UC Davis Campus Police Serving a Healthful Snack

In a stunning reversal, it was announced today that Lt. John Pike was not dousing seated, nonviolent UC Davis protesters with pepper spray—he was feeding them a healthful snack.

“In line with recent Federal lobbying to have pizza declared a vegetable, and the proud traditions begun by Governor Ronald Reagan at Berkeley in 1966 and in the USDA in 1981, the USDA has declared pepper spray a vegetable,” UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehei told members of the press today.

“We hold students’ welfare in the highest regard,”  she added. “The protestors had been out on the quad for hours and missed several meals, and some in Campus Security were concerned that they might be getting hungry. While I am deeply sorry for the manner in which the snack food was administered, I maintain that I did not order it to be delivered in such a manner, had no knowledge of it being delivered, and am refunding the $7.37 in Aggie Cash they were charged.

“I would like to point out that aerosolized, weaponized vegetables are in keeping with UC Davis’ long history of innovation and excellence in the agriculture and food sciences. Our labs are currently working in cooperation with DARPA and Monsanto on many other such innovations, such as anti-tank radishes, antipersonnel fragmentation pumpkins, and hunter-killer tomatoes.

“Finally, I assure you that justice will be done in this case. In keeping with UC policy that all food served on campus must come from approved caterers, Lt. Pike will be reassigned to Food Services.”

The iPhone is the 21st century musket

The number one criticism leveled at the Occupy Wall Street protests is the lack of coherent message. The second is that the protestors themselves are a bunch of middle-class kids, which in the critics’ eyes, makes them automatic hypocrites.

Not only are both of these statements wrong, they display an astonishing lack of historical perspective. If we look at the 99-percenter movement in context, its goals become pretty clear. After all, they’re the same as every similar movement since the Middle Ages.

If history teaches us anything, it’s that revolutions are made not by the sans-culottes, but by the middle class. The poor are too busy with day-to-day survival to organize. The poor don’t participate in the information economy. It’s the middle class who controls the media—the printing press in the sixteenth century, the Internet in the twenty-first. Every time someone at Zuccotti Park whipped out a smartphone to upload a picture of a sign to their Facebook page, they were doing the same thing Martin Luther did when he nailed his 95 Theses to the church door—only rather than spreading information at the speed of a fast horse, they were doing it at lightspeed.

It’s also the middle class that has the education, the organizational skills, and the frustrations from stifled aspirations to make a mass movement. This has been true of every revolution in Western history. The English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 wasn’t a starving rabble clamoring for bread: It was a well-organized rebellion by newly prosperous farmers who resented a parasitic nobility trying to turn back the socioeconomic clock. The first thing they did was burn the books that recorded their taxes and debts. The French Revolution was kicked off by the well-off Third Estaters who were sick of a dysfunctional social structure that was literally stuck in the Middle Ages. France’s second revolution began in 1830 when Charles X sank the economy and limited the freedoms of the middle class; the reign of his successor, Louis Philippe, ended when the petit bourgeoisie agitated for their share of the pie. The Chartist movement in England wanted universal suffrage and to do away with a system that benefited the few at the expense of the many. The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t led by the poor, but by middle-class church leaders and college students. Arab Spring happened because a viable and hungry middle class had formed—just like Turkey had when Atatürk led that nation kicking and screaming into the modern age. The list goes on.

What’s the lesson here? The economic and political are one. We see in Western history a steady, if not unbroken, march towards constitutionality, rights, and democracy—that which we call “liberalism.” It’s when someone tries to stem the tide that movements happen. You can’t have political freedom and real democracy in a world with radical disparities in class.

No one using an Apple product to broadcast the Occupy happenings all around the nation will make a serious argument against capitalism, but all will say that the abuses of the system need to be rectified. Citizens United means that an artificial person gets more of a say in the national discourse than one of flesh and blood. Millions of people declare bankruptcy because our supposedly Christian society does not see that stockholder profit and healing the sick are mutually incompatible goals. Education, the supposed path to upward mobility in our meritocracy, carries with it the price tag of lifelong debt. This is why the goals of Occupy Wall Street are no more and no less than those of any popular movement since the beginnings of the middle class: Economic opportunity, property rights, freedom of expression, and freedom from unjust laws and tyrannical concentrations of power.

This is why the 99-percenters aren’t the disorganized, disaffected Balaclava Bloc types from the Battle of Seattle 10 years ago. Nor are they idealistic college kids or a bunch of filthy street punks. The people in Zuccotti Park are teachers, grandmothers, and union members. They are African-American churchgoers and fathers and mothers. They are well-connected, well-educated, well-socialized ordinary people who have taken to the streets because they feel that they have no choice but to brave the physical discomfort and the potential risk of NYPD brutality. The rights their parents and grandparents fought for in the 1930s and the era of postwar prosperity have been whittled to nothing. We are the first generation of Americans to expect less out of life than our parents, and we are pissed.

The juggernaut of the middle class has awakened, and woe to those who do not heed the lessons of history.

Take the money and run

College sports are a paradox: Ostensibly undertaken for the pure love of the game, they are in reality a high-risk professional venture with millions of dollars at stake. The controversy around Cam Newton of Auburn is only the latest of many “improper benefits” scandals, such as those surrounding OJ Mayo at USC and the UNC football team, in which the athletes and their programs were penalized for trying, for a lack of a better way of describing it, to participate in the free market.

Though star college athletes can potentially generate huge revenue for their schools (even to the point of having their likenesses used in video games, the subject of a current lawsuit), and even though they run the risk of crippling injuries, they can’t be fairly compensated  due to NCAA rules. Rather, in the name of “amateurism,” the NCAA creates baroque and restrictive rules that work against market forces and inevitably give rise to black markets as universities compete with one another for the much-in-demand talents of best players. College sports—or, more accurately, men’s football and basketball (sorry, Title IX)—are a big money enterprise in everything but name.

Or are they making money? As Andrew Zimbalist, Professor of Economics at Smith College, points out in his masterful, nuanced analysis in his recent book Circling the Bases, most teams are actually financial losers. For instance, only seven NCAA Division I schools out of 220 managed to run profits consistently during a five-year study. The average loss was $9.87 million per school per annum, which is enough to pay the salaries of almost two hundred first-year professors at $50,000 a year.

This  is not new information, but rather something we’ve known for several years: College sports are akin to a high-stakes poker tournament. Only a few will come out on top, though everyone thinks they have a shot at the pot. Yet, schools are more than willing to pay the price of admission, which includes everything from needlessly exorbitant coaching staff salaries to capital projects such as stadiums, even at the expense of their own best interests.

To reiterate: Athletes such as Newton and Mayo may be hot commodities, but they are by and large fetish commodities. Their market value is not the result of the real value to their schools, but of the status they bring. College sports are a losing proposition.

So if college sports aren’t making a profit, who is subsidizing them? Answer: The students and faculty. “The relationship here is very simple,” Zimbalist wrote in an e-mail. “If a school has to put $20 or $30 million into athletics, then it is $20 or $30 million that it does not have for the educational budget.” As a result, students have to pay more in tuition and fees, and may find themselves being taught by overworked adjuncts rather than by full-time faculty. Sports, in short, may have the slight chance to raise a school’s profile, but they almost inevitably actually impoverish it, diminishing the actual quality and value of the education. “The take-away is clear,” Zimbalist writes. “As schools contemplate the expected social value of their athletics program, it is important to consider the trade-offs between athletics investments and investments in academic departments, research, or infrastructure.”

Furthermore, as many college professors will tell you, the “student” part of “student-athlete” is all-too-often a farce. To keep up in the hyper-competitive world of college sports, even in Division II, requires just as much practice and preparation as in professional sports, leaving precious little time and energy for academics. I’m not saying that there are professors being told to pass athletes or else—such incidents are rare, though of course pre-tenure faculty and adjuncts are more vulnerable to pressure—but coaches are master strategists. They know which professors and courses are athlete-friendly and direct their players there. What’s more, the school often lets in players who have no business being in college in a first place. As Jonathan R. Cole recently pointed out, even roughly one-fifth of Ivy League admissions are recruited athletes. If playing the eligibility rules and allowing students to graduate with non-majors such as “recreation” is shameful and dilutes the value of the school’s degree, how much more is letting in those who are not prepared for college?

It’s obvious that college sports, though they contribute much to a school in terms of reputation and college life, also consume necessary funds and detract from the real mission of education. But what to do about it? One could say that the purpose of universities is to educate and that the NFL and NBA can run their own farm leagues and pay young athletes what they’re worth on the open market, but this is highly unlikely given the amount of financial and social capital already invested in the enterprise.

Zimbalist gives some rather more realistic options in his book: artificially high coaching salaries are in sore need of reform (what are they going to do? coach high school?), the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) should be broken up, and the number of scholarships needs to be curtailed. The issue is from where such reform will originate. “Serious reform has never been possible within the NCAA, and presidents and governing boards have resisted using their organizations to build athletic reform,” Zimbalist said via e-mail. “Congress, too, has been reluctant to get involved.” But such reform is urgently needed, even at southern colleges where football seems to be the main industry: “What’s new now is that there is a crisis in the financing of higher education and athletic deficits are ballooning, from a median of $10.2 million among the FBS [Football Bowl Schools, formerly Division IA] schools in 2008–09 to a projected $22 million in 2015 and $44 million in 2020 if we continue along the current path,” Zimbalist points out. “Increasingly, college presidents and trustees are recognizing that the status quo is not sustainable.”

If we learn anything from the Newton case and those like it, it should be that college sports are broken. The elite competitors are only the most visible part of this: Schools throw away money that could be better invested in actual research and teaching, while the players whose talents make the machine run—and who put their bodies on the line—are not fairly compensated. To fix the system will take real work and tough decisions on the parts of university leaders—but until this is done, we will all suffer.

The other, which I’ll call the Whigs, argues that higher ed should be market-driven. Deployment of resources in departments and majors should make financial sense for the school, and the students should be prepared for careers as workers, not philosophers. The Whigs are the revolutionaries, despite their laissez-faire rhetoric, and their star is rising. This is more than an academic question (pardon the pun), but bears directly on the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiatives and his stated goal for every American to attend at least two years of college or trade school.

One of the deadliest weapons in the Whig arsenal is the statistic. Here, Richard Vedder argues that we have far too many college graduates—to the tune of seventeen million. Over 18,000 parking-lot attendants and 80,000 bartenders have BAs,  he says , and there are 5,057 janitors with Ph.Ds or other terminal professional degrees. Do we, Vedder asks, need so much education if people can’t get hired in the jobs meeting their qualifications? Is it that they have the degree, but not the actual brains to do the work? Are we, as a society, throwing our collective money away by educating the unfit? Or, as he puts it, “even if on average, an investment in higher education yields a good, say 10 percent, rate of return, it does not follow that adding to existing investments will yield that return.” (This is taken from Charles Murray’s very politically incorrect analysis of education in which he says that we can’t educate everyone equally because we’re not all equally intelligent.)

Both Whigs and Tories are arguing from a scarcity model: Tories say that we should increase things on the supply side, specifically by funding everyone’s college dream, while Whigs hold that we are working against market forces to keep demand unnaturally high. What Vedder says is that the college machine is reaching a sort of Malthusian crisis. Like a shark, colleges need to keep taking in freshmen to make a profit. However, the supply of college-ready people is finite. The result is either high dropout rates or a watering down of what a degree means. The solution is to restrict access to higher ed and to limit public subsidies—which very much goes against the Whiggish everyone-deserves-a-chance ethos. With supply limited, value will again rise.

But let’s suppose for a second that Vedder’s correct. What about the intangible value of a college education to those plumbers and parking-lot attendants? Are slinging hash and reading Nietzsche mutually exclusive? How many of those 317,000 waiters and waitresses with BAs are career garçons, and how many are struggling actors and singers? How many have taken a dead-end job because they had to move back to their rust-belt home town to take care of an ailing parent? How many have MFAs and are supporting an artistic vocation? How many of those janitors with Ph.Ds got them in Soviet Russia or online, or just got out of prison, or perhaps like being janitors rather than professors? How many are being discriminated against for being minorities, or handicapped, or lousy dressers, or just plain weird? Moreover, with so many people going to college, there will be people occupying both ends of the bell curve of ultimate benefits. There’s ample room in a country as large as the United States for all these types, including 5,000-plus Ph.Ds who make more money as janitors than adjuncts.

More to the point, can we simply evaluate the worth of a college education in terms of profit and loss? Weigh in below and let us know what you think.

Photo by j.o.h.n. walker

Why am I telling you all this? Because I was a so-so student who went to SUNY, found my passion—in my case, through the Classics department—and blossomed as a student and as a person. That’s why I took it very personally when the University at Albany decided to axe its own Classics department, along with French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre—along the way, also firing tenured faculty, which has earned them censure from the American Association of University Professors. Needless to say, I’m rather pissed off in a rather non-tweedy way.

It’s no secret that I’m a foe of hierarchies in higher ed. For rather obvious reasons, what matters for me is not the school your daddy could afford; it’s the quality of your work. I may not have chosen Albany  for my undergrad, but that doesn’t reflect on the excellent quality of the faculty and alumni. To cite one example, John Monfasani of the History department is a lion in the field; his former student Christoper Celenza, whose work I admire greatly, earned his BA and MA in history at SUNY Albany and then two Ph.Ds at Heidelberg and Duke.

Why did they cut these five departments? Money, of course. Thanks to the renowned incompetence of the state legislature, the University faced a $12 million shortfall. The argument was that there weren’t enough majors in the affected departments to justify keeping them. Who would they never cut, then? Business and Educational Administration and Policy Studies; Health Policy, Management and Behavior; or IT Management—majors that make a college seem more like a trade school.

This devaluing of humanistic knowledge is shameful. Not only is Classics is the foundation for a liberal education—the sort of ur-department in any university—but French, Russian, Italian, and Theatre are all useful majors. The study of languages speaks for itself (literally), and Theatre grads with lighting and set experience are keyed into a little scene down I-87 that they call “Broadway” (and off-Broadway, and off-off Broadway…). What’s more, axing the departments doesn’t even save the school any money in the end: There will be lawsuits by the affected faculty, and possibly by students, and the eventual payout will likely be more money than the administration would have saved. (SUNY faculty claim due process was not followed, but a hand-selected committee rubber-stamped an executive decision.)

What is worst, however, is that the SUNY Albany administration has said by their decision that the class system is alive and well, and that they are on the bottom. Things like French and Classics are not for mere state university students. In doing so, they have as much as admitted that they are a second-class university serving the dregs who could not get into “real” schools. The liberal arts are for the elite; the hoi poloi such as SUNY students should concentrate on IT management. If this is so, it means that I, a SUNY grad in Classics, have no business doing what I’m doing for a living. That’s why I’m worse than horrified by the SUNY Albany firings—I am personally insulted by them.

You know why Samuel Barber's music is so sad? Because of friggin' homophobes

We like to find someone to blame for every tragedy, but the fact is that a rather disturbing number of suicides happen on college campuses—around 1,100 per year. Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for college students, and the beginning of the academic year, with all its stresses, especially for incoming freshmen, seems to be a particular danger zone.

Administrators do their part to try to curb these disturbing statistics, but in some cases the cure is worse than the disease: Students who seem at risk for self-harm are often banned from campus. Better that they’re gotten rid of, goes this school of thought, than put the college at risk for a lawsuit or create another statistic or an embarrassing news story. Of course, rather than helping, this makes things worse, removing the at-risk students from any sense of progress towards a normal future, perhaps returning them to a bad home situation, and intimidating those who might have suicidal thoughts from speaking up and getting the help they need.

But that’s the subject for another column: What I want to talk about is the particular outrage directed at Dharun Ravi, the 18-year-old who, with his fellow freshman Molly Wei, is accused of publicly live-streaming the video of Clementi and his partner on September 21 after having peeped in privately two days prior. Campus LGBT groups condemned this as “cyberbullying” and a hate crime and took to the streets demanding Ravi’s head on a pike. As Steven Goldstein of the LGBT rights group Garden State Equality said, “You have to prosecute this as a hate crime. Anything less would be an insult to the memory of the young man our society lost.”

I disagree: While this was certainly a serious invasion of privacy, I’m not willing to say that it was a hate crime.

No doubt, what Ravi did was stupid, immature, and wrong. What is also wrong is characterizing it as an act of anti-gay hate without any supporting evidence. Ravi apparently didn’t say or write anything homophobic; by all accounts, he had gay friends, and he apparently liked Clementi. Though there’s still a lot of hate out there, Generation Y, as a whole, isn’t particularly homophobic. We live in a world where sexual orientation is thankfully becoming increasing irrelevant to how we judge others. Unfortunately, we also live in a world where any expectation of privacy, or filter between public and private, can be destroyed in a keystroke.

If, as I’m positing, Ravi was truly living in a post-gay headspace, broadcasting his roommate’s hookup may have seemed like a cute prank, The Virginity Hit-style, without the gender of Clementi’s partner mattering (besides being a way to exorcise the annoyance of being exiled from his room). However, this may have been all the push that was needed for the dominoes set up by Clementi’s own life experience and neurochemistry to fall over.

While acknowledging that there’s a great deal of anti-gay ugliness out there (and that college LGBT activists tend to be really angry because of it), and admitting that I may be living in a fantasy world where we’re on the cusp of real LGBT acceptance, I am unwilling to paint Ravi or Wei as bigots until I see specific evidence that they targeted Clementi because of his sexual orientation, or that there was a repeated pattern of harassment beyond the thoughtless webcam broadcast (that is, the second, public one). Just because something bad is done to someone who is gay doesn’t automatically make it a hate crime: Broadcasting your your roommate’s hookup is an assholish thing to do, no matter if it’s with a guy, girl, or Christine O’Donnell in a furry suit.

There’s no need to convict two people—one of whom (Wei) is guilty apparently only of letting a friend use her computer—in the court of public opinion before the full truth comes out. These two kids will already never have a sound night’s sleep for the rest of their lives and are facing criminal charges; there is no need to lynch them as well in order to satisfy our needs for vengeance or vindicate whatever injustices were done to ourselves in the past. If anything, past victimization should make us more sensitive to others. Thus, I may pity Ravi and Wei, and I may think they were wrong, but I’m not willing to condemn them as bigots quite yet.

What I am willing to condemn is that Clementi was made to feel that he had to suffer whatever he was suffering in silence. What I am willing to condemn is that he had to feel shame about being gay. What I am willing to condemn is that gay youth are made to feel feel so hopeless that they think death is better than life. And what I am willing to condemn is college administrators for not doing enough about the campus suicide problem.

Meanwhile, for all the gay teens out there, this link is for you.

Addendum: Why has no one shown sympathy for the poor guy, whoever he is, that Clementi was hooking up with?

Never let it be said that medieval history is an irrelevant subject. The so-called Ground Zero mosque is the current front line in the kulturkampf, with both sides using the historical record (poorly) to justify their positions. To set the record straight, I interviewed Professor Tom Glick of Boston University, one of the greatest living authorities on Muslim Spain (and one of my dissertation readers).

KM: The proposed name of the community center in lower Manhattan was originally “Cordoba House.” The Cordoba Initiative, the sponsors of the project, say that the meaning is supposed to evoke convivencia, the peaceful co-existence of ethnic groups in medieval Spain. Newt Gringrich is on record as saying that Cordoba symbolizes the oppression of Christians by Muslims, in the person of the famous mosque (now a church). What’s the real story on Cordoba?

TG: The Cordoba mosque perhaps could be taken as a symbol of Arab imperialism, but the other side of the coin is that Charles V, by building a little cathedral within the mosque itself, was sending a message of Christian moral superiority and Spanish imperial designs.

So what is this idea of convivencia? What evidence is there for it?

The word just means coexistence, but it has been romanticized to stand for peaceful and creative interaction among Muslims, Christians and Jews. Its proponents tend to gloss over conflict and stress creative results, such as scientific translations produced in the court of Alfonso X the Wise, or the transmission to Christians of tropes and metrics from Arabic poetry. But it would be silly to take such interaction, however creative, as evidence of tolerance. Abundant evidence exists of intolerance, the Spanish Inquisition in first place.

Some pundits today would have us believe that Judeo-Christian ideology is fundamentally at odds with Islam. How, and why, were Christian, Muslims, and Jews able to live together productively in medieval Spain?

Because there were neutral spaces where such interaction could take place: the markets in first place, scholarly circles and so forth.

Not every historian agreed with the idea of convivencia. What’s the opposing narrative, and who argued for it?

The late Elena Lourie insisted there was no such thing, that inter-ethnic relations in medieval Spain were all conflictive and based on structural hatred of one group for another. She used to say, for example, that the only positive interaction between Jews and Christians was their occasional partnership in crime. That’s too harsh a judgment and leaves the creative exchanges unexplained.

Spanish nationalists tended to hold with a myth of Spanish essentialism. How was the ideology used in Franco’s Spain?

Spanish essentialism (“eternal Spain”) predates Franco and perhaps was a borrowing from German essentialism. It’s an ingenuous racialist notion that culture is heritable. The nationalists, however, since they depended on Moroccan troops, were always careful to preserve a place for the great monuments of al-Andalus—and this all the while referring to their Moroccan allies with the derogatory term “moros” (Moors).

It seems that history does repeat itself, and that people are using similar arguments today, and for similar purposes. Thoughts?

Plus ça change… just like medieval Spain. [Some] Jews think that Muslims are, by definition, bad. Muslim moderates feed the flame by not speaking out. And the same old arrogant racist yin-yang from Christians. Or at least Glenn Beck-type Christians.

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Nowhere is this cognitive dissonance more manifest than in academics’ personal lives. We can study the rebels of history, but God forbid we try to épater le bourgeois ourselves. Those who wish to snatch the golden ring of tenure must self-censor every e-mail, hide behind pseudonyms on discussion boards, and make sure no incriminating photos of Happy Hour get posted on Facebook. This has only grown worse in recent years: In a tight job market and with the increasing insistence of running the Academy like a business, the pressure to be a perfect employee and to have no life outside of one’s research and teaching (save, perhaps, for some safe and non-threatening form of exercise such as jogging or swimming) is all-consuming.

In short, our lifestyles have become so self-regulated, difference has become so closeted, that our actual code of conduct embodies the exact opposite of what it professes. Tolerance is nonexistent: To be “queer” in academia is to be as damned as it was in pre-Stonewall days. The thing is, queerness is, as always, a moving target.

So who is queer these days? For starters, women with children. In researching this piece, I received a few e-mails from people who had to hide their gay BDSM lifestyles from their colleagues. However, it was pointed out to me that the real sexual nonconformists in academia are those considered some of the most normal in the real world: reproductive females. I was pointed to one study of art historians that revealed that, even with a field that is overwhelmingly (70%) female, men—especially married men with children—were granted tenure faster and more consistently, and at more prestigious institutions. For a woman to achieve on the level of a man, she needs to be, effectively, a female eunuch. This reflects both that two-career couples are likely to de-prioritize the woman’s career—and that home and childcare are more likely to fall to the woman, to the detriment of their careers. Even in the purportedly feminist academy, it seems de facto gender roles are alive and well.

How does this work? To get Foucaultian, the tenure carrot is used to discipline the academic body. “In my experience, thus far, the body and the person and the disciplines of both are opened up for commentary by senior faculty under the rubric of ‘tenure’,” an assistant professor in a Midwestern university posted on the H-HISTSEX discussion network. “If you want tenure you should think about such-and-such; you should be careful about so-and-so if you want tenure.”

Of course, only certain discourses are permitted. Replace “such and such” with “wear shorter skirts” or “wear your hair in a more attractive way” and you have a sexual harassment suit. Replace it with “marry a member of the opposite sex to fit in,” or “stop being a lesbian,” and you have a civil rights case. However, to say “stop asking us to arrange your classes so you can pick your kids up at 3 PM” is as allowable as “tone down your involvement with gay-rights groups” or “don’t let it be known you’re a furry.”

While the norms of academe may “queer” even normality, the process isn’t any easier on those who are more traditionally non-conformist. “It is only since getting tenure and then a promotion to a more senior position at a major old university that I have felt able to get visible body modifications, tattoos, etc.,” another respondent e-mailed me. “And given that, it means I am silent about most of the things that are associated with identity politics (I have not come out, primarily because I live with a girl, and prior to that was married with a kid). Not because this is necessarily prohibited, but because already working on ‘weird stuff,’ as the prof in my dept put it at our last staff meeting (homosexuality, S&M, other perversion, the body, etc). Most of my colleagues know my ex-wife and kids, they know I have a girlfriend, but they do not know that she is as queer as me.”

It goes without saying that we need to do more to promote real gender equity, instead of just lip service. (Paternity leave, anyone?) The big question is: Why the closeting for more traditionally eccentric professors? What would happen if people opened up? Who would complain? Students? Hell no. College students should be exposed to people of different backgrounds—race, class, sexualities, and, yes, lifestyles. It’s not like eighteen-year-olds can’t find out anything they don’t know via the Internet anyway, and, as it is, we already give them permission to be far more outrageous than the faculty is allowed to be. Alumni donors, the board of directors, or the state legislature? Again, hell no. If the big money spenders are dictating what people think and do in your school, then you’ve got more problems with intellectual freedom than a simple case of intolerance.

No, the ones who are consciously or unconsciously holding up the married, heterosexual, tweed-jacketed male as the gold standard are our senior department members—those who make the hiring and promotion decisions—and the rest of our colleagues in our fields of study. (And how did the generation that first marched for equality get so conservative?) The mold of “the way an academic should be” is nothing more than something in their heads—a self-perpetuating myth that forces us into untenable hypocrisy. Rather than perpetuating it, we must do what scholars have done throughout the ages: Examine our deeply held and unquestioned beliefs, and discard those that are badly founded.

While it is true that we, as a society, are growing more alienated from any ideology of authenticity, authenticity in the existential sense is an integral part of the academic mission to search for truth. It is no easy thing to adjust one’s gaze so that a woman is given the luxury of not having to choose between her child and her career, and so that being one’s authentic self (within the limits of professionalism and ethical conduct) is not an object of shame. However, it is a moral imperative.

As dean of the Law School, Kagan had a professional duty to enforce Harvard’s non-discrimination policies. Since the military, as an employer, discriminates against (and is legally required to discriminate against) gays and lesbians, this meant that she had to deny them the use of the Careers Office. This didn’t mean that Harvard law students couldn’t join up, of course—just that there weren’t any shiny brochures waiting to tell them how good they’d look in uniform when they were deciding which $200,000-starting-salary law firm to go into. In other words, this was strictly a symbolic gesture.

Such a deed, however, can be a sticky point when one is not in progressive, gay-friendly Cambridge, but rather before a military-revering Senate eager to skew one as a homo-hugging anti-military peacenik. However, we need to bear in mind that Kagan’s own views (whatever they were) were irrelevant in this case; she was acting, as was her professional duty, in accordance with Harvard policy. Her hands were tied; hers was an administrative decision, not an idealistic one, as can be seen by the fact she flipped-flopped when the legal status of the ban was overturned, then reinstated, by the Supreme Court. Of course, the other side is also equally willing to skewer her for this.

This brings me to what I’m pissed about: Not the gays-in-the-military thing (which I’m not qualified to comment on), but the fact that activists on both the left and the right are willing to paint a very brilliant woman with a broad tar-brush for doing her job. If Kagan had been a lawyer who defended a client who was a pedophile or a death-row inmate, that would be understandable as her professional duty—perhaps a political death-knell, but understandable in terms of our legal system and our Constitutional rights. However, as an academic administrator enforcing policy and walking a thin line between the law and her university’s mandates, she gets no slack.

In the end, thankfully, Kagan gave an answer that appeased all sides handled herself brilliantly in the hearings. But of course she did: After a life in academic politics, a Congressional hearing must be nothing.

Yet, the entities that administer such databases, such as Ithaka (the not-for-profit that runs JSTOR) and Brepols (a Belgian publisher that owns a number of scholarly resources) are operating on a nineteenth-century model that reserves access to information to the cognoscenti. In order to use their products (which are, as I’ll discuss, really someone else’s products), you usually have to be affiliated with an academic institution with the deep pockets to pay their access fees. Limited JSTOR access, for instance, is $40,000 per year, which is difficult for many smaller schools.

Cui bono? Certainly not those whose labor is being sold. Academics don’t get paid much for writing and reviewing books and articles—we do it because it’s part of the job description and because we love what we do. Most of us would be happier for a wider audience. Of course, from the publishers’ end, there’s an opportunity cost for publishing, server space, administration, etc., but it’s difficult to see why it is necessary to charge so much to essentially redistribute other people’s alienated labor. Nor is this trade subject to the external control of the market—it’s a necessary service that comes out of institutional budgets.

This last fact frustrates the hell many of those who aren’t in mainstream academia: Independent scholars, unemployed or under-employed Ph.Ds, and those between jobs or who have left the academy but still engage in scholarly activity. The access plan is thus out of step with the current realities, where very few go from a Ph.D program to a full-time academic job, but rather find themselves in a sort of limbo in which they should be maximizing their chances of landing a job by publishing as much as possible, which, in turn, requires journal access. This is especially annoying when an article that seems perfect for your current book project teases you by coming up as Google search result, but is inaccessible behind a pay wall, leaving you with no way to get at the tantalizing morsel of information.

Worse, it seems as if the resources necessary to do the work of academe are being controlled by the haves—rich, first-world research universities who can pay, the rest of the world be damned. The scale of the global demand for information was made clear when my Fordham user account was hacked a couple of years ago, probably when I was dumb enough to log in using an unsecure WiFi connection at an airport. What did the malefactors want? Money? E-mail addresses to spam? No—knowledge. Within hours, my username and password for the academic databases were spread on Arabic and Chinese-language sites. The multiple database logins were how the problem was caught, and it was a massive headache for me to get my access restored (I was in Paris at the time). Still, even if they were thieves, their motives were kind of commendable.

Now, I don’t mean to vilify an entire industry by this. There is no intentionality here, but rather simply a great deal of institutional inertia. The scholarly Scrooges are well aware of their miserly image, and are trying to do damage control. As I was sending out inquires around academic listservs to research this article, I was pleasantly surprised when, Kristen Garlock, a representative from Ithaka, the parent company of JSTOR, contacted me personally. (I had earlier sought to contact them, to no response.) Kristen was extremely responsive to criticism, and answered my questions at length.

“JSTOR’s price structure and access approach reflect the original aims of the service and the community it was designed to support,” she explained. “Our initial expectation was that JSTOR might be useful to large research libraries with significant print holdings. It has turned out that its value reaches much farther and that many academic and other institutions participate to gain access to collections of material they have never held in print and could never afford nor able to obtain in print at this time.”

Though claiming that their price structure is stepped to institutions’ various sizes and missions, Kristen also told me in her e-mail (which I won’t quote at length, since the prose styling was similar to the insomnia-curing bit of corporatespeak I quoted above) that Ithaka also has plans in place to increase access by introducing a tiered price structure, giving access through learned societies (which publish many journals in the first place), giving free access to not-for-profits in the developing world, beginning to allow alumni access in certain universities, and creating some sort of individual access for independent scholars by the end of this year.

As some colleagues have pointed out to me, there are also workarounds: In the U.S., you can often access JSTOR through public libraries, public universities (though usually on-site access only), and by joining the aforesaid learned societies (although rarely for free, and often at great inconvenience). If you know what you need, there’s public interlibrary loan, but then you can’t search the databases to see what might come up. Of course, if you’re in a rural area, an inner city with a gutted library system that can’t afford the steep fees, or two hours from the nearest university, you’re out of luck.

So, at least one of the companies involved seems to be sensitive to just what the situation looks like to the public, and things are being done to remedy the situation. The question I want to raise, though, isn’t so much if these solutions will be adequate, but rather if we need to rethink the entire philosophy behind the business model. Who owns scholarship, and how much can they get away with charging for access to it? Is this something that should be left up to private industry? What if the EU or one of its member states wants to democratize access (far more likely than the US government doing it)? What if Google buys up all these resources and distributes them for free?

Most importantly, will access to technological utopia spread to the knowledge that “counts”—not the Wikipedias and crank AOL hometown pages of the world, but the peer-reviewed journals that represent the best of human knowledge? “Anyone can edit” has long been the motto of those who seek a democratization of knowledge, but the fact is that human knowledge is arranged in hierarchies. In-depth research, expert opinions, and the vetting of ideas by scholars—the sort of things found in academic journals—are qualitatively different from the wisdom of the crowd. However, as it stands now, these resources, given free or at low cost by their creators, are cost-prohibitive and available only to a few. For the digital revolution to progress, this needs to change. Rather than “anyone can edit,” a better battle cry would be “anyone can access.”

Next time: Some ideas for the reform of academic publishing