Skip to content

Category: Uncategorized

Published on

I just finished --very much behind the curve--Eric Klinenberg's Palaces of the People, and of course I liked it. It gives pride of place to libraries in the evolving social structure of the 20th century in the United States, and of difficulties since. So why wouldn't I like that? I was still left with some questions (and maybe Klinenberg will continue on this subject in his future work).

Klinenberg focused on public libraries, and that's an important feature and caveat at once. My sister (now retired) was director of an urban public library in Michigan for twenty-four years, and I saw first hand how physical infrastructure, service commitments, political savvy, and sheer determination assisted in revitalizing Muskegon, Michigan --still a town with difficulties, but with a splendid public library. Deborah Fallows has noted that libraries are where you need to go if want to find out what is really happening in a town, that libraries often are the first institutions that take action to fill gaps in a community." I've seen this truth with my own eyes in a wide variety of locations. The three locations of Hamden Public Library (CT) are centers of the whole community, and alive with activity.

What about academic libraries? As Joshua Kim noted, "Klinenberg knows that academic libraries are under a quiet attack from every quarter of academia." I suspect that the old saw the "we don't need libraries now that we have the internet (or Amazon)" has finally begun to wear out, but there are many challenges to academic libraries, not just budgets.

In reality, libraries have made their services and technologies so seamless and transparent that users are often unaware that libraries have contributed to their success. I have heard some of my own faculty say, "I don't use the library; I get everything I need on the internet," blissfully unaware that they are finding things exactly because librarians did a lot of work behind the veil, as it were, to make sure that our users have access to expensive resources.

Then there's another old saw, "Students don't read books anymore." Funny --I remember faculty complaining about the growing lack of student reading in the early 1970s. I suspect t'was ever thus, and without doubt the advent of digital distractions has cut into paper book circulations. But if public library circulations are up, and printed book sales are up, where are all those books going? Pew Research surveys have shown that young people are more likely to use libraries and borrow books than many of their elders --but not college students? huh?

On a university campus, what I see is this: students use the library physical space both to stay on task, and to do so in the proximity of their friends. It is social capital, in Klinenberg's sense, but indirect. The good students want to keep up with the other good students: they do that through their studies, and many of them do that in the library, regardless how they interact (or don't) with library resources and services. The library also provides access to workstations and printers that some students lack: it is a relative leveller in an academic society that, like wider society, continues to stratify.

The question, do "good students" use the library, or do they become (and remain) "good students" because they use the library? What does "using" the library mean --space, context, resources, services, technology, or some personal amalgam of all the above? And what is a "good student" anyway? --is that just a proxy for academic high achievers, or can a student be "good" in a way not wholly described by grades? What about the student whose mind or heart is actually changed by something she learns through study, regardless how that is measured in cumulative academic assessment? (Is there any way even to know this?) Those spaces need not be "palaces" --a slightly misleading metaphor, though well-intentioned. But the spaces need to be adequate. Not every campus can afford a library space that wins architectural awards, and not every campus should.

I think that an emphasis upon cumulative academic assessment --GPA, etc.--and the question, how much of that is influenced by library services and resources and spaces?-- is too narrow. What an academic library might best provide is a space to be in process, to be different, really to grow or learn, to project or experiment with new ways for a student to be in the world, in the future. This is almost impossible to measure and so falls by the wayside of an academic culture increasingly dominated by numerical assessments, evidence-based practice, and "closing the circle" from assessment to improvement, "excellence and innovation in teaching" as my institution puts it. Good academic library spaces can offer (in an economic metaphor) affordances for such assessment, but so much more.

The digital library space can offer something similar --diluted or strengthened--to distance learners as well. I take Joshua Kim's reproof that online education is much more than MOOCs. At my library we work very hard to make sure that our services to online services match what we do for on-ground students, both in quality and resources. Some of our students taking online courses are in fact enrolled in on-ground university curricula. We have done online consultation sessions with students who are physically located upstairs or in the neighboring buildings. It is a challenge and a growth point to figure out how to be library fully in the digital space, a conundrum because these days no one is in the physical library space without interaction with the digital. No one is using a paper-only library on a university campus these days.

Campus social infrastructure is evolving, as well as off-campus. Different kinds of spaces on campus (maker-spaces, for example) are thriving and fostering a social capital in a manner not quite seen before --similar to what has gone on, but also different, and better (I hope!). I agree with Kim, Klinenberg, Barbara Fister that libraries are an essential social infrastructure. The question remains whether those who control the institution's fiscal resources will agree. One of the principle weaknesses of academic libraries lies in that dissonance: those who make the most important decisions about the level of funding for an academic library never actually use the academic library themselves. When did you last seen a President or Provost in the stacks, or reading, or even interacting with others in the building? What senior staff leadership sees, and what users see, can be quite different.

Published on
source: applift.com

Two recent articles or reports, published completely separately but oddly complementary, give shape to the ominous information landscape today, so hostile to expertise and alien to nuance. The first is published in Nature, "Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions," by Alexander J. Stewart et al.; the other (.pdf) is Source Hacking: Media Manipulation in Practice, by Joan Donovan and Brian Friedberg, by the digital think tank Data & Society, founded by danah boyd (lower case). Donovan and Friedberg have roles in the Technology and Social Change Research Project of the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

"Information Gerrymandering" reports results of an experiment in which people were recruited to participate in a voting game, involving 2,500 participants and 120 iterations. The game divided participants into two platforms, purple or yellow, and the goal was to win the most votes (first past the post). Would-be winners had to convince others to join their party; in the event of a deadlock, both parties lose. The authors writes, "a party is most effective when it influences the largest possible number of people just enough to flip their votes, without wasting influence on those who are already convinced." When willingness to compromise is unevenly distributed, those who have a lot of zealots, who in principle oppose any compromise, have an advantage. When both sides use such a zealous strategy, however, deadlock results and both sides lose.

To seed the game the authors added influencers, whom they dubbed "zealous bots" to argue against compromise and persuade others to agree with them. They ran the test in Europe and America (whether purple or yellow was better), and then ran similar analyses in UK and USA legislative bodies. They write,

[O]ur study on the voter game highlights how sensitive collective decisions are to information gerrymandering on an influence network, how easily gerrymandering can arise in realistic networks and how widespread it is in real-world networks of political discourse and legislative process. Our analysis provides a new perspective and a quantitative measure to study public discourse and collective decisions across diverse contexts. . . .

Symmetric influence assortment allows for democratic outcomes, in which the expected vote share of a party is equal to its representation among voters; and low influence assortment allows decisions to be reached with broad consensus despite different partisan goals. A party that increases its own influence assortment relative to that of the other party by coordination, strategic use of bots or encouraging a zero-sum worldview benefits from information gerrymandering and wins a disproportionate share of the vote—that is, an undemocratic outcome. However, other parties are then incentivized to increase their own influence assortment, which leaves everyone trapped in deadlock."

Information Gerrymandering and Undemocratic Decisions, p. 120

This is oddly synchronous with current events (August-September 2019), which seem turbo-charged to attract attention and conflict, and to deflect persuasion and obfuscate any nuance. Zealotry is a strategy to maximize attention and conflict, and to discourage the nuance that makes compromise and persuasion possible. Those who shout the loudest get the most attention. Zealous bots, indeed!

That's where the second article comes in, Source Hacking. Zealots can now use online manipulation in very specific ways with extremely fine-grained methods on very narrow slices of online attention or "eyes." Donovan and Friedberg call this "source hacking," a set of techniques for hiding the sources of misleading or false information, in order to circulate it widely in "mainstream" media. These techniques or tactics are:

  • Viral sloganeering, repackaging extremist talking points for social media and broadcast media amplification;
  • Leak forgery, creating a spectacle by sharing false or counterfeit documents;
  • Evidence collages, consisting of misinformation from multiple sources that is easily shareable, often as images (hence collages);
  • Keyword squatting, strategic domination of keywords via manipulation and "sock-puppet" false-identity accounts, in order to misrepresent the behavior of disfavored groups or opponents.

The authors ask journalists and media figures to understand how viral slogans ("jobs not mobs" was a test case), and to understand their role in inadvertently assisting covertly planned campaigns by extremists to popularize a slogan already frequently shared in highly polarized online communities, such as Reddit groups or 4chan boards. "Zealous bots" indeed!

Taken together, these two articles vividly delineate how zealots can take over information exchanges and trim their "boundaries" of discourse (gerrymander them) to depress any and all persuasion, nuance, or complexity. These zealots do so by using very precise tactics of viral sloganeering, leaking forged documents, creating collages of false or highly misleading evidence pasted together from bits of truth, and domination of certain keywords (squatting) so as to manipulate algorithms and engage in distortion, blaming, and threats. Taken together, such communication reaches a "tipping point" (a phrase used by Claire Wardle of First Draft News in 2017) in which misinformation and misrepresentation overwhelm any accurate representation, nuanced discussion, persuasion, to meaningful exchange.

Those who wanted to "move fast and break things" have certainly succeeded, and it remains to be seen whether anything can remain whole in their wake, outside of communities of gift (scholarly) exchange explicitly dedicated to truth and discernment. Libraries have to house, encourage, foment, and articulate those values and communities --hardly a value-free librarianship, and one that does risk sometimes tolerating unjust power relationships because their alternatives are even worse.

The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live! It is only from this question, with the responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "After Ten Years," 1943, translated and published in Letters and Paper from Prison

(And no, that is not a nod to a certain court evangelical who pretends to understand Bonhoeffer, but who can't speak a word of German, and is simply a shoddy scholar.)

Barbara Fister helpfully pointed out why librarians should not be intimidated by Kanopy video's tactics with library users.
Published on
Intimidation sculpture by Michel Rathwell from Cornwall, Canada
[CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)]

Barbara Fister's post on InsideHigherEd Unkind Rewind (June 26) is totally correct about Kanopy Streaming Video's creepy tactics, contacting users directly when a library cancels its Kanopy contract. This is an outrageous abuse of user data and has the long-term effect of completely undermining librarians' trust in the Kanopy organization.

Barbara references the Twitter feed @Libskrat as an oblique reference to Kanopy complaining to New York Public Library management when a librarian spoke out about their practices on a mailing list (AKA "listserv" but that's trademarked in the USA). Kanopy referenced a supposed NDA and may have threatened legal action. If this violates any NDA my library inadvertently agreed to, then let Kanopy bring it on. I do not see any non-disclosure stipulated in the Kanopy TOS (terms of service), but other terms are fairly creepy: the requirement to submit to binding arbitration by the American Arbitration Association, which is as good as useless. I may seek to cancel my library's Kanopy account on that basis alone. I expect my University General Counsel may in fact require that I do so.

In addition, Kanopy's privacy policy allows them (at 2.(a)), in their view, to abuse librarians' trust outrageously:

We may ask for certain information such as your name, institution name, email address, password and other information. We may retain any messages you send through the Service, and we may also retain other information you voluntarily provide to us. We use this information to operate, maintain and provide to you the features and functionality of the Service, and as further described below.

Barbara Fister (back to her blog) makes one claim, though, with which I differ:

For librarians, my advice is to resist the shiny and trust we are relevant, to value the rights we traditionally have when we purchase content, and push for transparency and fairness in licensing deals.

I did not fail to "resist the shiny" when we began to work with Kanopy in 2014. My library entered into an agreement with Kanopy for good reasons.

We began to work with Kanopy, in the first place, because our Communications school (then department) contracted with Kanopy without informing the library--and then expected to use the library's proxy service. (Actually a rather ignorant former staffer there wanted every student to create her or his own login, an obvious non-starter for Kanopy.) The Communications faculty wanted access to the Media Education Foundation's Media Studies and Communication. Only later did the library add the patron-driven acquisition, user-initiated (PDA) model which proved unsustainably expensive in the past fiscal year. We did so because we needed to move the library into providing streaming video for curricular use, not because it is "shiny" (. . . and some of it is not!)

With Barbara's help (above), I realize that we happily dodged a bullet. Because we could not cut Kanopy off entirely (Communications still wants and has that MEF license), Kanopy has never contacted our users to deplore our decision to discontinue PDA. What we have done instead is more circumspect. We left Kanopy in our A-Z databases list, but publicly discouraged its use. We removed records for any videos that are not licensed from our discovery service.

When an instructor wants to use a video in class (we have some of those), we attempt to re-direct the instructor to Academic Video ONline (AVON), which we have leased from ProQuest at a more affordable (and controllable) price. If no suitable content is available, we will reluctantly authorize a PDA license for that one video --but we make sure the instructor knows how much this it costs for 365 days. If a student wants access for a class or paper, we gently deny the request. (We can distinguish student requests from faculty because students have a slightly different e-mail domain address.) We make sure that department chairs, program directors, and Deans know how much Kanopy costs. They completely support our plan to control expenses.

So my advice to librarians: don't discontinue Kanopy, simply bury them. Take them out of your A-Z databases list. Remove them from your catalog or discovery service. Act as though they don't exist. Make Kanopy your library's "frenemy." And refuse to knuckle under to anyone's mob-like tactics of intimidation.

Published on

A week ago the Provost of the university I serve sent me a link to Dan Cohen's article in The Atlantic, The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper. I know Dan and like and respect him as a colleague, and what he wrote is accurate---he may have extrapolated a little too readily from his context at Northeastern to practically every other college library.

Linked image from Pew Research Center, by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

When the Provost of your university sends you a link like that, the implicit message is clear: books are already irrelevant, and libraries (the bearers of the "book brand") with them. His point did not have to be made explicit: libraries are toast. Libraries are the past; the future is STEM education.

Like many universities, my university is rushing headlong into STEM programs. The popular, pundit-led perception goes that those subjects are the wave of the future, with little use for legacy resources: the future is everything (here come the flying cars!). The reality might be different, but who cares? The sizzle of growth is all: more sizzle, more growth, more STEM.

This rush is a rational response to perceived market pressures in higher education, pressures all measured and conceived narrowly as data. Fear of failure is so palpable one can taste it: the demographics in the Northeast are grim. Adapt (and that means STEM) or die. Adaptation means success, in this view.

In higher education, success is measured by ever-narrower criteria and data for students, their parents, and higher education administrators.

Students want to earn an immediately marketable degree. Marketability and immediate application --that first job-- is emphasized through the college application and enrollment process. Success is narrow path: don't fall off.

Parents demand, ostensibly on behalf of their students, a university that provides a the path to earn such an immediately marketable STEM degree; otherwise the graduates might be left behind in a morass of doubt and student debt: the penalties for falling behind could be severe. Fear of the childrens' failure is palpable.

For university administrators, success boils down to survival. A university that fails to cater to the clientele risks falling behind and disappearing, according to similar narrow criteria. Demographics assure that enrollment will decline in the Northeast, and expensive private universities that lack substantial endowments will be especially threatened. Enrollments must be kept up: and especially male enrollment, in some places already critically low.

Among all qualified high school seniors, the supply of qualified male high school graduates will continue to decline, and that in particular threatens any university, like my own, that historically has been characterized by educations in nursing, education, health professions, and social services. The retention of all students, but especially males, is critical to the university's continuing financial success. Received wisdom has it that the balance of males and females cannot tip more than 60% in the female direction without risk of losing those males.

Hence the undeclared but transparent emphasis upon majors that are regarded as appealing to young males: business (sports marketing, accounting), and STEM subjects, such as computer science gaming, cybersecurity, and financial computing, and a few outliers such as athletic training and exercise sciences. Hence the emphasis upon varsity sports and NCAA division I status. Doubling down: these young men and their parents tend to define success by very narrow criteria: income ("bank") and corporate prestige: major firms or bro-grammer-led startups. Both their success and the university's is very narrowly conceived and measured.

Given these narrow criteria both for students, their parents, and university administrators, STEM seems to be the ticket to guaranteed success for all. Northeastern is the template of such a successful, expensive private university in the New England. Such "template" quality makes Dan Cohen's article doubly powerful: if library books are becoming wallpaper at Northeastern, then it must be true everywhere. Cohen cites Yale and University of Virginia --others in the elite class. If a university is not like Yale, UVa, or Northeastern, that college of university will face decline and extinction because it did not become like them. It's a charmed, circular logic that assures senior leadership, trustees, parents, and students that the university is providing an excellent education because budgets are maintained, money is saved, enrollment goals are met, and the number of graduates increases, especially graduates in STEM subjects. The numbers of the key performance indicators add up to doing a great job.

What's this have to do with libraries?

Libraries are identified with books, etymologically and historically. Where else by definition do you find a librum? (Yes: French for bookstore is libraire.) If the books are becoming wallpaper, then the library is becoming a museum, a lovely exhibit of what used to be, rather like Thomas Jefferson's library exhibited at the Library of Congress. Cohen, from Northeastern (that template of the future), proves it by word and example: case closed.

Or is it?

At the university level: Northeastern developed into the STEM fields earlier than many universities. Recently the number of STEM programs everywhere is increasingly so rapidly that sooner or later simple "reversion to mean" suggests that some of them will not be as successful as hoped --measured of course by those key performance indicators. When every college or university wants to do the same thing, competition will reward some and demote more. STEM education actually poses some risks. The reality that many STEM subjects are actually difficult and demanding usually goes unremarked: even the best programs and services in support of student success will not lead everyone to succeed. Academic risks (can any given student really master the subjects?), and financial risks (can any given university really afford the expensive equipment and faculty that STEM subjects demand?) suggest that failures, when they come, will be expensive and hard to overcome by other means.

Academia by definition is a vast sorting engine. The vast sorting of academic achievement will mean that not every computer science graduate (for example), or computer science program, will be equally worthwhile. When every student is urged to pursue STEM, and every university caters to STEM instruction, real market differentiation is very difficult for a university to achieve in the face of increasing competition.

At the University library level: Cohen's piece is hard to reconcile with several other influential studies and surveys. A well-sourced article in PLoS One, May 2018 surveyed over 10,000 tertiary-level students world-wide and found that national origins or school systems had little sway in choice of format (print or digital): "the broad majority of students worldwide prefer to read academic course materials in print." The rush to digital looks like, from this viewpoint, a considerable convenience to administrators, but not what students for the most part desire. Print is changing, not dead.

On the other hand, Jean Twenge et al. clearly charted trends in adolescents' media use 1976-2016, and came away with the conclusion that "the rapid adoption of digital media since the 200s has displaced the consumption of legacy media." Since 1976?--well, duh, since consumer digital media did not exist yet. Twenge's definition of "legacy media" is very broad: "print media such as books, magazines, and newspapers; TV; and movies." That age-related cohorts of users have moved away from printed media since 1976 is obvious if only because now they have many choices. By contrast, have adolescents really moved away TV? If by TV one means broadcast signal by the three major networks in the style of 1976 (plus maybe PBS), then yes --but how many adolescents now interact with digital "TV" media on phones, including full-length movies, numerous cable series, and Youtube videos? The crux comes with Twenge's verb "has displaced" meaning "taken the place of," or "removed." Her (or their) assumption is that because adolescents (as everyone else) have only some much time and attention, and the amount of time has not increased, therefore a zero-sum displacement must have occurred. On the contrary: many adolescents now interact with digital media in spaces and activities that never would have allowed similar use of printed or analog-visual media, such as transportation, exercise, and meal times. More accurate reading of the "time spent" might result in a verb such as "has supplemented," "has extended," or "has substituted." Measuring cohorts since 1976 effectively stacks the research deck: adolescents now do many things that were far less common activities in 1976: women's sports, interactive but not digital games (Dungeons and Dragons, for example), and community and social service. What activities had to be "displaced" for those to happen?

The question here is: are "library books" merely "wallpaper" (Cohen), and broad patterns of behavior only partially warrant that view. Work by the highly-regarded Pew Research Center in surveys regarding the internet, technology, and libraries give depth and nuance to the question of the public library users, engagement, and expectations.

Through a long-running series of surveys and reports, the Pew projects have identified typologies of engagement of public library users and non-users. Public library users are not a niche group: "30% of Americans ages 16 and older are highly engaged with public libraries, and an additional 39% fall into medium engagement categories" (Citation, page 4) This is seen in 2012 studies of library engagement among younger users: "Younger Americans—those ages 16-29—exhibit a fascinating mix of habits and preferences when it comes to reading, libraries, and technology." (Citation)

This scheme of user typology measures engagement, not age, although one of the groups, "Young and Restless," describes a group younger than US median age, new to neighborhoods and cities, not other civilly or socially engaged, and predominant in the South. They have lower levels of engagement and library use and do not usually know where a public library is located. On the other hand, library engagement frequently correlates with all kinds of information usage and interaction, income, and education: the groups of highly-engaged library users tend to be slightly younger but considerably more educated than the US median. Some engagement is also associated with life changes:

Deeper connections with public libraries are often associated with key life moments such as having a child, seeking a job, being a student, and going through a situation in which research and data can help inform a decision. Similarly, quieter times of life, such as retirement, or less momentous periods, such as when people’s jobs are stable, might prompt less frequent information searches and library visits.

(citation: page 4-5)

In 2017 further analyses of library engagement revealed that about half of US Millennials have visited a public library or bookmobile in the past year --53%, compared with 45% Gen Xers, 43% of Baby Boomers, and 36% of "Silent Generation." The survey question was specifically focused on the use of public libraries, not on-campus academic libraries. Pew reports "relatively high library use by Millennials might be related to changes that many public libraries have undergone in the past 20 years." When Pew asked "who doesn't read books in America?" (at rates ranging from 19% in 2011 to 27% in 2015, and 24% in reported in March 2018), the demographic traits that characterize "non-book readers" (who also seem to read little else) were mostly likely to be Hispanics, older adults, those living in households earning less the $30,000 per year, those whose education stopped with the high school diploma or did not graduate from high school. Again, this analysis was focused on public libraries.

So what about academic libraries? Cohen's report from Northeastern, buttressed by statistics from Yale and UVa, and consonant with experience elsewhere, is that college students are reading (and checking out) fewer books, but using far more e-books and other digital text (journal articles, and statistical, numerical, or geographical databases). This does not immediately translate to lower library engagement, because gate-count and head-count numbers suggest steadily rising library space usage by students who have relatively few quiet places to study (as well as one of the few places on campus with intentionally-designed small group work spaces). Cohen suggests that libraries are really seeing "a Great Sorting within the library, a matching of different kinds of scholarly uses with the right media, formats, and locations." Some books continue in high demand: bulky health sciences texts and reference works; art books and bound music, and a few other categories. "Multiple copies of common books" can still present a problem because of digital rights management restrictions imposed by vendors. Lower-use books are much more appropriately digital, and really good news at SHU is that we have far more books available to our users in digital format than we were ever able to provide in the years before e-book aggregations, rentals, and purchases.

Cohen's piece in The Atlantic centers on printed books, and the conundrum remains: why is academic book circulation lower while Pew also reports fairly high use of libraries and collections (including print) by Millennials? Millennials, like everyone else, are elective public library users: they choose to use a public library (contrasted with assigned-use in academia, for example "you need to find three peer-reviewed articles"). These different patterns and perceptions are hard to square with each other. I believe that many millennials have fairly high engagement with libraries, and believe that libraries are important to them and their communities, all while using printed books more rarely in academic settings.

Cohen acknowledges that the decline of printed book circulations "runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores, where print continues to thrive." (Note: many of those libraries and bookstores are in communities with many college-educated people.) Cohen continues, "Unlike most public libraries, [academic] libraries have always been filled with an incredibly wide variety of [resources] --different books for different purposes." Research monographs are rarely read through cover-to-cover. A 2016 study at Seton Hall University suggests that in-house use of printed books may in fact be higher than traditionally tracked by parallel circulations: is it time to bring back the in-house use count?

(How much familiarity does Cohen really have with public libraries? Many public libraries I know, even smaller ones, have a wide variety of resources, though often at less historic depth than academic, and certainly less access to specialized STEM resources, which are the staple at Northeastern. Still, many public libraries are hardly to be dismissed casually.)

The ground-level realities of public and academic libraries usage patterns, levels, and engagement by Millennials and late-Millennials (so-called "Gen-Z") are quite different than those perceived by their elders, who tend to substitute their own experience for the actual and observable behavior of those who are young now. The message that printed books are irrelevant, and libraries, distinguished as the "book brand," are irrelevant, too may disclose a lot of wishful thinking among academic administrators regarding STEM education, higher education finance, and the behavior of the young. Cohen did not intend to show in his Atlantic article that "libraries are now irrelevant," but that is how his article can be taken by those simply looking for confirmation of their established point of view. To which I can only reply, watching millennials use libraries: engagement is as engagement does.

Estonia has found a path forward for secure, social computing on a small scale, a humane, digital way of life that does not depend upon surveillance from giant corporations and semi-governmental entities. What might a humane, digital way of life look like in the USA, at a vastly larger scale?
Published on

In December 2017 Nathan Heller published an article, Estonia, The Digital Republic in The New Yorker. Heller frequently writes on digital topics, events and personalities in the Silicon Valley, books, and higher education --recently The Hidden Radicalism of Chris Hughes's Call the Break Up Facebook (May 14, 2019). Heller's "Letter from Tallinn" received some notice, notably from Rainer Kattel and Ines Mergel at University College of London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. The subject had also gained the interest of Ben Hammersley, a contributing editor for Wired.

Estonia has found a path forward for secure, social computing on a small scale, a humane, digital way of life that does not depend upon surveillance from giant corporations and semi-governmental entities. What has happened since 2017? What are the questions yet to be addressed in Estonia? What might a humane, digital way of life look like in the USA, at a vastly larger scale? How might academics (and academic librarians in particular) advocate for a manner of social computing that is fundamentally different from our troubled, troll-filled present?

Tallinn, Estonia, via Wikimedia

Estonia's story as a nation is deep-rooted and troubled. Emerging from pre-history in a the Scandinavian, Viking cultural orbit, Estonian origins are obscure and combine several groups connected by language. (Estonian, like Finnish, Hungarian, and Maltese, is not of Indo-European origins; but those four languages are only distantly related to each other.) The name Aesti was used by Tacitus in Germania 45 but it is unknown whether than name has anything to do with the ancient marahvas, the Estonian self-descriptor "country people."

The forcible Christianization of the "country people" 1206-1227 was one of the last such campaigns in Europe; Estonians were then dominated by Baltic Germans and Swedes. Estonia became Lutheran in the 1530s, about the time when monarchies of Muscovy, Sweden, and Poland/Lithuania sought to expand; the following centuries Estonians were dominated by Swedes and Russians in bloody conflicts that sometimes halved the population. The Estonian nationalist awakening began with the reclamation of the language mid-19th century, using the term eestlane, and Estonian epics, songs, theatre began to be recovered. (Recently the historic religions are regaining adherents and visibility.)

Estonian independence was declared in the violent confusion of German defeat and Bolshevik revolution 1918-1919 but lasted only twenty years; the Soviet Union annexed Estonia and reconstituted is as a Soviet republic in 1940. The war years 1940-1945 reduced the population by 25% as Estonians were killed, exiled, or fled as refugees; Soviet Russians began a program of forcible Russification to cement their hegemony and annihilate remnants of the Estonian resistance in the 1950s. The Estonian Republic was proclaimed in August, 1991 and the Russian army decamped by 1994. Estonians now comprise 88% of the population; the largest minority groups are Russian, Swedish, and Finnish; the latter two are official recognized cultural minorities.

For Estonian digital life, the defining event was a massive distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack in April and May 2007 that paralyzed the country. The attack was traced to undoubted Russian coordination and origins, especially since it started soon after Estonia relocated a Soviet war memorial from the center of Tallinn, and culminated on May 9 (Russian commemoration of victory in World War 2) and then suddenly disappeared. The 2007 attack was a template for later attacks against the Georgia, Denmark, NATO, the NASDAQ, and Russian interference in the 2016 US elections. In response, Estonians vowed "never again," and have hosted the NATO Cooperative Defense Centre of Excellence. Estonia now also hosts Locked Shields, a "unique international cyber defence exercise offering the most complex technical live-fire challenge in the world." (https://ccdcoe.org/exercises/locked-shields/)

External threats, largely Russian, influenced the fundamental design of Estonia's digital society. The Estonian government's Information Systems Authority developed X-Road, a "centrally governed distributed integration layer between information systems," first released in 2016 under an MIT license (free, but permitting reuse within proprietary applications). As a distributed integration layer between systems, X-Road permits (and even requires) fundamental Estonian policies: information is entered only once; an individual owns all information about herself or himself; information can only be used with the permission of the owner.

Such distributed information means that there is no central databank of information and no assembling of individual profiles without that person's knowledge (excepting law enforcement). It's all done on-the-fly and the owner of the data has to give permission. With no central databank, there is no single target for cyberattack. X-Road itself is protected by K.S.I. technology (Keyless Signature Infrastructure) that uses blockchain-like public ledger that appends a record of events to each successive event, and uses a "one-way cryptographic hash function" that encode data but is irreversible --no one could reconstruct the data from the hash values. The integrity of data is assured, and cannot be breached through any mere appearance of normality: every footprint can be traced. A massive network of meshed devices --the "internet of things"-- essentially asks every other device it contacts, "Are you OK?" The distributed effect of such device security is that a hacker has to penetrate the defenses of not only one object, but of a host of objects, all protected by a series of one-way encrypted queries.

Estonians know that the Russians will likely attack again: it is just a matter of time, as has been the case since the 13th century. One solution has been to backup the entire Estonian infrastructure on servers in Luxembourg with the same legal standing as any Estonian physical embassy. When the invasion comes, Estonia's elected leaders, scattered as necessary, can reconstitute their government and assure a secure integrated system remotely, on the cloud. The same backup will provide service continuity in the case of a massive cyberattack that is even partially successful.

The fundamental Estonian commitments to data ownership, integrity, and authorized use on-the-fly, foster a meaningful conversation about the basic values of Estonian society: What kind of society do people want? Where are the borders and the limits, whether tangible or digital? Who makes important decisions, and how are those decisions made? How can transparency and trust be assured?

In Estonia (and elsewhere) this will, in the long run, have to extend to questions only now emerging: what is a person's "digital estate" after death, and its status? How do healthcare and legal proxies work in a fully digital society? Does financial bankruptcy mean digital bankruptcy, and are they connected? Can anything ever really be forgotten? Many thorny issues remain to be addressed, from the difficult to the wicked, and they all hinge on cultural values: what is important and necessary.

These are fundamentally humanistic questions: they belong to the humanities, or at least to those humanists who believe they have something to contribute. Estonians do not have an luxury of distance, or any comfort from history, and their technical relationships with Finland and elsewhere cannot make up for their well-founded sense of unease. So the questions that Estonians are asking in a digital society are forerunners of those only now emerging publicly in the USA, EEC, and elsewhere. Events since 2017--the revelation of the extent of Russian interference in the 2016 US election, in the Brexit vote, attempted interference in France, continuing mischief in Italy --all have confirmed the message of 2007: no nation is safe, and Putin's Russia is more than willing to host and facilitate any bad actor that might come along. Cyber chaos is not just a tactic: it is a strategic goal itself, and interrogates ideas such as truth and justice. Teachers of the humanities who are unwilling to address the profound question, what makes a society human and humane?--simply abdicate their real responsibility to their students and readers. Martin Kaevats, Estonia's national digital advisor, said to Nathan Heller, the "gadgetry . . . is not important. It's about the mind-set. It's about the culture. It's about the human relations--what it enables us to do."

So what do we do? Where do we go from here?

What does a liberally educated person do? William Cronon's list (discussed in this blog previously) answers as well as any. Liberally educated people have mastered a inter-connected set of skills:

  • They listen and they hear;
  • They read and they understand;
  • They can talk with anyone;
  • They can write clearly, persuasively, and movingly;
  • They can solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems;
  • They respect rigor not so much for its own sake but as a way of seeking truth;
  • They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism;
  • They understand how to get things done in the world;
  • They nurture and empower the people around them;
  • They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End, "Only connect . . ."

That's a lovely list, but where do we go from here? What's the point?

In 2017, when Heller asked Kaevats "what he saw when he looked at the U.S.," he responded: "A technical mess. Data architecture was [is!] too centralized. Citizen's didn't own their own data; it was sold, instead, by brokers. Basic security was [is!] lax." Convoluted and backwards ideas of legal and digital protection have resulted in what some might call a "wicked" problem: "a systemic loss of community and trust."

To regain this trust takes quite a lot of time. . . . There also needs to be a vision from the political side. It needs to be there always--a policy, not politics. But the politicians need to live it, because in today's world, everything will be public at some point. . . . You need to constantly be who you are."

Estonia: the Digital Republic: Letter from Tallinn, by Nathan Heller, The New Yorker, December 11, 2018

Being constantly who you are (emphasis mine) connects Cronon's list and Kaevat's visionary diagnosis. Such humane "being who you" are starts with listening, continues with literacy, humility, and practicality, and ends with connection. That connection is perhaps the only source of renewed trust still available to us in fractured, divisive, fear-filled America today. It's about the culture: how do we change it, how to get that change done. It's about living the policy of humility, real security, personal dignity, and genuine respect (not hostility) for others who are bound to disagree.

In Rainer Kattel's and Ines Mergel's words, "Economic efficiency gains are not enough as value frameworks for digital transformations." They go on to note that while digital infrastructure and systems are sine qua non, so are the institutional arrangements that would create "countervailing powers to existing powers and routines within the bureaucracy. . . Public sector organizations need new forms of capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills. . ."

The liberally educated person in that context will understand many frameworks of value, the importance of "countervailing powers" (Kattel & Mergel credit the phrase to J.K. Galbraith), and be able to get on with the "new forms of [public] capabilities that centre on socially conscious design and software skills." That is: they will be able to solve a wide variety of puzzles and problems, respect rigor as a way of seeking truth, and connect people through reason, argumentation, and literate communication: the core of Cronon's list.

The U.S.A. is exponentially larger and more complex than Estonia, and both available and potential transformations will not have the same results in every location, sector, or class. American society so lacks any kind of civility and trust that is sometimes seems that the only way to save this village is to burn it down. Estonia cannot afford such a way of nihilism --because those who would burn it all down, and be happy to do so, sit just across a historically fragile border. Neither can the U.S.A. afford such nihilism in the face of the catastrophic challenges of climate change, financial mismanagement, generational inequity, and political polarization that will shortly become unavoidable. We have to change our cultural, legal, and commercial understanding of data security, ownership, and privacy. We have to follow something like Chris Hughes' advice to break up Facebook, and not just Facebook, but (in Nathan Heller's words) break up "the way the tech industry runs, changing the flow of investment capital, the strategies for growth, the people to whom the spoils of efficiency go." It won't be easy: Only connect. The Estonians can do it; we can do it, too. If only we will constantly be who we are (really).

Published on
An Easter vigil at St. Paul's Chapel in Lower Manhattan last year featured ancient and modern chants.CreditLeo Sorel/Trinity Wall Street,
via The New York Times

Rejoice now, heavenly hosts and choirs of angels, and let
your trumpets shout salvation for the victory of our
mighty King.

Rejoice and sing now, all the round earth,
bright with a glorious splendor,
for darkness has been vanquished by our eternal King.
Rejoice and be glad now, Mother Church,
and let your holy courts, in radiant light,
resound with the praises of your people.

Published on
Christ Church, New Haven, CT
(Source: Wikipedia, Public Domain)

“You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?” Cordelia asked [Charles Ryder in Evelyn Waugh’s novel]. “Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas . . . it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it.” --Brideshead Revisited

Incipit lamentatio Ieremiae prophetae:
ALEPH. Quomodo sedet sola civitas plena populo: facta est quasi vidua domina gentium, princeps provinciarum facta est sub tributo.
BETH. Plorans ploravit in nocte, et lacrimae eius in maxillis eius: non est qui consoletur eam ex omnibus caris eius: omnes amici eius spreverunt eam, et facti sunt ei inimici.
Ierusalem, Ierusalem, convertere ad Dominum Deum tuum.

Published on

Newport Digital Minimalism +-+4460807056_140Digital Minimalism, by Cal Newport. Random House, 2019. 256 pages.  ISBN 9780525542872  (Other sources cited in this article are listed at the end.)

Minimalist –anything spare or stripped to its bare essentials.  Minimalism became a cultural movement, then a social commitment: live with less than 100 things, or Marie Kondo’s things that spark joy. Is digital minimalism a contradiction in terms? Is it relevant to higher education, or is it another so-called luxury like “liberal arts education?”  Read on.

  1. Digital Minimalism

The present is a digitally maximal time –but it’s all very vague.  What’s good is great and best in huge quantities: maximum use of digital media (and social media in particular) to give “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (—Facebook’s mission statement). How? Just connect, share, and like, and somehow good things will happen.  “You never know, maybe you’ll find this useful” – one of the weakest sales propositions ever.

Anything or anyone that seems to resist digital maximalism risk the label “Luddite,” a dismissive reference to 19th-century weavers who destroyed machines to save, they thought, their way of life.  Newport is no Luddite: he’s a professor of computer science at Georgetown, author of erudite papers on distributed networks as well as popular works such as So Good They Can’t Ignore You (2012).  In Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (2016) he explored how to maintain focus to do optimal, cognitively demanding work in a world of distractions: high-value, high-impact undertakings rather than low-impact tasks.  Digital Minimalism sprang from his readers’ struggles with the role of new technologies in their personal lives.  The insight came to him while on a walk on a deserted beach in the Bahamas (Newport strongly recommends walking as an analog practice)— a lovely location for “deep work!”

Digital minimalism is “a philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value” –without the infamous Fear of Missing Out (FOMO).  Living this philosophy successfully means engaging long-term in cost/benefit analyses: is the benefit worth the time?  Time is the most truly limited resource. Clutter is costly; optimizing your time is crucial; intentionality is satisfying: consistently following through on your commitments.

Newport unpacks all this lucidly (he is, after all, a computer scientist).  His first chapters lay the foundations: why declutter your digital life? What can you gain? How do you do it and stick to it? His latter chapters focus on practices: how to do a digital de-clutter; how to grow comfortable again with spending time alone; how to reclaim real leisure; how to avoid digital rabbit holes such as clicking “like,” and how to find other digital minimalists: community support. He seeks to answer Andrew Sullivan’s plaintive essay, “I Used to Be a Human Being” (2016): to help upend Sullivan’s lament “by providing a constructive way to engage and leverage the latest innovations to your advantage” –to be able to “say with confidence: ‘Because of technology, I’m a better human being than I ever was before.’”

Wait—isn’t this the point of an education? Newport acknowledges the depths here: Aristotle, Thoreau, Abraham Lincoln; but he avoids getting pulled off-task.  The book is a readable length, but its shadow stretches very far indeed: becoming a better human being stretches far beyond dispelling the enchantments of technology.

Back, for a moment to Sullivan:  his moment of insight came after illness, sleeplessness, the demands of a profitable media business (blog), and dwindling friendships. “Multi-tasking was a mirage. This was a zero-sum game. I either lived as a voice online or I lived human being in the world that humans had lived in since the beginning of time.”  Why zero-sum? He had (has) only so much time to pay attention. The ceaseless wind-tunnel of distraction “denies us the deep satisfaction that comes with accomplishing daily tasks well, a denial perhaps felt most acutely by those for whom such tasks are also a livelihood —and an identity.”

Many university teachers have noticed that students (especially undergraduates) now seem even less prepared to engage in serious thinking, research, writing, and lab work than a decade ago.  Their observations dovetail with major shifts in student mental health observed by counselors in the past few years, validated by Jean Twenge’s research on those born 1995-2012, who grew up with constant access to social media. “Rates of teen depression and suicide have skyrocketed since 2011. . . Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones . . . . The effect of screen activities is unmistakable: The more time teens spend looking at screens, the more likely they are to report symptoms of depression . . . . This trend has been especially steep among girls.” Twenge’s teenage research subjects in 2015-2016 are (or will) enroll in university classes 2018-2021.

Can this be blithely dismissed: That’s progress, you can’t stop it?  “Progress” hides a more sinister reality: the social media apps these young people use so often have been specifically engineered to encourage maximal use through intermittent positive reinforcement and the drive for social approval.

  • Apple engineers Justin Santamaria and Chris Marcellino developed the iPhone push-notification technology that affects the same neurological pathways as gambling and drug use: “reward-based behavior that activates the brain’s dopamine pathways.”
  • Tristan Harris (“Design Ethicist” at Google) notes that humans crave approval, and companies tweeks their apps to hook their users with the power of unpredictable positive feedback, sprinkling “intermittent variable rewards [likes, tags, tweets, etc.] all over their products because its good for business.” Getting a reward is like winning at a slot machine, and “several billion people have a slot machine in their pocket.”
  • Sean Parker (Facebook founder) remembers, “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, ... was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?”

The combination of phones and social media apps is specifically designed to hook users –especially young people—into prolonged use because their business model is to expose them to paid advertising, political, and entertainment content intended to shape their behavior and gather their votes and dollars.  A great many users (especially the young) are compulsively on their phones because they have been hooked –exactly what the phones were designed to do.  Sean Parker fears that social media “literally changes your relationship with society, with each other ... It probably interferes with productivity in weird ways. God only knows what it's doing to our children's brains.”  Sullivan suggests that this enslavement is merely “new antidepressants of a non-pharmaceutical variety.”

These intentions are not a new idea, but in digital engineering now taken to new extremes.  Timothy Wu writes that newspapers were drastically changed by the introduction of advertising in the 19th century: readers became not just subscribers, but also an audience the newspapers delivered to advertisers.  Matthew Crawford notes that the first industrial assembly lines, by demanding concentration on repetitious tasks, so altered the experience of work that Henry Ford’s workers simply walked out in 1913.  When Ford wanted to add 100 workers to the line, he had to hire 963, and was forced to double the daily wage to keep the line staffed.  In broader social terms, Crawford writes elsewhere that advertising through social media apps of the claim a large portion of the “attentional commons” for private purposes in the attention economy, with the resulting surfeit of messages and enervated users.  Just as Ford’s innovations in long term fomented a powerful labor union, could a “user union” come to counterbalance corporate attention engineering?

Resisting these claims to wage labor or attention engineering is not new.  The 19th-century Arts and Crafts movement inspired by John Ruskin and William Morris grew from their revulsion against mechanized production and the Dickensian, oppressive division of sweatshop labor in Victorian England.  Newport advances Thoreau’s famous axiom in Walden, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”  Rather than the standard account of cost in money, Thoreau counts the cost in life: attention, connection, his pleasure of living deliberately.  In the first chapter, “Economy,” Thoreau gives a very straightforward, New England accounting of his life on the pond, replete with tables (his kind of spread-sheet) to show his point that frequently more is actually less.  By contrast, do not our Concord-like students, crushed and smothered under their load of distraction and debt, come to lead lives of quiet desperation?

Is there any solution or alternative?

A hint of a solution has been given, ironically, by Facebook itself.  Its own David Ginsberg and Moira Burke ask, “is spending time on social media bad for us?” After reviewing a lot of research, they conclude, “it really comes down to how you use the technology.”  This gives the game away: reflective, intentional use (in Newport’s words) “punctures the myth of Facebook as a foundational technology that everyone should just “use” in some generic sense . . . . [they] are encouraging people to think critically about exactly what they want to get out of this service.”

Newport realizes the potential of Ginsberg’s and Burke’s admission. “This mind-set is potentially disastrous” for Facebook because it could result in far less time spent in it, dramatically decreasing its value for advertisers and investors.  Any explicit comparison of the real costs of time and attention with the real benefits of social media threatens Facebook’s business model.

Reflective, intentional, and “critical use is a critical problem for the attention economy.”  By developing minimal and deliberate use of digital technology, users might “front only the essential facts of life,” to see if they can learn what it has to teach: to choose a focused life.  Have universities, by so catering to students’ and parents’ anxieties, accepted their students’ distraction by social media unreflectively?  The “attentional commons” of higher education has always faced competition, but now faces determined competitors armed with the specific agenda to “consume as much of [their students] time and attention as possible” (Sean Parker).

Universities can reclaim their cultural relevance when they come to understand that the greatest threat to education today is not careerism, financial instability, or political hostility, but distraction.  If higher education will ever offer a coherent alternative to a depressed and frazzled generation, it will have to engage the powerful corporate and cultural forces that want to hold students, faculty, and staff hostage to engineered, hyper-palatable mental pseudo-stimuli.  This engagement will have to be smart, flexible, subtle, and persistent if we are to challenge the fast food of social media with the slow cookery of a strenuous education.

The past few months have shown that Facebook and other social media sites are hardly invincible and certainly not foundational, as they face sharp-eyed scrutiny from public, government, and investors alike.  Now is the time for higher education to step up to the challenge of distraction.

Where is this wisdom to be found, and where is the source of this understanding?

  1. Critical Attention, Disruptive Humility, and Analog Reality

Much fuller responses come from a varied handful of writers.  Gary Rogowski and Michael Crawford return to attention required by the physical world of objects, activities, and pleasures that live on despite the blandishments of the digital.  Rogowski’s title and subtitle reveals his point: Handmade: Creative Focus in an Age of Distraction.  Examining what his life has to teach, the essential facts of his life (like Thoreau), Rogowski finds a correspondence between our hands and our thoughts: “Long ago we learned to think by using our hands, not the other way around.”  The sheer physicality of “analog” asks us “to give good evidence of yourself. Do good work.”

Craftsmanship “must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away.”  Crawford believes “the mechanical arts have a special significance of our time because they cultivate not creativity, but the less glamorous virtue of attentiveness.  Things need fixing and tending no less than creating.”  Sheer physicality, the recalcitrance of the real, is a way of learning the humility of attention. As Rogowski puts it, “situated among our fellows in norms and practices that shape a life, the environment matters.”

The humility of attention is not new. Alexander Langlands inquired into the origins and true meanings of traditional crafts, he bumped into the embeddedness of craeft, an Old English word connoting an amalgam of knowledge, power, and skill, extended to a sense of wisdom and resourcefulness. “We can’t put our finger on exactly what craeft was.”  As an archaeologist, he constantly studies material culture, the “deep time signatures” of so many traditional crafts.  They remind him, “we are makers, and that we have always lived in a world of making.”  The cognitive contemplation of making exercise the mind in silence and solitude.  Craeft is a form of intelligence, an ingenuity through which we can think, contemplate, and be: powerful, resourceful, and knowledgeable through the medium of making in a world of diminishing resources and increasing environmental instability.  To be craefte is all about a mindful life achieved through beautiful simplicity: the humility of attention, failure, and persistence.

Craeft provides a high-touch physical higher education.  It pays attention to the reality of physical, tangible materials as they both shape and respond to human desires, needs, and intentions.  Langlands’ “deep time signatures” are written with the ink of character on the paper of experience, an in-this-moment contact with forms of past life and future practice that transcend any individual’s encounters.  In the 21st century, is this mere nostalgia, or wishful thinking?

Jaron Lanier, one of the primary inventors of “virtual reality” practices these deep signatures of time through his music and writing.  Understanding the virtual imitation of reality so deeply, Lanier wrestles with actual reality acutely: difficult-to-play ancient instruments such as the begena (ancient harp), suling (flute), or esraj (sitar)—he has collected over a thousand.  He doubles down on being human by re-learning the ancient crafts of playing, the deep signatures of time that learning such ancient skills requires.

Lanier’s craeft of music extends to his craeft of writing, and understanding of books.  His Who Owns The Future (2013) concludes with entwined meditations, “The Fate of Books,” and “What Is To Be Remembered?”  Having watched the disruption of the music business and unintentional (but devastating) impoverishment of musicians, Lanier see a similar pattern dveloping regarding reading and writers.  Six years later, his hopes, fears, and expectations for books are fascinating: some have already come true.  Among them:

  • Readers will be second-class citizens (because ownership of a printed copy has become a contract of access to digital content; the reader is left no capital, nothing to resell –a rejection of a true market economy);
  • Many books will be available only via a particular device, such as a particular company’s tablet (think: Kindle, Nook, or digital rights protection such as Adobe Digital Editions);
  • Readers will spend a lot of time hassling with forgotten passwords, expired credit cards, or being locked into the wrong device . . . for years at a time;
  • People will pay less to read . . . while people will earn still less from writing (repeating a pattern seen in music and other media in which “software swallows everything”);
  • By the time books have mostly gone digital, the owners of the top Internet servers . . . will be more powerful and richer than they were before.

What does Lanier see about a book that is worth saving?  A book is not an artifact, but a synthesis of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity (my italics).  To Lanier, the pattern of devaluation and exploitation of “content” (music, literature) feels off-kilter and short-sighted. The network that fails to recognize and preserve human continuity will serve only its masters, just as digital music has fostered a dehumanization of music.  When the human role is reduced to producing “output” (or “content”) just like a collective or algorithm, and when a winner-takes-all market-place ideology becomes the sole means of valuation, the very qualities that make music or literature, reading or writing, humanely worthwhile are simply sidelined, as irrelevant externalities.  To paraphrase the famous declaration from Vietnam, “we had to burn this art form to price it.”

Lanier proposes this (potentially offensive) thought experiment: “Would you want to send a collectively programmed robot to have sex on your behalf because it was better than you, or would you want to have the sex yourself and get better by doing?” Too often Lanier has heard in response, “I’d prefer to have the best available robot,” silently passing over the nexus of data, servers, technological finance, and market ideology that make that choice seem preferable. By analogy, “If market pricing is the only legitimate test of quality, why are we still bothering with proving theorems?” Why don’t we just let the market determine whether a theorem is true?”  Content-by-algorithm or -collective is slow suicide for creators and researchers and slow homicide for everyone else.  Lanier concludes, “I am arguing that there is more than one way to build an information economy, and we’ve chosen the self-destructive option.”

“Content” at market price seems to be so easily available.  For example, printed books are still common.  Hyper-focused on “content-creation” and marketplace valuation, the “siren servers” of technology obscure how each book bears the marks of the deep signatures of time.  A modern book is a carefully crafted, progressively evolving artifact that only implies the depth of human continuity and experience in its design.  If you doubt this, just look at books printed a century or two ago to see the differences in design and the evolution of writers’ and readers’ expectations.  The book is a synthesis of fully realized personhood with the human continuity signed with time’s deep signatures. A printed book simply transposed into a digital reader as some kind of file bring convenience at the cost of interaction (annotating, bookmarking, easy page-to-page comparison or reference –and the present alternatives to those activities in software are simply dreadful).  A time may come when a digital book represents human continuity –but not yet nor for a long while.  We are creatures of touch and smell as well as sight, hearing, and taste.

I believe Lanier’s insight (that books and other media are syntheses “of fully realized individual personhood with human continuity”) foregrounds the odd and enlightening “revenge of the analog” (David Sax’s book). The return of “disrupted” technologies (prominently but not only vinyl recordings, paper books, film photography, and board games) is possible not only because digital versions work so well, but because they work too well.  Convenience becomes a trap, a mirage of experience rather than genuine experience. Sax’s different narrative shows that technological innovation is not an inevitable and irreversible march, but “a series of trials that helps us understand who we are and how we operate.”  The overwhelming superiority of digital media ironically leads to a shift of valuing: an older technology can sometimes work better, and its inconvenience and inefficiency becomes its renewed strength.  Print publishing, retail sales, on-site workers in a vibrant community (such as Shinola in Detroit), on-ground education, face-to-face interaction in meetups, book clubs, meditation groups, summer camps—all of these ideas and practices have proven surprisingly resilient.  Resilience cannot charm away real difficulties: no analog Dr. Pangloss!  But it does suggest that a popular narrative of irresistible disruption might not be all there is; resilience is an alternative to battle-field metaphors of victory and defeat.

The worship of disruptive technologies (and disruption in general) can go too far. “Disruptive innovation” may not in fact be the rule, but the exception.  Clayton Christiansen’s celebrated theory is not beyond criticism (by his Harvard colleague Jill Lepore) and equally cogent alternatives (Harvard colleague Michael Porter’s theories of competitive strategy and advantage).  Very recently Alfred University president Mark Zupan called Christiansen’s bluff.  Christiansen has doubled down on his 2011 prediction that as many as half of American universities would close or go bankrupt in 10 to 15 years.  Zupan has wagered $1 million, to be given to Christiansen’s non-profit Institute if at least half of all traditional universities fail or merge by 2030; if not, Christiansen would contribute the same sum to Alfred University’s endowment.  Will Christiansen be willing to put his money where his mouth is?  (See also this previous blog entry.)

The humility of paying careful attention to deeply fallible and human face-to-face encounters and processes calls the bluff of technologism –the belief that (often disruptive) technology will cure all woes, a new variety of traditional snake-oil wonders (climate change: “there’s an app for that!”).  Ryan Raffaelli (also from Harvard Business School) has studied how new value can be created for “old innovations” –a subtle and delightful riposte.  Raffaelli has studied, in particular, how the Swiss watch industry saved itself by reinventing its identity: a technology re-emergence.  Swiss watchmakers who survived the competition of cheaper imports saw prices for mechanical watches up for auction increase dramatically.  Suddenly they realized: there could still be value latent in an older technology re-conceived as a social and cultural fashion signal.  Just when the Apple watch might have swept away the Swiss watch industry, instead the watch industry revived as a progression for those who, having worn an Apple watch, now wanted something up-market that feels and signals “genuine.”  As went Swiss watches, so have fountain pens (Goulet Pens), notebooks (Moleskine), and independent bookstores, now numbering more than in 2012.

Here—at last!—is an opening for liberal arts education.

  1. Analog Liberal Arts Education Against the Grain: Digital Minimalism in Action

The term “liberal arts” now seems so old-fashioned or vague that it has been seen to impede further conversation.  I once spoke with the president of a well-regarded liberal arts college who claimed that she no longer tried to use the term, because no one knows what it means.  Her view discounts the real value of the phrase “liberal arts education,” ambiguous and elusive, which has thus resisted facile, ideological characterization. The ambiguity is the impediment that re-conceives value.  The word “liberal” in this case means something far older than the tired liberal-versus-conservative polarization that disfigures (or has destroyed) public discourse: liberal as in liberating, free-making, getting disentangled from the sloppy shortcuts of everyday thinking.  “Liberal arts” connotes a narrative of thoughtful practices out of synch with careerism and digital maximalism.

The narrative of the liberal arts, a braid of habits and practices from (inter alia) classical antiquity, medieval universities, American colleges in the New National period, and the rise of sciences and social sciences in Progressive era, is an amalgam that is unavoidably counter-cultural. Powerful ideologies, whether arising from crown, state, church, market, or faction have always arrayed themselves against it.  Overt ideologies are the obvious culprits, but equally antagonistic have been the subtle habits and dispositions that can cloak the subtle, slippery demands of power, position, and fortune.  The “liberal arts” have been both the servants of power and privilege and a primary source of their interrogation. This both/and contradiction or ambiguity, with a strong whiff of the impractical, means that contemporary marketplace ideology can hardly avoid patronizing liberal arts higher education as outmoded, expensive, boring, elitist, wasteful, and ideologically suspect.  That suspicion shows exactly why liberal arts higher education meets a critical need for pause and reflection in an ideologically riven time.  Being a thoughtful, humane person has never been easy.

What are the liberal arts?  Many answers have been proposed that, following William Cronon’s insight, come down to lists: essential facts, mandatory readings, curricular requirements, etc.  The original artes liberales were a medieval list of seven subjects that set male aristocrats off from everyone else.  Corresponding modern lists of competencies are scarecly inspiration and carry the odor of the curricular committee: competencies in commmunication, major modes of thought (science, mathematics, arts, social sciences, etc.), cultural heritages, etc.  Nevertheless, Cronon cannot resist making another list, ten personal qualities which he associates with people that seem to embody the values of a liberal education (here only several):

  1. They listen and they hear;
  2. They read and they understand;
  3. They can talk with anyone;
  4. They can write clearly, persuasively, and movingly . . .
  1. They practice humility, tolerance, and self-criticism. . .
  1. They follow E.M. Forster’s injunction from Howards End: “Only connect . . .”

(The ones left out here are necessary as well: read Cronon’s short essay)

All of these personal qualities are well associated with the analog, “real” world –contra the critics who see “reality” only as an excuse for performative hard-headedness.  Cronon:

A liberal education is not something any of us achieve; it is not a state.  Rather it is a way of living in the face of our own ignorance, a way of groping toward wisdom in full recognition of our own folly, a way of educating ourselves without any illusion that our educations will ever be complete.

Cronon then emphasizes that each of these qualities is also education for human community:

Each of the qualities I have described is a craft or a skill or a way of being in the world that frees us to act with greater knowledge or power. . . . [W]e need to confront one further paradox about liberal education. In the act of making us free, it also binds us to the communities that gave us our freedom in the first place; it makes us responsible to those communities in ways that limit our freedom. In the end, it turns out that liberty is not about thinking or saying or doing whatever we want. It is about exercising our freedom in such a way as to make a difference in the world and make a difference for more than just ourselves.

Cronon’s “craft, skill, or way of being in the world” returns to craeft: a way of living that bears the deep signatures of time, that nurtures the craeft of attention, humility, and human continuity.  This is the real point of a liberal arts college education –that it cannot be achieved or stated in four years, but is a life-long way of living in the face of our own knowledge and ignorance, wisdom and folly, and inevitably incomplete connection.  Only connect: human freedom of the service of human community, human continuity.

Matthew Crawford proposes a fruitful metaphor for connection: the cultural jig.  The metaphor’s origins lie in carpentry: “a jig is a device or procedure that guides a repeated action by constraining the environment in such a way as to make the action go smoothly, the same each time, without his having to think about it.” For example, a jig can guide a saw, so that a carpenter need not measure many boards individually.  A cultural jig can contribute to personal character “that is built through habit, becoming a reliable pattern of responses to a variety of situations:” such as (historically) thrift, parental authority, personal accountability.  Tradition can be a robust cultural jig, fostering a community of practice in which real independence through interdependence does seem to become possible (though never guaranteed).  The conundrum is that real freedom and self-mastery require some dependence on and mastery of cultural jigs, such as attentiveness.  When a liberal arts education is effective, a student (or graduate) is never adverse to seeking, genuine cultural jigs to guard against folly, foibles, and simple ignorance.

This line of thinking can get very woolly very fast (and maybe already has).  It can have real-world consequences, such as careful thinking about what makes work meaningful.  British business researchers Catherine Bailey and Adrian Madden have done research to discover what does, in fact, make work meaningful, and their conclusions bear striking similarity to the consequences of a liberal arts education.

How and why do people find their work meaningful? When:

  • work matters to more people than just to the workers themselves, or their bosses;
  • when it can mean engagement with mixed, uncomfortable, or even painful thoughts and feelings, not just euphoria or happiness, and a sense of coping with sometimes intractable challenges;
  • when meaningfulness in work is allowed to emerge in an episodic rather than scripted, sustained way, in moments that are not forced or managed, but “contain high levels of emotion and personal relevance, and thus become redolent of the symbolic meaningfulness of work;”
  • when workers have the time and space to become reflective, as meaningfulness can be realized over time rather than spontaneously or momentarily;
  • when the feeling of engagement is exactly a feeling or personal contribution in an organizational environment of tasks and responsibilities, formed in a narrative of engagement and satisfaction.

By contrast work becomes meaningless when connections are broken: people from their values; leaders from subordinates; pointless tasks without connection to any real problem; over-riding people’s better judgment; disconnection from personal relationships; exposure to personal harm (disconnection from safety and well-managed risk).  Organizations can cultivate meaningful work by stressing personal connections, well-delegated responsibilities, real-world problems, real-world beneficiaries, and recognized accomplishments.

Such meaningful work can become the occasion of the personal attributes that William Cronon identified in liberally educated individuals (above).  These can well be extended in context of work to build the practice of forgiveness, as Rogowski illumines it: “Screwing up is a given. Forgiveness is not. Unless you practice it.”  A liberal arts education is an ideal way to learn how to fail, since it is a given that one will fail, but also how to recover and go on.  An education that teaches how to fail, however, is neither what a college admissions officer wants to represent, nor what the anxious parents of a high-school senior want to hear.

Only connect: human, working freedom in the service of a good greater than mere organizational continuity, a craeft that conserves and strengthens human continuity.  The imperative to connect is, in a vital sense, a powerful cultural jig.

But can you make a living doing this?  The predominant narrative in American society now is that a liberal arts education is a frivolous waste or élite privilege that prepares a young person poorly for the “real world” (always taken to mean: the grimly hyper-competitive world that the writer envisions for everyone else).  It a liberal arts education of little value in “today’s world?”

A recent Mellon Foundation study answers: no: a liberal arts education incurs costs and permits benefits on par with pre-professional degrees.  This is a carefully nuanced study that looks carefully at what constitutes a liberal arts education, and that mere attendance at a liberal arts college is not always a good proxy.  It tries to control for factors such as parental income and achievement, college selectivity, typical incomes in various professions, and other factors.  It warns that observed correlations do not prove causations, since in any case no real control group is available to perform a meaningful (or even ethical) experiment.  Nevertheless, “claims that liberal education is of little value because it does not lead to employment is clearly not supported by the existing data.”  At the same time: more work needs to be done.

All this seems a long way from digital minimalism –or is it? I am convinced that one of the best ways to counter simplistic digital maximalism –a vague giving “people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Facebook) is exactly the craeft of connection that bears the deep signatures of time in human continuities in a variety of media.

A liberal arts education is analog in a digital world: intentionally inconvenient as a strategy for identifying enduring value.  The power of a “digital cleanse” (Newport) is vastly increased when a liberal arts education can provide genuine alternatives and powerful cultural jigs: engagement with real people, over-arching, important questions, and intractable problems.  Screwing up is a given. Forgiveness is not. Practicing craeft is a jig of attention, humility, forgiveness, failing and moving beyond failure, human continuity in a real community.  Only connect.

Resources linked or mentioned in this blog entry:

Allen, Mike. “Sean Parker unloads on Facebook, ‘God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,’” Axios, November 9, 2017

Bailey, Catherine, and Adrian Madden. “What Makes Work Meaningful—Or Meaningless.” MIT Sloan Management Review, Summer 2016.

Christiansen, Clayton M., Michael E. Raynor, and Rory McDonald.  “What is Disruptive Innovation,” Harvard Business Review, December 2015.

Crawford, Matthew B.  Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, Penguin Books, 2009,  especially pages 41-42.

Crawford, Matthew B.  The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction,  Farrer, Straus and Giroux, 2015, especially pages 8-20.

Cronon, William.  “’Only Connect’ . . . The Goals of a Liberal Education,” The American Scholar 67, Autumn 1998 (full-text available on his website)

Ginsberg, David, and Moira Burke. “Hard Questions: Is Spending Time of Social Media Bad for Us?” Facebook Newsroom, December 15, 2017

Harris, Tristan. “How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind—from a Magician and Google Design Ethicist,” Medium: Thrive Global, May 18, 2016

Hill, Catherine B., and Elizabeth Davidson Pisacreta.  The Economic Benefits and Costs of a Liberal Arts Education.  An essay commission by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation under the auspices of the Mellon Research Forum on the Value of Liberal Arts Education.  The Foundation, 2019.

Langlands, Alexander.  Craeft: an Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. New York: Norton, 2018.

Lanier, Jaron.  Who Owns the Future? New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013.

Lederman, Doug. “Clay Christensen, Doubling Down,: Inside Higher Ed, April 28, 2017.

Lepore, Jill. “The Disruption Machine: What The Gospel of Innovation Gets Wrong,” New Yorker, June 23, 2014.

Lewis, Paul. “’Our Minds Can Be Hijacked’: the Tech Insiders Who Fear a Smartphone Dystopia,” The Guardian October 6, 2017

Porter, Michael. “The Five Competitive Forces That Shape Strategy.” Harvard Business Review, January 2008.

Raffaelli, Ryan and Carmen Nobel.  “How Independent Bookstores of Thrived in Spite of Amazon.com”  Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge, November 20, 2017.

Raffaelli, Ryan.  Technology Reemergence: Creating New Markets for Old Technologies, Swiss Mechanical Watchmaking 1970-2008.  Administrative Science Quarterly, May 2018.

Rogowski, Gary. Handmade: Creative Focus in the Age of Distraction.  Fresno, California: Linden Publishing, 2017.

Sax, David, The Revenge of the Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter.  New York: Public Affairs, 2016.

Sullivan, Andrew.  "I Used to Be a Human Being."  New York, September 2016

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, edited by Jeffrey S. Cramer, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004, especially the first chapter, “Economy”

Twenge, Jean M. “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The Atlantic, September 2017.

Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside our Heads, New York Vintage Books, 2017, especially pages 11-17.

Zupan, Mark.  “Betting on (Non-Profit) Higher Education,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, February 28, 2019.

I love to return to a persistent source of wonder and thoughtfulness: the Metropolitan Museum's Artist Project.
Published on

"There was something deeply anti-authoritarian about just looking and observing and telling the truth as you saw it."  Swoon (Caledonia Dance Curry)

Sometimes I am utterly depressed by the state of higher education and disdain now shown for what used to be called the liberal arts.  This kind of education has come to be seen as either élitist, or old fashioned (analog), or simply useless --and higher education now has to be all about usefulness: return on investment, financial incentives, and serving the customer. Arts, humanities, history, and philosophy are all banished either to irrelevance or dismissed by accruing some number of credits in a core curriculum. Questions, beauty, and nuance are for boring people.

At dark moments I love to return to a persistent source of wonder and thoughtfulness: the Metropolitan Museum's Artist Project.  At first sight it seems to be an advertisement for a book --a worthwhile book, but still an ad.  Scroll down the page further and one simply sees an array of six "seasons" each with twenty artists names.  The real treasure is hidden and has to be discovered, a little at a time.  Some of the artists names are famous, and some less so.

Each three-minute video presents an artist looking at a place, piece, or genre at the Museum and then speaking what she or he sees.  Sometimes the pairing of an artist with an object is an extension of the artist's own work; other times it is a purposeful contrast.

For example, the photographer Thomas Struth, known for his Museum Photographs of visitors to famous art museum (Art Institute of Chicago, Accademia in Venice) which he expanded to include visitors to churches, and powerfully significant site such as Times Square or Yosemite National Park.  Struth makes viewers aware of their own active participation in the completion of the work's meaning, not as passive consumers but as re-interpreters of the past for the needs of the present" (Metropolitan Museum exhibition press release, 2003) . By contrast, Struth responds to the Chinese Buddhist sculpture (Room 208), a silent place "not so easy" to find.  Struth finds these sculptures humble, "can we afford humblesness these days?"  He asks, "Can it change my life? Can it transform my opinion or my existence in some small or larger way?"

Martha Rosler is a multi-media artist who uses photography, video, performance, and space, to examine womens' experience in everyday life in the public sphere, such as Secrets from the Street: No Disclosure (1980) or her current Irrespective at the Jewish Museum (open until March 3, 2019).  Contrary to expectation, she goes to The Cloisters, the Museum's special medieval building and collection at the northern tip of Manhattan located at the northern tip of Manhattan, "like another world floating in the clouds."  Early in the 1960s this art interacted with her work with abstract expressionism, but also opened the way for narrativity; "As a first-generation Brooklyn Jew I was trying to see where I fit in that story."

One of the most powerful moments in this anthology of videos is Swoon's account of Honore Daumier's The Third Class Carriage, ca. 1862.  Swoon sees a rough painting with almost cartoonish strokes, and yet "some people have said that this painting sentimentalizes poverty --and I disagree I think he's getting the complexity of life here."  She sees "something warm and rough and something beautiful and difficult; there's a compassion in this piece." Daumer is "a relentless social observer --he's always expressing his point of view. . . . You feel the love is contained within looking."  Swoon asks, "how do I make something relevant?  Daumier's position as seen through this work is just: look at people, observe what's going on, record that, give it fidelity in its simplest truth.  One of the highest functions of art I have identified within my own work is to be the vessel for empathy.  When I see this painting it just strikes the flint. I try to walk in those footsteps."

Humbleness, narrativity, telling the truth as you see it, fidelity, empathy --all solid concepts and self-awareness that, if learned well, makes a liberal arts education actually liberating.  No wonder the present STEM masters of the universe want to banish that liberating, inconvenient and subversive in their brave new world.  Resist: strike the flint.

To West Michigan, Dutch American culture, I am an outsider with one foot inside that small tent. I don't live there anymore.

Published on

To West Michigan, Dutch American culture, I am an outsider with one foot inside that small tent. As a child I was always aware that to my mother there was a qualitative difference between "here" (meaning Saginaw, Michigan) and "there" (meaning Grand Rapids). She spent most of her growing years in a house on Calvin Street in eastern Grand Rapids, just down the street from the site of Calvin College (then). Her Dutch American relatives, six aunts and numerous others, lived around the area; in the summers we drove to Newaygo to attend a summer church camp run by her home church, Westminster Presbyterian in Grand Rapids (where her ashes are now interred).

This Dutch American background (such as it was) became more vivid to me in the two years I spent at Hope College, 1974-1976. I earned my degree there after three years at Michigan State (one year in a music program there that gave me practically no transferrable credits). I came to Hope as an outsider with some sense of how things worked in that community, but I had been formed by highly negative experiences in a mediocre public high school, and then three years (1971-1974) at completely secular Michigan State. I studied in an "alternative" residential liberal arts college, Justin Morrill College, which was closed in 1979. I liked Hope's far greater structure, but I never took it as the definition of a liberal arts college.  I knew there were other options, some of them very good.

I was completely unprepared for what Hope meant by Christian college at that time, since I was really interested in Classics (Greek, Latin, history, philosophy), and German, and kept a low profile in almost everything else except organ performance. My academic experience there was intense, demanding (I had was the only Classics major and had an Oxford-like experience of demanding, fast-paced tutorials), and formed in me the habits that Princeton would nurture to maturity. It prepared for me for the intensity of graduate studies in a major program of the history of Christianity (Princeton Theological Seminary), without which I would have been lost. That Calvin wrote in Latin (complex, literate, humanistic Latin) was no news to me.  (My dissertation work was on the Carolingians, thankfully, far removed from the obsessions of the Reformed.) The Christian emphasis, however, was at first an puzzling add on, even as I was nurturing a desire to study the history of Christianity very deeply.

Hope's cultural pendulum at that point swung "liberal" (thanks to then-recently-departed President Calvin Vander Werf), so I largely ignored the cultural evangelicalism of many of the students around me. It was a comfortable, even snug world, but it was never really my world; I would not have stayed there had that been possible. My academic work was done. I freely admit that I was in Hope, but not really of it. I joined the German Club, otherwise I was what in Princeton they called "a grind."

After Hope I spent a year as a Fulbright Commission English teaching assistant in Vienna (arranged by a powerful Hope professor with many ties there, Paul Fried), and then took up M.Div. studies at Princeton Theological Seminary. Princeton in turn left me with an enduring respect for serious, top-flight scholarship, tough writers such as Kierkegaard, Barth, Bonhoeffer, and a far more global sense that both "Reformed" and "Anglican" worlds that were much broader and more diverse than my experience in Holland, Michigan had suggested. Eventually I became a librarian (another story), and ten years later returned to Princeton for doctoral study. The encounters I had with Evangelical doctoral students in the Ph.D. seminars were frustrating (with one exception), because their preparation was often so superficial, even glib. (Even that one exception previously had left the Assemblies of God for the Lutherans, ELCA.)  While at Hope I had become involved in an Episcopal Church, and that involvement left me with enduring liturgical preferences that eventually made my sojourn in the Presbyterian Church untenable.

During all this time I grew up in the cultural orbit (neighboring township) of Frankenmuth, Michigan, which offers a curious contrasting parallel to Dutch Americans in West Michigan. Frankenmuth ("courage of the Franks") was settled (1845) by immigrants from Rosstal, Franconia (Bavaria) sent by Pastor Johann Konrad Wilhelm Löhe just two years before A.J. van Raalte led his group to the shores of Lake Macatawa in West Michigan. The settlers of Frankenmuth in time wound up in the very conservative Missouri Synod and worshiped in German well into the 20th century, later than most equally conservative Christian Reformed churches worshiped in Dutch. The doctrinal rigidity of both groups is formally similar and each has regarded itself as "the true church," to the obvious exclusion of the other tradition (never mind everyone else). Growing up I was a heathen Congregationalist, so was (or would have been) beyond the pale of respectability in both groups: an outsider, with one foot inside the tent.

These German-American Lutheran families were emotionally convinced, I am sure, that Jesus spoke Martin Luther's German via God's true Bible, just as many Dutch in West Michigan would have assumed that Calvin spoke and wrote in Dutch, and correctly conveyed Jesus' teachings in Dutch (of course! --he could not have been French!). To this day when I am confronted by passionate attachment to the 1611 Authorized English Bible, or the 1662 (or 1928) Book of Common Prayer, I can only smile: I have been here with others in other languages. Linguistic fundamentalists are everywhere, I suppose. Both groups used theology and language as shields against encroaching "American" ideas in rising generations --a losing fight, to be sure.

PiperHolland

Douma's book (How Dutch Americans Stayed Dutch) delineated the manner in which Dutch Americans created and marketed new traditions through the development of Tulip Time in Holland, Michigan. Tulip Time marked not how much they remembered about the Netherlands, but how much they had forgotten. He specifically refers to Eric Hobsbawm's "invention of tradition," that cultural practices or traditions may not be genuinely historic but are adapted or invented to serve ideological ends. In turn, Werner Sollors (The Invention of Ethnicity) extended this to ethnic traditions; and in turn Douma extends it to Tulip Time in particular. It established a new channel of Dutch American ethnic identity that was a modern re-interpretation of actual 19th century Dutch identity which by the 1930s was passing or had passed away. By 1975 (my only direct experience of Tulip Time), it had become an unintentional but devastating caricature of Dutch Americans themselves, quite apart from anything really related to the Netherlands. It was very precious. It re-interpreted ethnicity in service to an ideology of the market.

I watched (though unawares as a child) this same invention unfold in Frankenmuth, mutatis mutandis. In 1959 William (Jr.) "Tiny" Zehnder Jr.,and Dorothy Zehnder organized a Bavarian Folk Festival to inaugurate major additions and renovations to the old Fischer's Hotel on Main Street. (I remember it!) The Bavarian Inn sat opposite Zehnder's restaurant (another repurposed former hotel), which had been operated since 1927 by William Zehnder, Sr., and then by Tiny's brothers. The original festival (1959) was a success and the community organized a Civic Events Council to oversee it annual continuation. From its beginning, the Bavarian Festival was an invented tradition, one marked by usually polite sibling and community rivalries.  For many years the Festival was a major "all hands" event in a small town, and a major source of social and financial capital. As the residents' ability to volunteer decreased due to homemakers' return to the work force and employment that did not allow so much time off, the Festival gently downsized and its now four days rather than a week, and under the control more of commercial entities more than of volunteer community organizations.

Other than commerce, why did the Festival endure? Its continuation was possible because of the unusual, cohesive character of the town, where civil, business, church, and school authorities all knew each other their whole lives. It expressed a positive way forward with a German American identity in a town that still felt it. German Americans, unlike Dutch Americans, had to negotiate the realities of being related to the enemy in two world wars, an enemy who committed the Holocaust, and in defeat endured a bitterly divided homeland (1949-1989). German Americans sought to be a model all-American minority because earlier generations (especially 1914-1918) were none too sure about them.  In the 19th century, earlier German American celebrations originated in the overlapping circles of workplace, Arbeiterverein (workers clubs), churches, and civic organizations.  That network largely passed by the turn of the 20th century (the Arbeiterverein were sometimes suspected of socialism!). With well-known German American celebrations in Wisconsin and Chicago as both example and warning, Frankenmuth's Bavarian Festival --entirely unrelated to any of those earlier-- allowed ethnic reclamation by using the word Bavarian rather than German. In the 1960s and 1970s hardly a (West) German flag was to be found: all the flags were the lozenge-patterned blue and white Bavarian flag. I worked as a waiter in the Bavarian Inn in the summers of 1972-1974 and 1976, putting on the slight lilt of Frankenmuth English to complement the hokey costume.

"Historic Frankenmuth" is made-up history at its finest, an imagined narrative in service to an ideology of the market. The town looks like a theme park mashed up with a wedding venue and a fudge shop. Holland, by contrast, is a larger small city with more to do than just tourism; the Dutch kitsch is comparatively restricted to Windmill Island and a few other locations. They are, each in their way, sui generis appropriations of fading ethnic consciousness.

When I lived in Europe, I immediately sensed the profound difference between the invented traditions of Tulip Time and Bavarian Festival and the national experiences and characters of the Netherlands, Bavaria, and Austria.  The gap left me scornful of those invented American ethnicities for a long time. To be sure, each community remembered the largely rural, pre-industrial 19th-century Netherlands or Franconia, with a great deal left out that was present even then.  For example, each neglected to mention that in both the Netherlands and much of Bavarian a significant amount of the population was Catholic! (Franconia was historically mixed). Subsequent to their departures, indutrialization and the experiences of the wars and the then-very-present Cold War assured a general atmosphere of willful social amnesia and fear of the past that contrasted very oddly with the happy-go-lucky invented pasts in Frankenmuth or Holland. I suspect that imagined history has returned over there as well, in the form of ultra-right or neo-Nazi movements.

Since I had very little background in evangelicalism, scholarly examination of the Bible was nothing new to me: the textual methods were very similar to those employed by Classicists on "difficult" texts. Early on in Princeton (1977) I just could not fathom the passionate objections to documentary hypotheses about the Hebrew Bible ("Old Testament") and the Gospels. I had little appreciation for the anxiety of many classmates and their habits of proof-texting or the assumption that Jesus' place and time was just like ours. Hence I had little idea how passionately many would cling to their belief that God could bless only procreating, married heterosexuals.  It turned out, over a decade or so, that many alumni/ae of Hope were gay or lesbian --so many that once I asked one, "Was I really so socially out of touch that was completely oblivious to your identity?"  He responded, "How could I have expected you to know something that even I did not know or acknowledge about myself at that time?"

During the 1980s and 1990s the horrific experiences of illness and deaths of numerous gay friends, and those who survived, meant that ahead of the curve I grew away from the homophobic culture in which I was raised. I was also living in the East, and in much more cosmopolitan, pluralistic environments. I grew impatient with the endless Presbyterian fights over the ordination of gay and lesbian ministers. I was so done with that. When a person I knew in seminary and truly respected was essentially run out of his parish in California (by vengeful elders of a neighboring Presbytery, not by his own congregation), I called B.S. --I had had enough. In 1992 I joined the Church of St. Luke in the Fields in New York City (Episcopal) and embraced my identity as a high-church Episcopalian, but one who likes good preaching, competent theological reflection, and tenacious, progressive social outreach.   My "elective affinity" ethnicity had long since become Scottish (in large part because of my name), and my Dutch heritage became less important. My understanding of Calvin was completely revised by reading William Bouwsma's John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (1989) in my Ph.D. residency.  Bouwsma restored Calvin to a context of other 16th-century writers and humanists such as Eramus and Montaigne.  I found that my previous understanding of Calvin had been just as invented as Tulip Time. When I visited Hope once for an alumni/ae event, I realized that I grown away from what I never really embraced anyway.

In the same years, Hope's pendulum swung in an extremely conservative direction during the campus pastorate of a certain Ben Patterson (1993-2000), an evangelical hired by Gordon van Wylen and tolerated by John Jacobsen (presidents). Patterson instituted or encouraged practices --such as public confession, confrontations with faculty members, praying outside the residential rooms of gay students for their conversion and correction--which I regarded as beyond the pale, divisive, and unfaithful. James Kennedy's Can Hope Endure? A Historical Case Study in Christian Higher Education (2005) confirmed my worst fears. Patterson's departure in 2000 did not usher in much change, however. In 2005 the highly respected Miguel de la Torre (since at Iliff School of Theology, Denver) was forced out of the faculty (how many Hispanics did they have then or since?). De la Torre's offense: he wrote a newspaper column satirically condemning James "Focus on the Family" Dobson's "outing" of the animated character Sponge Bob Square Pants as gay. (I'm not making this up! --can sponges be gay? Who knew?) Plainly the College could not tolerate any challenge to televangelists and their ilk lest its stream of money from evangelical supporters dry up.  (I'm looking at you, DeVos and Van Andel families!) Apparently if Dobson said it, then College President James Bultman believed it, and that settled it. (Always beware of making the former baseball coach your College president!)

Nothing changed. In 2009 Dustin Lance Black was insultingly treated by the same College president, and (still) Dean of Students Richard Frost, treatment that warranted national press attention.  Opponents of this rude nonsense organized a group Hope Is Ready, but unfortunately it was not.  The College's current policy (2011) is riddled with inconsistencies and hypocrisy: "Hope College will not recognize or support campus groups whose aim by statement, practice, or intimation is to promote a vision of human sexuality that is contrary to this understanding of biblical teaching."  Further down: "Hope College promotes the indispensable value of intellectual freedom . . . . Hope College affirms the dignity of every person." Obviously this is untrue and a bold-faced lie: you can talk about "it" (non-heteronormative sexualities) but do nothing more than talk.  Your talk better not "promote a vision." (What does that even mean?0 As though the College says: We talk the talk of intellectual freedom and personal dignity, but we will not walk the walk.  If you talk about this particular subject that is "contrary to . . . biblical teaching," we will shut you up.  Apparently being gay is, according to Hope College, contagious. This kind of policy relegates the College to the evangelical reservation: only those who agree need apply, and are wanted; the rest are second-rate. It affirms superficiality and mediocrity as a consequence of narrow-minded, misguided Christian faith.  It is unfortunately consistent with Richard Frost referring to "you people" in a semi-clandestine conversation with Dustin Lance Black.

In 2013 James and Deborah Fallows visited Holland as part of their journey through America that they called "American Futures" and resulted in their book Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey Into the Heart of America (2018). Holland was one of the first towns they visited, and they saw much to like: a vibrant, highly functional community with a both financial and social capital and sense of the future quite at odds with our paralyzed and dysfunctional national discourse. They wrote about the many positive aspects of Holland, but about its negative aspects, too. In his final post about Holland, James included a number of 'I won't live there' messages, the first of which came from me:

I'm a graduate of Hope College, magna cum laude in [XX subject in the late 1970s]. I know the area well. I have some Dutch ancestry. My sister is [an official] about 30 miles north. I know Holland and western Michigan and Dutch-American culture from the inside.

I grant all the excellent qualities you have written about --hard work, ingenuity, social cohesion, and a sense of an America very different from DC or NYC.

I won't live in Holland, and when my own children [three ages 15-19] have looked at colleges (or will), I never suggested my alma mater. My reason: the social narrowness of smug Dutch-American culture. Although there is a very significant Latino population in Holland, it has not successfully challenged Dutch-American Christian Reformed hegemony. That hegemony will allow no compromises.

You alluded to this smugness when you mentioned the failure of the gay rights initiative(s) there. I wouldn't want to raise my children in this atmosphere, and I don't want my children going to college in it. The hateful things that were said during that discussion give evidence of the smugness of that culture.

I live in Connecticut now (outside New Haven), and there's a lot wrong with CT. But we experience far more cultural, religious, and racial diversity here. It's not perfect, but we're working on it.

Holland has many fine qualities. But it's suffocating for many people, including me. Do mention the numerous people from Holland, and Western Michigan, who have fled the cultural suffocation.

Later in the same post James Fallows summed up Hope College pretty accurately (and with more than a touch of snark):

Hope College, once considered a "Harvard of the Midwest," now aspires to be a middlebrow Christian college. Babbit lives! A pharisaical pedagogy prevails ("Thank, God, we are not as others!")

James Bultman, Richard Frost, and Hope College trustees: I'm looking at you.  In 2017 Bultman's successor, John C. Knapp, resigned a year after nearly being forced out, by most accounts because he wanted to move the College to a more mainstream, inclusive position, again warranting negative national attention.

In 2016, the 40th anniversary of my graduation from Hope College came without my even remembering it. I received an unsolicited note subsequently from a Hope development officer, and I responded:

The dust-up about Lance Black was truly the end of me and Hope College, then. Living in CT, a state where the legislature passed marriage equality, a judgement that was sustained by popular referendum in 2008, the whole “gay” controversy is just so over, and marriage equality is an established fact on the ground here, and was in 2009. Amazing to say, the sky has not fallen in, western civilization did not come to an end here (necessarily more than it has anywhere else in the age of Trump); I don’t notice that personal morality has improved (or declined) since 2008. But candor has improved, and that can’t be a bad thing. Good friends who have been partners for decades —longer than many so-called “straight” couples— have become legally equal to my own marriage relationship, and I can’t see what’s wrong here.

Perhaps this is an overly confessional letter, because you wrote to me at the end of Lent, a good time to attempt greater self-awareness. I just don’t think about Hope College or my past relationship with it very much; it doesn’t feel relevant to much in my day. Our three children have each found their way through the college application process, and I never considered recommending Hope College to them — I just think they would find it too “other.” My younger son is a finalist for a  merit scholarship at DePauw University School of Music (vocal performance), but living in Greencastle may be a stretch for him. [In May 2018 he finished his sophomore year there, and is commited to staying to complete his degree.] He calls it the middle of nowhere, but I’ve let him know that nowhere is somewhere other than central Indiana —I’ve seen the middle of nowhere, and it’s called Houghton, Michigan. DePauw’s “look and feel” is much more emotionally and religiously accessible than is Hope's, and since he has both profound faith questions as well as long-time gay friends (though he is straight), I just didn’t see him at Hope.

Since I’m not wealthy —I’m director of an academic library— and not the profile of the usual Hope alumnus, I really don’t think I have very much to offer your College. I do wish Hope College well. My own acquaintance with the Reformed tradition at Princeton Seminary led me to understand it as very open to the world, to the new findings of the humanities and sciences, and not afraid of the truth. I suspect that colleges of any theological stripe which regard themselves as the Fortresses of Faith will have a very tough go of it in the coming decades. If Hope College were a good deal more open, and more willing to defy previously-articulated evangelical orthodoxies, it could really have something very positive to offer American higher education. Lord knows that higher education (and especially private higher education) as a sector is in deep trouble.

That note, and this blog post, says what I have to say.

Michael Douma's book was really helpful to me. I can now see, in the course of my own family background, how genuine Dutch identity in the Netherlands changed as it did from the 19th century to the modern, very liberal state. I can see how Dutch Americans evolved their own historical tradition that is almost a caricature of the Dutch and really has nothing to do with them. Just as Frankenmuth Bavarian identity has almost nothing to do with contemporary Bavaria and Franconia. That Hope College chose to double-down previous mistakes and became a defensive denizen of the shrinking evangelical academic reservation is a consequence of the "invented narrative" of Dutch American culture, shop-worn and sad. The accelerating withdrawal by younger "New Millennials" from organized religion of every stripe bodes ill for a College that values a defensive orthodoxy over liberating pedagogies.

It's almost July, and I remember how amazingly beautiful West Michigan can be this time of year, especially near the Lake. Shelly and I will visit my sister in Muskegon, and our younger son at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. Grand Rapids has changed profoundly: for example, the town LGTBQ adopted anti-discrimination ordinances in 1994, East Grand Rapids in 2015; Holland has yet to do so. The Grand Rapids arts community thrives, as do numerous ethnic communities. There is much to like and much more ahead than behind.

I regret that Hope College chose the path that it has (Babbit lives!). I havelittle to do with it or about it. My own life has gone on elsewhere, and for that Deo gratias!