I do my best, as a blogger, to stray from hot button/political/etc. topics.  This blog is, ostensibly, about film music (and related media), and as I detest loudmouth bloggers and pundits (from both sides) I feel it best to avoid such conflagrations.  But there is a topic near and dear to me and that is higher education and the importance and funding of such.  Living and going to school where I do, in a state that ranks very near the bottom of public funding for higher education, it is a debate that rages in the state and there is even a current senate candidate who once made comments to the effect that the government should discontinue federal student loans (the only way I can afford my PhD, needless to say he did not receive my mail-in ballot vote).

I tangentially talked about higher education a few months ago, but there have been two recent columns by Stanley Fish in the New York Times (Part I and Part II) which have once again made me worry about not only my own future as an academic and scholar, but also the future of academia and by extension intellectual discourse in this country.  To summarize the impetus behind Fish’s columns, the Albany campus of the State University of New York (SUNY) recently announced that it was giving the axe to the French, Russian, Italian, classics, and theatre programs due to budget cuts in the Empire State.

Fish’s main question is about this “crisis of the humanities” in public education (it’s not just a university problem, but also primary and secondary schools).  How do school administrators validate the existence of such programs when the benefits are not as tangible as, say, computer sciences, medicine, business, etc.  Not to mention the point of that so many of the departments are havens for trouble makers, boat rockers, free thinkers, and, god forbid, liberals!

Fish offers some rationales and possible arguments for administrators and the public, and finally comes down to a somewhat circular argument of that it should be funded because that is what a university is.  I will set his arguments aside for the time being and rather meditate on why this entire trend troubles me so.

There is a fundamental contradiction in today’s society in relation to education and knowledge that keeps me up at night now that I’m lecturing in front of a class on a tri-weekly basis.  At the same time that we have unprecedented access to knowledge thanks to the internets and the Google, people have seemed to stopped thinking about things in lieu of surface level thought and analysis provided by others (in forums such as the one you’re reading).  And while the blogosphere is great for things like instant analysis and for getting a conversation started, to many treat it also as an end.  Instead of thinking for themselves and doing thoughtful analysis, they just spout out what others say.

The humanities are exactly the subjects that give us the tools to do our own analyses, but our culture and economy are so focused on end products and results, the rather meta-level tools that such things as critical theory and philosophy give us are seen as unproductive because philosophy begets thoughts begets theory begets philosophy, and theory begets analysis begets theory.  And so on.  Academic for academic sake is not seen as a valid argument, though it is exactly the one put forth by Fish in the end.  And as I mentioned in my earlier post, it is exactly this dilemma I struggle with, asking myself (as I prepare another exam or counsel students on paper topics), “what is it I want them to take from this that I hope they can use in their everyday life.”

I see or hear loud political ads during this midterm election season and I wonder what happened to thoughtful discourse.  It seems like the loudest person wins, or at lease that is what the advertisers think.  And the “rhetoric” (I question if it’s even worthy of the term) tossed around seems to be only angry, loud, and used to instill fear into the electorate.  It’s a sad commentary when the sanest voice in politics and media is a comedian.  And this loss of thoughtful, intelligent discourse in the public sphere is, in my view, a direct result of the lack of quality education.

One of the bedrocks of a democracy is a well-educated electorate, and now that we truly have an electorate that embraces all citizens (not just wealthy, land owning, white males), it is the duty of the government to provide and support public education.  Don’t believe those that say that the American educational system is among the best in the world.  Yes, it better than many, and the universities are among the best, but if we, as a country, do not demand that states like the one I’m living in, and the federal government, work to increase that funding, those universities will go the way of so many rural or inner city school districts that suffer from a small or poor tax base in which to fund them.  And quality education will one again be only within the reach of those same wealthy citizens.

Education is supposed to be that great leveler in our society, the belief that free and public access to education is the means through which anyone can improve their socioeconomic status.  But if public universities lose all their public funding, that access is going to be dependent on either student loans (which cause such crippling debt that some believe it will cause another economic crunch soon), the kindness of endowed scholarships (which sometimes come with many strings attached that cause money to go unused or wasted), or a return to country where only a the privileged few have over a basic level of education.

I find none of those option particularly appetizing.

To bring this rant around to something resembling a point, I come finally to the title of this post, “Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood…”  To those who were awake and paying attention in English class, you will recognize the opening line of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”  It’s a popular poem and well worth anyone’s time and reflection, especially given the divergence of popular interpretation versus the more ironic and critical interpretation.  A fine example of how humanities program can teach critical thinking skills, especially given how the word “irony” is tossed around with little care to the actual meaning of the word (of which Futurama did a brilliant study on in its final episode prior to cancellation back in 2003).

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

But the image, too, is a powerful.  Which path should we choose in terms of our treatment of public education?  Both paths are difficult and worn about the same (which is what the second stanza says, “Had worn them really about the same”).  We have done public funding, we have done private funding, but which is the better path that can show the way for the future?  I personally think that if there is such a funding shortage and budget shortfall that maybe we should, as a country, reexamine some of the spending and look at what is truly for the public good.  Ask, “what is the function of government?” just as Fish asks us to consider “what is a university?”  You can probably guess my feelings: cut military and defense spending and dump those trillions into public education, problem solved (so many research and defense contracts go to public universities such as my own, at least this way the money might great spread around).

But another way could be a return to true liberal arts education such that courses in the humanities might receive higher enrollment and help fund the departments.  Have required courses in all of the major subjects, have more language classes required (I had to do two years in my undergrad).  Maybe we shouldn’t even offer classes in a specific major until the third year of college, the first two years must spent doing core and basic classes and that one cannot even select a major until year three.

I’m not sure the best course of action, but whatever it is, I’m sure that it beats the hell out of standing at the crossroads yelling at each other and achieving nothing at all.

This past Monday I was really “bummed out,” as we would say when I was young.  A friend of mine posted a link to this article on his Facebook, and I couldn’t actually bring myself to read it all the way through, but also browsing some of the writers other editorials, I began to be depressed and this fed into a dilemma I’ve been wrestling with: how to approach teaching my first class this fall.  But alongside that is my long running anxiety of coming back to grad school for my PhD.  In the face of a terrible job market in higher education, especially for humanities and the arts, I have questioned what it is I’m doing on more than one occasion.  In a world of vast homogenization of the job market, it seems like that it is either business, accounting, computer science, or some other degree that will lead to medical or law school that is the only way to go if you want job security.  So in such a world, why do the arts matter?  That seems to be the attitude of so many students.  On top of the problem of trying to actually prepare students to be thinking members of society and not just working to a goal of a good grade or whatever goal in life (good performance review, bonus, etc) is currently in front of them.

This also dovetails with a conversation I’ve been having with a good friend of mine who I consider a stalwart member of my “Brain Trust.”  In discussing the new Karate Kid movie and by extension the original, she told me about a book she had read (and graciously made some copies and sent to me) that dealt with how we learn, or rather the best way to learn.  You provide the groundwork (in KK the waxing, painting, or in the new, “Jacket on, jacket off, hang up jacket, etc), and the student has the breakthrough when they actually learn how to apply those skills.  Rather then rote learning, you actually have to apply what you have learned, integrate it into everything else you learn.  In what the author calls the “good student syndrome,” the student wants steady progress towards the ultimate goal, whereas in life, it’s really plateaus and breakthroughs.  You have to first learn the basics and then move on.  But conversely, as a teacher, you have to actually provide that foundation.  As a teacher, it’s easy to teach “for the test” – give them the bullet points of facts, dates, etc. that they’ll need to pass the test, and then call it a day – and this is really tempting because it is what so many student expect and want.  But besides making us lazy as a teacher and student, it also makes us intellectually lazy for life.

You see, part of learning, becoming intellectually stimulated for life, is learning how to learn.  How to take in information and process it.  To want not clear-cut answers and facts (trivia…which I love, I’m a massive trivia nerd), but rather systems of thought that can support larger ideas.  To seek out questions and answers that go to the core of who you are and who “we” are.  It is a reflection of this trend that so much popular culture is not made to challenge the audience, and those that do have a hard time finding an audience.  Lost is an exception to this, and it is odd that this show found such a wide audience, though at the same time I feel that it challenged the audience not in a way that made them look inward along with outward, but rather focused on the surface external mystery (though I do couch this in that there was the deeper level of meaning of community and human relationships that was there, but so much of the last half of the show “lost” this thread and it wasn’t really picked up again until almost the end).  It wasn’t challenging like BSG that made us question what it means to be human in the face of the apocalypse (or terrorism).

This is all to say that in approaching my first class, I have decided that I really must try to engage their minds on a deeper level – challenge them, confront them.  In my film class last semester the first set of readings the teacher assigned was from Michel Foucault, and she flat-out said that if you can’t get through this, find it difficult, or that you don’t want to do this kind of reading, that maybe this wasn’t the class for you – and bear in mind that this was a dual listed grad level/upper level undergrad class.  I would like to similarly challenge my students.  To much the same the degree that I am distressed by certain elements of modern culture (American Idol and other such reality television) and I am constantly fascinated by new media trends on the Internet.  And I wholly believe that culturally significant material is being produced and posted on the Internet.

But does the world really care when the people who would study such trends are finding it difficult to secure employment?  In my little niche of the world of film music studies, I find it fascinating that independently produced films made strictly for internet distribution will routinely employ composers to write original music.  Surf around the many Star Trek fan film series sites and you’ll quickly discover that many have composers on their team.  But who cares, really?  What is the point of my field of inquiry in the end?  To say that it’s just about music and media is to be very literal and narrow-minded.  On a higher level it is about how we as humans react to media and storytelling.  How music influences our emotions and thus how we engage and interpret a visual text.  Further, I study modern culture and trends, so part of it is also our cultural history, and what has been a more dominating force in culture of the last 100 years than film, television, and the internet?  As someone once noted, all that has changed is that the screens have gotten smaller.

This may validate my own feelings, but it does little to solve the larger problem, that of the state of education in America.  We’ve spent the better part of the last 30 or more years worried about the bottom line: standardized testing, achievement levels, and no child left behind.  All of which are designed to rate how a school and its students are performing.  We’ve overvalued higher grades and forgotten that ‘C’ means average.  So now it’s all about working the system so that students get a higher grade, and it’s easier and less stressful for a teacher to teach for the test and no more.  Teach from the text.  Well it didn’t work for me, and I feel that most of my major intellectual breakthroughs have happened outside the classroom as I read and challenge myself…well at least until my PhD.  In so many ways, this has been the most intellectually satisfying time of my life.

Of course, I keep throwing around this word “intellectual” which has taken on a bad meaning in America today, but I’ll leave that alone.  This is not a political blog.

I guess my true dream is to rediscover in academia the classical Greek academy, educate the whole person.  So many schools say they do this with their “core classes,” but we all know that many of those are watered down and the students don’t want a hard class “outside their major.”  And maybe this is also part of the problem, this focus on “majors,” that college is a means to an end.  Before, it was you would need a high school diploma to get a decent job and college wasn’t for everyone.  Now, to get that same “decent job” one has to have a bachelors degree, if not a masters.  College is now that means to the middle class dream, and that attitude of “I’m out of here in four years no matter what, so you better not fail me” pervades in the large core classes.  The traditional university has become more about vocational training in so many ways.

And I’m just as guilty of this as the next person, it’s only now that I truly miss having not pushed myself harder in my undergrad.  To have taken those philosophy and English classes and actually earn those minors I thought about.

My dream, my true dream, I guess, is to teach at a school, a small school that does challenge its students.  I don’t care if I have to start it myself, but I wish it to happen.  Start a think tank that is also part of an educational institution.  Have seminars and discussions with students, engage with them.  Who cares if Wagner died in 1883, or that his opera house was built in Bayreuth?  Why did he want that opera house built in the first place, what was its purpose?  What are the themes of Parsifal and what do they say about Wagner’s philosophy?  Indeed, what intellectual philosophies of late 19th century Europe influenced his operas, and how do these philosophers still influence thought today, or do they?  And the whole point of this is not to say, “look at how smart I am,” but rather to pose the question of how have these things influenced me and my modes of thinking?  Revealing the hidden structures of one’s own thought and shaking the scaffolding, see if it holds up.  We need to continually challenge our own thought, question ourselves.  We must do so to grow as a people, or we face a death of civilization, and if I have to turn into Spider Jerusalem to do so, then so be it.

To bring this all to a close, there are certain things in my life that have brought all this to a head recently.  Besides the already mentioned article, I have also been listening to the WNYC/NPR series Radiolab in podcast form.  This show always tries to get behind the story, ask the hard question of why.  And the questions and stories they tackle are ones that usually get to the very core of our human existence.  Now the sheer fact that such a show exists and has some 80 episodes available to download gives me hope.  Not to mention from an aural perspective, its innovative sound design and composition style is nothing short of brilliant.  Further, let us consider Star Trek, and it’s core tenant that humanity’s potential is limitless.  That, as long as we want to, we are capable of so much greatness and good.  While many sci-fi films, etc. project a dim and bleak or sterile future (Blade Runner, 2001, Alien, etc), Gene Roddenberry set out to show us a future, not without its warts, but one in which humanity found a way to come together for the common goal of peaceful exploration.  That our main pursuit in life is not one of wealth or power, but to better ourselves and those around us, be they from different countries or even planets…and to boldly go where no one has gone before.  Not to mention a civilization that still values art and culture, music, poetry…because these things to contribute to our lives.  They enrich us and have the potential to engage us on multiple levels.

And this is why I do what I do, because I believe that music and culture are at the very core of who we are.  That film and film music (and by extension other visual media and their music) are a central piece of how we engage with our modern society, and it is our duty to challenge one another to look beyond because that is how we can grow as a people.  Ask the question of how and why and what a film or piece of music says to us and says about us.  And without teachers in the humanities and arts there to ask these questions, pose them to students, we might end up with a bunch of Bill Lumberghs…and do we really want that?  I didn’t think so.

Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.