Neville Morley's Blog, page 26

Mr Pitiful

There’s a lovely moment at the end of Goodbye Lenin!, after Alex has finished his elaborate attempt at persuading his mother, through fake news footage, that Germany has reunited because of the desperation of westerners to flee to the east. “Wahnsinn,” she says, and the first time I saw the film I took it in the sense that Alex takes it: that’s incredible, that’s crazy, wow! Later viewings – and this is a film that bears repeated viewing; watching it last night for perhaps the twentieth time, I saw some things I hadn’t noticed before – make it clear how far there are substantial gaps between how Alex interprets his world (and tries to control it and the people in it), and the reality.

Indeed, since Alex ends up playing the role of the oppressive, intrusive DDR state, this is inevitable. By the end, his mother knows exactly what is going on, that he’s been lying to her and manipulating her – but in contrast to the historical reality that this family drama recapitulates, she accepts it as a sign of his genuine love and concern for her. So “Wahnsinn” allows her to let him carry on believing that he’s in control, while being true to the truth: this is ridiculous nonsense.

This is a direct reflection of how language operates in an authoritarian society: words are used in multiple senses, playing with ambiguity, to describe true things and feelings in a way that is nevertheless acceptable to the authorities, conforming – at least apparently, to those who don’t enquire too deeply – to the fake world they are trying to impose. And the more those in power commit themselves to believing that their fake world is real, or at least accepted by the people because it’s all being done for their benefit, the more susceptible they are to accepting at face value the apparent acquiescence of the people, and the meanings that fit their expectations.

Coincidentally, I was recording a lecture on Greek Tyranny this week that exactly echoes the theme. Diodorus Siculus (15.6) records how Dionysius I of Syracuse fancied himself as a poet – and here we have the origin of the Vogon captain forcing his captives to listen to his poetry in the original Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy; can our heroes escape without completely compromising their honour and artistic judgement..? A poet called Philoxenus listened to Dionysius’ poems and offered a frank opinion; Dionysius screamed that he was just jealous, and had him sent to the quarries for hard labour. Philoxenus’ friends petitioned on his behalf, and the tyrant relented. Another dinner party, another poetry reading, and this time Philoxenus didn’t respond to the request for his opinion but simply presented himself to the guards to be carried off to the quarries again.

In the arbitrary manner of tyrants, Dionysius found this funny, and let him off. (Another echo of modern authoritarian regimes: it’s the randomness, the unpredictability of punishment, that keeps everyone subdued and passive; cf. George’s Perec’s W, ou le Souvenir d’Enfance). Inevitably there came a third occasion, after Philoxenus had been begged by his friends to stop inviting execution. What did you think? asked the tyrant. Philoxenus replied: οἰκτρά. “Pitiful,” as the standard translation has it, though the problem with that is the modern English usage virtually excludes the possibility that this could be a sincere compliment. Better, perhaps: “I was moved to tears.” Dionysius can accept this at face value; Philoxenus escapes without completely compromising his artistic judgement.

Are tyrants stupid? Is Dionysius so convinced of his poetic genius that he genuinely believes he has won Philoxenus over? Or is this all a kind of game – if you pretend to like my poem, I’ll pretend to believe you – because the system wouldn’t work otherwise? Xenophon’s Hieron suggests that the tyrant knows everyone will be lying to him. But what matters, as in the real DDR and as in Goodbye Lenin!, is the acquiescence and acceptance of authority, however secretly resentful or mocking; the ruling power is allowed to delude itself if it wishes…

Welcome to Tomorrow

There are basically two kinds of opinion piece on the place of technology in higher education. A: anything which potentially distracts students’ attention from my dispensing of Truth in the time-honoured manner must be banished! Down with laptops, mobile phones and ballpoint pens! B: get with the programme, daddio! All the hip youth is on TikTok now so we must convert our mouldy old lectures into 15-second dance clips!

Yes, I’m being snarky. The latest manifestation of B, a piece on WonkHE about how we should all be using social media to engage with our students, actually warns everyone off TikTok as being “problematic”. To be honest, I can’t entirely fathom why this is judged to be the case when the all-devouring Facebook is promoted without hesitation, but, hey, if there’s no blanket recommendation of new tech just because it’s new, that has to be a good thing…

I really do understand the impulse. Hell, I’ve been lamenting on here regularly about the fact that students are mostly avoiding my lovingly-conceived online discussion activities, and I would be over the moon if they started debating my lectures on the Twitter. But responding to the “creepy treehouse” problem (we create welcoming online spaces that try to mimic their usual haunts, and they shun them) by trying instead to infiltrate their own spaces isn’t an answer – they will simply run away, apart from the few whose brains we have already eaten, who were participating in our VLE discussion threads anyway.

What really bothers me about the article, however, is the promotion of social media as the answer to issues with communication. “They don’t read their emails”. Well, no, not reliably, but we make it clear that they should, and that they’re liable for any adverse consequences from not reading them. The idea of doing this on social media is that they’re all on it anyway so we don’t have to require them to check it – but how are we going to ensure that they see our announcements, when increasingly no one sees every post from everyone they follow? Compel them all to follow our specially created module accounts so we can DM them? Muting your lecturer becomes a disciplinary offence? And what about all the students who aren’t on a particular platform – they must be compelled to hand over their information to Zuckerberg’s electronic shoggoth so we can then communicate with them in ‘their’ digital space?

This isn’t just about a bunch of sinister adults hanging around the edges of teenage gatherings; it’s an attempt at re-ordering those hang-outs so they suit our purposes, above all by doing away with the idea that they get to choose whom to interact with and under what conditions. At best, they will simply run away and refuse to engage – but at least we’d know that we’d failed. The savvier will simply create dummy accounts to engage with official university ones and then run away, so we’ll think that our announcements are actually reaching them.

Of course, the fact that something is a stupid idea and obviously won’t work has never stopped university management in the past…* It’s easy to see how these things can become an expectation and then a requirement – because are you saying that you don’t care enough about your students to want to communicate with them? Before this academic year began, we were given a model of a questionnaire to give to new personal tutees, asking them various things including their ability to engage online and their preferred means of communication. The latter question included as options phone and WhatsApp. Well, office phone isn’t a lot of use when we’re being kept off campus as much as possible, so that implies private phone number (massive alarm bells if any lecturer thinks that’s a good idea), and ditto WhatsApp.

Yes, the WonkHE article has an answer to this: separate work phone! And the university is going to pay for all these phones and their data plans, huh? This is symptomatic: the other suggestions don’t carry the same direct financial burden, but the time implications are substantial – especially when almost certainly we’d have to send out emails as well, if not messages on four different platforms just to make sure we haven’t missed anyone. I run a couple of different Twitter accounts, and it is quite hard work even if you’re committed to it. And the risk that the always-on nature of social media then leads to the expectation that we will be always available is considerable. Email can be bad enough, but what if we actually want to use social media for our social lives of an evening, but can’t avoid the work stuff?**

I don’t think anyone in university management is actually, consciously expecting staff to make themselves available to students 24-7 – but it doesn’t feel as if they are sufficiently conscious of this as a problem to recognise the implications of some of their “always go the extra mile”, hyper-sensitivity to (some) student needs proposals. It’s the difference, which is not properly kept in mind, between worrying that some students may not have brilliant broadband connectivity so we need to be careful about how we set up online learning activities, and worrying that we need to maintain communication with students so effectively allow them to dictate the platform (and we put in the work to record their preferences, switch between Teams, Zoom and Skype etc). Thankfully the questionnaire mentioned above was an optional model, so the choice of phone or WhatsApp could simply be deleted – but I can imagine how in some universities there might not be such a choice, and the fact the options were there in the first place is indicative of either woolly thinking or an assumption that, actually, yes, lecturers should lose some of their own privacy and/or invest time and money, for the sake of the students.

Seriously, what’s actually wrong with email? It’s ubiquitous for a reason; it’s easy and clear (including for substantial amounts of information, whereas communicating by Twitter could only mean giving a brief summary and link to full details – requiring students to make several extra steps to access it), it can be managed (including putting something aside for a while, whereas on social media you have to respond instantly or it just vanishes) and saved for future reference (social media: back to the vanishing problem).

And, for the moment at least, email looks set to continue to be a major part of most people’s working lives, so actually this is something students need to learn (including my regular pedantic lectures on correct forms of address; honestly, folks, you’re not going to get that internship if you write an email to the personnel director of the law firm starting just with “Hello”). If ever there was a case for our bringing them into ‘our’ digital space and expecting them to accept its workings, rather than trying to infiltrate theirs, it is surely here.

If I wanted to be really snarky about that article, I would say that it suffers from Facebook Thinking: why isn’t there a single platform for EVERYTHING (that we can control)? ‘Tha Kidz’ are using social media all the time for socialising and entertainment – so we need to get our teaching on there ASAP! They’re not using email any more – so we need to switch to WhatsApp! But what if they like having social media for socialising and entertainment, and are happy to keep the world of lectures and assessment quite separate? What if they don’t use email because they haven’t hitherto had to worry about the sorts of communication for which email is useful? What if – radical thought – we stop assuming that they are digital natives so we must accommodate ourselves to their world, and remember that there’s a lot they have to learn about how the wider digital world works?

*Maria Pretzler on the Twitter (@MariaPretzler) has reminded me of how excited some universities got about the potential of Second Life a while back. Every hyperventilating article about the wonderful pedagogic potential of new online social spaces needs to have someone whispering in its ear “Remember Second Life…”

**Also, even if we set up separate ‘official’ Facebook accounts for the purposes of interacting with students – actually that’s a bit problematic as far as the Terms of Service are concerned, unless he actually means Facebook pages, in which case the chances of interacting with students who don’t want to be interacted with are pretty well zero – then there’s still the issue of invading the privacy of the students. When Facebook first arrived in the UK, I accepted ‘friend’ requests from a couple of current students, as it seemed rude not to. Within a week, I switched to my current rule of never being friends with any student until they graduated. I’m not going to describe the image that one of those students shared, but I cannot scrub it from my memory; of course he didn’t mean to share it with me, but the whole dynamic of the platform is to persuade you to interact as if with a small group of close friends when actually you’re sharing stuff with hundreds, and with the system itself. If I create a work account to protect my privacy while sending out module-related stuff, I’m still opening up students to losing some of theirs. And leaving me open to seeing things I really don’t want to know… Honestly, do these people not actually use the social media they are recommending that we all pile into?

More Than Words

Pretty well all my mental bandwidth at the moment is taken up with teaching – learning new computer systems, recording lectures, correcting auto-captions (the variants on ‘Thucydides’ – Through CDC, These Sedatives, Civil Liberties – are a marvel, but isn’t the bloody AI capable of learning from my constant corrections?), checking online discussion fora and wondering why no one is participating, waking at 3 am to worry about the fact that no one is participating… So, an exchange of tweets with the great Shadi Bartsch is pretty well all the intellectual engagement I can currently muster. Even there it’s taken me nearly a week to work out what I actually think, by which point it would seem weird and even rude to push the conversation further (plus, I realised that I was doing this as the Thucydiocy Bot, which is a not-terribly-secret identity but nevertheless not immediately identifiable as me…).

Confucius said it before Thucydides!

"When the names [for things] are not right, what is said will not sound reasonable; when what is said does not sound reasonable, things will not be accomplished." (Analects 13.3)

— Shadi Bartsch (@ShadiBartsch) September 30, 2020

These things are, I guess, always a matter of perspective and emphasis. Is it most striking, as the tweet implies, that the concern of Thucydides 3.82 with words changing their meanings – much cited in present conditions of polarisation and culture war – was anticipated by Confucius? It seems like another bit of evidence for the ‘axial age’ thesis, the idea that similar philosophical concerns developed roughly in parallel in different parts of the globe; the perception that words could be malleable (and manipulable) and the sense that this was a serious problem for society and politics.

Or – and this was my initial reaction – are the differences within that broad area of concern more striking than the similarities? It’s not just that Thucydides was (ostensibly) describing the course of concrete events, albeit abstracting from them, where Confucius was offering a normative principle. Rather, they are describing two quite different problems. Confucius’ sequence is (1) words are wrong, (2) reasonable things don’t seem reasonable, (3) nothing gets done; Thucydides agrees on (1), but then moves partly to (2) unreasonable things seem reasonable (e.g. factional violence seems like sensible behaviour) and hence (3) things are done that shouldn’t be. And even the element in the latter’s presentation that comes closest to the former, that moderation (the ‘reasonable’ course of action) comes to be seen or presented as cowardice, still leads to the problem of action (people throw themselves into factional conflict rather than holding back and seeking compromise) rather than inaction.

This is where my capacity for abstract thought grinds to a halt; does this reflect the different political contexts (unifying state versus fragmenting political community), or the specific perspectives of the two authors, or the broader conditions in which they found themselves, or even one of those wild transhistorical generalisations about the East being cursed by inertia and the West by hyperactivity? Are they not just using different killer apps but different operating systems? [note that, unless someone wants to give me a six-figure advance to turn that speculation into a blockbuster trade book, I am not at thus point being serious]. And would western political discourse be more or less productive if more Confucius was cited and less Thucydides..?

Can’t Get There From Here

It’s possible that some people reading this will remember the Grauniad‘s ‘Readers Recommend’ music blog. The set-up was simple; every week, the writer in charge of it would set a theme – ‘Songs About the Sea’, for example – and people would comment on the blog with their recommendations, arguing both from quality of music and relevance to theme (and occasionally sheer brass neck; I once got Roxy Music’s Avalon accepted as a pick for ‘Songs About Myth’ through an elaborate structuralist analysis that showed the lyrics really were a deep engagement with the Arthurian legend, references to samba notwithstanding), and then at the end the writer would select his/her choices and write a short column about them.

The combination of getting to wax lyrical about one’s favourite music and try to persuade others to give it a try, and the intellectual exercise of thinking of appropriate songs, was a winner; the blog burgeoned in terms of number of participants and number and length of comments, and survived being dropped from the printed paper after five years – and actually continues in a new form today after being axed by the Grauniad altogether. And one of the main reasons for this was the way that it turned into a community: we got to know each other and our obsessions and habits through our different styles of communication, especially when the serious business of recommending songs was over and the blog switched to jokes and casual conversation; we developed informal norms to manage arguments that threatened to derail the discussion, we developed insider language, and then – worried that this might make the blog seem too much like a closed clique – we developed protocols to welcome new people. Some of the people I met on the blog are still friends – some of whom I have still never met.

This is one of my models for online engagement – the other, the politics’n’philosophy blog Crooked Timber, offers deeper ideas but a much less relaxing atmosphere – and I would be delighted if the asynchronous discussion elements of my modules this year could achieve even a faint echo of the combination of serious debate (if arguments over the real meaning of Deep Purple’s Strange Kind of Woman can generate thousands of words over a ten-year period, then interpretations of Thucydides’ approach to recording/inventing speeches can surely generate ten posts in a week..?) and genuine community building (an absolute imperative at a time when students have such limited social possibilities). I’ve made weekly discussion threads a core part of both my modules, and have included an online collaborative exercise in one of them; I’ve explained what it’s all about and what’s expected of them, offered lots of advice on different ways to engage, and emphasised that there really isn’t a wrong way of participating – they don’t have to write a mini-essay, if what they have is a simple question.

It’s not looking good so far; at a rough estimate, participation rates are around 10-15% (which means, in a final-year module of eight students, that just one of them has done anything at the time of writing). Those who have contributed have offered some resources intelligent, perceptive comments, just as I’d hoped – my only complaint would be that they’re sometimes a bit too much like mini-essays, not really opening up the discussion and potentially putting others off by being too good. I feel torn between wanting to rush in and respond and show how much I value these contributions, and fear that this will undermine any chance of the development of a self-sustaining discussion, turning it into a ping-pong exchange between me and individual students instead.

But obviously it’s the absent students – the vast majority who are simply ignoring what I’ve asked them to do – that is most worrying. Okay, it’s only week 1 of teaching, they’ve had lots of other things on, they’re getting used to a new way of life and new forms of studying – but this is a pretty minimal time commitment (maybe too minimal, so it doesn’t seem important?), and it’s one of the bits of technology that actually works reliably and puts relatively little strain on broadband capacity… The problem is that I’ve gone out of my way to integrate the online discussion into the module rather than having it as an optional extra, as a means of trying to ensure lots of active learning rather than just passive viewing of pre-recorded material, especially given reduced synchronous contact time and the difficulty of getting decent discussion going either in a Zoom/Teams session or with everyone wearing masks and distanced – and so this lack of engagement has serious implications for the way I’ve planned my synchronous sessions next week.

In other words, if I can’t work out how to increase the level of engagement, I’m going to have to rethink the entire module set-up – even the students who *are* participating aren’t going to get much out of it if they’re the only ones. I’m seriously wondering about doing a survey – not the usual sort of feedback gathering, ‘what do you like about the module and what would you change?’, but a focused set of questions about why they’re not engaging – but with serious concern that no one would bother filling that in either.

I’ve done a very brief search for relevant discussions in pedagogical research – and if anyone has recommendations I’d be delighted to hear them. There’s plenty on ‘resistance to active learning’ – and one obvious explanation of the current problem is that I’m attempting to force them all to be active learners, whereas in a typical class there are always students who do the minimum participation they can get away with, and however hard I try – given the imperative to get through the material as well – I can never get everyone to join in equally. Thinking back to the Readers Recommend blog: the number of people who participated enthusiastically, substantial in its own terms, was a tiny, tiny proportion of those who read the paper. Generalising from a self-selecting group is never wise. But on the other hand, these students ought to have a prior interest in these issues – and a direct personal interest in learning more about the topic.

Interestingly, on the basis of what I’ve looked at so far, the main focus of much of this research seems to be on teacher fear of student resistance to new approaches, not quite dismissing it as groundless but certainly emphasising the simple techniques that can be deployed to overcome it. There’s relatively little attention to the sources of this (not imaginary) resistance – which is a pain, because I was hoping for something concrete to set against my own assumptions, prejudices and anecdata. I’ve been experimenting with new approaches, especially in forms of assessment, for twenty-odd years, and am well-used to resistance – but some of the things I’ve tended to attribute this to seem much less relevant to non-assessed online discussion.

Another possibility: it’s about the technology, or rather discomfort at the way in which online ‘social’ activity is being co-opted for education – the ‘creepy treehouse’ phenomenon previously discussed on here. I wonder whether this can be subdivided: there is a feeling of discomfort about the online spaces into which I am trying to cajole or order them – and there is a separate sense that university education is not about online discussions. I can imagine an honest answer to questions about why they’re not participating being that that they have no interest in what their fellow students have to say, or what they think about their own ideas, because what matters is the view of the lecturer.

Further: in a conventional seminar/lecture set-up, resistant students can put up with a certain amount of discussion and interactive stuff because it’s bounded; it’s not the whole activity, the lecturer can almost always be tempted to fill the long silences, and it will be over soon. The asynchronous discussion has far fewer limits; it’s threatening precisely because the expectation of participation doesn’t go away, and because no one is going to restrain the students who *do* want to air their views. Is there a fear that this might ‘crowd out’ what they regard as proper learning?

Finally, and even more speculatively: is it possible that this is resistance not to the new forms of teaching and learning per se, but to the current state of the world? Ich bin mit der Gesamtsituation unzufrieden, to quote a comic classic. All the efforts that we have made over the summer to learn new technology, reorganise and rethink our modules and teaching techniques, come up with radical new ways of doing things – all with the absolutely genuine aim of reproducing the real, underlying goals and spirit of a university education – appear to them as a painful reminder of a traumatic year. They don’t, I suspect, share our view of the underlying goals and spirit stuff; the traditional lectures and seminars and unseen exams were university education, rather than just the conventional means of university education, and so we actually appear to be revelling in trashing all of that and going much further than we need to in changing everything, almost as if we’re seizing on the crisis with glee. The online discussion symbolises the ‘new normal’ that they desperately wish wasn’t; it represents the destruction of the familiar world and their expectations about it. No wonder they try to blank it…

This is, as I say, pure speculation – and easily falsified, because if everyone else has massive student buy-in to their online discussion threads and other activities, then the problem is clearly just me. This will become clearer with time; for the moment, I’m wondering if I should break out the tweed jacket and just offer the sort of unbroken monologue that I got in lectures when I was a student, as the kind of teaching that will offer the most reassurance and predictability in radically uncertain times.

I mean this quite seriously; maybe in five years, if I’m still trying to do this job, super-engaged online discussions and collaboration will be the norm, but for the moment what matters is helping the current lot of students cope with the upheaval and uncertainty and get through this year, and if that means ditching all my carefully planned innovations and exciting new ideas then so be it. It’s not appealing – but neither is the prospect of trying to run classes that are predicated on everyone having already been debating the issues when hardly anyone has…

Update: further thought prompted by comment from @IngvarMaehle on the Twitter, that his students happily interact and collaborate during the online ‘lecture’ but absolutely nothing outside that time. I may be under-valuing the importance of the lecture as event, a fixed point around which other things get organised – and, as suggested above, a means of settling limits on the intrusion of academic work into the rest of life. My assumption all along has been that the flexibility of asynchronous interaction has lots of advantages – but this may be just another example of generalising from my own experience and preferences, as I largely shunned lectures when I was a student but would have loved the opportunity to drop into ongoing debate when it suited me, fitting it in around all the other things I was doing. I can imagine – and should remember – that many people like more structure, and like to be given structure rather than develop it for themselves, and in disrupted, chaotic times perhaps even more so. Hence my effective downgrading of ‘the lecture’ as The Event, making it instead just one phase in an ongoing cycle, may be even more problematic than I thought.

How Online Teaching is like Middle Age

Nothing works properly.

Everything takes much longer.

Flabbiness in places it’s increasingly difficult to hide.

Is that really what I look like now?

Pervasive sense that I used to have much more energy.

Increasing tendency to use the phrase “in my day…”

Occasional thoughts that buying a really expensive new webcam might bring back the mojo.

Powerful suspicion that young people are smirking condescendingly behind my back.

Waking in the early hours to agonise about all of this.

Castles Made of Sand

I could honestly weep. This is our ‘welcome week’ before teaching starts on Monday, and today I was meeting – f2fip! – my new personal tutees. I have been trying to imagine what it must be like for them, making the transition to university in such extraordinary circumstances, and really wanted to ensure that as their tutor I could offer some degree of calm reassurance, a bit of a community, some essential guidance for the first couple of weeks while they find their feet. Well, it’s possible that I have succeeded in making them feel more confident and on top of things, in contrast to their shambolic tutor. For I was indeed the one to turn up half an hour late for the meeting because I couldn’t find my way into the building because of some very misleading signage…

Yes, great plan, Nev: emphasise the importance of leaving lots of time to find your way around Exeter’s non-Euclidean campus in the most dramatic way possible, then illustrate the dangers of relying on computer systems by failing to persuade the AV equipment to wake from its six-month slumber. The one bit of my own advice that I did follow successfully was the regular checking of email, as that’s how, after I sent out a message to reschedule the meeting on account of being unable to persuade the door to recognise my key card, I got the helpful offer from one of the students who had found their way inside to come and show me the way. Maybe they can all now bond over condescension for the elderly and bewildered.

Positives from today, other than the fact that it’s over? Having spent two hours this morning establishing that, no, the university does not currently have any system capable of simulcasting a seminar (I assume this means that if one student has to self-isolate, we take the whole class online – but I haven’t seen this stated anywhere yet), I was pleased that just firing up my laptop to run Teams did give the students who couldn’t attend in person a reasonable idea of what was going on, even if it clearly wouldn’t work for proper discussion and debate. And I was delighted that past me had topped up the stocks of espresso beans before abandoning the office back in March, even if he had inexplicably failed to get in a bottle or two of gin.

Well, as I was saying to myself two days ago: no plan survives etc. Yes, the student record system will suddenly allocate a couple of extra students to me, whom I haven’t had a chance to contact in advance. Yes, the timetabling system will randomly double book them into different meetings so I have to make instant decisions about which one I think they should attend. No, no one at all will participate in my carefully constructed ice-breaking activities online, either because of the ‘creepy treehouse‘ thing or because they’re all waiting for someone else to go first…

And as someone remarked on Facebook, we academics will work ourselves into the ground to try to deal with this, without anyone even needing to say ‘what about the students?’ Positive spin: they’re already finding their own way around, and we can get through this together. But I so wanted to be calm and reassuring, at least for today.

Update, having now calmed down a bit… One interesting thing to reflect upon, besides my own haplessness, is the contrast between f2fip and online – it’s not just that a ‘meet the tutor’ event could have been done online (and I know friends in other universities who are doing precisely that), but for students who hadn’t arrived in Exeter yet it was online (and that’s not an option we’ve ever offered before). Moreover, the online people got a meeting that started more or less on time, even if what they got was me explaining that everything was a big mess and we’d reconvene in half an hour, whereas the meatspace students got to sit around wondering where I was. On the other hand, it was lovely to see actual faces rather than just initials on a Teams screen…

What about plague precautions? The students, bless them, dutifully kept their masks on until seated with the regulation distancing, and asked my permission to remove them, so there was the opportunity to emphasise the vital importance of keeping them on in corridors, entering and exiting lecture rooms etc. The windows were open – they open only an inch and a half, so I’m not sure how much ventilation was being contributed, but better than nothing. And otherwise the campus was eerily quiet, though not quite as Ballardian as I’d hoped – no alligators in the ponds yet…

Before the Flood

This time of year is usually the calm before the storm; the brief pause, full of anticipation and nervousness, between the end of the summer and the start of the new term, when it’s impossible to settle down to any proper research and one falls back into the fond belief – which does occasionally come true – that it’ll be fine once everything settles down into a routine. This year? It’s not the calm before the storm, it’s the frantic rushing around before the flood. The water is clearly, inexorably rising, though we don’t yet know how bad it will be. What to do? Try to shore up defences? Secure valuables? Move livestock and children to higher ground? Try to improvise a boat? Assume the worst or hope for the best?

As I’ve suggested previously, the main driven of this frenetic activity is the wish to exert some sort of control, to find some solid ground on which to build. A major part of the problem, to run with the flood metaphor, is guessing what approach will be most effective in getting us all through unscathed. Trust in the exciting new technology we’re promised will save us, even if it’s all untried and some of it isn’t actually ready yet? Or retreat to old certainties (tradition teaching techniques and rely on my command of the subject matter), strategically abandoning higher ambitions until the new landscape becomes clearer? The major difference from previous years is that we know we will have to build new structures and routines from scratch, adapting ourselves and our teaching to circumstances that we cannot yet see, rather than being able to settle into familiar patterns once the first few weeks are out of the way.

What if one of our students, metaphorically speaking, can’t swim? What’s the best response – swimming lessons, or build them a life raft? The former is clearly better in the longer term but they might drown in the interim, the latter uses resources that might be deployed elsewhere, to help a larger number… (Yes, I am still feeling cross about how much effort I’m having to put in to reconciling a blanket requirement to provide captions on all recorded material with the inadequacy of the programmes available to support this with the possibility that some students may have real difficulty in accessing big video files).

It’s difficult not to start falling into military metaphors and aphorisms at the moment: most obviously, ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’. I know that I’m going to have to develop new work-arounds and techniques to deal with unexpected situations, however much I try to anticipate everything (and engage critically with the university’s slightly different approach to trying to anticipate things according to a different set of priorities), so it’s pointless working myself into a state about it before term has even started. Unknown unknowns, and all that. I fear our own mistakes more than I fear the enemy…

But on the whole I think this is an unhelpful way of thinking, above all because it misrepresents the situation. Students are not the enemy; the current threat is an impersonal force of nature (which doesn’t preclude the actions of individuals making it worse, of course). Students are potential victims of this as much as we are – but more than that, they are potential allies and resources, rather than children or livestock who just need to be rescued.

So, while in one sense the return of students to campus and the restart of activities is the flood that threatens to overwhelm us and will certainly dominate life for the next couple of months, I’m concentrating on seeing it instead as the arrival of people with whom I can work for collective survival. Just as teaching is not – and should never be – a matter of me imparting great wisdom from on high which they simply write down, but a process of mutual discussion, debate and enquiry, so teaching in the age of COVID is not a matter of me trying to protect them from every possible threat and adjust what I do according to their whims, but rather us working together to keep each other safe and healthy (mentally as much as physically) and to develop new ways of pursuing the old goals of understanding and enlightenment. They are going to help me learn; we are going to support one another, and hold back the rising waters…

Across the Barricades

On 2nd November 1860, the political scientist Francis Lieber, then professor of history and political science at Columbia College in New York, wrote a letter to his eldest son Oscar. War between the states loomed on the horizon; Lieber was firmly against secession, and during the conflict was in charge of the Loyal Publication Society as well as assisting in drafting military laws, while his two other sons would both serve in the Union army, but Oscar would die in 1862 fighting for the Confederacy. One can imagine the family tensions. Lieber wrote:

It sometimes has occurred to me that what Thucydides said of the Greeks at the time of the Peloponnesian War applies to us. The Greeks, he said, did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke Greek. Words received a different meaning in different parts.

When the historian James Ford Rhodes cited Lieber (referring to him in the text as “a philosopher, living in the South but sympathizing with the North” – which seems a little questionable, given that he’d taken up his position in New York in 1856, but I don’t have a copy of the biography to check), he observed that “Lieber quoted from memory and gave a free translation”, citing the relevant passage in Jowett’s edition of Thucydides. “A free translation” is generous to say the least. The final sentence in the quote makes it clear, as Rhodes had recognised, that Lieber was echoing Thucydides’ famous account of the stasis or civil war at Corcyra (3.82.4): “words changed their meanings” under the influence of factionalism and partisanship – or, as Mynott renders the complex language, “men assumed the right to reverse the usual values in the application of words to actions” – so that recklessness became regarded as courage and moderation became cowardice. But the comment about Greeks not understanding each other though they spoke Greek is not Thucydides but Lieber’s gloss, and he seems to imply that the phenomenon was geographical, with different regions developing a different understanding of the meaning of words, rather than all sides within a single, increasingly polarised community diverging in similar manner from traditional understanding.

Twenty years earlier, Lieber had cited Thucydides at length (and correctly) in his discussion of the dangers of partisanship in his Manual of Political Ethics:

Party spirit may run so high that the greatest link and tie of humanity, language, loses its very essence, and people cease to understand one another, when even the best intended words, as in theological controversies in religiously excited times, are unintentionally yet passionately, or wilfully wronged, misconstrued, wrung from their very sense; when, as Thucydides says was the case in Greece, during the Peloponnesian war… [quote follows]

Lieber at this point took the optimistic view that the danger today was not so great as in ancient times, because “our states are vaster, our race is less apt to be moved by masses, we value individuality higher, our religion, so long as unsullied by fanaticism, is of a tempering character, and above all, we act through representative governments.” There are strong echoes here of some of the arguments developed earlier in The Federalist Papers, citing examples of ancient factionalism as grounds for favouring representation as the key principle of the new state (as indeed is discussed in Thomas Gustafson’s Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865, where I found this helpful reference to Lieber). “Where the democracy is absolute, and the state small, the one indeed requires the other, it is difficult, to see how any party can be secure against breaking out into passion.” Nevertheless, Lieber strongly commends the reading of this passage of Thucydides, especially younger readers, as the danger still exists and will exist so long as men cherish freedom of action and are mental and moral individuals differing in their dispositions and prone to pursuing with zeal what they think is right.

By 1860, the tendency for humans to pursue their own convictions with energy and even fanaticism, and the consequences for the political community and its shared language, was all too real; and it seems perfectly understandable that Lieber should have recalled the powerful impression of Thucydides’ text as the definitive account of factionalism, even while getting all the details wrong and being too preoccupied to check. The letter to his son was never sent.

This is fantastic material for a conference paper I never got round to writing up, on different readings of the Corcyra stasis as a text for the present (including a fair amount on the late C18 American debate, that I can now supplement with Gustafson’s book). But it also relates to an opportunity for an interesting experiment in the contemporary citation of Thucydides: is it possible to nip a fake quotation in the bud, before it spreads?

The first I heard of Lieber was on Wednesday morning, when my usual monitoring of Thucydides references on the Twitter threw up a couple of people retweeting a New Yorker article by Robin Wright, Is America a Myth?, on the current unravelling of the United States, with this quote:

When Athens and Sparta went to war, in the fifth century B.C., the Greek general and historian Thucydides observed, “The Greeks did not understand each other any longer, though they spoke the same language.” In the twenty-first century, the same thing is happening among Americans.

No, not Thucydides. A quick google led me to the Rhodes quotation of the quotation in his 1912 lectures at Oxford on the origins of the Civil War, which made it clear that this was actually linked to the Corcyra passage and thus saved me a lot of work trying to identify lines in Thucydides that might have been mistranslated or garbled in this manner. A quick perusal of the Wright article showed that the line was taken directly from Richard Kreitner’s new book, Break It Up: secession, division, and the secret history of America’s imperfect union, where it’s used as an epigram for chapter 13 on ‘The Cold Civil War’. As Kreitner remarks in his notes (and I’m extremely grateful to him for sending me a screenshot of the relevant pages),

In 1860, the jurist Francis Lieber, living in South Carolina, used this quote to describe the acrimony between North and South. According to historian James Ford Rhodes, Lieber quoted the text from memory and muddled the translation. I have given Lieber’s version.

As I said above, I am not sure that Rhodes was right in locating Lieber in South Carolina in 1860. More importantly, the quotation is not so much muddled as fictitious; the bit that Lieber actually took from Thucydides is the final sentence that Kreitner doesn’t quote, whereas the line about Greeks not understanding each other is at best Lieber’s gloss on the passage.

As so often, the quote offers a powerful and extremely relevant idea; it is easy to imagine it being widely cited on the internet, first by New Yorker readers but then at some point escaping out into the wider culture and becoming naturalised – probably via GoodReads. One can even imagine it being taken up by participants in the interminable online debates about whether or not Thucydides provides definitive proof that Macedonians are or are not Greek, since that frequently revolves around issues of language and cultural homogeneity.

Normally, by the time I encounter a rogue quotation this has already happened; I can trace back the process by which it escaped and became associated with Thucydides (not necessarily in that order) – posts on this blog passim – but it’s already embedded in the sorts of Great Quotes websites that harvest content from one another and refuse to pay any attention to request for correction, and so hard if not impossible to eradicate.

I’m actually torn between wanting to stamp this one out before it has a chance to breed, and wanting to study what actually happens – how long does it take to spread? But the latter would require that the Thucydides Bot does not correct the line if it’s quoted, and would contribute to the total sum of fake information out there, which is already quite substantial enough. So instead I am going to take preventative action: the immediate addition of this to the list of ‘misattributed’ Thucydides quotes on Wikiquote, the submission of it to GoodReads under the name of Lieber rather than Thucydides (so any attempt at submitting it under the name of Thucydides can be redirected there rather than having a clear run.

And then we will see just how powerless and lacking in influence I am!

It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that Rhodes, whether or not prompted by Lieber’s remark, was entirely ready to consider the Civil War through the lens of Thucydides. He opened his first lecture by arguing that the history of the English Civil War was relevant to the subject, “though it may not convey as important lessons to the whole civilized world as did that one of which Thucydides was the historian”, and in advancing his claim that there was in fact one simple explanation for the American Civil War, there was one unimpeachable authority:

There is risk in referring any historic event to a single cause. Lecky entitled his celebrated chapter, ” Causes of the French Revolution.” Social and political, as well as religious, reasons, according to Gardiner, brought on the Great Civil War. Thucydides, on the other hand, though he did indeed set forth the “grounds of quarrel,” stated his own belief that ” the real though unavowed cause” of the war was “the growth of the Athenian power.” And of the American Civil War it may safely be asserted that there was a single cause, slavery.

But the most fascinating aspect of this particular rabbit-hole has been the discovery of Gustafson’s book, not least because he seems – to the best of my knowledge – to be the first to have promoted the idea of ‘The Thucydidean Moment’ as the successor to ‘the Machiavellian Moment’ identified by John Pocock – and as a distinctively American line of thought:

I use the term “the Thucydidean moment” to describe the moment that succeeds the failure of the Machiavellian moment: it is the moment when fortune or necessity or corruption defeats virtue, or when moral and political stability – and the code of language that sustains that stability – collapses into confusion and the muteness of violence. Railing against this collapse, the poet’s voice articulates the conditions of this chaos, this fall of words. In the crucible of the Thucydidean moment, under the pressure of competing voices, from the heat of clashing interests, “words strain, crack and sometimes break.”

This does feel all too relevant to the present – and if discussion of Kreitner’s book and other current commentary on the Civil War and its contemporary echoes doesn’t lead to a revival of interest in what Gustafson has to say on the subject, I’ll just have to do my best to raise its profile in my own work-in-progress…

References

Letter from Francis Lieber to Oscar Lieber, dated November 2, 1860, quoted in Frank Friedel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), p. 301

James Ford Rhodes, Lectures on the American Civil War, delivered before the University of Oxford in Easter and Trinity Terms 1912 (New York: Macmillan, 1913), pp. 66-7

Francis Lieber, Manual of Political Ethics, Vol. II (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1911 [1838]), pp. 262-3

Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), p. 80

Richard Kreitner, Break It Up: secession, division, and the secret history of America’s imperfect union (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2020)

Caught Out There

Ah, the research-teaching nexus, how I’ve missed you! As I’ve remarked here before, in different ways I do find that my teaching inspires and supports my research as much as vice versa, and this morning was a reminder – admittedly a fairly minimal one. About three years ago, I ran into a dead end trying to establish the origins of another alleged ‘Thucydides’ quotation: “You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely”. Weird phrasing which actually seems to be the wrong way round, googling the exact line just produces a set of mutually-dependent ‘Great Quotes’ websites with no references, and googling similar phrases gets nowhere because the words are just too common. The best anyone could manage was Jon Dresner’s suggestion that various Near Eastern lawcodes include vaguely similar provisions.

Well, quite by chance, I now have the answer. Gathering material for the course on Greek Tyranny I’m teaching this coming term has led me to read various texts I either haven’t looked at for years or have never actually opened, and that’s brought me to… Isocrates, Discourses 2 ‘To Nicocles’, 29: “Visit the same punishment on false accusers as on evil-doers”. Unmistakably the same sentiment, though much more compact and straightforward – I did for a moment wonder whether the version cited on the internet was the result of someone sticking to the original Greek word order in their translation, but no, Isocrates’ original is basically as the Loeb translation here has it.

Obviously this isn’t an idea we can accept at face value; as we would have needed to suspect manipulation if these had indeed been the words of Cleon in the Mytilene debate, so here we must be aware of the gap between Isocrates’ idealism or wishful thinking and any plausible historical reality. Yes, one might see ‘false witness’ as a problem in any system of justice, but it is especially a problem when all the power of judgement lies in the hands of a single individual who is all too open to manipulation. At any rate I’m using the text as an exercise for students in deconstructing ideology: what do these bits of advice tell us about what one-man rule was normally like? What are the recurring concerns? Why does Isocrates spend quite so much time talking about the ruler’s choice of friends and employment of bodyguards?

And in the meantime I get to update the Wikiquote page…

Connected

Whether or not anyone noticed, I’ve been less present on the internet over the last few days, as a lightning strike last week took out the WiFi router. While waiting for a new one to turn up, I’ve been discovering the delights of persuading the laptop to talk to the phone and persuade it to share its data, with a moderate degree of panic as I was scheduled to participate in a virtual Open Day this afternoon – and the joys of paying lots of extra dosh for additional data, as my usually ample allowance quickly ran out. And it’s not as if I stream stuff…

It is another addition to the list of Things That Might Go Wrong This Term – how many students are liable to find their broadband giving out at critical moments, and be struggling to keep up with different requirements and activities? It’s tempting – and I suspect an awful lot of us lecturers have been devoting many hours to this – to try to anticipate every possible issue and develop guidelines and protocols to address it. Certainly it is sensible for us to keep in mind that everything is unlikely to run perfectly however much time we invest in course revisions and online learning development – but then to approach this by building flexibility and resilience into the system where possible, precisely so that we can cope with the things we haven’t foreseen.

We offer lots of guidance in the hope of alleviating concern and showing that we care about these things, but also often as a means of control, especially when embarking on a trip into the unknown. If we overdo it, there’s an obvious risk that students pick up more on the control than the concern. The student who faces a problem that isn’t covered anywhere in the guidance shouldn’t feel that therefore they are the problem or therefore there is no redress for their difficulties.

Tone is therefore vital. I like the discussions that Amy Pistone (@apistone) has been having on the Twitter about the development of guidelines for Zoom seminars – emphasising that she’d like to see everyone’s faces but recognises that this might not be possible for some, acknowledging that pets/children/family members will at some point or other wander into view and again this is not an issue. (As my podcasts over the years have regularly been interrupted by yelling cats, I’d be hypocritical not to take the same attitude).

Meanwhile, the automatic captioning software merrily rendered “Hello, I’m Neville Morley” as “Hello, I’m level Molly”…

Update: a few additional thoughts, prompted partly by an article on WonkHE this morning that offers a bleak if not rather cynical take on the shift to online learning, and partly by the massive panic occasioned by an email that seemed to imply that I should already have recorded five weeks’ worth of lecture material and uploaded it onto the VLE. The latter – which turned out to be a suggestion rather than a command – seems to me another example of the wish to exert control and anticipate all possible problems (even if I fall ill during term, there’s less chance of lectures being interrupted if they’re already recorded, and I’ll have more capacity to respond to other things) at the expense of flexibility (what happens if student feedback or my own experience suggests I need to change my approach?).

And also at the expense of pedagogy – I keep my lectures and seminars quite loose and improvised so I can respond to student interests and questions, and that definitely includes picking up themes and threads from one week to the next, rather than sticking rigidly to The Plan – which is why my response to the WonkHE piece is complex; yes, the massive changes in teaching this year may be problematic, but they don’t have to be. If all we do is record lots of lecture material and just test students on their capacity to regurgitate it: problem, exactly as outlined. If, as I’ve discussed before, we take full advantage of the new opportunities presented by asynchronous online discussion, new forms of assessment (since the usual restrictions have been relaxed), and so forth, then this year’s teaching could be closer to the pedagogical principles that we seek to implement.

While that article insists that we’re dealing with the ‘infantilisation’ of universities rather than of students, I can’t help feeling that this is partly a rhetorical move to deflect accusations of blaming/shaming students, while the attitude that student demands and requests are a problem remains embedded in the substance. I suppose this is preferable to articles that overtly complain about students who don’t simply accept what they’re given without a murmur… From that perspective, my comments above could be criticised as surrendering to a consumer model of education in which lecturers are terrified of any adverse feedback and so desperately try to anticipate possible problems; it’s about enabling the ‘performance’ of learning rather than ensuring actual learning.

Well, that’s not the spirit in which I approach this; rather, it’s about removing possible barriers to students engaging in deep learning, exploration of interpretations and arguments, discovery of complexity and ambiguity and so forth, using the tools and methods appropriate to the situation. Currently, we are constrained to some degree by the pandemic; in the past, we were constrained to a considerable degree by tradition and embedded expectations – by which I don’t just mean the fetishisation of the good old-fashioned lecture, but also such attitudes as the assumption that students may cheat so take-home papers make no sense, and that online discussions are a mere add-on so you can’t enforce participation (my experience when I tried to use them a decade or so ago…).

This is new for all of us, and difficult – and actually one could argue that it’s therefore closer to the spirit of the seminar, in which lecturer and students explore ideas together, rather than the standard model in which the lecturer’s knowledge and understanding is assumed and we just worry about ‘modes of delivery’. It’s good for us to have a sense of the issues our students are facing in trying to engage with our subjects – including the issue of failing broadband…