The Wily Filipino

In Vino Veritas.

Setting: Express checkout lane, Safeway.

Woman at register [eyeing my bottle of 2006 Coppola Pinot Noir]: Now, sir, are you buying that because you like drinking it, or just to taste it?

Me: I've never had it.

Woman: How do you pronounce that? Cop-PO-la?

Me: Well, he pronounces it COP-pola, but back in Italy they probably pronounce it Cop-PO-la.

Woman [smiles]: That's what I said! So why this bottle?

Me: Oh, me and a couple of friends of mine are watching a movie about him tomorrow night.

Woman: About his wine?

Me: No, about a movie he made.

Woman: He's a winemaker and a director??

Me: Yup.

Woman [shakes her head]: Man. Sounds like someone oughta make up his mind.

"Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life: A List of Strategies."

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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My sincere thanks to all who responded to my query. The tips that you sent were wonderful, and really quite inspiring. Below is an initial compilation, divided under the six subheadings of: "On Unions and Organizing," "On Faculty Rank," "On Bureaucracy and Governance," "On Teaching," "On Student Tuition, Fees and Support," and "General Advice." A shorter top ten list will be published in the January 2008 edition of Anthropology News. I can already imagine that it will be difficult to edit down the expanded list of strategies that are included below. The below list has no copyright or individual authorship and you should feel free to distribute it widely, to post it to wiki sites and blogs, to invite your friends and students to expand upon it, and of course to encourage your departments and colleagues to implement its contents.

Angela Jancius

Battling the Neoliberalization of University Life: A List of Strategies

On Unions and Organizing:

* The No. 1 way is faculty unionization. Unionize tenure-track faculty, adjunct faculty and graduate students who teach. Your efforts will not be effective if adjunct and graduate teaching staff are not organized.

* Resist the destruction of solidarities (e.g. see David Harvey, The History of Neoliberalism).

* Support unity. As an adjunct instructor and a graduate student, I can tell you that management is WELL AWARE of the contempt that most full-time faculty has toward us part-timers. During contract negotiations, I've also heard GA's and adjuncts undercut the contracts of the full-timers. Management disciplines full-timers with the knowledge that they can be replaced instantly by the army of the underemployed.

* Invite part-time and adjunct faculty, as well as support staff and research staff, to departmental meetings. Make the minutes available to the entire community.

* Join professional organizations that will lobby in opposition to the lobbyists for privatization: NEA higher education organizations, AAUP, AFT. Pay your dues or be prepared to be sold out.

* Participate in faculty governance and advocate strongly for resolutions and policies that promote an academic community built on shared values and scholarship instead of a corporatized institution built on entrepreneurship and external overhead.

* Form parallel autonomous institutions that meet people's needs in a collective, non-hierarchical fashion. At my old school, SUNY-Binghamton, the campus was served by an excellent bus system that was owned and run by a collective of the drivers, funded by student fees.

On Faculty Rank:

* Reject the implementation of "benchmarks" or any other form of "standards" for merit raises or promotions that are predicated on quantified output. Rather, draw upon such ideas as those of Ernest Boyer (Scholarship Reconsidered) [http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/10/02/wcu]

* Reject merit raises all together and rather spread the total raises due the entire faculty of a department evenly to all faculty.

* When 65% of the professoriate is part-time, why have tenured positions at all?

* Refuse to sell ourselves as "stars" to highest bidding institutions. This reproduces the neoliberal self-made "man," reinforcing gender and class hierarchies within the academy.

* Don't refer to enthusiastic younger members of faculty as "junior" scholars. It annoys them intensely and makes them feel small.

* Allow complete transparency, re: salaries paid to all faculty in all departments.

* Identify and monitor the behavior all 'frumps' (formerly radical upwardly mobile professors).

* Use the growing 'sustainability consensus' discourse to push for a democratization of academia - as sustainability centrally implies participation.

On Bureaucracy and Governance:

* Expose and oppose corporate control of academia.

* Resist the process of turning universities into institutions of management rather than places of "higher learning" by refusing to accept administrative positions that are newly created and not really necessary for "learning."

* The university can be run by the faculty, but the faculty must organize in constant vigilance. Professors could collectively attend administration meetings and repeat the demand, week after week, to stop the metastasized growth of bureaucratic bosses. Use the saved funds to create more professor positions, course offerings, and library books, and to establish student scholarships grants. The heart of the university is here, not in creating ever more layers of office managers to govern this and that for a bottom line value that is set by the new MBA bosses.

* Rip up parking lots. Implode student housing. Stop all construction projects not related to safety. Make students get gym memberships elsewhere.

* Demand accountability for the university practices in hiring faculty, labor, etc. in the construction of new campuses abroad (i.e. NYU's global expansion to Abu Dhabi).

* Resist the temptation to outsource to private companies, especially big non-local multinationals, tasks which the university could do by itself.

On Curriculum:

* Resist the neoliberal transformation of the curriculum (there is an excellent article--chapter 6--by Aihwa Ong in Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.)

* Restore a system whereby intellectual inquiry is valued for its own sake, and not just seen as a means toward increasing capitalist productivity. If the government's current proposal to fund all research on the basis of "relevance" were carried out, it would be the end of virtually all Humanities research as we know it.

* Resist the homogenization of university studies that is taking place all over Europe. Anthropology, in order to survive, is being asked to demonstrate demand from the job market. And its courses are oriented towards market demands.

* Avoid strict degree completion deadlines. Returning students bring valuable professional experience, but they also need the time to balance professional, work and personal responsibilities.

* Make research findings and publications freely and publicly accessible on the web.

On Teaching:

* Teach students about neoliberalization (its history, its impacts on individuals, etc.). They are the ones who can stop it.

* As teachers, we have a unique opportunity to relate the material we teach to the everyday lives of our students. Hold seminars on campus on the impact of neoliberalism on campus life and learning. Use critical pedagogy - encourage critical thinking

* Create a course that studies the University as an anthropological project.

* Link with activists, community groups, etc., beyond the academy. Carry out critical (including participatory) research. Develop more experience based learning courses, including internships and community service learning programs.

* Make the world your classroom. Teach in parks, bars, restaurants, homes, online.

* Offer courses on weekends, evenings, and on-line, so that working students and students with child and eldercare responsibilities can take courses/make progress on degrees.

* Encourage team-teaching.

* Conduct and assess instructor evaluations in a manner that reflects that students are scholars, not consumers.

* Avoid grade inflation. In a context of grade inflation, instructors that seek to honestly assess performance find themselves at a disadvantage, especially if they are adjunct staff.

* Develop undergraduate programs that pay particular attention to non-anthropology majors, since they are the ones that fill your large classes. Increase the pressure for small classes for introductory courses.

* Make classes last as long as they need to be. Stop with the micronization and fetishization of time. Some days I have a lot to say, some days not so much. Some days students need to practice and drill, and other times one profound sentence might do it.

* Quit giving standardized tests and grades. Pass/Fail. Get rid of students who don't want to be there. Tell them to come back when they know what they are there for. If we stop treating students like cash cows, maybe they will actually appreciate learning.

* Assign primary texts instead of textbooks.

* Make your students do the work - have them explain concepts to each other. Have them create materials they think are useful. Grade them for effort rather than results - they are there to learn.

* Spend less time preparing, and more time getting to know your students and their individual needs.

On Student Tuition, Fees and Support:

* Don't use standardized testing as a measure to determine student admissions or funding.

* Make applying for college more affordable. Applying to graduate programs is increasingly expensive. Transcripts (often in duplicate) are required from each school. The cost of transcripts is inflated (averaging $5-$10 per order, for regular mail). Applications fees are $50-$95 per school. GRE fees increase by roughly $10 per year (and this test should be banned, anyway, since it only tests your ability to learn test-taking strategies, not true knowledge or ability to succeed in a program).

* Use course packets, blackboard pdfs and next-to-last edition textbooks in introductory courses to decrease student book costs.

* Fund all students who are admitted into your program equally. Since Thatcher (and Reagan), efforts to turn higher education into a vocational finishing school for industry have been much more systematic and blatant. Under this model, if you're funded you get money to live off, to pay fees, and to attend conferences etc. If you're not funded, you get nothing and you have to pay fees. So one person has masses of help, while another is hindered and must struggle. This is one of the central ideological maxims of capitalism.

* Do not permit university programs to let graduate student instructors teach without compensation, merely for the experience of it or for credit.

* Do not burden Ph.D. candidates and recent Ph.D.s with the heaviest teaching loads. The abusive practice of using younger scholars as workhorses keeps a new generation from reaching its potential, in scholarship and as practioners.

* Pay health care benefits and tuition fees for graduate students, if possible.

General Advice:

* Be a happy person. Stop with the bitterness.

Kinetic Force.

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.)

Updates.

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.

Dengue Fever, The Independent, SF, 11/09/07.

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.)

3. I was standing in the back of the venue when I turned around to look at the bar and saw Chhom Nimol. Who was waving at me. I turn back to my friends (Talaya, Ben and Carlo) and point her out. And she was indeed waving at me. I couldn't believe it.

4. Later she said she recognized me from seeing me at the shows (!). (I think it was a case of mistaken identity, but still! How cool is that?)

5. So she gave Talaya (who speaks Khmer, a good thing) her cell phone number and told her to call and wait until after the show, when she came out. So we all got to talk afterwards and have pictures taken and CDs signed. She was sooooo cool and friendly; she wanted photographs with everyone, and was giving us hugs right and left. (She started telling us a story about having a room next to Maya Arulpragasam during the Treasure Island Music Festival, and how she was wearing all blue, and bringing Cambodian CDs, but I didn't hear the rest.)

6. Oh, wait, the show: an excellent set, as always, with more new songs from the forthcoming album creeping into the list (I'm wondering if "Doo Wop" or "A-Go-Go" will ever show up on it).

(7. The opening night selection at this year's Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival was none other than John Pirozzi's Sleepwalking through the Mekong! I can't wait to see it.)

8. And Talaya sung "I'm Only Sixteen" with Dengue Fever at the encore! (There was no way she'd mess it up like I did before.)

Two Movies With Nothing To Do With Each Other, #7.

David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises (2007) and Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever (2007).

(Some mild spoilers follow.)

Like Neil Marshall's The Crying Game, David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises is all about the penis. (Actually, come to think of it, so is Cronenberg's adaptation of David Henry Hwang's M. Butterfly.) Or at least that's how friends, co-workers, and the non-movie critic media characterize the film, especially since the said penis is attached to one Viggo Mortensen. (Actually, come to think of it, vaginas, or substitutes thereof, play supporting roles in Videodrome, Dead Ringers, and Crash as well. Plus there's a talking anal sphincter in Naked Lunch, but that doesn't count.)

Okay, I'm just kidding about the penis. Featuring easily the best naked male wrestling scene since Larry Charles' Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Eastern Promises is, on its surface, a fairly conventional thriller, in much the same way that Mortensen seems like a fairly conventional Russian gangster. You probably already know the story: an underused Naomi Watts stumbles upon a child prostitution ring run by the Russian Mafia after a young pregnant woman dies on her operating table. (The temptation here is to call it the structural (but not thematic) inverse of Cronenberg's A History of Violence -- same director, same lead actor -- but I won't reveal any plot spoilers. Suffice it to say that, like the Asian American Studies grad class I taught for four years or so, it's about Family and Identity.)

Critics (okay, David Denby, the only review I've read so far) have singled out the gore in Eastern Promises -- and how it simultaneously detracts from the film's seriousness, as well as confirming Cronenberg's more lurid impulses -- but I'm wondering whether that may be part of the point. What's odd about the film is that the gore doesn't seem real somehow, and I wonder, again, whether it's deliberate. There are a couple of throat slashings in Eastern Promises that look like they came right out of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film -- in other words, patently, stupidly, fake -- and then there's the eyeball-stabbing scene, which results in a rather chaste (and cinematically classic) pool of blood growing underneath the victim's body. (The way the throat cuttings are shot -- front, center, and very slowly -- don't help but foreground their artificiality.)

Contrast this with the oeuvre of another North American director who makes "serious" films but similarly traffics in gore -- see Casino, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, Gangs of New York -- and you'll see what I mean; Scorsese clearly enjoys this stuff, and makes sure to pummel us with its nauseating realism. Compare this again with Cronenberg's earlier splatter-filled work in Videodrome, The Dead Zone, and Scanners; despite their horror / fantasy-based context, the scenes of violence in those films are excruciatingly detailed.

But more instructively, compare the odd fakery of Eastern Promises to A History of Violence, which is itself bookended by a kind of staging of the fake: the wholesomeness of Small Town America that, upon a second viewing, takes on a surreality that borders on Blue Velvet; the John Woo-stylings of the cartoonish bloodbath at the end. Eastern Promises also seems set in a London that (deliberately?) doesn't look like the moviegoer's London (but probably familiar to its residents); the fact that the film is populated by a cast and crew (Cronenberg, Mortensen, Watts, Cassel, Mueller-Stahl, Cusack) that seems like they're from pretty much everywhere *except* Russia or London -- well, I don't know where this is going. Maybe some grad student can figure this out.

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I've never been particularly taken with concert films: they inevitably pale in comparison to the experience of being at a live venue, and the cinematography usually runs the gamut from queasy oblique shots to cameras zooming in and out while sitting on tripods. Teppei Kishida's MONO: The Sky Remains The Same As Ever sidesteps the usual cliches for a largely impressionistic and immersive experience into MONO's European tour and on stage.

Instead of the usual shots of the musicians setting up their gear (or generally static shots of the lead singer, interspersed with shots of the lead guitarist as she or he goes into the solo), Kishida's fluid camera swoops unobtrusively over the proceedings, lingering over the tangles of wires on scuffed floors, the blur of the hi-hat, the top of the guitarists' heads as they hunch over their guitars. (MONO is an instrumental band, which naturally diffuses any focus on any single member of the band.) Perhaps most interesting (at least from a cinematic point of view) is the way the director pointedly includes the audience in the film during the performances: people drumming on the monitors, a couple swaying with their eyes closed -- an acknowledgment, perhaps, that they matter just as much as the music itself.

But this is all at the expense of any kind of insight into the Japanese post-rock quartet's impenetrable (or completely opaque, depending on your views) music: we vaguely hear interviewers asking questions on a voiceover track, but they aren't exactly answered. There's an inconsequential piece of footage with Steve Albini at the mixing desk, and another short scene while they rehearse with a string section, but there's nothing else about the creation of the music. The hyperbole on the MONO website doesn't exactly deliver, and maybe that's a good thing. The suitably moody, beautifully shot scenes of wintry landscapes, the sun's glare through leaves, freeways through rain-spangled windshields perhaps illustrate the emotional pull of their music best.

I realize that the words "for fans only" sounds like I'm panning the film, but it won't necessarily make a convert of the casual listener; the best way to do that is to take your friend for a drive outside of the city and put "Yearning" on really loud. In the end, the viewer gets what should have been promised in the first place: a solid and fascinatingly filmed visual souvenir of their concerts. Everything is thrillingly here: the ritualistic swaying, Taka's wall-of-sound freakouts, the 10-minute monolith of pure feedback in the middle of "Lost Snow."

Thanks For Making Me Feel Really Old, Pitchfork!

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.