Charlotte Allen wants to know why college textbooks cost so much.  As a young instructor, this was always the first complaint of my students.  They were paying as much as $100 for a mediocre book about drama (I know many of your college textbooks cost much more), and it wasn’t a book I’d even want them keeping.  I could have had them spend $100 and bought five, six, seven books of plays and other things that they could read and re-read for years, rather than the $100 beast that would become tattered and worn in only a few months and would be sold back for a great loss or just thrown away.  Here’s the story Allen tells:

You’ve just started your freshman year in college, so one of your first stops is the campus bookstore to pick up your textbooks. You signed up for Econ 101, where your professor has assigned one of the top-selling basic textbooks in the field: Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw’s 936-page Principles of Economics (South-Western/Thomson), now in its fourth edition. The price: $175.95, or if you want to throw in a study guide to help you ace the course, $209.90.

Wow, that’s steep for just one book - but you’ve only just started. Next class: the first semester of your college’s world history survey course, spanning the period from 1 million B.C. to 1500 A.D. In that class the prof is having you read the first volume of Traditions & Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past (McGraw-Hill), the ever-so-politically correct overview by Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler that devotes only 28 of its 600 pages to ancient Greece. The sticker price for Traditions and Encounters, now in its second edition: $89.69. Next, chemistry class, where the assigned textbook is Karen C. Timberlake’s Chemistry: An Introduction to General, Organic, and Biological Chemistry (Prentice-Hall), now in its ninth edition. The price here is $148.80 for 736 pages plus a CD-ROM, and another $64.90 if you want a study guide. The bargain on your textbook list, if you can call it that, is Lynn Bloom’s The Essay Connection (Houghton-Mifflin), the required anthology for your freshman English class, and “only” $61.16 for 656 pages. The Essay Connection is in its eighth edition, an improvement over the seventh edition, its blurb promises, because the book now includes essays by David Sedaris (can’t you read him at home in your parents’ New Yorker?), a photo collection on the horrors of war (guess what non-English-related political point that’s trying to make), and cartoons and other illustrations for students who learn better by looking at pictures.

That’s nearly $500 for just four books.  From 1986 to 2004, college textbook costs rose 186 percent.  That’s a little odd.  Which is why the U.S. House of Representatives is trying to fix the problem.  Or, someone smart in the textbook industry could do better than the government by figuring out a way to sell textbooks more cheaply, earning the business of students nationwide and forcing the rest of the undustry to adjust.

HT: Phi Beta Cons

The Nation, scion of the Left, has joined the chorus in its disappointment with the humanities in general and English departments in particular.  Probably the single greatest humanistic failure of higher education in the modern era can be summed up in a paraphrase from the essay: classicists were deposed by humanists, humanists deposed by historians, historians deposed by critics and now critics deposed by theorists.  With each new deposition, “the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, ‘literature itself’ versus historical context.”  In other words, getting further from reality and experience and moving toward the Land of Theory and Esoterica.

There’s good news and bad news here.  The good news is that English departments have to justify their existences in universities.  They do this by teaching rhetoric and composition (not classical rhetoric, but a thin and reedy heir to it) to every undergraduate at the institution.  This means that at least some English departments are committed to writing, to argument, to making real claims in a real world.  The bad news, though, can be found in the other kinds of professors English departments are trying to hire and in the “job lists” advertised by the Modern Language Association.

To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they’re trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: “Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies”; “literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture”; “visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies.” The items on these lists are not just different things–apples and oranges–they’re different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions–apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism–whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called “digital humanities.”

We’re already moving toward smaller and smaller English departments, consigning themselves to interesting and quirky corners of the academy and becoming less and less relevant to the discussion, to life, to the pursuit of knowledge and progress.  If they keep trying to teach courses and disciplines like those listed above, that’s where they’re headed, and by their own doing.  This, I think, is as it should be.  Higher education, at least in respect to the humanities, was better when rhetoric was its own department, when English departments didn’t exist.  I predict that, within another 150 years, English departments will be few and far between and that new Rhetoric Departments will be in their places, focusing on writing, persuasion, speaking, and the handling of ideas from philosophy, history, theology, the sciences, etc.  A man’s got to dream a dream.

HT: Phi Beta Cons

The Times Sunday magazine has a tremendous story, both tragic and comic, on transmales, or girls who call themselves boys.  The story focuses on Rey, who had the wicked problem of being a girl, who wanted to be a boy, but who also happened to attend Barnard College, a school for girls.  I call the story tragic because, well, it is.  And I call it comic because, well, the gods must be crazy in a world like this.  Rey’s problems began in the dorm.

In the first week of September, he found out that his roommates had complained to the college’s freshman housing director about being asked to share their rooms with a man. They wanted Rey to find somewhere else to live. According to Dorothy Denburg, the dean who spoke to Rey about the situation, these young women were disturbed when Rey told them on the first day “that he was a transboy and wanted to be referred to by male pronouns.” Rey’s roommates had, after all, chosen to attend a women’s college in order to live and be educated in the company of other women.

But Rey is a conservative next to Jordan Akerley, who rejects the use of pronouns.

“I find pronouns cumbersome and self-limiting,” Akerley told me, which is why friends use the name Jordan, a name that Akerley says she intends to make official this year.

Facts have a way of being cumbersome, I suppose.

Professor Harvey Molotch is teaching a really innovative course at NYU: “The Urban Toilet.”  The article about the course is in The New Yorker, and I have to say, several times while reading it, I had to keep checking to make sure it wasn’t in the “Humor” section.  Nope.  It’s in the “Academy” section.

Molotch’s […] remarkable syllabus reads almost like a parody of Allan Bloom’s worst nightmare, bringing the jargon of gender and ethnic studies, city planning, and industrial design to bear on the most euphemized of subjects. 

Woody Allen had a funny essay in one of his old books about all the weird courses that could possibly be offered.  In this respect, university life continues to imitate art.

“There are two reasons to study the rest room, both great,” Molotch said. “One is social justice […] and the other is to understand things that don’t have much to do with rest rooms.”

You really have to read this.

HT: Phi Beta Cons

Heather MacDonald writes in City Journal about rape on college campuses.  Apparently, it’s an epidemic that’s been going on for twenty years, when a study suggested that one in four college women would be raped or assaulted while in college.  What MacDonald found when researching, though, is that college administrators don’t do the one thing they should be doing.  They don’t ask female students to modify their behavior.  She says that most…

…alleged rapes could be avoided if the girls took certain steps: don’t get into bed with a guy when you are very drunk, don’t take off your clothes, don’t get involved in oral sex, and so on. Such advice is fully consistent with female empowerment. It recognizes that girls have the power to stop “campus rape.” It treats them as moral agents able to control their fates.

But when I suggest to campus sexual assault administrators that they could stop what Koss calls the “rape pandemic” overnight if they persuaded girls to exercise more prudence, I inevitably receive responses like the following (these are my interlocutors’ actual words): “I am uncomfortable with the idea of ‘recommending that female students exercise more modesty and restraint’ - this indicates that if they are raped it could be their fault - it is never their fault.”

MacDonald suggests that administrators answer this way because “these self-professed women’s advocates really do believe that a drunken hookup is rape, and yet are withholding from women the simplest, surest way to prevent being raped, simply in order to preserve the principle of male fault. If the latter situation actually prevails, I conclude that the campus rape movement is purely political, interested solely in casting men as the evil perpetrators of the patriarchy rather than in most effectively protecting potential victims of a traumatic crime.”

Is she right?

Liberal arts proponents have been trying to justify liberal arts education ever since people like Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and all of a sudden, studies in Greek and Latin didn’t look so useful.  Victor E. Ferrall Jr. was a college president for nearly a decade, and he is defending the existence of the liberal arts college in a way similar to Stanley Fish, discussed here and here a couple of weeks back.  Ferrall says the old (and bad) arguments for the liberal arts are these:

(1) Even though it won’t get you a job, a liberal education really is useful because it teaches students how to think critically.

(2) A liberal education best provides oral and written communication skills.

(3) Liberal arts colleges provide an international education.

(4) You can study the subjects you like best and are most interested in.

(5) You will get good grades and this will help you get into the graduate or professional school of your choice.

The new (and good) arguments for the liberal arts should be these:

(1) The quality of a liberal education that makes it so effective is that the subject matter studied is not [useful].

(2) The best teaching is at liberal arts colleges.

(3) Your life will be fuller and richer if you read Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau.

In other words, you best not make the Liberal Arts Argument by saying it’s practical.  Best to say it’s not.  Because an essay is never as practical as a cotton gin.  This doesn’t mean the liberal arts aren’t practical, it just means that saying this, in some ways, misses the point.  Like trying to get someone to go to church because it’s practical.  Yes, it may be, in the long run (and even then, not for everybody).  But that’s not why you go.

Capitalism makes lots of people angry.  Why is this?  In “Why Capitalism is Good for the Soul,” Peter Saunders says that capitalism’s biggest weakness is really an image problem: it lacks the emotional appeal of socialism or communism, and it offers no visible “dragons to slay.”

It is quite the opposite with socialism. Where capitalism delivers but cannot inspire, socialism inspires despite never having delivered. Socialism’s history is littered with repeated failures and with human misery on a massive scale, yet it still attracts smiles rather than curses from people who never had to live under it […] Chic westerners are still sporting Che Guevara t-shirts, forty years after the man’s death, and flocking to the cinema to see him on a motor bike, apparently oblivious to their handsome hero’s legacy of firing squads and labour camps.

But why do intellectual elites still hate capitalism so much? 

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A friend and I were recently talking about an HBCU (Historically Black College or University) in our shared hometown.  Its reputation, as that of other HBCUs (aside from the handful of “HBCU Ivies” like Morehouse and Howard), was as a place of low academic quality that emphasized its marching band over anything resembling the better academic traditions of Western Civilization (of course, one really can say that about just about any large university these days).  But this reputation for HBCUs, in most cases, is undeserved.

George Leef says that things are sometimes far better at black colleges than most of us know.  Two good things he discovered: Graduates of HBCUs do well in the sciences, and HBCUs tend to have stronger general education programs than larger flagship institutions.  Read it here.

It’s a new year, and that means lots of people are looking for new, and hopefully better, jobs.  In case you feel bad about your impending job search, you might enjoy this brief rant on what it’s like to look for a job in higher education.  Most of those who are looking for a college teaching position do so at the various annual meetings for their respective disciplines.  English professor hopefuls attend the annual MLA Convention for interviews.  Theater hopefuls attend the annual ATHE Convention.  And so on and so forth.  This rant concerns the American Philosophical Association, and how depressing it can be.  If you’re looking for reasons not to get a Ph.D. and teach on the college level, start here.

Every time conservatives point out the preponderance of liberals in higher education, the response is usually the same: What a bunch of crybabies. 

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