An “Ordinary Nazi”
Christopher Browning has an excellent essay in this week's New York Review of Books that sheds great light on the question of what, if anything, we mean when we speak of an “ordinary Nazi.” His reflections are addressed at two books, the first of which is A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust, by Mary Fulbrook. Fulbrook looks closely at “Udo Klausa, the Landrat (the principal civilian administrator) of the county of Be˛dzin (Bendsburg).” Klausa carried out and administered a racist Nazi policy, but, in Fulbrook’s account, he saw himself neither as a racist nor as a bad person.
She, following in the tradition of Arendt’s exploration of Adolf Eichmann, asks: How could an apparently upstanding and normal person become so entrenched in carrying out Nazi policies concerning the Jews. Browning writes:
What kind of person was Udo Klausa and what does Fulbrook mean by the term “ordinary Nazi”? Klausa came from a family of nationalist, conservative Catholics and aspired to a career in either the military or civil service. His frail health precluded the former more than his Catholicism disadvantaged the latter. A party member since February 1933, he allayed the reservations of even the most fervent anti-Christian Nazis by his loyal and efficient service to the regime. Fulbrook summarizes as follows the evaluation of Klausa by a notorious Nazi opponent of the Christian churches:
Despite the fact that Klausa internally “felt himself bound to his Catholic religion,” he had “in no way” let this get in the way of his “practical commitment to the National Socialist cause” and his preparedness “to give his utmost for the Führer’s work.”
Klausa shared the assumptions of many of his countrymen about Germany’s entitlement to imperial rule in Eastern Europe over people deemed racially and culturally inferior. Remarkably oblivious to the human impact of Nazi racial and “Germanization” policies on Jews and Poles, he felt himself to be “decent,” not “really” a Nazi, and an apolitical civil servant who was involved in “only administration.” Through a parallel account of the experience and fate of Be˛dzin’s Jews, Fulbrook demonstrates that what to Klausa was “only administration” was in fact the implementation of policies that humiliated, expropriated, exploited, impoverished, starved, uprooted, and finally murdered the Jews of Be˛dzin. Their families were torn apart and their lives ended by successive levies for forced labor and then selections for deportation to Auschwitz.
Browning makes the obvious analogy to Arendt’s characterization of Adolf Eichmann as banal. He argues, however, that whereas Fullbrook is right to see Klausa as an ordinary Nazi, Arendt was wrong to think so of Eichmann. Why this is, however, he neglects to say. For if one reads all the recent research on Eichmann from the Sassen interviews, the obvious conclusion is that Eichmann, like Klausa, was also an ordinary Nazi, with the one meaningful difference that Eichmann had a job that put him in at the center of the Nazi Jewish extermination program, while Klausa’s job left him on the fringes of that same policy. This is an important difference insofar as Eichmann, much more so then Klausa, became a central symbol and facilitator of the holocaust writ large. But how it changes their moral motivations is difficult to see.
The second book Browning reviews is Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs, by Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer. Soldaten is an excellent book, one I’ve read. It uses recorded conversations of German Prisoners of War to explore the inner and moral frames of German soldiers during the war. Browning writes:
Two such frames of reference were pivotal, they argue. The first was the Third Reich and its “National-Socialist morality,” predicated upon fundamental racial inequality and the primacy of the German Volk community over other groups as well as individual Germans. The second was the war, during which 17 million Germans served in, and identified with, the armed forces and held the widely shared military values of bravery, toughness, obedience, and willingness to sacrifice. Against these two major influences, they argue, other factors such as previous political views and individual predisposition were marginal in shaping behavior.
The authors also note that our contemporary historical understanding of the Nazi era, which places the Holocaust at the center, was not the perspective through which most Germans—both soldiers and civilians—experienced World War II. (Indeed, they might have added that viewing the Third Reich and World War II primarily through the prism of the Holocaust did not prevail within the historical profession and wider society until the 1980s.) But the conclusions the authors draw from these surreptitiously recorded conversations concerning soldiers’ awareness of, attitudes toward, and participation in war crimes and the murder of the Jews are the strong point of the book.
Both A Small Town Near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust and Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing, and Dying: The Secret World War II Transcripts of German POWs are crucial reading. So too is his review. It is your weekend read.
-RB
Looking Beyond A Digital Harvard
Graduation is upon us. Saturday I will be in full academic regalia mixing with the motley colors of my colleagues as we send forth yet another class of graduates onto the rest of their lives. I advised three senior projects this year. One student is headed to East Jerusalem, where she will be a fellow at the Bard Honors College at Al Quds University. Another is staying at Bard where he will co-direct Bard’s new Center for the Study of the Drone. The third is returning to the United Kingdom where he will be the fourth person in a new technology driven public relations start up. A former student just completed Bard’s Masters in Teaching and will begin a career as a high school teacher. Another recent grad is returning from Pakistan to New York where she will earn a Masters in interactive technology at the Tisch School for the Arts at NYU. These are just a few of the extraordinary opportunities that young graduates are finding or making for themselves.
The absolute best part of being a college professor is the immersion in optimism from being around exceptional young people. Students remind us that no matter how badly we screw things up, they keep on dreaming and working to reinvent the world as a better and more meaningful place. I sometimes wonder how people who don’t have children or don’t teach can possibly keep their sanity. I count my lucky stars to be able to live and work around such amazing students.
I write this at a time, however, in which the future of physical colleges where students and professors congregate in small classrooms to read and think together is at a crossroads. In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller has perhaps the most illuminating essay on MOOC’s yet to be written. His focus is on Harvard University, which brings a different perspective than most such articles. Heller asks how MOOCs will change not only our wholesale educational delivery at state and community colleges across the country, but also how the rush to transfer physical courses into online courses will transform elite education as well. He writes: “Elite educators used to be obsessed with “faculty-to-student-ratio”; now schools like Harvard aim to be broadcast networks.”
By focusing on Harvard, Heller shifts the traditional discourse surrounding MOOCs, one that usually concentrates on economics. When San Jose State or the California State University system adopts MOOCs, the rationale is typically said to be savings for an overburdened state budget. While many studies show that students actually do better in electronic online courses than they do in physical lectures, a combination of cynicism and hope leads professors to be suspicious of such claims. The replacement of faculty by machines is thought to be a coldly economic calculation.
But at Harvard, which is wealthier than most oil sheikdoms, the warp speed push into online education is not simply driven by money (although there is a desire to corner a market in the future). For many of the professors Heller interviews in his essay, the attraction of MOOCs is that they will actually improve the elite educational experience.
Take for example Gregory Nagy, professor of classics, and one of the most popular professors at Harvard. Nagy is one of Harvard’s elite professors flinging himself headlong into the world of online education. He is dividing his usual hour-long lectures into short videos of about 6 minutes each—people get distracted watching lectures on their Iphones at home or on the bus. He imagines “each segment as a short film” and says that, “crumbling up the course like this forced him to study his own teaching more than he had at the lectern.” For Nagy, the online experience is actually forcing him to be more clear; it allows for spot-checking the participants comprehension of the lecture through repeated multiple-choice quizzes that must be passed before students can continue on to the next lecture. Dividing the course into digestible bits that can be swallowed whole in small meals throughout the day is, Nagy argues, not cynical, but progress. “Our ambition is actually to make the Harvard experience now closer to the MOOC experience.”
It is worth noting that the Harvard experience of Nagy’s real-world class is not actually very personal or physical. Nagy’s class is called “Concepts of the Hero in Classical Greek Civilization.” Students call it “Heroes for Zeroes” because it has a “soft grading curve” and it typically attracts hundreds of students. When you strip away Nagy’s undeniable brilliance, his physical course is a massive lecture course constrained only by the size of the Harvard’s physical plant. For those of us who have been on both sides of the lectern, we know such lectures can be entertaining and informative. But we also know that students are anonymous, often sleepy, rarely prepared, and none too engaged with their professors. Not much learning goes on in such lectures that can’t be simply replicated on a TV screen. And in this context, Nagy is correct. When one compares a large lecture course with a well-designed online course, it may very well be that the online course is a superior educational venture—even at Harvard.
As I have written here before, the value of MOOCs is to finally put the college lecture course out of its misery. There is no reason to be nostalgic for the lecture course. It was never a very good idea. Aside from a few exceptional lecturers—in my world I can think of the reputations of Hegel, his student Eduard Gans, Martin Heidegger, and, of course, Hannah Arendt—college lectures are largely an economical way to allow masses of students to acquire basic introductory knowledge in a field. If the masses are now more massive and the lectures more accessible, I’ll accept that as progress.
The real problems MOOCs pose is not that they threaten to replace lecture courses, but that they intensify our already considerable confusion regarding what education is. Elite educational institutions, as Heller writes, no longer compete against themselves. He talks with Gary King, University Professor of Quantitative Social Science and Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s President, who see Harvard’s biggest threat not to be Yale or Amherst but “The University of Phoenix,” the for-profit university. The future of online education, King argues, will be driven by understanding education as a “data-gathering resource.” Here is his argument:
Traditionally, it has been hard to assess and compare how well different teaching approaches work. King explained that this could change online through “large-scale measurement and analysis,” often known as big data. He said, “We could do this at Harvard. We could not only innovate in our own classes—which is what we are doing—but we could instrument every student, every classroom, every administrative office, every house, every recreational activity, every security officer, everything. We could basically get the information about everything that goes on here, and we could use it for the students. A giant, detailed data pool of all activities on the campus of a school like Harvard, he said, might help students resolve a lot of ambiguities in college life.
At stake in the battle over MOOCs is not merely a few faculty jobs. It is a question of how we educate our young people. Will they be, as they increasingly are, seen as bits of data to be analyzed, explained, and guided by algorithmic regularities, or are they human beings learning to be at home in a world of ambiguity.
Most of the opposition to MOOCs continues to be economically tinged. But the real danger MOOCs pose is their threat to human dignity. Just imagine that after journalists and professors and teachers, the next industry to be replaced by machines is babysitters. The advantages are obvious. Robotic babysitters are more reliable than 18 year olds, less prone to be distracted by text messages or twitter. They won’t be exhausted and will have access to the highest quality first aid databases. Of course they will eventually also be much cheaper. But do we want our children raised by machines?
That Harvard is so committed to a digital future is a sign of things to come. The behemoths of elite universities have their sights set on educating the masses and then importing that technology back into the ivy quadrangles to study their own students and create the perfectly digitized educational curriculum.
And yet it is unlikely that Harvard will ever abandon personalized education. Professors like Peter J. Burgard, who teaches German at Harvard, will remain, at least for the near future.
Burgard insists that teaching requires “sitting in a classroom with students, and preferably with few enough students that you can have real interaction, and really digging into and exploring a knotty topic—a difficult image, a fascinating text, whatever. That’s what’s exciting. There’s a chemistry to it that simply cannot be replicated online.”
Burgard is right. And at Harvard, with its endowment, professors will continue to teach intimate and passionate seminars. Such personalized and intense education is what small liberal arts colleges such as Bard offer, without the lectures and with a fraction of the administrative overhead that weighs down larger universities. But at less privileged universities around the land, courses like Burgard’s will likely become ever more rare. Students who want such an experience will look elsewhere. And here I return to my optimism around graduation.
Dale Stephens of Uncollege is experimenting with educational alternatives to college that foster learning and thinking in small groups outside the college environment. In Pittsburgh, the Saxifrage School and the Brooklyn Institute of Social Science are offering college courses at a fraction of the usual cost, betting that students will happily use public libraries and local gyms in return for a cheaper and still inspiring educational experience. I tell my students who want to go to graduate school that the teaching jobs of the future may not be at universities and likely won’t involve tenure. I don’t know where the students of tomorrow will go to learn and to think, but I know that they will go somewhere. And I am sure some of my students will be teaching them. And that gives me hope.
As graduates around the country spring forth, take the time to read Nathan Heller’s essay, Laptop U. It is your weekend read.
You can also read our past posts on education and on the challenge of MOOCs here.
-RB
Water and Desert: Perspectives in Education
For two years I taught literature, reading and writing at a public university in one of New York City’s outer Boroughs. Of course having come out of a liberal arts “thinking” institution what I really thought (maybe hoped) I was teaching was new perspectives. Ironically, the challenge that most struck me was not administrative, nor class size or terrible grammar and endless hours of grading, the most pressing obstacle lay in creating a case for the value of “thinking.”
I state “case” because I regularly felt like my passions and beliefs, as well as my liberal arts education went on daily trial. I had originally come from a hard-scrabble immigrant reality, but my perception of reality had been altered by my education experience, and as an educator I felt the need to authenticate my progressive (core text) education with my students.
I was regularly reminded that the immediate world of the “average” student (citizen) with all its pressing, “real” concerns does not immediately open itself to “thought” in the liberal arts sense. We are a specialization, automation, struggling and hyper competitive society. The “learning time” of a student citizen is spent in the acquisition of “marketable,” and differentiating skills, while their “free time” is the opportunity to decompress from, or completely escape the pressures of competitive skill acquisition. The whole cycle is guided by an air of anxiety fostered in our national eduction philosophy, as well as the troubled economy and scattered society at large. I don’t think one can teach the humanities without listening to their students, and listening to the students calls for a deep inventory on the value of “thought” in the humanities sense, and then ultimately in how to most truthfully communicate this value to the students.
I need to add here that my students were quite smart and insightful. This made it even greater of a challenge. Their intelligence was one of realism. I needed to both acknowledge and sway their perspective, as well as my own.
Each semester I began with a close-reading of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech at Kenyon College, “What is Water.” He begins his speech with the parable of two fish swimming by an older fish which as it swims by asks, How is the Water?” The little ones swim on and only later ask each other, “What is water?” Didactic parable, cliche -- yes -- but Wallace goes on to deconstruct the artifice of commencement speeches, parables, and cliches, and then rebuilds them. Having so skillfully deconstructed them he has invited his listers into the form making, and as he communicates the truth beneath what had earlier seemed lofty or cliche, the listers follow him towards meaning making. Ultimately Wallace states that education is “less about teaching you how to think, and more about teaching you of the choice in what to think about.” To have agency is to be a meaning maker. And as more and more cultural institutions artfully vie for the citizens devotion and loyalty -- politics, religion, but even more so, corporate houses and pop culture designs, in the ever growing noise of institutional marketing the call to choose seems ever more muted.
The choice, for so many students today, is simply in how to most skillfully compartmentalize themselves and their lives in the face of the anxieties of their immediate world. The choice for many young teachers, facing their own set of related anxieties, is in how far are they willing step away from the ideal of learning-living-teaching integration model -- so easy is it today as an educator to simply become disenchanted, frustrated and aloof. Sometimes, “thinking” is the process of choosing what to keep and what to give away.
Wallace's insightful, no b.s, humorous and sincere tone resonated with my students, that is of course until they found out that Wallace killed himself. Then, that’s what everyone wanted to focus on. I can not blame them. There is a ‘text’ to ‘personal’ mystery, a ‘content’ to ‘context’ disjunction that opens itself at such a revelation, a mystery that the “thinking” mind wants to explore. The modern “thinking” mind draws little separation between the lofty and the sublime, the public and the personal. Such is a byproduct of a generation raised on reality television and celebrity stories. I, in all sincerity cannot judge this. My generation, the X’s who came of age on the cusp of the Millennials, were culturally educated by MTV, The Real World and Road Rules, and thus we crave hip, colorful, appropriately gentrified spaces to occupy -- think of artist collectives, or Facebook and Google working environments (bean bags, chill and chic prescription sunglasses, lounge happy hour with juice bars, untraditional working hours, colorful earth tones). I digress, I meant to make some observation of “thinking.”
I was excited to teach what excited me: I began with Wallace, then Kafka, O’Connor (Flannery or Frank), Platonov, Carver, Babel, Achebe Kundera, Elliot, etc... It is, essentially, the seven sisters freshmen reading list, a popular catalogue of classic stories peppered with some international obscurity. It is the “cool” thing in liberal arts. But, over and over my students came to me complaining that they could not find this relevant to their lives. After such reports I would tweak my lesson plans to give a greater introduction to the works, going deeper into the philosophical tenets of the stories, and into the universal reward of being able to utilize the tools of the thinking, writing mind. Induct, deduct, compare, contrast, relate, “give it greater shape,” I would say. “Breath life into it.”
To have the skills to decipher plot, to record the echo of a narrative, to infer characterization from setting, to understand the complex structure of a character, to be invited to participate in the co-creation of a narrative which gently guides you through action but leaves the moral implications up to the reader. These are “indispensable,” I would advise my students. “Indispensable for human agency.” Some would slowly gravitate to my vision, as I prodded further and further into their motivations for being in school, career, and other ‘relevant’ choice. Yet, they often felt only like visitors in my library, preparing to check out and return to the “default” education thinking mode as soon as the quarter, mid, or end semester exam periods began. The pressures of what they call “the real world” are much stronger then the ghosts of books and introspective thought -- vague, powerless, intangible.
“The real world:” Here I am reminded of the scene from the Matrix when Morpheus unveils to Neo “the desert of the real.” A barren waste land of human energy as only a power source nourished for consumption. The Matrix, I will add here, is based on a work by Jean Baudrillard, a french philosopher who warns of a modern society as a place existing in consumption and entertainment, devoid of meaning making -- the urge towards agency, in hibernation; the map towards meaning, defunct. In describing this new world he coined the phrase “the desert of the real.” Again, I fall into tangental thought.
I needed to find a way to invite, seduce, capture my students. I tried using myself as a conduit.
I pride myself on the fact that I am an immigrant, a former “at risk” student, that my tattoos all have mythological meaning and thought behind them, that I am a high-school drop out with credentials to my name, a top tier education, a masters degree, etc... I felt like these could help me bridge for my students the platforms of reality-setting discourse and humanistic thought. I had, and still do, believed that real “thinking” is indispensable in being human, in being free, and in the ability to have fun and play with the world.
Again, my students would, at times, meet me in the middle space I wanted to create, though rarely did this space become living for them, instead they lay their heads to the sound of another’s palpitation and breath, and then moved on. Maybe I planted a seed, I like to think. But then, maybe, they were bringing me somewhere as well.
They could not recklessly follow me, or I them. It was an issue of pragmatic bonds. For a moment, my class, or an individual student I was reading with would delve into the power of words with me and the ending of Andrei Platonov’s “Potudon River” would finally break through the events of the page: “Not every grief can be comforted; there is a grief that ends only after the heart has been worn away in long oblivion, or in distraction amidst life’s everyday concerns.” And my students would draw new understanding of the passage, enter it through a word or phrase that could unlock that middle space between their worlds and the world of literature, philosophy, metaphor. “Grief,” “long oblivion,” life’s everyday concerns,” all the sudden my students would give these new meaning, now only slightly guided by the story and letting their lives find a grip to the reigns. They would find new connections, and again they would return to the “real” world.
More and more I struggled to make thinking relevant. “Will this help me get a better job?” I was asked.
Thinking about it I had to encounter my own struggles with this question. I know the answers. I know the programed liberal arts answer, and the “real” answer. I know that the liberal arts answer exposes the “real” as something at best lacking, at its worst empty. I also know that the real, is real; it happens in real time, removed from the concerns of literature, poetry, and philosophy which concern themselves with the work of mans eternity.
“Unlikely,” I would answer. For gods sake, though I was teaching all these things I cared so deeply about, I also worked nights as a bartender to satisfy the demands of the real. I had to produce something consumable and all of my learning and thoughts on thinking are not that.
Here I acknowledge that this answer is not entirely true. We can find jobs which call for liberal arts skills, but these are few and far between and rarely afford a comfortable standard of living. We may also posit the argument that liberal arts skills will contribute to ones ability to perform better and have a greater understanding of ones job, but this argument does not lend itself to substantial evidence, no matter how much I may actually believe it. This was the litmus test of my “thinking,” and it only survives in embracing the privacies of my world, that I chose my private world despite and above the “real.”
“Unlikely.” And where does that leave us?
Ultimately, all I have as a conscious being is the ability to tell stories, to choose and create my narrative from the scattered world I am provided. Ultimately, after deconstructing both the “real” and the “lofty” I could only encourage my students to choose their own themes. To the question of “what is water?” I could only answer, “the desert.”
Oddly enough, and as “unlikely” as it may seem, when I answered with honesty, to them as well as myself, they followed. -- we could talk.
-Nikita Nelin
Amor Mundi 3/24/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Poet T.R. Hummer uses the recent discovery of a Thomas Edison recorded reading of Walt Whitman's "America," spoken by a man who may or may not be the poet himself, as an opportunity to consider the nature of the poem. Hummer describes its grand goal as "nothing less than the reinvention of the human voice, and the human consciousness behind that voice, through writing-through the process of writing and writing's product, transmogrified. There are volumes yet to be written about his achievement, the often misconstrued depth of his ambition for humanity."
On the occasion of the latter's new book of non-fiction, Brad Fox spoke to writer Aleksander Hemon. In the interview, Hemon, a Bosnian originally from Sarajevo, touches on nationalism, the importance of the stories we all tell ourselves, and expresses a good deal of cynicism about the role of art in society. He ends, however, with a slightly more hopeful impulse: "despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art. I make money doing this, and I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better. I do believe-and I know I shouldn't-that art transcends money and success and any of that."
Bonnie Honig speaks with Nick Pearce about politics, democracy, Antigone, and the importance of a common public realm. Also about her fascination with Hannah Arendt: "I was drawn to [Hannah Arendt] because of her insistence on the central importance of what she calls 'the political' to the study of politics. She was correcting for political science's attention to bureaucracy, administration, and civic order and for philosophy's focus on the eternal and the universal, each to the detriment of the contingent and the fragile that are, for her, the stuff of politics. Contingency, fragility, change, unpredictability - these are central elements of political life and yet they were inaccessible from a philosophical point of view and were seen by political science as something to be overcome. Arendt worried that the political, as a concept, could disappear beneath the pressure of political science and philosophy."
Jessica and Tim Lahey enjoy pillow talk about the importance of failing. The teachers-one in middle school and one in medical school-share their intimate conversations about how our unwillingness to let our children fail is hurting their ability to succeed. Parents and teachers both must learn that "when children try to preserve their parents' perception of their intelligence, they can be less likely to work hard, and less prepared for the inevitable challenges of schooling, and life after it."
Finally, Evgeny Morozov warns against the perils of what he calls solutionism, "an intellectual pathology that recognizes problems as problems based on just one criterion: whether they are "solvable" with a nice and clean technological solution at our disposal." Morozov argues that "whenever technology companies complain that our broken world must be fixed, our initial impulse should be to ask: how do we know our world is broken in exactly the same way that Silicon Valley claims it is? What if the engineers are wrong and frustration, inconsistency, forgetting, perhaps even partisanship, are the very features that allow us to morph into the complex social actors that we are?"
Featured Upcoming N.Y.C. Event
Blogging and the New Public IntellectualAn Ongoing Series of discussions moderated by Roger Berkowitz and Walter Russell Mead.
April 9, 2013 at Bard Graduate Center
David Frum, blogger for The Daily Beast & The Huffington Post.
Learn more here.
"David Frum is back. And he's jockeying to be the front and center of the post-Romney American conservative movement". - Eddy Moretti
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Wolfgang Heuer considers what happens when the revolution is over, and whether or not revolution is necessarily followed by dictatorship. Jeff Champlin reviews Allen Speight's essay "Arendt on Narrative Theory and Practice." And Roger Berkowitz looks back to Hannah Arendt's 1965 essay "The Christian Pope" to raise questions about the ascension of Pope Francis I.
Bowling Green Cuts 11% of its Faculty
There is a petition going circulating asking Bowling Green University to rescind its decision to cut 11% of its faculty—nearly 100 positions—while simultaneously planning to increase enrollment. The petition reads:
Slashing faculty numbers while planning to increase enrollment by 6,000 students (as you publicly announced in 2012) will greatly diminish BGSU’s position as one of Ohio’s top-rated public universities. Your plans would compromise the education of current students, and it would reduce the prestige of degrees that have already been granted by BGSU.
The decision is designed to save $5.2 Million, just over the $5 Million that the university is set to lose as a result of Ohio’s recent budget cuts to public university education.
On the one hand, this is a story that will be repeated over and over in the coming years. On the other hand, why is it that the university chooses to fill the entirety of its budget gap by letting faculty go? There was no announcement about cutting administrators, pairing back expensive sports programs, and halting an expensive building plan. Here is what the The Bowling Green State University Faculty Association said:
“[T]he $5.2-million savings is suspiciously close to the $5 million number that BGSU officials have floated as the loss from state share of instruction under Ohio’s new funding plan,” the statement indicates. “In other words, Mazey may have decided that faculty alone should absorb any budgetary challenges. It’s certainly easier than cutting six-figure administrators, in-the-red athletics, expensive residence halls, luxurious renovations to the rec center, high-priced outside consultants, failed football bowl games, or Mazey’s team of spin doctors which, as Mazey administration spending indicates, are her true priorities.”
It does seem that the University is cutting the faculty in a disproportionate and severe manner, especially given the announced intent to increase enrollment. It would be much better to cut administration and sports teams. But the sad fact remains, colleges like Bowling Green are going to suffer as public funding is cut back, student debt levels depress enrollments, and alternatives to college emerge. At the same time, technology will begin to displace many faculty members and allow colleges to educate more students with fewer professors.
Given the changes coming to higher education, it is important that colleges and universities adapt intelligently. We might start by cutting back on administration and luxury dorms. One big question is whether tenured faculty positions will continue to make sense at a time that demands flexibility and innovation. It is worth noting that Bowling Green cut exclusively amongst adjuncts and part-time faculty, leaving its tenured faculty untouched. How much longer that will continue to happen is real question.
-RB
For more HAC coverage of the financial woes of higher education, read "The Dorm Wars", "The Merging of High Schools and Colleges", and "The Higher Education Bubble? Not So Fast".
The Sandstorm of Repression
"If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with that of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms."
-Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Arendt's concluding image in The Origins of Totalitarianism leaves us with a bleak sense of how the mass of lonely and isolated individuals in modern society – the desert –can readily be swept into the "sandstorm" of totalitarianism.
The book sketches the forces that drive this new form of frenetic political motion, as well as the traditional resources that prevented it earlier: the loneliness of the frightened person as opposed to the solitude of the reflective individual; the community of discussion instead of the techniques of "mass movements."
Of the specific principles of totalitarianism that Arendt raises, few are as intriguing as her recasting of what is now termed polycracy [Neumann/ Hüttenberger/ Broszat], the notion that at every level individuals in a totalitarian society found themselves within overlapping systems of bureaucracy and power, unsure which level was of the most import. "All levels of the administrative machine in the Third Reich," she notes as a principal example, "were subject to a curious duplication of offices, with a fantastic thoroughness." At every level of society, individuals were unsure of how to calibrate actions and statements to their context for self-promotion, defense, or simply to be left alone, since there were often two or more overlapping systems of organization defining their position. The average worker, for instance, might be unsure what factor was decisive for their fate: the role of their actual boss, the party connections of colleagues, the intrigues of the secret police, the family connections of acquaintances, or even their role in apparently secondary organizations such as an automobile association. Ultimately, "regular" politics could never pertain, while the politics of the "movement" always had some traction.
The result in Arendt's telling was often a necessary striving beyond proscribed roles to express alignment with the ideals of the party and in the quest for advantage or mere safety. Unlike aspects of her later argument for the "banality of evil," here simply "fitting in" was not enough. In this manner, later scholars have argued, the decisive feature of totalitarian societies was neither the passive "structure" of organization nor the simple "intent" of members, but rather a new middle term created from the ill ease of masses of individuals.
The "conditions under which we exist today" no doubt still include the original possibilities of totalitarianism, but Arendt would also have us ask what has changed, what new aspects of society facilitate or act as windbreaks, so to speak, for such "sandstorms." Earlier windbreaks passively functioned, as Arendt suggests for even relatively dystopian societies such as tyrannies, through the exercise of clear lines of authority, the existence of an active private sphere of life, and the possible formation of a discursive community of individuals, even if only in small groups.
At first glance, the new social technologies credited in recent uprisings and protests suggest a strengthening of these windbreaks by giving voice to critiques of incompetent and unjust administration, the solitary opposition of conscience, and, perhaps most decisively, the possibility of organizing coordinated discussion and action on wide scales. Yet, apace with these changes there are also darker transformations allowed by vast increases in computing memory and power that make tracking information and people on social media progressively easier. In repressive societies this is already occurring through the aggregation of past communications, the profiling of individuals, and guilt by association with members of one's social orbit.
By definition secret, statistical, and yet deeply connected with personal preference and affiliations, the aggregation of data concerning the individual in the context of social networking presents a real potential for abuse by any number of outside powers. Although most apparent in directly repressive societies, this transformation has the potential for abuse in numerous forms of governance. For if not managed properly, the laws and infrastructure of the internet could increasingly give rise to the sense – and reality – that one's words and actions could be interpreted in any number of contexts and by many forms of institutions. The malign influence of polycracy on individual decision, previously a signal feature of totalitarian regimes, might start to appear in any political system whatsoever.
As data about the individual becomes potentially available to a spectrum of interests and parties, ranging from credit agencies and divorce lawyers to political opponents and work rivals, it is easy to imagine individuals (and software) attempting to "mask" or redefine preferences, interests, and affiliations.
The result would be a pervasive self-censorship, but also – in light of this confusing secondary power – a corollary attempt to act out in the manner that seems most open to reward. The ability of individuals to first believe in the honesty of their own choices and speech, and with this the honesty of others, could be profoundly altered, as would the nature of civil society.
Precisely in first connecting the private and public spheres in new ways, groups of friends and political action, social media has the possibility to atomize anew. Debates over the role of law and infrastructure in shaping these contexts takes on a new relevance for preserving the basis of the windbreaks of civil society, ranging from recent initiatives such as "do not track" to the separation of terrorist investigations from other forms of surveillance (such as occurs in Germany), to larger innovations such as the E.U.'s "right to data privacy" or plan for the "right to be forgotten." Although integral perhaps to preventing the "sandstorms" Arendt warned of, these innovations may also prove critical to amplifying the positive features of individual conscience and civil society allowed by social media.
-Greg Moynahan
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