Beyond Pantsuit Solidarity

This, my first explicitly political post, is directed very locally: to economically comfortable liberal white women, like me, living in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. If what I say applies to other liberal white women living in blue bubble communities, counties, states: good.

We can do better in 2018 and 2020. We need to keep a hanger handy for the pantsuits, though.

Yes, misogyny is real, and yes, pantsuit solidarity is needed. Girls shouldn't have to be informed on national television that they can do anything (if you click on the link, watch to the end)--we all should know it so deeply that it doesn't have to be said. Also, powerful women should not be more vulnerable than powerful men because they have the same careerist, domineering, opportunistic, manipulative, underhanded, disciplined, and unlikeable tendencies. Also, women should be helping each other, along and across every line of race, class, wealth, gender identity, ethnicity, disability, and citizenship status there is.

So what I'm talking about here is just one of those lines: the rural-urban divide. Yes, that's a Cracked article. Read it anyway. Definitely read it if you've already read, "I'm a Coastal Elite from the Midwest: The Real Bubble is Rural America."

Is the rural-urban divide the whole story of what went wrong with this election? Of course not. We have months of figuring that out ahead of us. But it's a big enough piece to be worth addressing as we go forward, particularly those of us who live in "blue islands in an ocean of red" ("Champaign-Urbana Big Outlier in Area Results").

It's not a piece that pantsuit solidarity is equipped to confront. What about women who can't afford the dry cleaning and don't have anywhere to wear a pantsuit anyway?  Who don't want to wear pantsuits? Who don't aspire for their daughters to wear pantsuits? Who have been screwed over by women wearing pantsuits? Who have good reason to believe that anyone in a pantsuit will look down on them? Who find it hard to believe that anything good ever comes of talking to someone in a pantsuit?

It was no more inevitable that the vast low-population tracts of rural America would turn out to be zones of economic depression, racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Oxycontin abuse than it was that chunks of inner cities would turn out to be zones of economic depression, violence, teen pregnancy, and crack addiction. Trying to understand the environment that breeds racism, sexism, and xenophobia with the hope that it can be made less hospitable to those diseases is not a capitulation to them. Laying aside judgment to learn about the risk factors that promote those diseases is not capitulating to them.

Yes, it's complicated, and yes--racism is a cause as well as a symptom of the complex history that has made rural America a source of prosperity for large multinational companies but not for the people who inhabit it.

New York Times

Of the many, many tasks ahead of us, it's on educated, comfortable, left-leaning white women to start this process. To reach out to the women on the geographical and ideological margins of their blue communities. To seek out opportunities for community that aren't centered on institutions of higher learning, left-leaning white congregations, or social activist groups dominated by people like them. To risk discomfort and awkwardness across class lines as well as racial and ethnic lines. To recognize that not everyone regards educational status and book-learning as markers of personal worth and to start genuinely valuing themselves and other people on other terms. To have real conversations that aren't premised on the assumption that we already have the answers. To find the stalwarts who voted blue in red communities and find out what kinds of action they think are needed. I'm sure there's more. That's just a start.

On the Changing Mission of the Public University

Academic freedom was never free, though our conviction that it should be has always helped us look past the thousands of necessary, daily ways that it's not.  Scholars have to eat, the buildings don't build themselves, books come from somewhere.  Whoever pays the bills gets a say: tax-payers, parents writing checks for tuition, alumni donors, grant-funding agencies, publishers, founders, legislative bodies, politicians.  And why shouldn't they?  So often, their concerns are mild and legitimate, the accommodation not so painful, the appeal to a greater cause easily made.

And then higher education stopped being regarded as a public good, worthy of state funding, and things changed.  So much so, that I've had this cynical thought this past week:

It would have been better if the UIUC Chancellor could have said to the American Indian Studies program, "Hiring Steven Salaita is going to cost this institution $XK in lost donations and tuition, even taking into account the inevitable law suit.  We can't afford it.  I'm sorry, AIS, but you will just have to suck it up."  It would have been the end of AIS, obviously, which is bad.  But what we've got is worse.  In order to preserve the illusion that academia isn't for sale, our Chancellor, with the backing of the Board of Trustees, has sold out the very principles of academic freedom and faculty governance.  

It would be nice to know how much we got for it. 

The faculty in STEM and professional fields still don't seem to care that much.  No discipline-wide boycotts, and apart from a few emeritus faculty, no letters.  Not much signing of things either.  The ability to pull external grants and create entrepreneurship opportunities insulates fields that can do those things.  The likelihood that the BoT will "unhire" a well-funded chemist, say, because his climate change activism offends generous alumni who've grown rich from the burning of fossil fuels, is remote. It also means, of course, that STEM faculty have other things to worry about, different problems of dwindling resources, a whole different set of compromises to be made with entities outside the university.  There is, though, this consequence of the public defunding of higher education: it creates a divisive hierarchy of monetary value within the university, in which the humanities cease to matter.

The Pedagogy of Confusion

www,dailymail,co.uk

Never mind the feedback we get from students, confusion can be a good thing, according to recent pedagogical research described in the Chronicle of Higher Education.  Counterintuitively, clarity limits what students learn:

"It seems that, if you just present the correct information, five things happen," he [Derek Muller] said. "One, students think they know it. Two, they don’t pay their utmost attention. Three, they don’t recognize that what was presented differs from what they were already thinking. Four, they don’t learn a thing. And five, perhaps most troublingly, they get more confident in the ideas they were thinking before."

Nothing surprising here, particularly not for anyone whose classroom practices have been influenced by Ken Bains's pivotal What the Best College Teachers Do (Harvard UP, 2004).  Students take information on board more effectively when they grasp that there are flaws, gaps, misconceptions in their understanding.  Since students rarely know what they don't know, a good instructor will find ways to stimulate their awareness.  The problem is, students resist the notion that their coarse-grained understanding of the world is wrong.  They expect education to feel like an ongoing and consistent affirmation of what they already know, and they are poorly equipped to cope when it doesn't.

In my teaching of Enlightenment era literature, I create an atmosphere of productive confusion by setting students to work on the first day on a poem from the period that fails to display the powdered-wig-decorum that they expect.  Joseph Warton's "The Dying Indian" or the unknown Ephelia's "Maidenhead" work well for this exercise, but they don't come easily to students.  They find it frustrating.  I usually have to gloss a few key words, advise them to read sentence-by-sentence rather than line-by-line, and set them to work in groups with clearly defined goals before they can make sense of either poem.   More than that, I have to be on: monitoring the groups closely, listening for that moment when productive confusion shades into irritability, deciding when to decipher a line for them rather than letting them work it out for themselves, picking the moment when the small-group work has ceased to be productive and it's time to guide the class to shared clarity.  I don't always get it right, and even when I do, there will be individual students for whom my explanations come too late (after they've already tuned out) or too soon (before they've time to arrive at the limits of their comprehension).

According to The Chronicle of Higher Ed,

Technology could provide a solution. Mr. D’Mello and Mr. Graesser have been experimenting with 'affect-aware technology'—software that attempts to read facial cues and adapt to a student’s level of confusion. The technology is still in the early stages, but Mr. D’Mello says reading emotional signals in humans could be an important next step for software that responds to the needs of individual learners.

A better solution?  A different model of what learning looks like. Even for the majority of students who respond well to the exercise, I have to start a semester-long process of selling the idea that discomfort and uncertainty are necessary parts of learning: this is not a view of learning that comes easily to them.  Increasingly test-centered education has taught many students that knowledge consists of arriving at predetermined correct answers, and that good teachers deliver them to those correct answers.  They've experienced wrong answers (or difficulty in framing an answer or productive confusion about the questions being asked) as pedagogical design flaws, not as intrinsic features of the process of trying to understand the world.

Some part of the world is always going up in flames, but as I write this towards the end of the summer of 2014 there's an urgency about teaching students to grapple with confusion.  Chasms are opening all around us, from the methane holes in Siberia to the fractured suburbs of St. Louis.  For all our sakes, our students need skills in confronting confusion.  They need practice in pushing past their unacknowledged longing for order so that they can recognize its distorting effects.  

The Absence on the Horizon

Photo from http://www.mnh.si.edu/highlight/riola/

This post, for once, isn't about academia.  At least, not directly.

When I was a kid, my mother and I would drive at least twice a year from Morgantown, West Virginia to the middle of Indiana to visit her family.  Ohio was long and boring to get across, but when we had left the hills behind us and the landscape flattened out, I knew we were really on our way and getting to somewhere I very much wanted to be.  The fields stretching out in all directions told me so: the dome of sky was not part of my experience at home in West Virginia and I loved it, even if the long drive under it was tedious.  My mother had long since pointed out the rim of trees circling the horizon.  "Have you ever wondered why we never get to those trees?" she asked me once, and in a few moments I had worked out why.  The fencerows, the occasional buildings, which appeared individually as we passed them by, piled up at the end of one's field of vision, making it look like permanent border between earth and sky. My mother had been pondering the phenomenon with much more regularity than me from an earlier age, and still remembered the bewilderment she felt as a young child, about the forest that always receded.

Now I live under the dome, a bit farther west, in Illinois, but my days are so sheltered by a tree-covered campus and academic neighborhood that I only see it when I drive or bike out of town.  A few years ago on such an excursion I started to point out the rim of trees on the horizon to my daughters, to pose to them the same question that had puzzled my mother.  But it was gone.  There was no rim.  There were a few trees here and there, now and then a house and barn and outbuildings, but mostly there were just soybeans, and then corn and more corn, as far as one could see into the distance.  With no fences to piece out the landscape, less variation between corn and beans, the fields looked less flat, the undulations in the ground were more apparent.  Beyond them, the corn and beans met directly with the sky.

The change fits in with the story that's getting told with increasing urgency, about why the bees are in decline.   These big unbroken fields under a sole manager make it easier to spray pesticides. They lack the borders and fence and marginal spaces where flowering weeds used to flourish.  It's complicated, of course.  My grandfather, a farmer, prided himself on keeping his fencerows clear of the weeds and undergrowth that we now know provide habitats crucial to the ecosystem.  

Thousands of small choices, each of them made for good reasons, have changed the relationship between earth and sky within my lifetime.