"END THE UNIVERSITY AS WE KNOW IT"

People, in particular readers, are so busy obsessing over the aesthetics of reading from an electronic device that they never even inquire about what electronics has done to books. They never had awareness in the first place of how books were published. Books just materialized as objects on a shelf with no history at all, unless you’re talking about the biography of the author. But in fact, the internet has completely remade publishing. One does not print out a manuscript and send it (return postage included but not glued to the return self-addressed envelope) to be stacked in a slush pile. There is no slush pile. Publishers have laid off their editors, who are now agents and acquire possible manuscripts by reading the first three pages of an email submission. Then delete. Actually, a smart agent reads small journals or self-published books with good sales figures, which may or may not be related to the quality of the writing. More likely the drive of the author to sell. Or the recommendation of the marketing department.

There is no warehouse, no shipping dock, no book returns (did you know that bookstores can send back to the publisher all unsold books?), no remainders, no pulping. In fifty years how many used books? Recently the Pentagon bought the entire 10,000-copy first edition of a book critical of them, in order to prevent readers from getting it. But printing that many paper books is old-fashioned. Next time there will be no physical stacks of books to buy. The Pentagon negotiated for a second printing to be made, with the changes they want, which can be easily done since since the type-setting is on the computer. Soon there will be no second or third or fourth printings, but a publisher could supply unique editions of any book to fit any stipulations. One version for the Pentagon, one version for you. Censorship is already preparing to move online.

Universities are also still largely unconscious of the difference the internet makes. If one can get the lectures on YouTube and books on Amazon, why would one want to go pay huge amounts of money to a university? (Of course, my cousins went to university to find prosperous husbands, but online dating services could be made more upscale.)

One could interpret the original colleges as a development of monasteries where books were written out by hand in a community sequestered to concentrate on theology and medicine. Gutenburg was the troublemaker that time, releasing books to the masses. Because books are so transformed by electronic technology, so are all book-based pursuits, particularly theology, medicine, and law.

This is also driven by economics. Universities become more and more burdened with the need for money in order to maintain the status quo, which craves endowment for both expensive buildings and libraries. Rules have been made to protect the professors (tenure) but demographics mean that sometimes there are too many of them and other times there are too few. Emphasis has moved from the classroom to research. Suddenly one must acquire a “quality” education by going profoundly into debt at the same time that the usefulness of the degrees is questioned, the validity of those highly paid occupations is challenged, and the high status has gone through a trapdoor. Science, due to new insights from computer-enabled analysis (DNA, physics, climate) is also quite transformed. Humanities, now required to be global instead of the elevation of British tradition, has become hell-raising as post-this-or-that or hides behind the door of a million footnotes relevant to nothing.

Mark C. Taylor’s Op-Ed in The New York Times on April 27, 2009, gave a quick summary of his newly published book, “Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.” (You can get it on Kindle.) This man is like Bertrand Russell on steroids, an old-fashioned polymath but internet-hip friend of Derrida (what a troublemaker) who grips things like religion and cuts the crap. He’s the head of his religion department at Columbia and publishes at the U of Chicago Press. Now he’s on my list of people to follow. He’s even handsome!

This too-short list of his ideas, all strike me as absolutely on-target. “Cloning” by requiring students to conform to their advisors and burnish their tenured careers is over. Departments, divvying subjects up in the medieval pigeonholes, are over. Using students as slave labor (in grad school or as adjuncts) is over. Black box research beyond the purview of anyone is over.

Here’s the positive version:

1. Restructure the curriculum so that it is a complex adaptive web, a network that clusters around issues like “the role of religion in society” and has a care for method. (Martin Marty undoubtedly knows this guy.)

2. Departments should have sunset clauses and be renegotiated every seven years, like Old Testament debt. This moves the emphasis from the status quo to process, which makes study far more responsive to actual issues like water in an age of warmiing.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. He seems to mean crossing international boundaries for university partnerships. I can see collaboration between kinds of institutions.

4. “Transform the traditional dissertation.” Publication at present is simply waste and the scholarly certification is a mockery. Why must dissertations be in print? Why can’t they be cross-media?

5. The PhD as teaching certificate is obsolete. What else can you do? Business, NGO’s, art, government?

6. Mandatory retirement with tenure replaced by seven-year contracts.

Bottom line, a quote: “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”

Terrifying. Necessary. It will happen anyway, even if a gun is held to our heads, because life is a process. There is no tenure in life. There are no books so brilliant that they change lives . . . Hey, wait. There are. The problem is finding them, which is why I’m pointing at this one. Some are not print, but images. After all, if someone is out there who really understands Derrida rather than interpreting him as a weapon of mass destruction, I want to spread the news. (I still don’t understand Derrida myself in spite of a U of Chicago master's degree.)

I used to speak in sermons about “harrowing,” meaning both a frightening experience and the literal ground-breaking that we in Valier know well as the planting of seeds. It’s not comfortable. I wish it weren’t done in such straight lines -- good conservationists know to contour their plow lines to prevent erosion. I wish they didn’t poison out weeds and ground squirrels or use chemical fallow (kill EVERYTHING in the plot so no moisture will be drawn out of the ground). I wish that commercially owned seeds were banned. It was grain that made cities possible, cities that made universities possible, and now the internet has made something entirely new possible. I can sit here in my back bedroom and -- hey, I wonder if Mark C. Taylor is on YouTube!

NOT! What the . . .

BEYOND THE SPIDER AND THE STARFISH

Single-idea books with cute titles are supposed to be one path to big profits. So consider “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations" by Ori Brafman, Rod Beckstrom (Author)” or “Brainticklers : Beyond Y2K : Questions for the New Millennium and the Year 3000,” by Elizabeth Arnold and Rod Beckstrom (which is the same as what I call a “slap pack” of questions) or even “An Introduction to VAR” (1995) by Rod Beckstrom. (VAR turns out to be variable, a scientific concept, and also a program for sorting or creating algorithms.) What is being sold with this starfish/spider metaphor is an organizational design concept contrasting the centralized hierarchical model and the small local decentralized pattern.

This morning on NPR the author was interviewed on All Things Considered http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129310098 and professed to be surprised that the Teaparty movement had picked up the book. I don’t know why he should be surprised. In fact, the original movement that started this country pitted the decentralized colonies against king-headed England. And then the more-or-less “united” States spent the next century fighting the even-more-decentralized native American tribes on the rest of the continent. What’s being talked about here is basic guerrilla strategy, the same discussion that goes on all the time about whether modern terrorists have one leader who can be conveniently assassinated or many small local leaders, hard to find and hit.

Unitarian Universalist people are also used to struggling with the dilemma of whether their denomination is a free-association (many small independent units -- some call it “disorganized religion”) or should be unified (a third “U”) under a strong leader. They often use as their point of focus the idea of “values” that Beckstrom talks about, calling them “principles.”

Having been struggling with Deleuzeguattarian thought, I see the contrast in patterns in a slightly different way. Their “rhizome versus tree” is the same contrast, but what they discuss is how forces in society can and will self-assemble a kind of “machine” for specific purposes. That is, affinity-needs interact with the ongoing forces we might call “history-in-the-making” and the purposes of government (acknowledged and unacknowledged) and commerce to produce groups. Deleuze and Guattari also consider that rhizomes are in communication with each other, like cells in a resistance. Therefore one seeking to understand this phenomenon would need to know a lot more than what values the individuals share.

If we look at the Tea Party movement, we see that forces might include onerous taxation and regulation (the putative focus), the vacuum left by dysfunctional and deadlocked political parties, the schism between those who are educated to understand science and those who prefer to use authority figures, modes of media (decentralized blogs versus cable), overpopulation, distressing economic patterns often attributed to corrupt and greedy big shots, and so on.

The NPR host, possibly because the example offered was the Tea Party movement, seen as right-wing, then went to a bit of bad reasoning known in the trade as mis-placed concreteness. The author had proposed the advantage of the starfish is that if you cut off its arms, it can regenerate and continue functioning. But a spider cannot grow a new leg and, when its head is cut off, is dead. So the host pointed out that a spider doesn’t have a head: the “head” is part of the body -- to have a head, you need a neck. And technically neither animal has a brain. And besides that, sponges can be put through a sieve and resume function as a lot of little sponges. So do you want to be a sponge? Very funny. (I would consider the function of prison as a sponge sieve.)

We have not yet really looked at the forces that shattered lucrative arts organizations into hundreds of local groups and individuals. The switch to electronic communication was only part of the change. Publishing, for instance, is not being replaced by ebooks simply because it’s possible. The quality of the books offered; the over-hyping of them; the economic piling up of profit in the hands of a few (both within the publishing house where faithful editors were thrown out to live as independent agents, and outside the publishers when they were acquired by conglomerates who knew nothing about books and only wanted profit); the failure of schools to teach people how to read; the rise of fancy critical theory resistant to understanding; the failure of marketers to reach out to thin and specialized populations; the movement of populations both displaced and immigrant which require different languages and information; the new consciousness of the hidden costs of paper which were no longer so hidden; the diminishment of the status of “famous writers” (Partly because everyone forgets the renaissance of books after WWII when GI’s learned to read paperbacks and writers had plenty of raw material); the new private habits of passively watching television or actively playing electronic games; the necessity of working hours that don’t leave time for reading; the demand for living in big houses that need a lot of maintenance and earning enough profit to pay for it -- not a little used bookstore at the beach that supports one old singleton and a cat. You get the picture. One could devise an algorithm.

One of the most powerful forces is the proportion of the world population that is young versus those who are old. The young are not “into” preservation and history. The world, so far as they are concerned, begins with them and they see themselves as creators as much as consumers. Connection comes naturally to them, but not hierarchy. All the authority figures have proven themselves inadequate if not outright wrong. Families no longer exist in the sense that they did. International corporations are plainly and defiantly trumping nations by imposing their lines of supply across borders and evading any kind of accountability: kids know that.

So, will a persuasive leader arise to unite us again? Maybe not. The central unifying force that CAN pull the population of the world into cooperation is probably a threat to human life en masse. But so far no one has vividly enough explained AIDS or global weather change or starvation in terms that can be more compelling than the Tea Party movement. And NPR, which is vulnerable to all the forces I listed above, needs to check their algorithm.

EYES, AGGREGATORS AND CURATION

Daily I wade through blogs and vids from the many websites trying to figure out what to do about the collapse of “English gentry” Manhattan-style publishing a la Bennett Cerf, which probably died about the same time he did, and then the corporation Hollywood mogul-style publishing that has slid along behind for the last decade or so until they realized there simply were not the profit-margins they expected. It’s strange that everyone got so excited about Detroit collapsing, but no one offered a government bail-out for publishing. Maybe it’s because entrepreneurs are unlikely to create automobile factories at home, but they CAN publish from the kitchen table. At first (like me) we printed pages at Kinko’s and bound them with some kind of clunky machine. Then came Print On Demand outfits like Lulu.com and via computer we could order professional quality books that arrived at the post office in a week.

But distribution and marketing remain huge and largely unsolved problems. Slowly the necessary concepts for renewal are appearing. I see three good ones so far: eyes, aggregators and curation.

Eyes means readers, which translates to buyers. Eyes are driven by interest, people looking for material they care about. They can be grouped into what we might call “niches” which is more specific than calling them “mailing lists.” So much of what Amazon, as well as mail-order gizmo merchants, does is to accumulate humonguous mailing lists either on paper or via email. The selling of tasty concentrated email lists is profitable enough to attract pirates. The best ones don’t include much spam, but are crammed with people who have a true interest in some topic. They might also include “hits” on a website: people coming to see what is there because of search engines like Google or because they picked it up from word of mouth. Facebook is pursuing something similar: the creation of webs of relationship that one can tap in one place to send vibes all over. The assumption is that friends might be interested in about the same things. (This doesn’t entirely work for me because I have quite separate “spheres of interest” who are not in sympathy with each other, as readers of this blog know.)

Once “eyes” are listed, the next step is “aggregation” which is simply the gathering of materials that go together. This is more slippery than one might think because it requires careful definition of the niche, as anyone knows from trying to get Google to cough up info you want. (I’ve been trying to make it give me an account of how and why frost comes out of the ground which I know is in there someplace because I got it once before. I just can’t remember what phrase I used to fish for it.)

Let’s assume “eyes” who are interested in traditional cowboy stories and lifeways -- not the glitzy sequin-studded New West crowd, but the old-fashioned real-life ranchers in their cozy kitchens, as served by a website called www.ropeandwire.com. I was looking for an online ezine that printed short stories in the Western mode. That’s exactly what this is and more.

If you like the whole category of authentic Western stuff -- stories, poetry, cooking, jokes, musicians and those classic old movies from just after WWII, not quite “Turner Classics,” then this is the website for you, “A gathering place for Western Writers, Cowboy Poets and Old Western Movie Buffs.” You can order eCards, watch those movies right online, and read what Scott Gese, the owner of this spread, calls a “barnful” of stories. Maybe send in a few of your own. It’s an “aggregation.” That’s a collection. You know, like your duck-hunting license says you can shoot so many ducks in the “aggregate,” which is not an organ but the total number. Amazon and other online book distributors are “aggregators” that list enormous alphabetized lists of available books.

The next step is curation. Right about now the self-aggregating artists who wish to participate in one of the March auctions of Western art in Great Falls are sending slides or maybe actual artwork to the committee in charge of sorting the works, deciding which should be included. They will probably also be doing a bit of active searching for authentic works by Charlie Russell, since the whole shindig is in his honor. This takes experts, people who know the range and who has what stock. Among book publishers, curators -- which is an art term -- are usually called “editors” who are the people who can identify quality and other considerations. People confuse editors with publishers, who are simply the providers of capital and might have no taste whatsoever -- just money.

Scott Gese, who has Western tastes, is his own curator for www.ropeandwire.com and puts his criteria for inclusion online. So far he has accepted some of my stories and turned down two: the one about the punk but artistic Blackfeet boy on a motorcycle who liked snakes and the one about the mail-order bride whose husband staggered in from a blizzard nearly dead of hypothermia. She was in a hot bath in front of the fire and simply pulled him in with her to warm him up, which also warmed up the marriage. It made Scott blush.

This is entirely legitimate. Scott neither pays nor charges for the stories he prints and he gives full credit and free publicity to writers. He is an aggregator and a curator, and his practices are above-board, though they don’t please commercial authors trying to sell the same sort of material. A smart publisher would simply keep on eye on this website and acquire some of Scott’s stock. In the meantime it is a way for an amateur like me to get started, to attract eyes.

We are in hard times when it comes to publishing. Too often hard times cause people to put up fences and hoard. The gatekeepers slam shut the access and load their guns. But smart people maintain their generosity, knowing that the way to get new ideas is to share the old ones. Ideas can be aggregated and curated as easily -- maybe MORE easily -- than actual objects. (No UPS charges.) In the end we all profit.

THE DISCARD PILE

Over the years I have discarded a few ideas, some early and some recently. Some that were family heritage, some that were traditional scholar’s assumptions, and some that I’d invented for myself.

One of the main ones to be cast off was the idea of progress, that everything is gradually getting better, which includes the increasing value that is supposed to correspond with increasing technological “advances” and more complexification of ideas. I surely accept change, because what could be more obvious? But I think that “better” and “worse” are braided together all through the passage of time and that one must do a bit of sorting right along the way so as to find the “better” in the moment and tough it out through the “worse.” There is NOT a steady progression onward and upward, though my family so sincerely believed in it out there homesteading on the prairie. To them progress was nearly synonymous with patriotism, the belief that America (which in their minds included Canada) is progressing, perfecting, always improving -- even though in their own lives there was only one short period of relative prosperity in the middle period of their lives.

Related to this is the idea that the “primitive” is either less complex or satisfying than contemporary ideas and lifeways. Life before agriculture, life before cities, life before the Internet, were neither more golden nor more leaden. They just WERE and the people in every time have varied in their ability to make the best of it. “Primitive” cultures were neither Eden nor necessarily hardscrabble. A culture of bone, hide, stone and feathers can be as elaborate and evocative as one of metal, silicon, electricity and radioactivity. After all, it’s always pretty much the same humans.

And again, I reject the notion that being younger is “better” than being older. Being a certain age can favor one person’s skills or another, but the point is to find out what you can do during the age you are, given the context of the times, rather than mourning over or glorifying the past, particularly when that glorious past was high school!

Another sequencing puzzle that I think will never be “solved” as good/better/best is that of the generations -- how the success of one converts to the failure of the next and then back again. Environment (both time and place), genetic endowment, and something elusive like expectations, all interact. Melding with this is one’s luck in finding other people or institutions who can protect and support. The right attitude and the right mentor make all the difference. Much of it is just pure dumb luck, but I don’t quite accept the idea that one is confined by fate to one alternative. I think there are always a set of responses that can affect the situation, even if they include passive acceptance, madness or physical escape.

The advantage of discarding all this baggage is that one is free to concentrate on the present moment, to extend one’s awareness. But one should not play it safe. It is always worthwhile to jump to a new context that will uncover whole new realms of alternatives, some of which might be vital to you, but all the while one must accept that some of them might simply kill you. (Homesteading, for instance.) On the other hand, one shouldn’t discard everything. I think one main plan and a couple of backups might be the right proportion.

Another discard category is that of awards, prizes, institutionally certified achievements and so on. I find them quite hollow. Obama’s peace prize in a time of war is not an exception. Ceremonies like ministerial ordination or Christian marriage are mockable and imitated with fake certificates. University degrees are unrecognized as the Ponzi schemes they can be: one cannot get them without pleasing the people in charge of the terms and then the receiver must validate that material by imposing it on the next generation. It’s a conserving system. To dissent is to be eliminated. Doing a thing and excelling at it ought to be its own reward. If others agree with your self-evaluation, it’s blessed. If you HAVE to jump hoops to get where you want to go, just do it. No preening.

But uniformities are dangerous: it only takes one small chink for the whole category to collapse, whether it is Irish potatoes or some culture now lost, maybe one that drank wine boiled in lead pots. Another trap is binary oppositions instead of integrations: right versus wrong instead of right variously interacting with wrong. And false continuums. To be human is to be part of a spectrum condition, but which spectrum and which end is advantageous is strictly situational. What could save your life in one predicament might wipe you out in an alternative dilemma. Being smart or strong or well-connected sound like good ideas, but if you didn’t bring your insecticide-treated mosquito netting and you’re living in malaria country, you’re no better off that the dumbest, weakest and most abandoned little kid. If the kid has sickle cell anemia, he or she might have a slight advantage, since that confers some resistance to malaria.

I had thought -- and been assured -- that the higher level of education I attained, the better the job I could get and therefore the easier life I would have. This turned out to be pretty misleading in several ways. One can “over” educate oneself right out of the job market -- in fact, this is easily true in small-town Montana -- or have the wrong kind of education. In fact, an attachment to place -- which I share with most of the people around here -- can undercut the kind of employment that our politicians insist on calling -- ungrammatically -- “good-paying jobs” because there aren’t any. (This place is great for people who have large chunks of capital for ranches or natural resources.)

When it comes to religion, what I want to discard is God. I’m not an atheist, an un-theist, an anti-theist -- I just don’t want to talk about theism. I think it’s a waste of time. There’s plenty of other subject matter that is religious and much more useful in daily life. I’m not inclined to deny others the right to talk about God, but they should be warned that from my point of view, they’re talking about their relationship to authority figures and not much more. More about that tomorrow.

PERMISSION TO KILL

Right now the Montana legislature is considering a rewrite of a law that permits home owners to kill intruders. Normally, these laws obligate a person in danger to try to escape before using deadly force in self-defense. There have always been a lot of jokes and tales about killing someone with one leg over the windowsill and then dragging them the rest of the way in, the same as cops are rumored to carry a gun to put in the hand of unarmed persons they have shot in error. Just now the conservative and guarded members of Montana society want permission to kill WITHOUT trying to avoid confrontation written into law. (They have also been making a run on the gunshops because it is rumored that Obama’s administration will confiscate all guns.)

Just a week or so ago I was talking to an elementary school counselor on the reservation who advised me with a shaking voice to get “a big mean cur” and at least a gun. Nothing has happened directly to her except a horse theft last summer, but there is a lot of talk about defects in police system. In fact, the biggest property theft she and her husband have suffered is the government impoundment of materials they were bringing back from Alaska for the fabrication of traditional artifacts. Senator Craig of Idaho, perhaps as a gesture of repentance, managed to get some of those hides and horns returned to them, but not the best (most valuable) objects. I will not get a gun.

That’s off my original subject, which is permission to kill. The law generally gives permission to kill (besides to 007) to a law officer, a soldier, a person defending himself or another person but not necessarily property, and -- in Oregon when I looked at the law there -- a person committing arson. That’s the obvious stuff.

There is another subtler form of “fatwah,” which is a positive command to kill, like the one Salman Rushdie has survived -- so far. When we first began to learn about fatwahs declared in the name of blasphemy, we thought it was a barbaric notion, unenforceable in a civilized country. Think again. Stigmatizing individuals or groups for their beliefs happens all the time. Attacking them verbally and violently is the great sport of the Internet. Aside from that, it’s easy and invisible to kill people in great numbers -- not by plunging airliners into skyscrapers, but by cutting off the funding for what might keep them alive. As I write this, the radio is talking about how Bush’s narrow moral dictates and polarizing us/them rhetoric have encouraged war and terrorism across the Middle East.

But let’s look at some more immediate cases. Earlier the radio was talking to Johnny Lee Clary, a KKK defector, who describes hate crimes and the initiation threat that defectors will be killed, a threat that caused one mentally ill woman to so panic that she tried to run from the ceremony -- whereupon she was killed. It is assumed that being threatened with death is the worst. For Johnny Lee Clary, being associated with the KKK -- even after he defected publicly -- eliminated his wrestling career and his gym business. He was shunned, that is, he suffered not physical death but virtual death: the pretense that he didn’t exist. Now, of course, he’s been on Oprah so he’s documented. The price was simply repentance. Now he’s a member of the Big O, a major economic advantage.

The theory is that no print attack is harmful to a person whose living is publicity-based. So long as they spell your name right, says Barnum. But real shunning eliminates publicity. For some people, who cannot accept this kind of nonexistence, they up the ante, like a child who taunts an abusive parent, feeling that even a beating is better than being ignored. The more you ignore them, the more outrageous they get and the more everyone agrees that they deserve what they get, which is the child’s deepest conviction.

One way of handling death threats is a kind of fatalism, accepting death -- maybe even longing for it, trying to trip the cops into shooting you. Another is to keep one’s adrenaline level so high that ordinary reason is taken off-line.

Mary Gordon relates on the NY Times blog, “Papercuts:” “. . . a man is standing in the middle of the road raving. Raving like an animal. Weaving in and out of traffic, raving unintelligibly. He is wearing a distressingly festive sky-blue or robin’s egg blue parka. I call 911. I stand on the corner watching, waiting for the cops. No one comes for 10 minutes. Then I see a friend. This gives me the courage to approach the raving man. I say: “You must get out of the street, you need help. I’ve called someone to help you.” He looks at me with hatred. “Why did you do that, why did you do that?” he says, and he runs into the subway. I want to tell him: “I didn’t want you to be killed by a car.” But I have no idea what he might want. Or if I finally approached him because I wanted to be seen by my friend as a compassionate and courageous person.”

The curse of a reflective writer is looking at all sides of the issue. The curse of the shunned writer living with death threats is quite different. How can they look at all sides? The only issue is how to survive. The great gift of all writers is to pay attention and tell the story.

Bob Scriver, to whom I was married in the Sixties, was threatened with death by self-righteous red-empowerment local tribal members. They put a curse on the curator of the then Alberta Provincial Museum, who subsequently died from a rare cancer. The announced intention with Scriver was to rope him and drag him, which was a way a local tribal law enforcement officer had been killed in those days. This sort of thing puts a worm in your heart that is hard to remove and that spreads from one person to another. For Bob, every bad thing that happened after that was caused by the threat and many white people believed him, adding to their conviction of us/them dynamics.

We are all hoping that Barack Obama will change the terms of the culture, but he can’t do it without the help of the rest of us.