Monday, November 20, 2006
Students and Iraq/Palestine/Israel Protests on Campus
Recently, I've been to a number of anti-war events on campus and have been really surprised by the lack of attendance. They have a vaguely retro feel to them. There are people playing songs on guitars about Irish people fighting for the Mexican side in the Mexican-American war, and lots of really old people. And I wonder if that isn't part of the reason it's difficult to get students on campus interested in such issues, because of the tendency of thinking of antiwar protestors as being the nostalgic memories of their mother--or grandmother--in their younger years. There's also a fundamental lack of knowledge of more than the basic geography or issues in the region and of how issues interact. What do these issues all have to do with one another? Which nation is developing nuclear reactions? Even--shockingly--what was the cold war? Many students in their late teens or early twenties simply don't know. And when you don't really know what's going on except for being inculcated with the idea that the "Iraq war is going badly," then how can you be outraged?
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
To Wikipedia or Not to Wikipedia?
Should students be allowed to cite wikipedia in their papers? Can wikipedia be a good classroom source? What should its purpose be?
I write about this question from the perspective, I think, of a distinct minority of professors. I think wikipedia is awesome and that its use should be encouraged. I know that I am in the minority, however, when even wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, objects to the citing of wikipedia as an academic source ("Wikipedia's Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation," Chronicle of Higher Education (12 June 2006)).
To me, the attitude of most professors against wikipedia boils down to a elitist need to maintain their academic authority and an entrenched notion of individual and property rights.
Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia to which anyone can add or delete information. It shares this format with open-source computer software and operating systems like linux. Your average Joe can go into a linux program at any time to change the code and make programs run better. Today, most people in the academy accept the notion that linux operating systems crash less and run more streamlined programs than Microsoft, with their veritable army of highly qualified programmers. This is simply because open sourcing is a better format. If something does not work or is not right, it can be changed by anyone. It logically follows that if this works for linux, it ought to work for wikipedia as well. So wikipedia is the ultimate peer-reviewed source. Rather than just having one or two peers review the data, literally tens of thousands of people can examine a text and change it as necessary.
If this is the case, then why are so many professors dead-set against using wikipedia? The answer is simple: elitist self-preservation. Professors are inculcated to believe in an established system in which terminal degrees like Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s and J.D. are supposed to give them a kind of higher authority to speak on topics than students or average people have. And perhaps some professors do have greater knowledge than most average people. But if professors dislike content on wikipedia or think that this content is inaccurate or unreliable, they're always welcome to go change it themselves. Why is this insufficient? Because terminal degrees do more than authorize knowledge; they actually operate as exclusive gatekeepers. Normal people aren't supposed to be able to speak on topics; they have to be excluded.
Professors also don't like wikipedia because it goes against the academic mentality of individual intellectual ownership. This mentality, whose roots can ultimately traced to an uncritical acceptance of capitalism, is that ideas are owned individually, and not collectively, and that students learn most effectively by writing down their "own" ideas or by culling ideas from "authoritative sources" with Ph.D.'s who write books that no one at all would read if professors didn't keep handing out these research assignments. This is the same mentality that allows Metallica to make millions of dollars while they criticize poor students for downloading their incoherent music and allows drug companies to charge $200 a bottle for needed medications for AIDS because they own the "patent" or the "trademark" even while people who can't afford the drugs die. Needless to say, this notion, that only individuals can create texts, is also Eurocentric. Many ancient philosophical works from the rest of the world were the product of many different authors.
Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't like students to turn in a paper that only contained footnotes from wikipedia. But that's simply because students should expose themselves to a variety of types, formats, and ideas in sources, and wikipedia is only one of many possible sources. But professors should think twice about what values they are trying to support before they ban the use of wikipedia in their classrooms.
I write about this question from the perspective, I think, of a distinct minority of professors. I think wikipedia is awesome and that its use should be encouraged. I know that I am in the minority, however, when even wikipedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, objects to the citing of wikipedia as an academic source ("Wikipedia's Founder Discourages Academic Use of His Creation," Chronicle of Higher Education (12 June 2006)).
To me, the attitude of most professors against wikipedia boils down to a elitist need to maintain their academic authority and an entrenched notion of individual and property rights.
Wikipedia is an open-source encyclopedia to which anyone can add or delete information. It shares this format with open-source computer software and operating systems like linux. Your average Joe can go into a linux program at any time to change the code and make programs run better. Today, most people in the academy accept the notion that linux operating systems crash less and run more streamlined programs than Microsoft, with their veritable army of highly qualified programmers. This is simply because open sourcing is a better format. If something does not work or is not right, it can be changed by anyone. It logically follows that if this works for linux, it ought to work for wikipedia as well. So wikipedia is the ultimate peer-reviewed source. Rather than just having one or two peers review the data, literally tens of thousands of people can examine a text and change it as necessary.
If this is the case, then why are so many professors dead-set against using wikipedia? The answer is simple: elitist self-preservation. Professors are inculcated to believe in an established system in which terminal degrees like Ph.D.s and Ed.D.s and J.D. are supposed to give them a kind of higher authority to speak on topics than students or average people have. And perhaps some professors do have greater knowledge than most average people. But if professors dislike content on wikipedia or think that this content is inaccurate or unreliable, they're always welcome to go change it themselves. Why is this insufficient? Because terminal degrees do more than authorize knowledge; they actually operate as exclusive gatekeepers. Normal people aren't supposed to be able to speak on topics; they have to be excluded.
Professors also don't like wikipedia because it goes against the academic mentality of individual intellectual ownership. This mentality, whose roots can ultimately traced to an uncritical acceptance of capitalism, is that ideas are owned individually, and not collectively, and that students learn most effectively by writing down their "own" ideas or by culling ideas from "authoritative sources" with Ph.D.'s who write books that no one at all would read if professors didn't keep handing out these research assignments. This is the same mentality that allows Metallica to make millions of dollars while they criticize poor students for downloading their incoherent music and allows drug companies to charge $200 a bottle for needed medications for AIDS because they own the "patent" or the "trademark" even while people who can't afford the drugs die. Needless to say, this notion, that only individuals can create texts, is also Eurocentric. Many ancient philosophical works from the rest of the world were the product of many different authors.
Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't like students to turn in a paper that only contained footnotes from wikipedia. But that's simply because students should expose themselves to a variety of types, formats, and ideas in sources, and wikipedia is only one of many possible sources. But professors should think twice about what values they are trying to support before they ban the use of wikipedia in their classrooms.
Tuesday, November 14, 2006
WestConn and the Immigration Debate
This week's version of the Echo features a trenchant letter to the editor by Paul Streitz, the Co-Director of Connecticut Citizens for Immigration Control ("Letter from Paul Streitz," The Echo: WCSU Student Newspaper LII: 7 (14 Nov. 2006), 8). In his letter, Streitz crititizes a recent online article written by Alex Standish, an Assistant Professor of Geography at WestConn. Standish's online article, "Is there still room for the 'huddled masses'?: Mid-term Elections: A Missed Opportunity to Debate the Role of Immigration in America Today," discusses the recent controversy over the "Danbury eleven" earlier this fall. In September, workers looking for employment around Kennedy park in Danbury were approached by undercover agents of the federal Immigration and Customs enforcement agency (ICE) who were posing as employers. When the eleven workers approached the ICE's van, they were lured inside. Without being allowed contact with their families, these eleven were whisked to Hartford and then to a detention facility on Long Island.
Professor Standish's article tried to examine why these violations of civil liberties could go on just a few blocks away from Westconn with only a hint of student or faculty protest. He concludes that:
"With such a weak sense of what it means to be an American today, non-English speaking immigrants who stick together and ‘impose’ upon quaint suburban America are being seen as a threat to this way of life. Surprisingly, a number of students I teach subscribe to this conservative perspective, one that might usually be associated with older generations. Certainly, many of them are taken-in by arguments that too many immigrants will overburden the system, taking jobs and services from law-abiding Americans. Few people consider the potential of additional labour to add to the wealth of a country."
Streitz objects strenuously to this conclusion. He argues that parades in Danbury in which immigrants hold Brazilian flags show a lack of a desire of immigrants to assimilate, that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from American citizens at the local McDonald’s, and that the “colleges graduates [sic] of New Delhi” with H-1B visas are stealing computer programming jobs from American citizens in Hartford.
These arguments are silly at best and dangerous at worst. They are silly because immigrants, undocumented or not, produce jobs rather than taking them away. Half the businesses in Danbury would go under if everyone who immigrated to this town in the last three decades just up and left. Moreover, they are silly because all undocumented immigrants pay taxes in the form of sales tax, and many if not most of them pay income taxes too (see Eduardo Porter, "Here Illegally, Working Hard and Paying Taxes," New York Times 155 (19 June 2006): A1). They are silly because having pride in one's ethnic identity is not mutually exclusive with being proud to be an American. And they are silly because H1-B visas are given out very selectively and only when the federal government makes a finding that there are not qualified Americans for the jobs being taken.
The arguments are dangerous because they justify the kind of outrageous actions seen in Danbury under Mayor Mark Boughton, such as locking up people for being in a park without proper due process. Since the Danbury eleven were given precious few rights, the same thing could happen to anyone, including Mr. Streitz. Why isn't Mr. Streitz afraid of Danbury's mayor locking him up and not letting him have due process protections? Remember, they were locked up without solid evidence to determine their immigration status, so anyone--including U.S. citizens--could be similarly treated. Anyone, that is to say, who looks Latino.
That's the real danger behind the anti-immigration position: behind it lies a closet, racist ethnonationalism, the same kind of ethnonationalism that has led to the bloodbaths in Nazi Germany, the Balkans, East Timor, Cambodia, and Sudan. Mr. Streitz worries that Professor Standish ignores his students and doesn't serve them when he calls for the fair treatment of all immigrants. The real disservice is if we ignore the needs and sensibilities of the many people in our classes who are immigrants.
The fundamental reason people immigrate to the United States illegally is because it is nearly impossible for most people from non-European countries to migrate here legally unless they have connections (for Europeans and people in select countries, it is easier; a consequence of racist immigration laws passed early in the twentieth century). Mr. Streitz forgets that if most Americans took the position he does when his family came here, he wouldn't be a United States citizen in the first place.
Professor Standish's article tried to examine why these violations of civil liberties could go on just a few blocks away from Westconn with only a hint of student or faculty protest. He concludes that:
"With such a weak sense of what it means to be an American today, non-English speaking immigrants who stick together and ‘impose’ upon quaint suburban America are being seen as a threat to this way of life. Surprisingly, a number of students I teach subscribe to this conservative perspective, one that might usually be associated with older generations. Certainly, many of them are taken-in by arguments that too many immigrants will overburden the system, taking jobs and services from law-abiding Americans. Few people consider the potential of additional labour to add to the wealth of a country."
Streitz objects strenuously to this conclusion. He argues that parades in Danbury in which immigrants hold Brazilian flags show a lack of a desire of immigrants to assimilate, that illegal immigrants are stealing jobs from American citizens at the local McDonald’s, and that the “colleges graduates [sic] of New Delhi” with H-1B visas are stealing computer programming jobs from American citizens in Hartford.
These arguments are silly at best and dangerous at worst. They are silly because immigrants, undocumented or not, produce jobs rather than taking them away. Half the businesses in Danbury would go under if everyone who immigrated to this town in the last three decades just up and left. Moreover, they are silly because all undocumented immigrants pay taxes in the form of sales tax, and many if not most of them pay income taxes too (see Eduardo Porter, "Here Illegally, Working Hard and Paying Taxes," New York Times 155 (19 June 2006): A1). They are silly because having pride in one's ethnic identity is not mutually exclusive with being proud to be an American. And they are silly because H1-B visas are given out very selectively and only when the federal government makes a finding that there are not qualified Americans for the jobs being taken.
The arguments are dangerous because they justify the kind of outrageous actions seen in Danbury under Mayor Mark Boughton, such as locking up people for being in a park without proper due process. Since the Danbury eleven were given precious few rights, the same thing could happen to anyone, including Mr. Streitz. Why isn't Mr. Streitz afraid of Danbury's mayor locking him up and not letting him have due process protections? Remember, they were locked up without solid evidence to determine their immigration status, so anyone--including U.S. citizens--could be similarly treated. Anyone, that is to say, who looks Latino.
That's the real danger behind the anti-immigration position: behind it lies a closet, racist ethnonationalism, the same kind of ethnonationalism that has led to the bloodbaths in Nazi Germany, the Balkans, East Timor, Cambodia, and Sudan. Mr. Streitz worries that Professor Standish ignores his students and doesn't serve them when he calls for the fair treatment of all immigrants. The real disservice is if we ignore the needs and sensibilities of the many people in our classes who are immigrants.
The fundamental reason people immigrate to the United States illegally is because it is nearly impossible for most people from non-European countries to migrate here legally unless they have connections (for Europeans and people in select countries, it is easier; a consequence of racist immigration laws passed early in the twentieth century). Mr. Streitz forgets that if most Americans took the position he does when his family came here, he wouldn't be a United States citizen in the first place.
Parking Places
A real patriot is the fellow who gets a parking ticket and rejoices that the system works.
-- Bill Vaughan
The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
--Robert M. Hutchins
I love WestConn. And so it seems somehow wrong to start a blog with something that makes people as grumpy as parking issues. But I begin with it because I think that WestConn's well-known parking woes, and the failures and successes in efforts to solve them, say a great deal about this place.
First, the good news: for the most part, WestConn has now finally gotten parking right. The Fifth Street Garage is finally operational. And the WestConn parking committee, after hearing from the University Senate and other constituent groups on campus, has removed the most objectionable of the regulations imposed at the beginning of the fall 2006 semester. The "reserved parking" for administrators, department chairs, and other bigwigs on campus on the surface lots will be made available to all faculty, and the White Street garage will be available to commuter students if the Fifth Street Garage is full.
This means an end to some of the most pitiful sights of the last several months. Gone will be the sight of bedraggled professors laboriously hauling cartons of slides, maps, and library books from the White Street garage to White Hall and Warner Hall. Gone will be the line of students telling me about the epithets they were forced to hurl at the (equally pitiable) hired students who denied them parking in the White Street garage when it was completely empty. That is a relief.
Of course, the new solution will not satify everyone. Commuter students, who paid for the 5th street garage with their own money, may have a right to complain about allowing faculty to use their spaces, even after hours and on weekends. Students have already told me that their hard-won garage, paid for with their own fees, should be reserved for them, and for good reason.
And in many other ways, the bad taste in the mouth from the parking issues will linger. The ad hoc parking committee that has made, and revised, their decisions on parking consists of nine administrators, four faculty and staff members, and one student. Maribeth Amyot, WestConn's Vice President for Finance and Administration, thanked the committee for "devoting their time to assessing the best way to balance the needs of various constituents for parking." While I agree that in the end the committee did so, how could the "various constituents" really feel that their needs were being represented properly when administrators were in control of the decision? And given this situation, is it a surprise that when the original parking regulations were revealed in September 2006, the people who benefited most from those regulations were those same administrators, who, along with chairs of departments, were given specially numbered spaces on surface parking lots?
But why does this even matter? Parking is trivial and detracts from everything wonderful that students, faculty, and administration do around this place. I am reminded of the statement attributed to Henry Kissinger that academic disputes are so rancorous because the stakes are so low. But here the stakes are not as low as they seem. Parking, like funding, is an area in which the purported ideals of a university are put to the test of competing interests. It is all well and good for WestConn to discuss how much students are valued on campus, or what a wonderful faculty WestConn has, but the real test of those statements come when administrators are asked to delegate something (like funding, or parking) to faculty or students when doing so is not in their own interest. WestConn's administration elicited more goodwill than I think they know by giving up their marked spaces in the middle of the parking crisis last year, because it showed that they really believed in what they said about the importance of students and faculty. And they let all of that good feeling melt away when they arrogated to themselves most of the surface parking this year. Now, fortunately, a good solution has been reached.
Ultimately, for parking to really live up to WestConn's ideals, it should be entirely on a first-come, first-serve basis. If we really want to say that administrators, faculty, staff, and students are equal in their importance, then they should have an equal ability to find parking. Of course, there are technical reasons why such a thing is impossible. But I am glad to see that the Parking Committee has taken a step in the right direction, and I look forward in relief to the day that faculty and students will not have to show up early to arrive at their classes on time.
-- Bill Vaughan
The three major administrative problems on a campus are sex for the students, athletics for the alumni, and parking for the faculty.
--Robert M. Hutchins
I love WestConn. And so it seems somehow wrong to start a blog with something that makes people as grumpy as parking issues. But I begin with it because I think that WestConn's well-known parking woes, and the failures and successes in efforts to solve them, say a great deal about this place.
First, the good news: for the most part, WestConn has now finally gotten parking right. The Fifth Street Garage is finally operational. And the WestConn parking committee, after hearing from the University Senate and other constituent groups on campus, has removed the most objectionable of the regulations imposed at the beginning of the fall 2006 semester. The "reserved parking" for administrators, department chairs, and other bigwigs on campus on the surface lots will be made available to all faculty, and the White Street garage will be available to commuter students if the Fifth Street Garage is full.
This means an end to some of the most pitiful sights of the last several months. Gone will be the sight of bedraggled professors laboriously hauling cartons of slides, maps, and library books from the White Street garage to White Hall and Warner Hall. Gone will be the line of students telling me about the epithets they were forced to hurl at the (equally pitiable) hired students who denied them parking in the White Street garage when it was completely empty. That is a relief.
Of course, the new solution will not satify everyone. Commuter students, who paid for the 5th street garage with their own money, may have a right to complain about allowing faculty to use their spaces, even after hours and on weekends. Students have already told me that their hard-won garage, paid for with their own fees, should be reserved for them, and for good reason.
And in many other ways, the bad taste in the mouth from the parking issues will linger. The ad hoc parking committee that has made, and revised, their decisions on parking consists of nine administrators, four faculty and staff members, and one student. Maribeth Amyot, WestConn's Vice President for Finance and Administration, thanked the committee for "devoting their time to assessing the best way to balance the needs of various constituents for parking." While I agree that in the end the committee did so, how could the "various constituents" really feel that their needs were being represented properly when administrators were in control of the decision? And given this situation, is it a surprise that when the original parking regulations were revealed in September 2006, the people who benefited most from those regulations were those same administrators, who, along with chairs of departments, were given specially numbered spaces on surface parking lots?
But why does this even matter? Parking is trivial and detracts from everything wonderful that students, faculty, and administration do around this place. I am reminded of the statement attributed to Henry Kissinger that academic disputes are so rancorous because the stakes are so low. But here the stakes are not as low as they seem. Parking, like funding, is an area in which the purported ideals of a university are put to the test of competing interests. It is all well and good for WestConn to discuss how much students are valued on campus, or what a wonderful faculty WestConn has, but the real test of those statements come when administrators are asked to delegate something (like funding, or parking) to faculty or students when doing so is not in their own interest. WestConn's administration elicited more goodwill than I think they know by giving up their marked spaces in the middle of the parking crisis last year, because it showed that they really believed in what they said about the importance of students and faculty. And they let all of that good feeling melt away when they arrogated to themselves most of the surface parking this year. Now, fortunately, a good solution has been reached.
Ultimately, for parking to really live up to WestConn's ideals, it should be entirely on a first-come, first-serve basis. If we really want to say that administrators, faculty, staff, and students are equal in their importance, then they should have an equal ability to find parking. Of course, there are technical reasons why such a thing is impossible. But I am glad to see that the Parking Committee has taken a step in the right direction, and I look forward in relief to the day that faculty and students will not have to show up early to arrive at their classes on time.
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