographics.
• “Many scholars [fail] to appreciate the difference between the logic of discovery and the logic of presentation.”

Kitabet:

• “we are standing until the asphalt speaks”
• Letter from a Congo Literary Festival
• Manual of Decolonization: an architectural toolkit for a post-occupation West Bank
• An interview with Amit Chaudhuri
• The Prophet of Aleppo
• “In Hackney, the riots are spoken about in strangely fond terms….”
• When Electricity Was New, People Used it to Mimic the Moon
• More Thoughts on the Dangerous Fragility of Men
• The University as a Site of Struggle: on Occupying in a Midwest College Town
• The Good, Racist People
• Amnesia in Mesopotamia (the remnants of the Iraqi National Library)

Bint Battuta:

• The Development of Arabic-Script Typography in Georgian Britain
• Religion and the Rise of Printing in the Ottoman Empire [podcast]
• Yemeni Manuscript Digitization Initiative
• Faces, Veils, Beliefs…and a Decision
• The Evil Architects Do: Crimes of Urbicide and the Built Environment [pdf]
• Pahlavi Iran & Zionism: An Intellectual Elite’s Short-Lived Love Affair with the State of Israel
• Edward Said in Bombay
• Beautiful places to read in London
• Mogadishu: Images from the Past
• Who Spoke Siculo Arabic?
• On astrolabes, astronomers and observatories
• Is there a political theory in the Hebrew Bible?
• Before Orientalism: From Paris to Patna in the 17th Century [video]
• South Asians in British and American music
• The Khazarian Hypothesis and the Nature of Yiddish
• Les chrétiens de l’Inde, la tradition de saint Thomas [podcast]
• Looking at photos
• How Istanbul-born Greeks have kept their culinary traditions alive in Athens

• What is yours / How to get it
• Dear Sheryl Sandberg: “Leaning In” Doesn’t Fix What’s Actually Broken for Working Women
• Crisis and domestic work (On self-reduction, shoplifting, and other forms of gender war) “In fact, while for the male worker, his reproduction and reintegration is always assured, the woman is the only worker for whom these moments [of reproduction and reintegration] are not assured: she must, in practice, self-reproduce as labor-power throughout her entire life, whether within the house or outside it.”
• “…clear instances of violent acts for private ends, the very embodiment of piracy.”
• “Have prisons and jails become the mass housing of our time?”
• I Didn’t Do Anything – The Fight for Alan Blueford (video)
• Against Hired Guns: A six-part series on policing and violence in Oakland “In our attempts to curb police violence solely through the legal system, we give power back to the very forces that criminalize, kill, harass, corral and incarcerate people. We willingly return power to the structure responsible for the violence in the first place, replicating the system of domination that we are trying to fight.”
• Bird’s eye view of Oakland, 1900
• The Immediate Need For Emotional Justice

Kitabet:

• The Biblical Pseudo-Archaeologists Pillaging the West Bank
• The Plague Years, in Film and Memory
• Cranking up the Volume: Music as a Tool of Torture
• The Road (and Rail) to Justice (on the transportation justice movement)
• Archive Fever: A Visit to the Denver Public Library with Wendel Cox
• The Rape of Petty Officer Blumer
• Parents Get on Board With Turkey’s LGBT Movement
• Landscapes of Dispossession
• Parícutin: “Here Is Something New and Strange”
• What Was at Stake at Brooklyn College?
• Let Us Now Praise Garbage Men
• Syria: Sectarian narratives promote troubling agendas, not justice
• Pfc. Bradley E. Manning’s Statement for the Providence Inquiry
• Anthropomics says it all, re: Napoleon Chagnon, the NAS & the NYT 

Kerim Friedman:

• “these spaces becomes imbued with the sentiment that becoming a victim is inevitable”
• But should a wrong be constantly used to cover up many rights?”
• Google fingers
• “These Cro-Chagnon scientists simply refuse to discuss the facts of the ethnographic case.”
• “just because some of your enemies distrust science doesn’t mean you’re any good at it”
• “this document marked the fall from grace of one the world’s most influential political writers”
• “As all great orators do, Yellen begins with a chart.”
• US taxpayers subsidize banks to the tune of $83 billion a year, or 3 cents on every dollar.
• “A Pokélingo, if you will.”
• “The word ‘tukhes’…cannot to be found in Weinreich’s volume”
• “So where does the idea that consensus is a “white thing” actually come from?”
• China to restrict fly numbers in its public toilets.
• “misery and immorality are produced among women when they receive less than a living wage”

Frank Pasquale:

Bint Battuta:

• Imperial Japan’s Islamic Policies and Anti-Westernism
• Scouting Palestinian Territory, 1940-1948: Haganah Village Files, Aerial Photos, and Surveys [pdf]
• On Thomas Browne’s Musaeum Clausum
• The Influence of Hebrew on Portuguese
• Chinese in Egypt [photos]
• The Archive of Indian Music
• Reflections by an Arab Jew
• The life of a Dutch East India Company chart
• Productive Aliens: Economic Planning and the Lebanese in Ghana, c.1930-1972 [pdf]
• Tribes With Flags – Is the Arab State Really Dead?
• The American Colony in Jerusalem 1870-2006
• Modern Miniaturism: An Interview with Kurosh ValaNejad
• Eli Reed’s photos of Lebanon 1983-1987
• Democracy and Emotion [podcast]

Jacob Remes:

• Why are these assholes using my decoy towel? What is wrong with them?
• No accountability at the UN.
• Historical land grabs and contemporary scams that have bilked North Dakota Native people of their oil wealth.
• Immigration actually helps the economy.
• Meet Josh Eidelson, the country’s best journalistic writer on labor.
• Why vegetarians (and horsemeat fanciers) should care about the horsemeat scandal.
• Giving ex-yakuza a helping (prosthetic) finger.
• The semiotic photography of Taryn Simon. (radio 54:36)
• Nazi-themed art presented as ironic turns out to be made by a white supremacist.
  
• Agitprop and quixotic lawsuits as useful tactics.
• Who are these “experts” who want to take away my legal pad and filing cabinet?

ReclaimUC:

• UC Berkeley uses sketchy, unproven funding model to finance $321 million stadium renovation
• UCLA medical school’s unusually close relationship with sketchy pyramid-scheme Herbalife
• “Of the 320 students enrolled . . . the 60 students taking the course online consistently underperformed compared to the in-class students.”
• California and UC will be hit hard by sequester
• Anti-sequester: A salvo
• Boots on campus: Yale interrogation study highlights the militarization of academia
• What was at stake at Brooklyn College? On the limits of academic freedom as politics
• “Revenue from beef sales, meanwhile, could help fill some of the gaps left by years of deep state budget cuts.”
• A “broken windows” theory of pedagogy [pdf]
• It’s probably not the best time to suggest that universities should be run more like the cruise industry
• Look at all the administrators
• Why we are occupying Sussex University
• Fleeing his own war on drugs, former Mexican president Felipe Calderón finds refuge at Harvard, yet journalists find barely a trace of him there [español]
• Montreal students return to the streets to protest new round of tuition hikes (intense video from the front lines)
• Against hired guns: A six-part series on policing in Oakland
• State of the industry: Politically deployed cinema at the Oscars (part 1) and And the winner is . . . the state! (part 2)

• “Thanks to Berkeley…”: Managing multiculturalism in an age of austerity
• “Hidden behind a false wall and a fast-food restaurant, large black and brown images depict the faces of seven UCLA alumni, symbolizing the struggle of social activism and black history.”
• Fitch gives UC bonds AA+ rating, and the university still takes its marching orders from the bond raters
• Florida Atlantic University joins the prison-industrial complex
• As growth shifts into overdrive, NYU faces a rebellion from within
• Historicizing the Yale torture center and the administrative response
• Immigration activists to Yale: “We’re not lab rats”
• Michelle Rhee donates significantly—to the tune of $250k—to L.A. school board races
• The student body, for sale
• The PhD bust in 7 charts
• Antebellism: The neoliberal compromise of the political
• Disaster capitalism in the Chicago public schools
• Michelle Alexander on the school-to-prison pipeline
• “At the end of December, about 400 students occupied the Russian State University of Trade and Economics in Moscow for over a week to protest controversial education reforms that would absorb their institution into another university.”
• Just war theory is just intellectuals justifying war
• Christopher Dorner and the LAPD: America’s native sons
• Organizing as if social relations matter

T.F. Charlton:

• After the Feminine Mystique: “Talking only about The Feminine Mystique severely limits our understanding of feminist philosophy, its potential to transform how the market is structured, how labor is valued, and what forms of justice can really be achieved.”
• Roopika Risam on Emory President James Wagner and who is afforded the luxury of “misspeaking.”
• Adoption, identity, and family secrets
• Kye Allums on being a transgender athlete
• Queer feminist pornographers on what it means for porn to be ethical and feminist.
• The White Savior Industrial Complex in American evangelical anti-trafficking movements
• “[Secular] Women seem to want groups that do more than criticize religion.”

Magdalene Laundries:

• Enda Kenny apologized to Magdalene victims, but something is missing (full text of Kenny’s apology).
• Samantha Long remembers her mother, who lived in Magdalene Laundries from childhood until her death at 51.
• Magdalene Survivors on Taoiseach apology (video).

Reeva Steenkamp’s murder:

• Oscar Pistorius: Salvaging the Super Crip Narrative
• The curious case of Reeva Steenkamp’s boyfriend
• Oscar Pistorius and the media

Kitabet:

• Microscopic World: “The implications were theological as much as they were scientific.”
• “Anyone who has traveled in rural Turkey as a foreigner has undoubtedly had the experience of being taken for a spy.”
• “While she was missing we sensed her palpability, physical and digital. When she died it was quickly forgotten, in favor of arguments about Turkey, about the Turks, about women, about violence.”
• The Pink Series: the street art of Ankara’s Avareler (Vagabonds) collective.
• The Gentlemen of Gentrification: Engin Gerçek’s photographs of Turkish living rooms
• A City Built on Dredge
• Protecting White Kids From History
• Anthropology, Inc.
• “Sometimes, as a graduate student, I felt like a kind of ghost.”  

Kerim Friedman:

• “This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars”
• “Feeding the duckrabbits is forbidden by local ordinance.”
• On a “receiving line.”
• “To invoke a narrative of gaffe by way of “clumsiness” is to claim ultimate deniability and to abdicate responsibility for one’s words.”
• “only 30 percent of the fathers who wanted to share child care equally with their wives actually did so”
• “The journey from volksgeist to race captured a significant shift in perceptions of human beings.”
• Problem with “the social construction of race is how it was never joined to a concrete political program.”
• “Farmers in parts of India are breaking growing records, using less seed, less water, and compost as fertiliser.”
• “pork-blobs are being danced through the street, filled with metal, and are about to be killed for the New Year.”
• “Hello everyone, I am Marx. I just started on Weibo.”
• “Funding eo ipso does not, in fact, act like NetHack’s Speed Boots once awarded.”

Frank Pasquale:

• Livin’ la vida think tank: models and bottles.
• 200,000 without homes post-drones; perma-war on horizon.
• Government makes $34 billion profit on student loans.
• 500,000 correctional officers in US.
• 8.6 million US households have net worth over $1 million.
• Lie-bor, now and forever.

Bint Battuta:

• Is Europe Western?
• Reflections of a Qur’an Translator [video]
• The British in early 20th-century Basra, and “inarticulate cosmopolitanism”
• On hunting for Armenian gold in southeastern Turkey, and the politics of historical memory
• Karachi’s Malayali community
• The Balustrades of Beirut
• Footage of Sharjah in 1958 [video]
• Ethnic Identity and Cultural Appropriation in Early Ottoman Architecture
• Edward Said’s Untidiness
• From Syndication to Society: Abdullah Tuqay and Central Asian Literature
• On the loss of public space in Beirut [video]
• Egypt’s Music of Protest: From Sayyid Darwish to DJ Haha
• Ghassan Kanafani on the 1936-1939 revolt in Palestine
• The Afghan Photography Network
• Mapping intellectuals in Ottoman Anatolia
• The women of India’s Baghdadi Jewish communities

Jacob Remes:

• Security for journalists begins with solidarity among them.
• Using a European trade deal to improve US labor laws.
• scott crow on politics outside the government.
• The practicalities of picking a pope.
• Epcot Warsaw (radio 20:35)
• Hungary returns to the 1930s.
• Japan’s most right-wing prime minister in years comes to Washington.
• Moving to Tohoku to build a model society.
• Immigration status and disaster relief.
• Immigration, heterosexuality, and class.
• On being different at Yale.
• The prehistory of Yale’s new interrogation training center.  (See also here.)
• “If you have the university and it’s just the administration and the trustees, nobody’s going to come to school here, right?”
• “This is what we should expect when a university president is essentially a CEO.”

L.E. Long:

• Bhanu Kapil enters urbandictionary
• “It must be hard to deny charges of arson when the name of your settlement is literally ‘holy fire.’”
• “Organizing, good organizing, is to my mind the slow, steady, one-on-one building of relations and interconnections that are at odds with how people are treated under capitalism. “
• Riots! the video game
• Trouble in Mind: Crime, Punishment, and Mental Illness
• What is filth?

Topical:

• Oscar is a job creator.
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – The Romance of Precarity I
• Beasts of the Southern Wild – The Romance of Precarity II
• Me Tarzan, You Jane. Me Django, You Chains
• Lincoln against the radicals

nathan jurgenson

• “Catfish is Jerry Springer for the social media age“
• “Let’s face it: panic about ‘people’ not pairing off is really panic about women not pairing off“
• “the idea that technology comes from us, people, is something we are reluctant to accept“
• “Stop Calling It ‘Digital Humanities’“
• “temporary photography is doing something very interesting with time“
• “I don’t oppose the MOOC any more than I oppose online classes, or three-hundred-person-lectures, or Wikipedia“
• “the way that the Harlem Shake meme seems perfectly designed for the workplace“
• “Everybody in the industry wants to see Spotify succeed“
• “Who hates free speech? The powerful and the powerless“
• “With almost 20 different speakers over two hours, not a single woman took the stage“
• “Cup holders aren’t just for our constant hydration, they’re the source of our psychological well-being on the road“
• “Google is doing other things to recruit the fashion-savvy, particularly women“
• “There is no difference between the “real” and the “virtual” : a brief phenomenology of digital revolution”
• “Writing, like drones and smartphones, is a technology“
• “linguistic innovations that start with young women spread rapidly throughout the population“
• “we can disturb the archive & begin to draw new connections between the personal & the technical“
• “Even if an accusation is unfounded, being branded as a troll can be damaging to an online reputation”
• “social engineering disguised as product engineering“
• “the Internet once felt like a secret. And, like most secrets, it was mostly about sex“
• “the “urban renaissance” isn’t benefiting everyone“
• “No art show, even at a state-supported museum, is complete without the merch table“
• “the supposed line between the natural and the social is of crucial importance for theories of justice“
• “The 85th Academy Awards will elevate films that are openly ideological, weaponized tools of the state“
• “Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male“
• “a new method of measuring mouthfeel: the wonderfully named “acoustic tribology”“
• “We are able to reject qualified, diverse candidates on the grounds that they “aren’t a culture fit”“

Millicentsomer:

• Gollum, Dreaming
• Pride, Prejudice
• Orwell, Orwellier 
• Anne Carson, Glass
• Misericords
• Trolls and Rose
• Spanish Handwriting Lessons
• Ten Little Suffergets
• Comedy Library
• Saunders, Catholic
• Love? Dead.

And a very special guest, Gerry Canavan, brings us the week in MOOCs:

• Obama wants to decouple Pell grants from traditional accreditation, opening the door for full-throated neoliberal profiteering. Commentary at MetaFilter.
• MOOCs are not primarily or even secondarily about bringing open, no-cost education to the masses. Instead, these efforts created by private elite institutions and for-profit businesses squarely aim to outsource traditional governmental functions in education, and divert taxpayer dollars from the building of public assets and institutions to create long-term revenue streams and profit for corporations.
• MOOCs, Progress, and Player Piano: David Noble’s “Digital Diploma Mills” (1998), via iterating toward openness.
• MOOC as right-wing plot.
• The Trouble with Online College.
• February 14, 2013: McGill reels as budget cuts begin. February 21, 2013: McGill gets on MOOC bandwagon.
• “So far, most MOOCs have had dropout rates exceeding 90 percent.”
• FrankenMOOCs and zombie profs.
• Research Questions about MOOCs.
• The more I think about the xMOOCs in terms of power relations, the more I note that they preserve and consolidate those of traditional academia. They take the sedimented prestige and name-brands of elite institutions and open up new markets for them, even while undermining many of the structures that those institutions have operated on for generations. The xMOOCs convert the capital carried by academic reputation into new value, at a new scale, in new forms.
• Beyond the Buzz, Where Are MOOCs Really Going?
• Professor Leaves a MOOC in Mid-Course in Dispute Over Teaching. Twitter user @cjprender has a slightly different take.
• MOOCs: What if the cure is worse than the disease?
• And my own thing I wrote.

Of course, it is a very stupid thing for James Wagner to write, full stop, and not simply because of the deep and profound level of historical ignorance it demonstrates. After all, the reference doesn’t even work on its own terms: the 3/5ths compromise, like the compromise of 1850, utterly failed at solving the conflict over slavery, whose bloody resolution it only delayed, intensified, and made all the more inevitable. If the purpose of such compromise was to preserve the union by tabling the question of slavery, after all, the civil war which broke out over the question of slavery demonstrates how profoundly “compromise” failed on those terms. There was no permanent compromise between slavery and anti-slavery; there was only resolution through conflict, and to think otherwise was always delusional.

It’s also a bizarrely inflammatory choice on his part, a truly catastrophic message failure. Why would he make the rather banal point that people should just suck it up and compromise by referencing one of the most deeply shameful episodes in our political history? It would be almost exactly like urging that we should use negotiation and dialog to prevent war and international conflict, just like Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler did in Munich. It’s hard to think of a way to more completely sabotage your argument than to point at the American consensus on the acceptability of racial slavery as your example of constructive compromise.

Ignorance is the most obvious explanation, and we cannot solve a problem like Wagner without presuming a great deal of it. You have to be pretty stupid to write that article, one way or another: either he was too ignorant of the history to understand what he was saying or he was too ignorant of his constituency to understand how what he was saying would be received. The purpose of a “From the President” message in an alumni magazine is to be pleasantly forgotten. Waxing rhapsodically about the good old days when white men made political bargains over the bodies of disenfranchised black slaves is just not a good decision on his part, especially as president of a university whose historical legacy is as specifically implicated with slavery as Emory’s is. The college was literally built by slaves, and its scholarship helped bolster the peculiar institution’s intellectual legitimacy.

But why would we expect him not to be obtuse, out of touch, and stupid? I am not being cynical, here, or playing more-disillusioned-than-thou; I was so upset yesterday, when I read the piece, that my rage-tweet had three typos in it. I expected the president of Emory University to be something other than offensively stupid, and I guess I still do: no one who can write that essay should be the president of a university. But what I’m really saying, when I say that, is that I expect a university to be a place where authority is derived from knowledge and engagement, where intellectual rigor is part of the air one breathes, the atmosphere of the place, in the water. And maybe that expectation shows that I’m the one who’s out of touch.

The job of a university president, today, is not to be an intellectual leader but to be a manager and a fundraiser, the CEO of a corporation which just happens to be a university. And because the job is to ensure the continuity of the institution, no matter what, it makes a certain kind of sense that the 3/5ths compromise would appeal to him as an idea. Politics trumps principle. Especially in the era of fiscal crisis—which has been going on in higher education for decades now—the purpose of a university president is to manage that crisis, both to ensure the survival of the university and to use that crisis to make whatever structural changes he can to ensure its future survival. A crisis is therefore a terrible thing to waste, as (blessedly outgoing) UC president Mark Yudof likes to say (here for example, and here). And a “good” university manager is someone who knows how to use the crisis of the moment to restructure the university so that its indefinite continuity is more likely.

What is it that survives, though? When you value continuity above all, you glide silently over the fact that “the university” is radically transformed when its primary function is simply to exist. When the president of a university is fighting to get rid of programs that don’t pay for themselves, because they don’t pay for themselves, it doesn’t really matter what they are; the substance of the university’s intellectual work is not what matters, just its bottom line. The result is that managers and academics are in inevitable conflict. Universities are divided between administrators—whose concern for institutional health is expressed in fiscal projections and budgets—and academics who would look at a President spouting historical ignorance in an alumni magazine as a bleeding sore on the academic body.

There is, however, no better example of the mentality that prioritizes institutional continuity over intellectual principles than the 3/5ths compromise. The apparent arbitrary nature of the number is what makes it stick in our minds as a historical scandal, in some ways more than it should; after all, at a time when the vast majority of American adults could not vote—when the franchise rested almost exclusively with white male property-owners—the scandal was not that slaves “only” counted as 3/5ths of a person, it was that they were slaves in the first place. But what the number’s arbitrariness demonstrates is how both sides were simply compromising in order to compromise, prioritizing the continuance of the Union over everything else. “3/5ths” didn’t mean anything, and no one pretended it did. The only important thing was that the power elite came to a consensus, and 3/5ths was where the horse-trading stopped. If that consensus required that millions of dark skinned people be enslaved and brutalized, well, that was a small price to pay for the glorious union. Continuity is what matters, after all.

James Wagner’s casual and apathetic ignorance about slavery is one thing, and his assault on the liberal arts is another. I want to be clear about that: I am not equating them with each other, even if there is a certain overlap (as Tressie McMillan Cottom argues). But the kind of thinking that allows a person to value “compromise,” as such, is the kind of mind that doesn’t care very much about what is being compromised. The kind of mind that can cut a university’s education studies division, physical education department, visual arts department, and journalism program—sacrificing core functions of the university in order to save money so the university can “continue”—is also the kind of mind that could see slavery as the unfortunate broken eggs that were needed to make the national omelette. There is nothing surprising about this, in other words. This is what we should expect when a university president is essentially a CEO. And the easiest response is simply to shrug our shoulders. Can we expect better? Should we be surprised?

It’s a small point, but I think it’s actually important to be upset about stupid stuff like Wagner’s dumb alumni letter. The man should lose his job for this, and in a world where a university actually was all the things it’s supposed to be, he would lose his job: in a world where a university president was something other than a CEO, that message from the president would have been his resignation letter. We don’t live in that world. But acting like we do is a way of demanding it. In other words, I want to distinguish understanding why he is the kind of mind he is—why his mentality would make that kind of stupidity plausible, if not inevitable—from an acceptance of that reality. To be so cynical that we would shrug our shoulders at people like Wagner and Yudof is to resign ourselves to their sense of what is “realistic,” and to give up. To stop caring what he says is to let him say anything. And to be enraged, however impotently, is to refuse to be realistic.

• “Facebook has certainly taken notice of the desire for impermanence”
• “It’s interesting that we now create things specifically to forget”
• “networks can be far more tyrannical, opaque, and anti-democratic than hierarchies”
• “Snapchat subverts the affordances of networked publics…the technology now—not the recipient—is the trusted object”
• “using the magic word “MOOC,” the privatization disappears in a puff of euphemism. We are instead “expanding access””
• “Just as CafePress can sell you a customized T-Shirt, why shouldn’t OKCupid aspire to sell you a customized partner?”
• “use online connectivity not to try to define ourselves perfectly but to undo ourselves over and over”
• “social media seem to intersect interpersonal sociality and corporate monetization”
• “they all took snapshots and movies of each other out of fear of experiencing the meaninglessness of their existence”
• “And that song was just the apology for being misogynist throughout my life“
• “Using videos of heavy metal concerts, write the authors, allows them to study crowd behavior“
• “the continued cause for concern is a slightly embarrassing absence of blood“
• google street scene

Kitabet:

• A Reader’s War: “I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere.”
• Captured on Film: “It’s true that Syrian films tend to be critical of the regime, but the nature of the protest is often indirect, like the projection system of the Damascus Cinema Club.”
• “There are dozens of aerial photo calibration targets across the USA, curious land-based two-dimensional optical artifacts used for the development of aerial photography and aircraft.”
• “in 1963, USGS and NASA scientists transformed the northern Arizona landscape into a re-creation of the Moon.”
• Corpus: Mining The Border (war & mining at Sierra Leone’s borders, for Cultural Anthropology’s new photo essay section)
• Arizona: naming the dead from the desert
• excavating a galaxy far, far away (an archaeology of Star Wars)
• “Suddenly, wide swaths of women had access to two dangerous things—the mail and the post office.”
• “Every night for a month, he and fifteen colleagues met to pack texts into small metal boxes, the size of a treasure chest, that they bought at the local market. When Timbuktu ran out of boxes, Haidara ordered more from Mopti, two days away by boat on the Niger River.”
• “drones are being treated as the Maxim gun of 21st Century hegemony”
• an architectural defense against drone warfare
• “During the Civil War, volcanoes were widely invoked as harbingers of societal upheavals.”
• Lolcats of the Middle Ages: “The relationship between mice and cats, and the prospect of an organized mouse insurrection against the oppressor, was actively explored as a metaphor for human society.”
• A Map of the Empire of Language as a Place of Struggle
• Third Eye: photographs of the filmmaker Satyajit Ray and his movies

Kerim Friedman:

• Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All
• Ronald Dworkin (1931–2013)
• Anthropomics: Diamonds and clubs
• ON THE ENLIGHTENMENT’S ‘RACE PROBLEM’
• Yes, Virginia, the Rich Continue to Get Richer: the Top 1% Got 121% of Income Gains Since 2009
• Is compulsory coupledom really the best way to live?
• No, Marco Rubio, government did not cause the housing crisis
• Royal Bodies
• Why do dogs bark? (And what are they saying when they do?)

Frank Pasquale:

• Targeted killing, and questions for Brennan.
• OCC as bank lobbyist; swap regulation as enormous joke.
• “Financial crises … growing in scale and global impact.”
• The lazy slob as “screen upon which much of the resentment against the adverse effects of the civilization of productivity
• and private affluence is projected.”
• Liquid modernity & flexible hospitals.
• Watson as doctor’s big helper.
• Sugar baron avoids paying “millions of pounds of tax in an African state blighted by malnutrition.”
• 1 powerful media exec for every 850,000 subscribers; whom are they close to?
• Dark money at Donors Trust.
• Google’s algorithm is not a thing–perhaps not even a digital thing.
• Top 1 percent of households by income captured 121 percent of all income gains between 2009 and 2011.

Bint Battuta:

• Not Talking About Pakistan
• Shahnameh-themed wartime propaganda postcards
• Afro-Emarati: a Unique Historical Experience [pdf]
• Cairo’s ballet academy
• When Italy bombed Bahrain
• A History of Espresso in Italy and the World
• Warspace: Geographies of conflict in Beirut
• Imperfect Strollers: Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, W.G. Sebald, and the Alienated Cosmopolitan
• “Time-Sense”: Railways and Temporality in Colonial India
• An Ottoman map of North America
• “He loves drinking old wine from the jug”: Some Remarks on Alcoholic Beverages in Syriac Literature Based on Secular and Religious Texts
• South Asian stories from Californian streets
• Our own Orientalism: Why Medievalists are Complicit when Manuscripts Burn and Ruins Crumble 
• Tea in Morocco: Nationalism, Tradition and the Consumption of Hot Beverages [podcast]
• From Dazzle to the Desert: A Cultural-Historical Geography of Camouflage [pdf]
• Mocking “Foreign Accents” and the Privilege of “Sounding White”
• On “Bandari” music and the marginalization of southern Iranian culture

Jacob Remes:

• New Jersey’s dangerously broken police complaint system (radio 8:37)
• How an archival source can help us understand a treaty. (radio 54:00)
• Who works at minimum wage?
• Obama, union stooge, once, twice, thrice.
• Jack Layton’s strategy of building a broad NDP coalition and the next election.
• “The raw energy behind this is young native people who are educated.”
• Can we even call it “carnival” when the government forbids political mockery?

L.E. Long:

• Indigenous sovereigntists speak
• When the Lights Shut Off: Kendrick Lamar and the Decline of the Black Blues Narrative
• Rappers against the segregation of Romani children in the Czech schools
• PBS has a “futuristic” show about importing the poors back into San Francisco
• How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity
• On the eve of our repression: communiqué on the squatting struggle in Oakland
• Tegan Eanelli on the legacy of Bash Back (video)
• “So now my dear friends, it’s your turn to decide where you belong, and what you are made of.”
• Critical analysis of rape in anarchist studies
• Carnal Knowledge: an interview with Melissa Febos
• Our reformers have suddenly made a great discovery – the white slave traffic. Emma Goldman on trafficking (1910)
• Hidden Costs: The narrative of class and race in Chris Kraus’s Summer of Hate
• Don’t call yourself a revolutionary
• State of the Union: Flammable
• “Had Christopher Dorner been a different kind of camera-ready body, he might have been invited to tell his story by Jon Stewart…”
• Exterminating Angels
• Because being anti-racist ain’t got nothing to do with the color of your skin.
• “President Barack Obama can order, without trial, the death of a citizen residing in another country who threatens us, but we can’t follow through with the same sentence in this country after a trial for one who has actually killed a U.S. citizen?”
• Teaching and transitioning
• The phenomenology of solitary confinement
• Pad Thai

Millicentsomer:

• Hilary Mantel on royal bodies and the spectacle thereof
• Speaking of spectacles, why doesn’t it occur to women to want to be directors?
• Star Wars and women
• Audi commercials and how to educate a rapist
• The ‘Bitch’ Was Onto Something: A Re-Reading of “The Feminine Mystique”
• Bing Bleu’s stuff
• Subashini Navaratnam on Les Mis, Red Lights, and white Oscars culture bait
• A tribute to last week’s episode of Girls

ReclaimUC:

• Management’s backup plans (update on the state of the anti-privatization struggle at the UC)
• Some real UC budget facts: “tuition increases have actually outpaced state reductions”
• Janus-faced Leviathan: California’s prisons and the universities as two faces of state power [pdf]
• Tree sitting
• What is the business model for online education?
• The pre-history of MOOCs: college courses by radio
• Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about Michelle Rhee
• The other side of paradise: Glimpsing slavery in the university’s utopian landscapes
• Exterminating angels
• The State of the Union amidst the ashes of extrajudicial death
• Prison sentences given to black men are 20% longer than those given to white men for the same crimes