Mar
4
So, Um, What’s the Value of a Liberal Arts Education Again?
Filed Under academia, education | 3 Comments
From John Lingan’s “They’re All Zombies,” about a new craze sweeping colleges nationwide:
Now that the game has been embraced by students at a dozen-odd other colleges, we can see its proponents for what they really are: kids who view college as a four-year playground.
These students exists at any school—hence the popularity of H v. Z at bigger campuses like the University of Maryland and Bowling Green State—but it’s telling that this game originated on a 1350-person campus like Goucher’s; something about the self-contained small communities of liberal arts colleges enables students to waste their time in such needlessly complicated ways. As a recent alumnus of such a school, I’ve seen that most undergraduate humanities majors were able obtain a GPA in the B range while doing barely any work. (The same can’t be said for science majors, it should be noted.) I have no idea what kind of work ethic Temkin and his cohorts have, nor do I know the average grades of H v. Z players, but they are familiar types insofar as the Post portrays them.
Their confidence suddenly boosted after leaving high school (and home), these proudly “weird” kids find themselves with a dearth of necessary schoolwork and a whole new audience to impress with their superficial quirks. Maybe they wear a funky hat or cut their hair into a Mohawk. Maybe they stop wearing shoes around campus or start throwing a Frisbee in obviously inappropriate spots. Or maybe they buy 10 Nerf guns and stop going to class, the better to focus on their 24-hour-a-day zombie fantasy. “[A] player’s life can be entirely consumed by the game” during H v. Z, writes Quindecim interviewer Asa Eisenhardt. The Post article abounds with descriptions of the participants’ months-long preparation, the time-consuming strategy involved, and, of course, the necessary hours spent convincing the administration that H v. Z is a legitimate way to spend time.
I wasn’t the greatest student in undergrad, I admit. I was terrible at German and while I read lots of books, I didn’t read any of them well. Still, I posted this elsewhere on the Internet, and it’s definitely true:
Between sophomore and junior year I felt dumb, so I read all three of Rousseau’s Discourses that summer, the Social Contract, as well as Mill’s “On Liberty” and “Utilitarianism.” Then that junior year, I had Western Political Thought, so that was Aeschylus, Plato, Aristotle Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas (each in brief), and then the second semester junior year was a course on Wittgenstein (the C+ I’m proudest of), and I wrote some 30 odd pages on “Paradise Lost,” which I must have read something like 10 or 20 secondary sources (about 3 or 4 full length books were just a few of those sources) on.
And from then on, I took as much philosophy as I possibly could – the semester after that was Descartes, Locke, Leibniz; an intro to logic course that was fairly demanding; a classical phil. course that covered the Presocratics, some Plato, some Aristotle… you get the idea. Again, I didn’t read much well, but no one can say I didn’t try. So it is heartening for me to see statements like John Strassburger’s “For the Liberal Arts, Rhetoric is Not Enough:”
The faculty developed a two-semester program required of all first-year students, what became known as the “Common Intellectual Experience.” It involved professors from across all the departments teaching in small sections, having students reading seminal thinkers from East and West to confront the “big questions”—those reflecting on the meaning of life, purpose, and values.
Over the years, writers like Plato and texts such as Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and the Bhagavad Gita, along with those by Descartes, Darwin, and other leading thinkers have ignited heady discussions among students.
Creating that two-semester course around the big questions supposedly at the heart of liberal education was more or less a leap into the pool without checking for water first. It was an act of faith. But it turns out that what we suspected all along is, in fact, true. Anyone spending time with 18-year-olds knows that they are consumed with moral questions, mostly in terms that Immanuel Kant would recognize. They want to know about their obligations to their families, girlfriends, boyfriends, or teammates. They wonder if being rich will bring happiness, or whether happiness will be found in relationships or through serving others. Of course, they also wonder if they will be good at something—good enough to make a decent living or even to excel—and whether they will become wealthy or famous. [emphasis mine]
Strassburger’s statement is good enough that I would use it as my own introduction to the liberal arts. And yet, you will notice that one of the colleges Strassburger cites as working in his own school’s vein is Goucher, the school that brought us the H v. Z game.
I can preach all day, but I’d rather leave off here and go into Philadelphia and take a walk. Comments are requested. I’ll just say this: I do poems on the blog because 1) they’re entire texts, despite being short 2) they push you to speak another’s voice aloud and see as they see, hear as they hear. Moral questions are important, so important they probably need to be the center of campus life, and most certainly part of daily life. Of Socrates it was said that he never stopped asking what justice and virtue were.
Jan
18
Briefly Noted: James W. Ceaser, “The Roots of Obama Worship”
Filed Under academia, politics | 2 Comments
James W. Ceaser, “The Roots of Obama Worship”
James Ceaser has written credible and thoughtful articles before. In fact, I think it’s from him that I learned the Electoral College was designed so that not one popular vote was cast for the President.
The article I’ve linked to above – which I am not too fond of – argues that “Obama Worship” stems from a “Religion of Humanity” that can actually literally be traced back in our culture. When discussing the “Religion of Humanity” and its founder, Ceaser is at his strongest. A look at the founder, Auguste Comte:
Mill and Croly were both intellectual disciples of the French social philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1857). Though rarely studied in America today, Comte bequeathed an enormous legacy. He was the first to simplify and popularize the idea of a progressive movement of history, which he described as proceeding through three great epochs: the age of theological thinking, the age of metaphysical thinking, and the age of scientific or “Positivistic” thinking. (“Positivism,” referring to the scientific mindset and approach, was one of Comte’s many linguistic inventions.) The inevitable march of humanity (still with a small h) through these stages, albeit at different rates in different places, was the great story of history. Variations among nations and groups might continue, but they paled in significance next to the common destiny of humanity. Those who continued to view the world in terms of nations and their conflicts—Comte called them “retrogrades”—were caught in old thinking, unable to grasp the new global order being formed by the forces generated by Positivism.
Comte argued that it was time to expand man’s scientific knowledge of the physical world to the social realm. A new science of society, “sociology” (Comte’s term), was the latest and highest of all the sciences. Possession of knowledge of the laws of social movement was what ideally bestowed the title to rule. Comte and his circle were never much impressed by democracy and favored instead one system or another of governance by experts. (Saint-Simon, for whom Comte worked for many years, once proposed running society with “Councils of Newton.”)
But there was an important twist to Comte’s praise of science. In contrast to many who thought that the scientific method and scientific values were sufficient to bind society together, Comte insisted that people had to believe. As faith in the transcendent was no longer -possible in the Positivist age, he called for “replacing God with Humanity.” The aim of this religion without God was to build a global community that assured the betterment of man’s lot.
So far, nothing shocking here. There are liberals and progressives like this in every age – you could say the Presocratics are New Age. And it isn’t shocking that some important elements of popular or elite culture are influenced directly by this stuff:
The rise of the Religion of Humanity is what best describes this event. This strange term designates an actual sect, now defunct, that enjoyed a considerable following and prestige in intellectual circles in the 19th century. John Stuart Mill was a prominent convert, pronouncing the “culte de l’humanité [to be] capable of fully supplying the place for a religion, or rather (to say the truth) of being a religion.” In America, where the religion wore the respectable label of the “Church of Humanity,” the acolytes included the well-known journalist David Croly and his son Herbert, the founder and longtime editor of the New Republic. If it were not for the Religion of Humanity, Americans today might not have the pleasure of reading Jonathan Chait on “The Rise of Republican Nihilism” or E.J. Dionne “In Praise of Harry Reid.”
Alright, cute. I’m not The New Republic’s biggest fan, although they’ve done some credible and necessary work before – the expose of Ron Paul’s bigotry should be required reading for everyone in the United States, especially Republicans and libertarians.
But what I’ve quoted above is about all in the article that one can learn from. For then Ceaser takes a pretty simple proposition – that Obama ran a messianic-themed campaign, with himself as the center – and implies strongly that what’s happening is a lot more menacing. On some issues, of course, he’s exactly correct:
The conflicting demands of the Religion of Humanity and the presidency of the United States have become most apparent in the administration’s approach to dealing with the threat of Islamic terrorism. The Religion of Humanity, by its own reckoning, admits to facing challenges from two quarters: from those who have not yet fully entered the age of Positivism, which includes the terrorists, and from those who are part of the advanced world but who refuse to embrace it, which includes the likes of George W. Bush. In the present situation, these two groups are understood to have a symbiotic relationship. The existence of the terrorists is regrettable, not only because of the physical threat that they pose, but also because, by doing so, they risk strengthening the hand of those in the West who reject the Religion of Humanity. Supporters of the Religion of Humanity therefore believe they have good reason to deny or minimize the danger of terrorism in order to save the world from the even greater danger of the triumph of the retrograde forces. This is the dogmatic basis of political correctness, and Obama and his team have gone to considerable lengths by their policies and by their use of language to hide reality. But reality has a way of asserting itself, and it is becoming clearer by the day that being the leader of Humanity is incompatible with being the president of the United States.
You won’t get any complaints from me on this score. The administration does not take security seriously enough in my opinion; they did come into office thinking that these issues weren’t so important, and acted that way for the longest time. And there are lots of people who should know better that agreed with the administration’s initial priorities. However, I wouldn’t use a lot of “Religion of Humanity” language to make that case. I wouldn’t even say that President Bush represented some fundamental threat to deeply held progressive beliefs that are basically cultish. The sneering hatred for the former President is only dogmatic as much as laziness is dogmatic.
It’s Ceaser’s consistent attempts to tie this “Religion of Humanity” language exactly to what is happening today that make his article read like a satire, but I’m not sure who the joke is on. Consider these two passages:
Barack Obama’s coming served as the galvanizing force to carry the day for the cause of progress. Although Obama never conceived himself as playing a universal role when he launched his presidential bid, he awakened at some point in the campaign to the realization that he was no longer running merely for president of the United States. He was being selected for the much grander “office” of leader of a new world community. His credentials for this position were impeccable. Humanity as a concept formally includes everyone, but it is especially favorable to those who have previously been excluded from full recognition. (The old aristocrats, in Comte’s description, were hardly part of Humanity.)
Having decided as a young man to identify himself as African-American, Obama was in the category of the dispossessed, a member of a race against which some of the greatest crimes in history were perpetrated. This fact immediately commended him to Western intellectuals at the same time that it enabled him to be the plausible representative of the teeming masses of the Third World. No one from a privileged race could ever have fulfilled this role. Just as important was the fact that Obama is not purely African-American, but a product of amalgamation, what the French approvingly call métissage and Harry Reid describes less felicitously as being “light skinned.” Obama is postracial or, as he himself put it, a “mutt.” This look, favored among international fashion models, represents physically the common denominator of humanity. Religiously, too, Obama, though a Christian, has ties through his father to Islam, a fact he proclaims on some of his overseas trips. He was the embodiment of all men. Finally, while holding these biological qualities of both the dispossessed and of humanity, Obama is a member of the clerisy of the Religion of Humanity, having been credentialed at Columbia, Harvard, and Chicago and stamped as one holding progressive views.
Professor Ceaser, what on earth are you babbling about? You sound like a New World Order conspiracy theorist, and I don’t even want to touch the stuff on race. A quick glance at nearly any conservative blog’s comments will reveal exactly why your comments above are very, very problematic. When people put forward things like this online, it’s usually accompanied by “9/11 was an inside job” and “global warming is about global government.” Regarding the latter, you write:
There is one point, however, on which Comte’s idea of the Religion of Humanity, was inadequate. Social improvement, however admirable, was too elevated a goal to mobilize people and sustain their devotion. The contemporary movement has gone beyond the original to discover a new and firmer basis for promoting solidarity in the great cause of confronting climate change. Here is a project that can unite people in waging the moral equivalent of war against a common threat. The liturgy has been vastly strengthened by allowing the ecological soldiers to glimpse the moment of their glorious triumph, when, in candidate Obama’s words, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.” This moment marked the dividing time between the pre- and post-Obama eras. The cause is also perfect in its “positivity,” since the threat can only be properly gauged by the disinterested research of the “best science,” the practitioners of which must be granted a central role in planning strategy. Although the recent Copenhagen conference on climate change ended in disappointment (even with Obama’s last minute intervention), the cause has lost none of its appeal. It is the subtext of James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar, which represents the next “flashpoint” in the evolutionary development of Humanity.
Oh yeah, that paragraph isn’t going to empower the Glenn Becks of the world. I realize you’ll tell me to look at the “Religion of Humanity” argument as you sketched it before in the piece, and not take the hyperbole literally at all. After all, you did mention that after the “theological” age, there’s a “metaphysical” and “positivist” age, and you’re not terribly subtle about making allusions in these paragraphs to “metaphysics” or “positivism.”
But here’s what I’m going to say: You’re not writing for conservatives that, for the most part, can tell the difference between their crackpot fantasies and reality. Your piece is going to be lapped up by every nut that thinks that liberals are wrong about everything, that free markets and people going to work alone could save a place like Gary, Indiana or North Philadelphia, and that the UN is planning to take over Michigan. Believe me: I’ve seen some of the next generation of conservatives and their parents. You cannot underestimate the amount of actual fear of anything different that I’ve seen, and I am seeing among people my age some very ugly attitudes about race (obviously there are conservatives who are seriously good people and cannot be empowered enough. But I’d be lying if I said they were the most vocal right now). I do not want to mention names, but believe me, outside of UVA and Stanford racism is alive and well and still nasty, nasty stuff. I love this country, but I would be crazy to ignore cases like this:
The most striking impression I get is the pervasive, suffocating role race plays in everyday life. The fear and paranoia from black residents can be overwhelming. But even to someone generally skeptical about claims of racial discrimination (as I am), it’s utterly convincing. When people in the area talk about why they don’t trust law enforcement, you hear the same cops named over and over again. You hear about many of the same incidents, then learn that the officers involved never really stop policing; they just move from one department to another. It takes me just a few hours in Prentiss to find another woman who says she too was on the receiving end of a violent, forced-entry drug raid. Though the police didn’t find the meth lab they were looking for, they nevertheless jailed her brother for months (he couldn’t afford bond) before releasing him without explanation. The Monticello County Sheriff’s Department, where the man was jailed, claims he was bound over to circuit court for trial. But eight months later, he has yet to be charged or tried.
And it’s not just civilians who make such accusations. One black officer warns me not to trust what I hear from white cops in the area. “The badge and the gun don’t mean anything,” the officer says. “It doesn’t mean they found what they say they found.”
Mississippi has tried to make amends for its past, but some areas of the state still lag behind the rest of the country when it comes to race. Jefferson Davis County is one of them. “Jackson’s a pretty modern city,” says Andre de Gruy, the earnest, eloquent young lawyer who heads up the state’s legal aid program for death row inmates. De Gruy, a white man in his 30s, works with two other lawyers in a modest office overlooking the dig where the state’s new Supreme Court will be built. “In the northwest, you have the Memphis suburbs,” he continues. “The Gulf Coast development down around the casinos is comparatively enlightened too.” He pauses. “But just about everywhere else, this is still Mississippi.”
Another defense attorney is blunter. “We don’t lynch black people outside of Mississippi courthouses anymore,” he says. “But we still lynch them on the inside.”
Now I realize the article above is from 2006. But my point is that 2006 did look like 1950 for some people, and I’m not ready to say that 2010 is any different with certainty. I’m not saying liberals are right about everything. What I am saying is that you could have made the case against what the Obama campaign stood for much more easily. You could have hit them hard for being intellectually lazy and just feeding off of Bush hatred to get power: is it really worth destroying one person’s name to get power? (In case you’re wondering what Bush did right that isn’t debatable: The Africa record) You could have hit them for having these liberal fantasies and not knowing about Comte; you could have talked about the good work done by Mill in advancing democracy, and talked about how progressive ideas have a good and a bad side, not just a bad one. You could have hit them for their lack of balance and cultishness not by going after the administration or the campaign, but by talking about the relation between progressivism, education and mass media: if progressives feel everyone has to be educated, does that force them to rely on mass media more than giving the best education possible? Finally, you could have hit all of us for creating a messianic sort of politics. I’ve critiqued that on a more basic level in “Why do we need a party?,” but two words suffice if you don’t believe the Right has its Messiah too, complete with a reactionary bent that makes postpartisanship look like the most brilliant idea since the wheel: Sarah Palin. You’re only looking at liberal elites and what they “think.” Those of us that really know how to think should be the ones you’re talking to and bouncing ideas off of before writing.
Dec
17
Kevin Carey, “That Old College Lie”
The article is excellent and should be read by as many as possible as soon as possible. The primary call is for information:
American colleges grant more than 300,000 bachelor’s degrees in business every year. Whose graduates are most successful in business? There are anecdotes, but no available, comparable data. Nobody really knows. Which teacher education program best prepares candidates to excel in the classroom? Nobody knows. Nearly every college teaches introductory courses like calculus and English. Where are the best calculus and English professors? Who is most successful in preparing students for law and medical schools? Whose graduates make unusual contributions to philanthropy and the arts? Who teaches writing well, given the academic preparation of the students they enroll? Who teaches anything well? Nobody knows.
Very powerful interest groups within the university, of course, do not want any information about what their students learn and its utility to be shared at all:
To get colleges to participate in their surveys and tests, NSSE and the CLA had to strike a bargain. Colleges would control the results–the data would remain secret unless colleges chose otherwise. Then, in 2006, Mark Schneider, the commissioner of the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, proposed adding some new questions to the annual survey all colleges are required to fill out in exchange for federal funds. Colleges would be asked if they participated in surveys and tests like NSSE and the CLA. If the college answered “yes,” and had already chosen to make the data public, it would be asked to provide a link to the appropriate Web address. It would not be required to participate in any test or survey not of its choosing, or disclose any new information. It would just have to tell people where to find the information it had already, voluntarily, disclosed. One Dupont Circle rose up in anger and the proposal was summarily squashed. For his temerity, Schneider was nearly fired.
And I don’t think I need to tell any of you how serious a crisis we face in American education as a result of garbage like this:
….When Pell grants were named for the senator in 1980, a typical public four-year university cost $2,551 annually. Pell Grants provided $1,750, almost 70 percent of the total. Even private colleges cost only about $5,600 back then. Low-income students could matriculate with little fear of financial hardship, as Pell intended. Over the next three decades, Congress poured vast sums into the program, increasing annual funding from $2 billion to nearly $20 billion. Yet today, Pell Grants cover only 33 percent of the cost of attending a public university. Why? Because prices have increased nearly 500 percent since 1980. Average private college costs, meanwhile, rose to over $34,000 per year.
….The average graduation rate at four-year colleges in the bottom half of the Barron’s taxonomy of admissions selectivity is only 45 percent. And that’s just the average–at scores of colleges, graduation rates are below 30 percent, and wide disparities persist for students of color. Along with community colleges, where only one in three students earns a degree, these low-performing institutions educate the large majority of Pell Grant recipients. Less than 40 percent of low-income students who start college get a degree of any kind within six years.
….A 2006 study from the American Institutes for Research found that only 31 percent of adults with bachelor’s degrees are proficient in “prose literacy”–being able to compare and contrast two newspaper editorials, for example.
….Ten percent of the U.S. News rankings are based on spending per student, with additional points for high faculty salaries and other costly items. If an innovative college found a way to become more efficient and charge less while maintaining academic quality, its U.S. News ranking would actually go down.
….The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education recently found that the total increase in college tuition from 1983 to 2007 (439 percent) far outpaced the rise in median family income (147 percent) and even the medical care costs (251 percent) that are threatening to bankrupt the nation.
Alright. I do have some quibbles with the article:
- Yeah, it’s elitism, but it needs to be addressed – no amount of information can tell you who can or cannot be taught if you neglect that issue from the very beginning for egalitarian reasons.
- Related to that: this article does not take seriously whether colleges admit too many to begin with.
- A utilitarian model strictly can only help those in fields like mine – political philosophy, for example – indirectly. While I’m all for greater access to information, I do worry that an already materialistic public will become even worse. Higher learning does have to be “higher” in some sense.
- There are some reasons to believe that colleges are actually quite good: I mean, one does get to work with people who strive for new knowledge in their fields and are experts. Again, the fact that students from our grade school and high school systems cannot appreciate what they’re getting should be a concern. I do believe in higher education reform, but is a college really in the business of teaching people how to read? That seems to be what the article is implying. Education reform has to be complete; there are failures all over the system.
Josh and I were talking about the issue of what could have made college better, and I think we concluded that some sort of comprehensive exam given senior year would have been a huge help. Definitely in grad school qualifying and comprehensive exams helped me put a large number of issues from various classes into a whole that had to be defended. It’s not just a useful exercise: it pushes the school to be a bit clearer about what it is educating in, while allowing students to take a reasonable diversity of classes. (Schools may have to institute a few core classes to have such an exam, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all – the core at the University of Dallas works in my experience. I would never insist a school do the exact same thing as Dallas, but a bit of openness to that idea wouldn’t be a bad thing).
Moreover, if a school takes the exam and its preparation seriously, it should realize that it has something with which to sell its students to employers and graduate schools: “look, our students learned X,Y,Z and passed proficiency tests.” A good school should be marketing its students and working to get them employed; that for-profit colleges don’t care whether their students get employed is a sign of what a racket higher education has become. Which brings us back to the main point of agreement between Mr. Carey and I – if a school cared, the students would be better and they would be treated better by the school and the world at large.
Oct
9
Should Political Science Receive Money from the Federal Government?
Filed Under academia, politics | Leave a Comment
I only indirectly am involved in this fight: given the nature of what I do, I might apply one day for an NEH grant if it were possible. I doubt I’ll be studying electoral models or conducting surveys any time soon, and applying to the NSF for a grant is rather unlikely for me.
I also think Sen. Coburn could have made his case very simply by saying “it would be worth paying for the research if we had the money. We don’t at the time.” Implicitly, this means I agree with Dan Drezner – “basic research in the… social sciences is a public good.” A good example of electoral politics done well (but receives $0 federal funding, I imagine) is Jay Cost’s HorseRaceBlog, which I depend on to keep up with trends in the American/electoral politics part of my field (it helps, to my discredit, that the writing style is popular and it doesn’t get heavy with statistics).
But instead, Sen. Coburn had to say this:
Theories on political behavior are best left to CNN, pollsters, pundits, historians, candidates, political parties, and the voters, rather than being funded out of taxpayers’ wallets, especially when our nation has more urgent needs and priorities.
I’ve often said that conservatives are hostile to education, and I’ll repeat that here: if you can’t tell the difference between a comprehensive scientific survey into voter attitudes and engagement geared toward a specific, academic question (i.e. how is party identification achieved, with what levels of knowledge are people going to the polls), versus a poll CNN runs during one of its shows in order to demonstrate that everyone agrees with the host, well.
Moreover, Senator Coburn really hurts his case when one considers how little money is at stake – we’re talking $100 million the last 10 years ($325 million, though, last year alone when one includes the study of economics. Hmm.). Again, I think it can be cut; he can also advance the case that the hard sciences more desperately need the money at this point. But he chooses to advance the latter case in such a way as to attack anyone and everyone who studies politics with deeper questions in mind. Ultimately, he’s making a case that there shouldn’t be such a thing as political science that is federally funded in any way: it should be cut, according to this logic, from every state university and private institution receiving federal funds. After all, why is any money spent on political science a good thing?
I don’t know how to respond because I don’t like advancing the case that learning is useful: it isn’t a useful thing for you to know about the Gettysburg Address or the Federalist, or to know how other people in the US think and feel aside from what professional pundits and people openly lusting for power say. Ultimately, democracy itself isn’t a useful thing: one who knows better ruling simply – a very smart despot, a “philosopher-king” – would probably be the best form of government. At some point, the criteria for “who is educated” stand far away from utility. I’m not saying political science in its present form is a precondition for democracy (although – a defense of political science that is very rigorous: Aristotle, Nic. Ethics 1094a28 – 1094b12), but I am saying the line of questioning pursued is a dangerous thing to abandon. If you believe politics is reducible to populism, then Senator Coburn is correct, as is Nancy Pelosi, both at once: our tools for differentiating between the two are inadmissible. While political science nowadays isn’t concerned with “the good,” it is most certainly concerned with identifying formal aspects of political behavior that are most useful to us who are concerned with what is best, and do not need crude populism to argue for budget cuts partly because we study political science.
Sep
30
What does success on the Internet look like?
Filed Under academia, blogging, education | 3 Comments
Still thinking about how all this adds up, if it does. I’m aware there are gaps in the reasoning.
1. Been saying to people recently stuff like “look at the top bloggers, look at Kos, who basically transformed the Democratic party into his vision – no one knows who these people are, yet you can nearly rule the world from here.” I’m not saying I’m right, but that’s one starting point for this inquiry.
2. The other could be this wonderful interview with Felicia Day (h/t Josh), where she says this:
Wired.com: Has The Guild helped your acting career?
Day: It’s very funny. No. It’s a little frustrating. Having done this for two years, I’ve gotten used to the fact that it’s not going to cross over. Occasionally I’ll see a writer who knows about the show. I have fewer auditions now than before I started The Guild because I have less time to concentrate on my acting career. In an ideal world, people would be offering me roles or at least I’d get more appointments and so would my cast members.
Wired.com: How about the other cast members?
Day: I would love them to work more as actors. It’s very weird to live in two different worlds — where we’re very popular, almost celebrities. And then when I go in to audition, the people in the waiting room recognize me as Felicia Day, the person who does The Guild, but when I go, in very few of the people who could hire me to do the job recognize what I do. It’s a very interesting place to be and I’ve gotten over the fact that that might not change.
3. Finally, a brief note about what those formally invested in education are doing (the case of established success):
In 1990, Harvard had an endowment of about $4.7-billion. That was still a lot of money, about $7.7-billion in today’s dollars. Only five other universities have that much money now. Over the next two decades the pile grew to colossal heights, $36.9-billion by mid-2008.
Harvard spent the money on many things. But not a dollar went to increasing the number of undergraduates it chose to bless with a Harvard education. In 1990 the university welcomed slightly more than 1,600 students to its freshman class. In 2008, $32-billion later, it enrolled slightly more than 1,600 freshmen.
That is remarkable stinginess. Harvard undergraduate degrees are immensely valuable, conferring a lifetime of social capital and prestige. The university receives many more highly qualified applicants than it chooses to admit. Because the existing class includes underqualified children of legacies, rich people, politicians, celebrities, and others who benefit from the questionable Ivy League admissions process, Harvard could presumably increase the size of its entering class by, say, 50 percent while improving the overall academic quality of the students it admits.
Granted, it would cost money to teach more students. The university would need to invest in land and buildings and professors. But that’s precisely what the university spent the endowment on. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences alone expanded by more than 125 positions over the past decade and increased spending by hundreds of millions of dollars. The university gobbled up nearby land and erected a collection of handsome new buildings, creating over six million square feet of new space since 2000 alone. Yet none of the brilliant new people and buildings and land were used to give more undergrads a Harvard education.
4. Let’s start adding this together: we know there are real world needs and wants, and we know that there are content-producers on the Internet that can help satisfy (i.e. “The Guild” can help other people relate to more intense gamers; if you read everything I have on Dickinson carefully you’d probably be much better in your English classes, or at least sound like a nutcase) and – this is the kicker – satisfaction is had, actual power is obtained, attention is gotten yet no knows who you are or how they can even use you.
The weird thing about the Internet is that you’re getting attention from a select group of people, but it’s like you’re operating in another spectrum of mass media. The Internet is mass media, but it doesn’t cross over into the continuous tv/cable stream or newspapers or radio the same way those things get spliced into online culture. It makes a lot of sense to talk about the “entrenchment” of more traditional, mainstream media: it isn’t like the content offered is of the highest quality: it’s pretty clear there’s a lot more that goes into some 5 minute shows than to much on television currently.
I think it also makes a lot of sense to talk about “money” and how far that goes. I brought up Harvard because Harvard isn’t merely symbolic – it is the literal instantiation of our reasoning that money creates educated people. We may think, when we actually focus on the problem, that such an assumption is absurd. But the truth is we’re operating on that premise – or something very close to it – every day. It’s no shock to me that Kos got a lot of his power by showing he could fundraise; money commands the attention of those who would rule. And Day is pretty clear that a little bit more money for her show can go a long, long way, although there is a limit of diminishing returns that can be reached quickly. Part of the reason why mainstream media is entrenched is that money established a mode of discourse, a mode of thought: no one talks about political issues the way I do on television. There’s a format, people are used to it, they can get the gist of what everyone’s saying without paying attention to a single word.
No amount of money is going to help the Web break that last monopoly, not for some time. What money represents – its impact on all our education – is that learning can be convenient, politics can be user-friendly and entirely about expressing oneself, and entertainment need not challenge us to be better. When you consider the labor of love it takes to do anything well (read the Day interview and contrast with what most Harvard students are up to) it becomes clear that money isn’t corrupting necessarily, but sets the stage for the worst sort of complacency.
So what success on the Internet looks like is what it is now: for the most part, fairly modest even when one gets a “hit.” One gets attention because one is authentic for the most part. When success on the Internet changes, we’ll have to look for a new medium entirely for the sake of cultivating the things that matter.