English Majors

I am an English major, so I should take the debate about the relevance of this particular major seriously.

In an age of technological hegemony, the relevance of much that doesn't have a direct bearing on technology, or isn't deemed useful/productive in crudely quantitative terms, is questioned.

The relevance of the English Department is under scrutiny, and ex-English majors occupying plum posts within the universities, The NY Times, the New Yorker, The Atlantic and other institutions of elite occupancies are coming out of the woodwork, as it were, to chime in in defense of the English major, or more broadly, the Humanities.

Adam Gopnik of the New Yorker won't be left behind. The illustrious writer who weighs in on every issue ranging from books to poverty and the state of the American prison, makes a point that an English major's preoccupation is books. The English professor teaches students how to read books in a structured and authoritative ways. Gopnik implies that as long as texts, written, visual or oral, are important in our culture, so will be the English major, or the Bachelor's degree in English. Since we can't do without books, we should never dispense with the relevance of the English major.

But is the study of English in institutions of higher education, a mere study of books?

I think that's just one aspect of the immensely rangy spectrum of what is "English" studies in the 21st century American University. The old world English departments used to teach folks how to "read" and have meaningful discussions about books. But would the Gopniks and the Verlyn Klinkenborgs please look at the complex changes and morphings the newer, more zeitgeist-friendly English departments have undergone? English is no longer English in the sense that the discipline focuses on cultivating taste and a sense of critical aesthetics.

English is more interdisciplinary than it ever has been. So a study of Dickens, is not just a study of Dickens, but a study of Dickens in the context of urban poverty and public policy. Dickens can be taught in conjunction with govermentalism, as much as poetry can be taught in intersection with physics.

Those who are defending the relevance of the English departments are not doing a good job of it, as I feel they are themselves out of touch with the transformations that the discipline itself has undergone.

Indeed, one of the major transformations is manifested in the emergence of the field of the Digital Humanities. It could be argued that the hegemony of technology has coerced this transformation into being, but then English being a minority discipline since the 80s, has to adapt and adjust to the demands of the majority disciplines which are business and technology.

There is so much that the debate on the relevance of the English major is neglecting to rope in.

O networks with Harvard and the result is below average rating

Or so I thought.

Oprah Winfrey's commencement speech at Harvard University's convocation for the class of 2013 disappointed me. 

She had a chance to be irreverent and unconventional as is her way to approach authors on her book club show.

Throughout her speech, Oprah displayed an obsequiousness toward Harvard that made me squirm. It seemed like she was gratified at being asked to serve as a commencement speech-maker at Harvard, and described the invitation as a morale booster after a year of being in the rating doldrums with OWN (Oprah Winfrey Network).

I thought a turning point in her speech was when she said "Why me? Why choose somebody who hadn't succeeded to address those who are guaranteed to succeed (a.k.a. Harvardies)?" I don't see how she could label herself as "unsuccessful" on the basis of just one flop venture, in an otherwise successful career that made her into a media mogul with billions of dollars in net worth. 

Anyhow, so the turning point in her speech turned out to be a damp squib; instead of expressing silly gratitude to President Drew Faust, Oprah could have gone on to re define what "success" is. Success shouldn't mean getting, as Oprah indicated, a Harvard U "calling card" with which you could make infinite calls into the gateways of the biggest and the best in the world.

What Oprah--naively so--assumes, as I gather from her speech, is that once you study at Harvard, you get to know "everything." Thus her humility in saying "What can tell those who already know it all," sounds affected. This attribution of omniscience to the Harvard tribe ran like a refrain in Oprah's speech.

I feel like the opposite is true: Harvardies and other fellow Ivy Leaguers, at least those from the 90s onwards, know as much or as little of the real world. I recall, NYT columnist (himself a Harvard alumni) Frank Bruni writing that those who typically enter the Ivy League consortium are born into privilege and continue to live through the narrow corridors of privilege till they enter their graves. They ought to, Bruni said, yank themselves out of their comfort zones if becoming more "real" was their goal in life. This means that an Ivy Leaguer essentially learns nothing new, but more and more of the same that have been conferred on them since their birth. Their life experiences remain pretty homogenous till they fall into heterogeneity. 

Oprah should've told the class of 2013 at Harvard that they know nothing and their life of learning commences after the commencement. But who am I kidding? Oprah Winfrey is no Socrates.

Harvard's decision to bring in Ms. Winfrey is a good one as far as it gives Harvard a more popular, lightened-up image, and Ms. Winfrey did deliver some motivating (I wouldn't say inspiring) moments. She even modernized the phrase "moral compass" into "internal GPS" in keeping with our technological zeitgeist.

But, if you ask me, they should have asked Oprah to share the podium with Khadijah Williams, the astonishing graduate in Harvard's class of 2013, the black Los Angelina who hopped from shelter to shelter, school to school, public lavatory to public lavatory, trash can to trash can, along with her mother, and by sheer dint of persistence and merit got into Harvard through a Pre-College for gifted but indigent students program.

Now, she would have had a story to tell. Oprah mentioned Williams in passing, but only as an evidence of her own theory of how hard work pays off. Ms. Winfrey's own story was the piece de resistance of her performance at the commencement. Her story, however, is passe and the "the poor girl from rural Mississippi" doesn't quite touch the hearts of millennials, is my belief.

America has changed drastically from its post-segregation days, since the time she "made it" through hard work. In today's America the poor have not only become poorer and the elite ossified in their inability to relate to anything outside of their own sub culture, but institutions like Harvard are becoming the gatekeepers of privilege and prosperity.

I disliked Oprah's statement that whenever, as the CEO of her own network, she sees a resume with the Harvard credential in it, she thinks, "ah, since she is from Harvard, she must be good." It smacked of servility.

Oprah makes for a poor 21st century O (Othello) in this particular case.

Why we teach?

Why we teach?

For those of us who are in the business of teaching, at whatever levels, it's a question worth pondering.

Gary Gutting, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and a frequent contributor to the Times' The Stone, a forum for contemporary philosophers to discuss issues pertaining to philosophy, writes that for him "teaching is not about the amount of knowledge one passes on, but the enduring excitement one generates."

Gutting is primarily interested in enabling "close encounters" between students and "some great writing."

"What’s the value of such encounters?" He asks, and the answer is that 

They make students vividly aware of new possibilities for intellectual and aesthetic fulfillment—pleasure, to give its proper name. They may not enjoy every book we read, but they enjoy some of them and learn that—and how—this sort of thing (Greek philosophy, modernist literature) can be enjoyable. They may never again exploit the possibility, but it remains part of their lives, something that may start to bud again when they see a review of a new translation of Homer or a biography of T. S. Eliot, or when “Tartuffe” or “The Seagull” in playing at a local theater.

Hurray for hora

What's the connection between a monologue on time and death from a contemporary science-fiction movie, The Blade Runner, and an exhortation to Achilles in Homer's epic, Iliad?

It's "hora."

The connection is brilliantly and seamlessly made by Gregory Nagy, Professor of Classical Greek Literature at Harvard University.

Nagy has been teaching a popular class titled "Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization" at Harvard since 1978, and now the course, renamed simply, "The Ancient Greek Hero," is available online, as one of Harvard's first massive open online courses (or, moocs).

The decision to teach the heroic ideals of Achilles through a Blade Runner-like modern story was made when Nagy's course went online.

The rain-drenched death soliloquy of Roy Batty is as disparate as it gets from anything redolent of Achilles.

The soliloquy goes thus:

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe, [...] attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

Here is Nagy's interpretation:

The tears in rain are a way of comparing the microcosm of the self and the macrocosm of the rain that is enveloping the whole scene, [...] ‘Time to die’—and, for me, a good point of comparison is the word hôrâ, which means the right time, the right place, the seasonal time, the beautiful time. Where everything comes together.

The Professor then links with Homer's Iliad: 

The scene from the Iliad in which Achilles is told of his forked destiny: “You have two choices, Achilles. Either you stay at Troy and fight, and then die young, and then get a glory that is imperishable. Or you go home. And then you don’t die young. You live to a ripe old age, presumably, and you could even be happy. But you’re not going to get the glory. And this glory—I use the word ‘glory’ to translate kleos—is not just glory. It’s the glory that comes from being featured in the medium of Homeric poetry.

Online and offline

A MOOC Classroom

Two studies in contrast between higher education offered online versus that taught in traditional offline classes: MOOC's or Massive Online Open Courses, taught by professors who are leaders in their field (a.k.a those who teach mostly in Ivy League colleges and universities), and the regular classes taught by the brigade of the less-hallowed professors inside brick and mortar classrooms, where real-time and real-space contact between learners and teachers is an intrinsic part of the experience of learning.

A.J. Jacobs, editor at large at Esquire Magazine, shares his experience with MOOC learning, while novelist Philip Roth remembers his Homeroom teacher as a superb mentor who not only taught content, but also shared with his students an inspiring presence.

Both Jacobs and Roth concur, implicitly, that the process of learning is dynamic and will stall if there is no real dialogue or intellectual interaction between students and professors. The MOOC's, says Jacobs, give students from "South Dakota to Senegal" access to Ivy League wisdom, but the Ivy League wisdom is dispensed pretty impersonally. Professors are as inaccessible as the Pope or Thomas Pynchon.

Roth's Homeroom teacher, on the other hand, was highly accessible, much like the figure of Socrates and Roth says that one of the things that stood out about this extraordinary teacher of his was the fact that his talk was always permeated by the "tang of the real."

MOOC professors deliver content remotely, whereas offline professors, at least a few of them, might just end up shaping the learners' outlook on life at large, in ways big and small.

Berate my professors

The Wall Street Journal writes of Notinmycountry.org, a website dedicated to the exposure and shaming of corrupt university professors and administrators.

Innovative!