Rethinking College In America

The Article: Is it time to kill the liberal arts degree? by Kim Brooks at Salon.

The Text: Every year or two, my husband, an academic advisor at a prestigious Midwestern university, gets a call from a student’s parent. Mr. or Mrs. So-and-so’s son is a sophomore now and still insistent on majoring in film studies, anthropology, Southeast Asian comparative literature or, god forbid … English. These dalliances in the humanities were fine and good when little Johnny was a freshman, but isn’t it time now that he wake up and start thinking seriously about what, one or two or three years down the line, he’s actually going to do?

My husband, loyal first and foremost to his students’ intellectual development, and also an unwavering believer in the inherent value of a liberal arts education, tells me about these conversations with an air of indignation. He wonders, “Aren’t these parents aware of what they signed their kid up for when they decided to let him come get a liberal arts degree instead of going to welding school?” Also, he says, “The most aimless students are often the last ones you want to force into a career path. I do sort of hate to enable this prolonged adolescence, but I also don’t want to aid and abet the miseries of years lost to a misguided professional choice.”

Now, I love my husband. Lately, however, I find myself wincing when he recounts these stories.

“Well,” I sometimes say, “what are they going to do?”

The answer, at least according to a recent article in the New York Times, is rather bleak. Employment rates for college graduates have declined steeply in the last two years, and perhaps even more disheartening, those who find jobs are more likely to be steaming lattes or walking dogs than doing anything even peripherally related to their college curriculum. While the scale and severity of this post-graduation letdown may be an unavoidable consequence of an awful recession, I do wonder if all those lofty institutions of higher learning, with their noble-sounding mission statements and soft-focused brochure photos of campus greens, may be glossing over the serious, at-times-crippling obstacles a B.A. holder must overcome to achieve professional and financial stability. I’m not asking if a college education has inherent value, if it makes students more thoughtful, more informed, more enlightened and critical-minded human beings. These are all interesting questions that don’t pay the rent. What I’m asking is far more banal and far more pressing. What I’m asking is: Why do even the best colleges fail so often at preparing kids for the world?

When I earned my diploma from the University of Virginia in the spring of 2000, it never occurred to me before my senior year to worry too seriously about my post-graduation prospects. Indeed, most of my professors, advisors and mentors reinforced this complacency. I was smart, they told me. I’d spent four years at a rigorous institution honing my writing, research and critical-thinking skills. I’d written an impressive senior thesis, gathered recommendations from professors, completed summer internships in various journalistic endeavors. They had no doubt at all that I would land on my feet. And I did (kind of), about a decade after graduating.

In the interim, I floundered. I worked as a restaurant hostess and tutored English-as-a-second-language without a formal work visa. I mooched off friends and boyfriends and slept on couches. One dreary night in San Francisco, I went on an interview to tend bar at a strip club, but left demoralized when I realized I’d have to walk around in stilettos. I went back to school to complete the pre-medical requirements I’d shunned the first time through, then, a week into physics, I applied to nursing school, then withdrew from that program after a month when I realized nursing would be an environment where my habit of spacing out might actually kill someone. I landed a $12-an-hour job as a paralegal at an asbestos-related litigation firm. I got an MFA in fiction.

Depending on how you look at it, I either spent a long time finding myself, or wasted seven years. And while all these efforts hardly add up to a tragedy (largely because I had the luxury of supportive parents willing to supplement my income for a time), I do have to admit feeling disillusioned as I moved from one gig to another, feeling as though my undergraduate education, far from preparing me for any kind of meaningful and remunerative work, had in some ways deprepared me, nurturing my natural strengths and predilections — writing, reading, analysis — and sweeping my weaknesses in organization, pragmatic problem-solving, decision-making under the proverbial rug.

Of course, there are certainly plenty of B.A. holders out there who, wielding the magic combination of competency, credentials and luck, are able to land themselves a respectable, entry-level job that requires neither name tag nor apron. But for every person I know who parlayed a degree in English or anthropology into a career-track gig, I know two others who weren’t so lucky, who, in that awful, post-college year or two or three or four, unemployed and uninsured and uncommitted to any particular field, racked up credit card debt or got married to the wrong person or went to law school for no particular reason or made one of a dozen other time- and money-wasting mistakes.

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Rethinking Marx In The 21st Century

The Article: Why Karl Marx Was Right by Lee Sustar in Socialist Worker.

The Text: Economist Nouriel Roubini, whose predictions of the financial crash of 2008 earned him the nickname “Dr. Doom,” has referred his patients to a specialist in capitalist crisis: Dr. Karl Marx.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Roubini said:

Karl Marx had it right. At some point, capitalism can destroy itself. You cannot keep on shifting income from labor to capital without having an excess capacity and a lack of aggregate demand. That’s what has happened. We thought that markets worked. They’re not working. The individual can be rational. The firm, to survive and thrive, can push labor costs more and more down, but labor costs are someone else’s income and consumption. That’s why it’s a self-destructive process.

For several hours on August 12, the Journal website ran the video of the interview as a top story, under the headline, “Roubini: Marx was Right.”

Considering that the first edition of Marx’s three-volume masterwork Capital appeared in 1867, Roubini’s revelation isn’t exactly news to socialist opponents of capitalism. But given the intractable nature of the current crisis–a deep global recession, a weak recovery in the traditional core of the system in the U.S. and Europe, and now the possibility of a lurch into a second recession–mainstream, or bourgeois, economics has been exposed as ideologically driven and incapable of offering solutions.

Stimulus spending, championed by liberal followers of the economist John Maynard Keynes, was in full swing two years ago. It staved off total economic collapse after the financial crash, but failed to produce a sustained boom and led to big government budget deficits.

That opened the door to the free-market champions of the so-called Austrian economic school of Friedrich von Hayek, who argued that slashing spending was key to an economic revival–only to see such measures choke off growth in Europe and, more recently, the U.S.

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The Oscillation Of Capitalism

The Article: Massive Unemployment: Proof That Global Capitalism Doesn’t Work – We may be witnessing the birth of a new permanent class of the marginalized by Steve Fraser and Joshua B. Freeman in AlterNet.

The Text: Not long ago, the city council of Ventura, California, passed an ordinance making it legal for the unemployed and homeless to sleep in their cars. At the height of the Great Recession of 2008, one third of the capital equipment of the American economy lay idle. Of the women and men idled along with that equipment, only 37% got a government unemployment check and that check, on average, represented only 35% of their weekly wages.

Meanwhile, there are now two million ”99ers” — those who have maxed out their supplemental unemployment benefits because they have been out of work for more than 99 weeks. Think of them as a full division in “the reserve army of labor.” That “army,” in turn, accounts for 17% of the American labor force, if one includes part-time workers who need and want full-time work and the millions of unemployed Americans who have grown so discouraged that they’ve given up looking for jobs and so aren’t counted in the official unemployment figures. As is its historic duty, that force of idle workers is once again driving down wages, lengthening working hours, eroding on-the-job conditions, and adding an element of raw fear to the lives of anyone still lucky enough to have a job.

No one volunteers to serve in this army. But anyone, from Silicon Valley engineers to Florida tomato pickers, is eligible to join what, in our time, might be thought of as the all-involuntary force. Its mission is to make the world safe for capitalism. Today, with the world spiraling into a second “Great Recession” (even if few, besides the banks, ever noticed that the first one had ended), its ranks are bound to grow.

The All-Involuntary Army (of Labor)

As has always been true, the coexistence of idling workplaces and cast-off workers remains the single most severe indictment of capitalism as a system for the reproduction of human society. The arrival of a new social category — “the 99ers” — punctuates that grim observation today.

After all, what made the Great Depression “great” was not only the staggering level of unemployment (no less true in various earlier periods of economic collapse), but its duration. Years went by, numbingly, totally demoralizingly, without work or hope. When it all refused to end, people began to question the fundamentals, to wonder if, as a system, capitalism hadn’t outlived its usefulness.

Nowadays, the 99ers notwithstanding, we don’t readily jump to such a conclusion. Along with the “business cycle,” including stock market bubbles and busts and other economic perturbations, unemployment has been normalized. No one thinks it’s a good thing, of course, but it’s certainly not something that should cause us to question the way the economy is organized.

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The 9/11 World And The Tentacles Of Neo-Liberalism

The Article: Global Executioner: Scales of Terror by Neil Smith by the Social Science Research Council.

The Text: The French philosopher Joseph de Maistre argued that insofar as human beings were constantly tempted to evil by their deepest passions, the maintenance of a peaceful social order ultimately depended on a single person, the executioner. It was much the same with nation states, according to Maistre, which “are born and die like individuals” and have a singular soul, a singular “race.” Reason was insufficient to combat passion, he believed, and the hiatus between them was inevitably colonized by power, whether between individuals or nations. The state takes on the role of executioner.

This conflation of scales – the assumption of a homology between individual and nation, a seamless continuity between individual and national behavior – Maistre shares with many Enlightenment and counter-Enlightenment thinkers alike, and it is foundational to the nation building project that accompanied the emergence of nation states in the eighteenth century. For want of a more sophisticated geography of global affairs, this ideological scale conflation retains a resonant appeal today in self-understandings of US foreign policy, whose justificatory discourse is full of recourse to nations as schoolyard bullies or “rogues.” It registers too in the defensive identification of individuals with government during times of conflict (“we should bomb Iraq”) in a country and a national culture that prides itself as anti-government.

This historical comparison is anything but idle. Maistre, a self-defined reactionary, was writing in the aftermath of the French revolution and reflecting on Robespierre’s self-defined role as executioner during the Reign of Terror, an episode that gave us the word “terrorism” to describe government rule by terror. As emerging bourgeois nation-states came to define themselves in opposition to the rule of terror, “terrorism” was increasingly redefined as non- governmental even anti-governmental, activity as in its routine epithetic use to describe postwar anti-colonial struggles, or the Red Brigade of the late 1960s. The more recent polemical discovery in the West of “state terrorism” has worked to isolate those states that combined two characteristics: domestically and perhaps internationally their governments were often (but not always) authoritarian, and economically they refused to be governed by the laws of the capitalist world market and its attendant political structures. Implicitly, however, the recognition of state terrorism reintroduces de Maistre’s sense of states as executioners.

Since September 11th when the World Trade Center was felled by hijacked commercial aircraft and a wing of the Pentagon similarly destroyed, and especially since October 7th when US retaliation against Afghanistan commenced (notwithstanding that none of the hijackers was Afghani), we have been living through a further dramatic evolution in the meaning of terrorism. Here too the question of conflated scales has been crucial. In one sense, the attack on the World Trade Center was strictly local insofar as the affected site itself measures no more than 16 acres. Yet this was obviously and equally a global event: the hijackers from several countries led multinational lives; victims were of 83 nationalities; the unfolding catastrophe was instantaneously broadcast on television screens around the world; the economic, political and cultural fallout has been global. It was not, however, a clearly defined national event in the moments immediately following the attacks. For all that they were on US soil, the targets were symbols of global as much as national economic and military power, and such obvious symbols of US national and cultural power as the Statue of Liberty, Hollywood and Disneyworld were not targeted. If indeed Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda network are responsible, the perpetrators have no coherent national identity either.

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Retrospect On David Foster Wallace And Roger Federer

Editor’s Note: In light of today’s great Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic match at the US Open, we found it appropriate to post David Foster Wallace’s classic profile of Roger Federer. Note, however, that the following contains an introduction by Michael MacCambridge before the actual David Foster Wallace article.

The Article: Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace, with an introduction and retrospective, Director’s Cut: Federer as Religious Experience, by Michael MacCambridge of Grantland.

The Text: The New York Times’ ambitious sports magazine, Play, was still in its early days in the spring of 2006 — one issue was published, another was about to go to press — when editor Mark Bryant persuaded novelist David Foster Wallace to write about Roger Federer.

The assignment came as both writer and athlete were at the height of their respective careers. The story (for Play’s third issue, published shortly before the 2006 U.S. Open) constituted a dream pairing of writer and subject, like John McPhee sitting down with Bill Bradley, or George Plimpton hitting the road with Muhammad Ali and his entourage. That wasn’t just because Wallace, who committed suicide in 2008, was considered by many to be the literary voice of his generation. He had also proved (in both his novel Infinite Jest, and his exhaustively annotated Esquire piece, “The String Theory”), to be a spellbinding writer on the subject of tennis. Wallace had been a regionally ranked junior player during his teenage years in Illinois before giving up competitive tennis because, as he explained to Rolling Stone’s David Lipsky, “just as it became important to me, I began to choke. The more scared you get, the worse you play.”

That summer, the often-reclusive Wallace traveled to tennis’ most hallowed ground, the All England Lawn Tennis Club, to survey the masterful Federer in the midst of a four-year run in which he won 11 of a possible 16 Grand Slam titles. The resulting story, which Wallace turned in 10 days after returning from England, still stands as one of the most stirring, illuminating essays ever written about the beauty of sport at its highest level.

The piece almost didn’t happen. When Bryant called Wallace’s agent, Bonnie Nadell, to float the idea, she told him it was a nonstarter (“He’s completely focused on his fiction right now,” Bryant recalled her saying). It was only months later, after another writer had bowed out of the assignment just weeks before Wimbledon started, that Bryant called Wallace himself and pitched the story again, saying, “David, I have three words for you: Roger Federer, Wimbledon.” Wallace’s response — “Oh, my god; would you would let me do that?”— showed he was game, and providentially, Wallace was already going to be overseas, at a literary festival in Italy.

Even then, the reporting of the story was an ordeal for both Wallace and Play’s senior editor, Josh Dean, who dealt with Wallace on a daily basis and was privy to the numerous calamities (and near-calamities) the writer encountered in England. At the time, Wallace didn’t have a credit card, a cell phone, or an e-mail address he was willing to share, according to Dean. He was still naïve in the ways of pack journalism, and many routine matters — how to get from his hotel to Wimbledon, how to secure press credentials, even how to enter the grounds — often confounded him, prompting calls back to Dean, some of which came in the middle of the night in New York.

Wallace landed a brief one-on-one interview with Federer during the tournament, but the setting was so sterile and impersonal that Wallace chose to confine his account of it to a lengthy footnote in the story. (Among Wallace’s notes in preparation for his interview with Federer, there was this explanation he presumably shared when they sat down: “I’m not a journalist — I’m more like a novelist with a tennis background.”) After watching Federer conclude the fortnight with his fourth straight Wimbledon title, Wallace returned to the States and wrote furiously, turned in the story on time, then worked closely with Bryant and Dean on everything involving the story’s close — including the cover treatment, the headline, and whether a stray semicolon could be changed to a period. (Per Wallace, it couldn’t.) Wallace had more ammunition than your average precious freelancer, as he was, in Dean’s words, “a remarkable grammarian,” and was on the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary.

The “pre-article advisories” note he sent to Dean along with his first draft provided a peek into his philosophy of footnotes (“the big thing is to avoid breaking footnotes over pages — it gives readers a headache”) and his fiercely protective stance toward his own prose: “I’ve got the fucker down to like 8,400 words. Another maybe 100-200 words can come out without much problem, if need be. Cutting much more from that will cripple the piece, which I’ve worked hard on and feel protective of. (If you decided, for instance, that you want to run only like 5,000 words of it, I wouldn’t do it — I’d settle for the Kill Fee.)”

There was no chance of that. Bryant and Dean did very little editing, and Bryant even sided with Wallace and against the Times’ own fairly rigid policy against serial commas, going high up the masthead to gain approval.

Another 100 or so words were trimmed for space, and the piece ran as Play’s cover story on August 20, 2006.

Federer as Religious Experience

By David Foster Wallace, August 20, 2006

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

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