A couple of weeks ago, Angela Jancius, the moderator of the Society for Urban, National and Transnational/Global Anthropology (SUNTA) listserv, posted a query for “a top ten list of ways to battle against the neoliberalization of university life.” Members of the URBANTH-L list replied, and four days later, this was Angie’s compilation of the answers. (I haven’t edited anything, but fixed formatting for readability).

And while some tactics are either of the hippy-dippy or Smash-the-State varieties (hope that didn’t sound too pejorative) and wouldn’t work at so-called research institutions (or so-called teaching institutions, for that matter), a good chunk of these are implementable, even on an individual basis. (I’m always shocked at the prices of textbooks in the sciences, for instance; I’m usually hesitant if my assigned books are over 30 bucks in total!)

If you ask me, it’s the size of classes that has the most direct impact on classroom quality. It’s bad for the professor, of course, who has to slog through grading all those papers and will therefore be tempted to cut corners (shorter papers, insubstantial multiple-choice exams). But it’s just as bad for the students: less time with professors, briefer comments on papers, radically decreased opportunities for participation, and a semester signposted by exams and binge-and-purge learning. (It was only a few years ago that, in an attempt to increase class size, the administration where I used to teach kept pushing more chairs inside the classrooms until the safety marshals hollered “Fire hazard!”) And don’t get me started on how criminally underpaid adjuncts and temporary lecturers are…

My former employer, an urban school by reputation, has essentially abandoned its decades-long “commitment” to the working class from its immediate surroundings, and instead has concentrated on recruiting aggressively from the O.C. to fill up their dormitories. (I have nothing against SoCal in particular, but it does raise the question of where the SF high schoolers are ending up. A year ago an overwhelming majority of the first-year students in my anthropology class were already dorm-dwellers. This is a fairly profound student demographic shift in my opinion, suggesting, perhaps erroneously, that they were relatively moneyed and that they had few ties to the local community. But that latter part can change.)

(If you want to cut and paste this and repost on your respective lists, or blogs, or whatever, please remove all the above drivel first.)

Enough chitchat; here we go:

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I don’t think I’ve seen BAE Systems advertise in the Chronicle of Higher Education before, and I may be wrong — and a quick Google search shows places like Monster.com, Job.com, and Intelligencecareers.com, all places I don’t frequent — but lo and behold, it showed up in the Anthropology listings this week (though it was on the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology job site almost a month ago):

The Human Terrain System (HTS) is a new Army program, designed to improve the military’s ability to understand the local socio-cultural environment in Iraq and Afghanistan. Knowledge of the local population provides a departure point for a military staff’s ability to plan and execute its mission more effectively using less kinetic force.

Unlike the other postings, this job description specifically mentions Iraq and Afghanistan. And despite the deliberate vagueness of “less kinetic force,” this statement is probably as close to saying (and excuse the bluntness), “Having an anthropologist or two around makes it less likely that we’ll have to waste some Iraqis.” I suppose if you put it that way, it makes the job a little more attractive. Kind of.

The whole topic has been discussed in academic circles for a while now, but has only recently hit the mainstream press (in particular, a high-profile article in the New York Times). See Savage Minds for a primer and links to other articles, dating from as early as 2005. (For something earlier, Eric Wakin’s out-of-print Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand will fit the bill.)

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1. My mom’s Christmas Village 3.0 is, as the kids say nowadays, ginormous. Wish I were going back this year but there’s too much work.

2. Work is slowing down, but the end of the quarter at Cal State Hayward (I refuse to call it Cal State East Bay, sorry) is approaching quickly, and I have a winter class at UC Davis that I haven’t taken care of yet, and I have a manuscript due in January.

3. So those monthly mp3 mixes won’t be showing up for a while, I’m afraid. But a glimpse of what it would have looked like:

- Caribou, “Melody Day”
- Chatmonchy, “Renai Spirits”
- Wild Billy Childish and The Musicians of the British Empire, “Date with Doug”
- Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, “What Have You Done For Me Lately, Part 1″
- Jean Knight, “Do Me”
- The Zombies, “This Will Be Our Year” (where was this song all my life???)

and a couple of stray Spoon tracks (“I Turn My Camera On,” “Sister Jack”), plus an old Interpol song (“Obstacle 1″).

4. Though I’m still reading stuff online — check out my del.icio.us feed / bookmarks on the right.

5. Yes, I’ve gone back to Twitter.

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1. In what is clearly my Best Concert Year Ever, I met Chhom Nimol, the lead singer of Dengue Fever (the coolest band in America, as I’ve written many times) this evening. I bought her a shot of Jagermeister, which she requested (“Medicine for singers,” she said).

(2. Imagine three exclamation points at the end of each sentence and you’ll have a good idea of how I’m feeling.)

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Give or take a year, I’m the same age as (my musical heroes) Polly Jean Harvey and James Murphy, who I presume are also in that big nebulous open-ended Middle Age / Senior Citizen group.

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