Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 342

September 17, 2014: Country Music and Society: The Dixie Chicks and Strong Women

[As with any longstanding, popular cultural genre, country music has a complex, evolving relationship to American society. In this series, I’ll highlight five ways we can AmericanStudy the genre and those social connections and meanings. I’d love to hear your country connections and analyses for a twangtastic crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the strength and independence we seem to value, and those we don’t.One of the central narratives of the country music scene over the last few years has been the rise of strong female voices and artists. Of course there have been examples of such artists for decades, including Monday’s subject Dolly Parton and many others, but the sheer number of breakout young female stars on the current country scene is undeniable: from established talents like Gretchen Wilson, Miranda Lambert, and Carrie Underwood to on-the-verge artists like Kacey Musgraves, the Pistol Annies, and the Band Perry (among many many others in each category). Moreover, many of these artists have risen to prominence with hit songs of female empowerment, strength, and independence, whether sassy and proud (Wilson’s “Redneck Woman”), angry and defiant (Underwood’s “Before He Cheats”), or simply self-confident and wise (Musgraves’ “Follow Your Arrow”).Among the most prominent, popular turn of the 21st century predecessors to these recent female stars would have to be the Dixie Chicks, a group that from their name to their early hit “Goodbye Earl” (2000), the single for which was paired with a tongue-in-cheek B-side of “Stand By Your Man” for added effect, embodied these concepts of strong, independent country women. And then came March 2003, when lead singer Natalie Maines expressed her strong, independent perspective on the imminent Iraq War, telling a British audience that “We don't want this war, this violence, and we're ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas." While it’s fair to say that the overall American reactions to Maines’ comments were mixed, with plenty of agreement and support from anti-war voices (including country legend Merle Haggard), it’d also be accurate to call the reaction of the country music scene and country fans overwhelmingly negative: from public record destructions and boycotts to private death threats, and just about everything in between.Of course I understand that the specific historical moment of Maines’ comments—and the related, broader context of the “love it or leave it” version of patriotism which surrounded both the Iraq War and the Bush presidency—played into that particular response. But on the other hand, I would argue that gender did too—that the far more extreme and hysterical response to the Dixie Chicks (compared for example to the response to Haggard’s anti-Iraq War statements and song) had at least something to do with the fact that a trio of women were leveling this critique on the powers that be. Which is to say, 21st century country music and America in general might well support strong, independent female voices and artists, might even embrace such figures more fully than at any prior point in our culture—but it seems clear to me that there remains a glass ceiling on such support, one connected to images of what kind of independence is permissible from our artists and cultural figures and what isn’t. Next country connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post, or other country connections you'd highlight?

September 16, 2014: Country Music and Society: Patriotism and Images of America

[As with any longstanding, popular cultural genre, country music has a complex, evolving relationship to American society. In this series, I’ll highlight five ways we can AmericanStudy the genre and those social connections and meanings. I’d love to hear your country connections and analyses for a twangtastic crowd-sourced weekend post!]On the genre’s frustrating embrace of lazy and even divisive national narratives.As an AmericanStudier, and one who tries consistently to help us understand the complexity of our national past, identity, and community, few cultural genres frustrate me more consistently and thoroughly than the uber-patriotic country song. I’m thinking in particular about Lee Greenwood’s ubiquitous “God Bless the USA” (1984), which from its titular evocation of that trite phrase through its facile uses of parallel phrases like “proud to be an American” and “at least I know I’m free” embodies what I’ve elsewhere called the easy, unthinking version of patriotism. But even worse is Toby Keith’s post-9/11 anthem “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (the Angry American)” (2002)—I’m not sure I know of a more troubling or more false line about America than that song’s “We’ll put a boot in your ass/It’s the American way.”It’d be a mistake to simply lump Garth Brooks’ “American Honky-Tonk Bar Association” (1993) in with songs like Greenwood’s and Keith’s. Besides taking itself a lot less seriously (no small distinction to be sure), Brooks’ song seems to envision a more broadly inclusive definition of the national community: as “one big family/Throughout the cities and the towns,” a family that “reach[es] for those who are down” and whose “heart is in the music/And they love to play it loud.” But then there’s the second verse, which I need to quote in full: “When Uncle Sam dips in your pocket/For most things you don’t mind/But when your dollar goes to all of those/Standing in a welfare line/Well rejoice you have a voice/If you’re concerned about the destination/Of this great nation/It’s called the American Honky-Tonk Bar Association.” So that titular family has a particular agenda, and that agenda is to express concerns about the future as represented by another part of the national community, a part that seems comprised quite specifically by those fellow citizens “who are down.”It’d be important to contextualize that part of Brooks’ song in its historical and social moment, as part of the early 1990s move toward “welfare reform” that culminated in President Clinton and the Congressional GOP’s famous and deeply problematic 1996 law. But the song also connects to a much more longstanding and divisive national narrative, one that pits “working Americans” (Brooks opens his song by addressing those whose “paycheck depends on/The weather and the clock”) against the shiftless and dependent poor, divides “makers” from “takers,” argues that social programs like welfare represent a (even the most) significant American concern. Given the percentage of the beneficiaries of such social programs who are precisely the rural working-class Americans about whom Brooks is singing, his version of this longstanding narrative is as inaccurate as any. But it’s also just unnecessarily divisive, a definition of the national family that depends on exclusion as well as inclusion—and for an artist as popular as Brooks, such divisiveness can have a potent and destructive effect.Next country connection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Responses to this post, or other country connections you'd highlight?

September 15, 2014: Country Music and Society: Gender and Identity

[As with any longstanding, popular cultural genre, country music has a complex, evolving relationship to American society. In this series, I’ll highlight five ways we can AmericanStudy the genre and those social connections and meanings. I’d love to hear your country connections and analyses for a twangtastic crowd-sourced weekend post!]On stereotypes, progress, and how the genre represents gender.Johnny Cash’s “A Boy Named Sue” (1969) was written by none other than
PPS. After finishing this piece, I saw this recent New York Times story on Dollywood and Parton as a gay icon. And I should also note here that my initial inspiration for this post came from fellow AmericanStudier AnneMarie Donahue.

September 13-14, 2014: Robert Greene II’s Guest Post on Sports and Society

[Robert Greene II is a PhD student in history at the University of South Carolina, where he’s studying 20th century American and Southern history, African American intellectual history, and a lot more. He’s a frequent contributor to the U.S. Intellectual History blog, and one of the more prolific and engaging Tweeters I know. And I’m very excited to share this Guest Post on another of his lifelong interests, the social and historical meanings and impacts of sports.]
On College Sports Rivalries
Growing up in the Deep South, and attending two institutions there (Georgia Southern University and the University of South Carolina), it occurs to me that a major part of the college experience is, well, hating another college. There are times when I think about such rivalries as being trivial—what has someone from Furman University or Appalachian State ever done to me (as a GSU fan)? No one from Clemson or the University of Georgia has caused me any harm; why should I get red in the face when I see their colors (as a graduate student attending South Carolina)? Yet, I cannot think of the college experience without that element of irrational hatred.
I think the scholarly examination of sports, which has grown by leaps and bounds (and now includes a fantastic blog on U.S. Sport History) can gain much by interacting with American Studies, and vice versa. Considering sports rivalries, in part, can be helpful in looking at the broader implications for sports on society. I’ve also found myself thinking about different types of rivalries, as I hesitate to say that all college and professional sports feuds are created equal.
There’s something to be said for a greater examination of college sports overall among academics. Already, much has been written about race, gender, and college sports, but I think an examination of just a handful of college rivalries would offer a great deal to chew on. Some of these rivalries—South Carolina versus Clemson, for example, are reminders of deep, long-festering intra-state divisions that go beyond the gridiron or basketball court. For scholars, such rivalries can be used to examine deeper fissures in society.
The difference in passions involved in college and professional sports—with some exceptions, of course—is also worth noting. I find myself talking to plenty of people who prefer college football or basketball over the professional versions because of ideas of “purity” or, simply, because the college versions seem to have far more at stake for the average fan. I’d go so far as to say that, in the South especially (but this can also apply to some of the old feuds in the Midwest and on the West Coast) college sports and the rivalries that go with them offer something missing in most of the professional variants nearby. I think my father, as big of an Atlanta Falcons fan as he is, probably cares just a bit more about Georgia-Florida than he does about Falcons-Saints.
With that said, let’s not make the mistake that rivalries stay the same over time—or even that the fanbases do. The intersection of sports and the media matters here. How did the growth of television broadcasting of games affect fan support for teams in the second half of the 20thcentury? I’d venture a guess and argue that some of the big rivalry games—think Michigan-Ohio State, Auburn-Alabama, and so on—acquired a lot of casual fans on the Saturdays when they played. Of course, that’s not scientific, but the broadcasting of games on television, and before that radio, at least offered the chance for groups of people across the country to start caring about games not in their region. And think of Americans today adopting English Premier League teams, or fans in China adopting NBA squads—the imagined communities of fandom are something scholars can begin to consider more as part of understanding the relationship between society and sports. Not to push the imagined communities aspect too much, but there is one last idea surrounding sports rivalries I’d like to consider—race and rivalry. Specifically, thinking about the inclusion of black athletes in the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference in the 1960s and 1970s—how did black fans gradually become part of Southern fanbases? What were the thoughts of black sports fans towards such college programs before their integration? There’s a lot that can be done with fandom, rivalries, and American Studies. I usually do intellectual history—but a part of me does, someday, hope to explore such questions.[Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? If you’d like to contribute a Guest Post, let me know!
PPS. Following up the week’s series, one more ongoing Cville history and story to highlight: http://www.dailyprogress.com/opinion/letters_to_the_editor/city-needs-to-own-up-to-its-history-of-slavery/article_25e7b946-2f7e-11e4-ad24-001a4bcf6878.html?mode=jqm. ]

September 12, 2014: More Cville Stories: Hazings

[Back in March, I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville stories in anticipation of a book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town, because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city. So here they are!]On two of the factors that make hazing such a complex and challenging issue.One of the more prominent stories of the 2013 NFL season was former Miami Dolphins offensive lineman Jonathan Martin’s charges of harassment and abuse against fellow players Richie Incognito, Mike Pouncey, and others. In much of the coverage of and responses to Martin’s story, it was framed in relation to the social issue of bullying, an issue that unquestionably affects numerous young Americans (especially those in the LBGT community, among others) and to which the Martin story likely helped draw further attention. But I would argue that Martin’s situation could be better described through the lens of hazing, an issue that relates to bullying but that comes with its own distinct factors and challenges—and that for this AmericanStudier has a couple Charlottesville connections.For one thing, while bullying depends on narratives of othering, of treating the victims as outsiders in one way or another, hazing is connected instead to the concept of belonging—and, concurrently, is to a degree voluntarily pursued by its victims, in an effort to belong to whatever group or organization is doing the hazing. Earlier this year, two University of Virginia fraternities lost their charters due to charges that they were hazing new recruits, just the latest in a long history of fraternity hazing incidents around the nation (many of which have resulted in fatalities). I have no problem with such punishments, and indeed hope that they can help eliminate the hazing process at all fraternities and sororities (as well as other collegiate organizations)—but again, part of what makes it so difficult to identify and police hazing is that its victims are likely aware of the specifics of what will happen to them, and certainly aware of the broad concept of hazing within the organization, and yet enter into the recruitment process nonetheless. I don’t believe it will be easy to eliminate such a communal process, although I support the goal.Both my support for ending hazing and my understanding of its complexities come from a more personal Cville story as well. As a freshman at Charlottesville High School, I experienced two hazing processes—a brief but violent hazing performed on all first-year students in the marching band; and a much more individual, intimate, and extended hazing at the hands of upperclassmen on the cross-country team. (Both the band director and the cross-country coach were well aware of, and at least tacitly supported, these hazings, adding another complication to ending them.) Immediately after the cross-country hazing, I also experienced another complicating factor in the process: the way it easily turns into a multi-year cycle. The upperclassmen who had been chiefly responsible for my hazing asked me to imagine how good it would feel to enact a similar hazing on the subsequent year’s freshmen, who were at the time 8th grade members of the team; I believe I’m a good person, but I will admit that this ugly version of paying it forward offered a tempting way to ameliorate some of the pain (physical and psychological) I was feeling. Yet I’m proud to say that I resisted that temptation, helping instead to put what to my knowledge has been a permanent end to such hazings at CHS. It can happen, but it’s not and won’t be easy, as these Cville stories illustrate.My next Guest Post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think about this complex issue? Other stories from your town(s) you'd share?

September 11, 2014: More Cville Stories: Fry’s Spring

[Back in March, I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville stories in anticipation of a book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town, because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city. So here they are!]On four exemplary stages of one of Charlottesville’s most enduring sites.Fry’s Spring earned its name through one of the area’s early 19th century blue-bloods. James Francis Fry, grandson of Joshua Fry (one of the two men who patented Albemarle County in the mid-18thcentury), received 300 acres of land in the area from his father-in-law, the equally prominent local Nelson Barksdale, in 1839. Fry built the estate Azalea Hall on the site but also discovered a nearby spring, which he christened Fry’s Spring and which by mid-century had become well-known throughout the region. This was the era in which President Buchanan maintained a “Summer White House” at Pennsylvania’s Bedford Springs, and Fry’s Spring offered those further south their own such escape.By the end of the century, the spring had changed hands and become part of a far more elaborate resort community, one connected to the nearby Jefferson Park Hotel. This was the height of the Gilded Age, an era defined both by conspicuous consumption and by the rise of marketing and advertising to appeal to those wealthiest Americans, and the Hotel offered it all: access to waters advertised as “the third most powerful of their kind in the world”; an on-site menagerie known as Wonderland; and two different train lines (a small “dummy-line” and a larger steam locomotive) to bring visitors to the site. Resorts and spas were no longer simply for first families and presidents—they were part of a network of sites linked to the upper stratum of Gilded Age America, such as Newport’s mansions, Lenox’s Ventfort Hall, and many others.The Hotel burned down in 1910 (with salvaged wood being used to construct nearby homes, including one in which a certain AmericanStudier grew up!), and the land was sold to a trolley company that focused on adding to the Wonderland amusements. Among other ways in which Wonderland was developed in this era, the company added the city’s first moving picture shows. This was the period in which this new form of entertainment was sweeping the nation, but to my mind the movies signaled more than just a new technology—they represented, along with the rise of professional sports and the popularity of places like Coney Island, Revere Beach, and other so-called “trolley parks,” a democratization of leisure, a broadening of sites like Fry’s Spring to include more than Virginia blue bloods or the nation’s upper classes.The next stage of that democratization of leisure and of Fry’s Spring began soon thereafter, and has continued into this AmericanStudier’s life and the 21stcentury. Local businessman J. Russell Dettor bought the site in 1920 and built a swimming pool, which he opened in 1921 as Fry’s Spring Beach Club. The century since has seen plenty more history and evolution, including those related to segregation that I detailed in this post, but they’ve all been connected to the Beach Club. The Beach Club where I kept the beach ball up and swam laps and played tennis throughout my youth, and where I just took my boys for the next stage of their own Charlottesville histories and stories. Their lips got a lot bluer than their blood, and the only water they tried was heavily chlorinated, but the story of Fry’s Spring continues into the 21st century nonetheless.Last Cville story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories from your town(s) you'd share?

September 10, 2014: More Cville Stories: Barracks Road

[Back in March, I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville stories in anticipation of a book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town, because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city. So here they are!]On the elided but still evocative histories all around us.In this post AmericanStudying cities to which I’ve had the chance to travel, I mentioned how impressed I was by the presence and intimacy of Rome’s histories, the way in which you could turn any corner and find yourself confronted by the Colosseum, the Forum, or any number of less famous but equally historic sites. To my mind, that element contrasts noticeably with our tendency in America to separate the historic sites from the present cities around them, to demarcate their existence as an area to be visited (or, saliently, to which to take tourists and other visitors to our city, but probably not venture ourselves) but not a part of the place’s ongoing life and identity. Such separations and demarcations are far better than not remembering or maintaining the histories at all, of course—and that has been an option in America far too often, so I’m always happier to see the maintained sites in whatever form—but it nonetheless makes it easier to treat the past as a foreign country, rather than as integral to and interconnected with ours.Moreover, there are reminders of those histories all around us, if we know where and how to look for them. Throughout my life I have frequented the area of Charlottesville known as Barracks Road: the shopping center was home to the Shoney’s (aka Bob’s Big Boy) that was a favorite childhood restaurant, the Baskin Robbins that was a favorite dessert site, and the toy store that was, well, just a favorite spot, as well as to the Barnes & Noble where I worked for eight months between college and grad school; Barracks Road itself was close enough to my high school that my bus and car routes often included it, and a longtime high school girlfriend lived just off the road; and so on. Yet I had virtually no sense of the history comprised by that name: that a group of more than 3000 British and German prisoners of war were housed at a site along the road for nearly two years during the Revolutionary War (after the Continental Army’s 1777 victory at the Battle of Saratoga), in what came to be known as the Albemarle Barracks (the site itself is just outside of the city limits, in Albemarle County). Like the name, the shopping center’s sign obliquely gestures at that history, featuring a Revolutionary-era horseman.So the reminders, like the “Indian Names” on the landscape about which Lydia Sigourney wrote so beautifully, remain. On the one hand, those slight echoes might make the overall elision of the past more frustrating: Barracks Road was for a time one of the South’s most significant Revolutionary War sites, and now I would wager that most Charlottesville residents know it solely (as I did for all those years) for the shopping center. But on the other hand, the echoes represent a continued presence, indeed an illustration of the influence the past has in creating the present—and as such as they also offer an opportunity to begin to connect with and learn about those histories, as long as we recognize and follow their clues. Which is to say, Sigourney was wrong to mourn the vanishing past in her poem, not only because Native Americans didn’t vanish (although that too to be sure), but also because the past never goes anywhere. It’s always there, quietly but crucially constituting our world, waiting to be discovered and better understood.Next Cville story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories from your town(s) you'd share?

September 9, 2014: More Cville Stories: The Black Knights

[Back in March, I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville stories in anticipation of a book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town, because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city. So here they are!]On how the past can imprison us, and how it doesn’t.I’ve written a good deal about Charlottesville’s histories of racism and segregation, especially in this post on race and the city’s segregated swimming pools. I don’t mean to suggest that the city or its history can be defined or understood solely through the lens of such issues, certainly not any more than most Southern locales (although Charlottesville’s status as one of the school systems that resisted desegregation most vocally and aggressively makes it a telling such locale to be sure). But the truth is that if we don’t remember those histories, it’s easy to miss how present they are, even in places and ways where it’s easy to overlook them. That’s true of yesterday’s subject, the University of Virginia, which for nearly two centuries made virtually no public reference to how much of its construction and maintenance were performed by slave labor. And it’s true of the building in which I attended high school.For more than a decade after that slow and forced desegregation, Charlottesville’s secondary students attended Lane High School, which had been in operation since 1940. But Lane proved too small to accommodate this greatly increased number of students, and in 1974 the city opened a new public high school, Charlottesville High. CHS inherited both Lane’s colors and its mascot, the Black Knight, the latter an ironically evocative icon that long predated desegregation. But the new building came with some unique features all of its own, ones that I couldn’t help but notice during my years there in the early 1990s: three distinct wings that were connected only by small hallways and that could be entirely isolated by the lowering of cage-like partitions that were housed in the ceiling; and two large ground-level courtyards that were overlooked by second-floor windowed structures that resembled guard towers. In short, it felt and still feels to me—and this is simply my own analysis, but I would argue for it—like Charlottesville High School’s physical structure was modeled in some key ways on a prison.It’s hard to imagine a more potent metaphor for what the past, and particularly its darkest attitudes and histories, can do to the present and future than a school modeled after a prison (which may be, I’ll admit, one reason why this analysis appeals to me, although I’d be hard-pressed to analyze those elements of CHS in other ways). But while my high school experiences were as full of conflict and challenge as most people’s, I can’t say that racism or bigotry was part of the CHS that I knew: we had administrators and teachers of multiple races, I had friends from across those communities as (I believe) did most of my peers, I dated an African American classmate with no pushback or issues of any kind, and so on. Indeed, I would say that my mixed-race Charlottesville high school and its communities were probably identical to many schools and communities around the country and world—which is, perhaps, an even more potent symbol for how youth does not have to be defined or limited by the imprisoning attitudes of the past.Next Cville story tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Stories from your town(s) you'd share?

September 8, 2014: More Cville Stories: Mr. Jefferson’s University?

[Back in March, I featured a week’s worth of Charlottesville stories in anticipation of a book talk there. Well, Cville is just an AmericanStudier’s kind of town, because during my August visit with the boys I found myself thinking about another handful of local histories and stories from this Central Virginia city. So here they are!]On the instructive early struggles of an educational pioneer.I’ve been pretty hard in this space on Cville’s favorite son and the namesake of my childhood street (among 2,832 other things in town), Thomas Jefferson, and I stand by those analytical critiques. But TJ also did a lot of great things in his long and influential life, and I agree with his tombstone’s argument that the founding of the University of Virginia was among his most impressive achievements. While the narrative that UVa was the nation’s first state university is an inaccurate one, it was something even more significant: America’s first non-sectarian university, one created and designed with no denominational affiliation or sponsorship. Whether that made it entirely secular is a matter for debate, but absent such affiliation (and with, for example, no requirement for chapel attendance for its students), the university represented a significant shift in American higher education in any case.As is often the case when such norms are challenged, Jefferson’s university faced pushback and critique from religious leaders and other adversaries (such as its in-state rival and Jefferson’s alma mater, the overtly Anglican William and Mary College) in its early years. But as journalists Rex Bowman and Carlos Santos document in their recent book Rot, Riot, and Rebellion: Mr. Jefferson’s Struggle to Save the University That Changed America (2013), the far more extreme early struggles were those presented by the students themselves, a group of (mostly) spoiled plantation aristocrats who spent more time partying and dueling than studying, who (as that linked review quotes) “randomly [shot] as passersby” and “whip[ped] professors,” and a masked one of whom even murdered the popular law professor John A.G. Davis in 1840. Jefferson did (spoiler alert!) help the university change course, as did others including some of the students (who designed the famous Honor Code after the Davis killing), but in its early years UVa was seemingly as far from Jefferson’s ideal “academical village” as it could be.Fun stories to be sure (although slightly chilling ones for any professor to read!), but do they have a broader significance, beyond simply (if importantly) revising our perspective on this one university? I would argue that they do, on at least two levels. For one thing, anyone who finds him or herself critiquing 21st century college students for their excessive partying or lack of focus on their studies or the like should probably stop and realize a) college students have always been thus and b) things were far worse in certain places and moments than they are now! And for another, it’s worth considering one reason why UVa students could and did get away with these crazy and violent behaviors for so long with few if any reprisals: their privileged status, class, gender, and race. Mike Brown, the African American teenager killed by a police offer in Ferguson, Missouri, a few weeks ago, was about to start his college career as well—and whatever Brown did or did not do on the day of his death, it’s fair to say that it wasn’t nearly as bad as much of what went on in the early days of Mr. Jefferson’s University.Next Cville story tomorrow,Ben
PS. What do you think? Stories from your town(s) you’d share?

September 6-7, 2014: Crowd-sourced Fall Plans

[As I did a couple years back, I wanted to start the fall semester by highlighting a few of the things I’m working on and looking forward to this fall. For this crowd-sourced post, I’m sharing some of the fall plans of fellow scholars and friends—I’d love to hear about what you’ve got going on for the final few months of 2014 in comments!]First, one more plan of mine: in mid-October, I’ll have the opportunity to be one of the social media chroniclers of the Delange ConferenceIX at Rice University. You’ll be able to read my live responses to that important event and conversation on Twitter, but I’ll be following it up with a mid-October series in this space as well.My colleague and friend Kisha Tracy follows up Thursday’s post on FSU’s strategic planning with her own thoughts on the process: “One of the major takeaways so far is the idea of what the ‘student of the future’ is going to look like, particularly here at FSU (interesting read). As Technology Working Group Chair, this has been on our minds, as has the concept of what we want our culture here to be like (re: online courses of varying kinds in particular). I've been collecting useful quotations from readings here.”Paul Beaudoin follows up Kisha’s thoughts, adding, “I have lots of ideas about the ‘Student of the Future,’ and in many places of the world, that student has already arrived.”AnneMarie Donahue follows up my arguments for multilingualism in that post, noting, “Multilingualism is a not only an asset to the student but is a core 21st Century Skill (a term I'm slowly growing to loath as this is often just equated to technology based education, but at core is a decent term). However, I would argue that attempting to educate a student in an additional language at 18, 19, or 25 (which is the average age of the FSU student) is like closing the barn door after the horse escaped. Multilingualism needs to start at a childhood endeavor. If you are hoping to inspire a love of another culture, great multi-cultural tolerance (another word that I just despise...if the best you can offer your fellow man is tolerance, you aren't doing a good job at being human) or if FSU's goal is simply to introduce students into a multicultural view of America then there are better way than asking someone to sit through Spanish I & II. I worry that I'm coming across a belligerently ignorant in this love to not educate. I would have loved to learn another language, but I'm learning disabled and learning languages is really difficult. Colleges and universities by and large do not have plans in place for students who, while determined and hard working, still have difficulties with processing. Trust me, I know. This comes from a lifetime of working twice as hard just to be a C+ student. Language courses could be a great way to start a student looking at America as a non-English primacy world. But there are other ways to do this without compromising their curriculum or alienating processing deficient students. Perhaps, if the goal is multi-culturalism and not multi-lingualism then a new class or series of classes could be created to satisfy this.”The great Ian Williams follows up my discussion of blogs as scholarship in that same post, saying of this blog that it “exemplifies thoughtful, timely scholarship—the delight of seeing a mind unfolding, not already unfolded” (which may be the most pro-Ben thing I’ve ever posted here, and I apologize, but I wanted to share it as a perspective on why blogs should be treated and evaluated as such).Another colleague and friend, Heather Urbanski, shares some of her fall plans: she’s “working on editing a new collection for McFarland on Memory and Popular Culture (drafts are due in November) and presenting a paper on The Hunger Games and collective memory at the Northeast PCA/ACA conference at the end of October.”Jay Shaw notes, “My daughter is auditioning for The Nutcracker this Saturday. First ballet audition for her, big day for both of us.” That’s today, Saturday 9/6, so make sure to send some good thoughts her way if you would!Next series starts Monday,Ben
PS. So one more time: what’s on your autumn agenda?