In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood

NACSA -- IX

Not long after Liz left my office, the phone rang. There was a syrupy voice at the other end. "Mr. Bruce?" It was the human resources lady at Origami Motors. "Apparently you made quite an impression on Mr. Walsh. You went back to see him a second time, didn't you? He didn't tell me about that beforehand. It sounds like you two had quite a time together." She let whatever implications I might want to pick up from that sink in. I knew she wouldn't like him going around her that way. I would have done the same thing.

"He asked me to check your references," she went on. "You do have references, don't you, Mr. Bruce?" I pulled a sheet of paper out of my desk and read off three names, with titles and phone numbers.

Ten minutes later my phone rang again. It was one of my references. "I just got a call from some woman," he said. "I did the best I could for you, but I've never had a call like it. I'd tell her how you did a good job on one thing, and she'd start asking me if I was covering up for you."

"I sort of expected something like that."

"I didn't say anything bad about you, but she sure tried to get me to."

"Thanks."

"Just thought you'd like to know."

"I appreciate it. Thanks."

It was time to head for the lunchroom to hear the executive vice president talk about the company's future. I ran into Liz Fuller on the way. We both ran into Thelma Gudgeon. Thelma was a department head. She was wearing a clown costume, and she was carrying a roll of happy-face stick-ons, which she was posting onto every item in sight. She pulled one off and stuck it on my shirt pocket. "Anyone who can write the manuals for the Piton can't be all bad," she said.

"I don't know what's going to happen to her," said Liz after Thelma passed by. "She's been here so long and done so many things that she's identified with the place. Nobody else is going to want to hire her if we go under. I wonder if the people who won't be able to get good jobs are starting to resent the people who can."

All the tables had been taken out of the lunchroom, and the chairs were arranged auditorium-style. Even so, the room was decorated with paper pumpkins, cardboard black cats, and orange bunting. The employees filed into the seats dressed as cowboys, doctors, Raggedy Ann dolls, Richard Nixons.

Into this walked Richard B. Stillman, the executive vice president. He took off his jacket, folded it carefully, and draped it over the back of a chair. The common-touch gesture went only so far; he still had his vest on. A gold pen and pencil were in the vest pocket. "I want to give you all the information about what's going on that I possibly can," he said. "I'll give you an idea of what's going on from the company's point of view, and then I'll try to handle your questions. If I can give you an answer, I'll answer as honestly as I can. If I can't reveal information that you've asked me about, I'll tell you that, too."
fiction
stories
writing

NACSA -- VIII

I went back to Origami Motors a few days later for the second interview with Bob Walsh. It went as well as the first one did, though he hadn't talked to the human resources lady since I'd been in earlier. He introduced me around to the people in his department as though I'd be starting there soon. "Well, let's make the usual checks, and we'll get back to you," he said.

It seemed pretty plain that I was what he wanted: I understood the technical issues, I was willing to take initiative, and I'd work hard. That was good for him, less good for me -- it meant he wouldn't need to do much work on the problems Origami Motors's IS department had. I'd do it all; if anyone got upset, as people certainly would, Walsh would be able to say it was my fault. He could triangulate his way through a tough situation and come out smelling like a rose at the end of it. I, on the other hand, would be expendable.

It was another early-morning interview, and I got back to Jacquard right around their normal starting time. It was Halloween day, a big celebration at Jacquard. A lot of people came in costumes and partied all day. Three or four people were in the parking lot dressed in costumes as I drove in. They were helping Liz Fuller push her new Harley up the steps into the building. Liz was butch and ran the art department. She normally drove a car; the motorcycle was apparently part of Halloween, but she was wearing what she normally wore, jeans, T-shirt, ski boots, and a platinum blonde buzz cut. I guess she was coming to the party as herself.

One of the guys helping Liz was dressed as an Arab sheik. This was clearly meant to represent a potential buyer for Jacquard. Another, a programmer who up to that day was pretty much of a flower child, had cut his hair and shaved. He was dressed in a pin stripe suit with a white shirt, rep tie, and a display handkerchief. He said he was a venture capitalist, another hoped-for buyer. It seemed as if they were trying to perform sympathetic magic, creating buyers for the company in their Halloween costumes when real ones didn't seem to be turning up. In fact, the Executive Vice President was going to address the employees in the lunch room on the subject of the company's future later that morning.

I worked a lot with Liz putting together the manuals. Her people did the drawings, and I wrote the text. She and her people were one of the things I was going to miss about the place when it went under. Liz poked her head into my office once she got her Harley squared away. She was the only manager there who was willing to admit what was happening. "How does it look at Origami?" she asked.

"They're going to get my references."

"Think they'll make an offer?"

"Hard to say. Human resources hates me. And I'm not sure if I like what I'd be stepping into there. The boss gets to go to all the meetings; I get to do all the work. It's a big political clean-up job. When everyone gets upset that they've got to make changes, the boss will jump out of the way and say it's my fault."

"Be good if you can bail out of here, though," she said. "You never know when the ax is going to fall. I was in a big layoff at my last place. The first anyone knew if was coming down was when we got in to work that Friday morning and there were rent-a-cops all over the place. Then they announced the plant was closed."

"I'm surprised more people here aren't expecting something like that to happen."

"I think it's because we were sold once before. The owners we have now wound up putting a lot of money into the place. A lot of people got big raises and promotions out of it."

"They expect that will happen again," I said.

"It's the only reason I can see. Nobody's nervous."

"So are you looking now?" I asked her.

"I've started. Not all that many places want art directors lately."
fiction
stories
writing

Fight! Fight!

Via Rarely Likable, I discover that there's something of a tempest in a website teapot going on about the value of the MFA in a literary career. Several years ago, I ran into a site that denounced MFA programs -- it made the somewhat dubious point that no truly major US writer had graduated from such a program. But then the site disappeared. I can think of at least one exception, Flannery O'Connor; maybe someone can point out others -- though I'd insist that they be at her rank, not some recent nine days' wonder. And Flannery O'Connor has always struck me as not a conventionally respectable writer: her stories show little regard for the pretensions of the haute bourgeoisie and the over-educated. An O'Connor character who stressed the value of an MFA would, I suspect, not be sympathetic.

Anyhow, the latest cycle got started when someone named Elizabeth Clementson published a piece called "Down With MFAs". As regular visitors here know, I don't have an MFA myself, though I have an ABD in English, and I suspect that had I entered an MFA program, I would have left in disgust pretty quickly. Clementson's points carry for me a certain ring of truth:

[T]he big publishing world relies on MFA programs to produce "accredited" writers. Desperate for literary plot lines that will sell, editors are on an eternal quest to find the next big young thing. This is big business and like any corporate job, editors are pushed for time and pressured to find books that sell. Just like authors, they too are judged on their book's sales figures.

As a result of this relationship, students in MFA programs are hen–pecked and criticized until they deliver the "sellable" plot line that publishers want. And, instead of rejecting the forces that corrupt them, many young writers turn on each other, reinforcing the rules learned in workshop, rejecting anything—or anyone—that challenges the status quo and threatens their carefully crafted world. Thus, anything created outside of the workshop environment is treated with contempt, and outsider voices are ignored.

Just the other day before I saw this piece, I was noting the odd unwillingness of mainstream writers to give anything like offense, something I saw in the context of The Atlantic's discontinuance of a regular monthly short story. Whether the internal dynamics of workshops or MFA programs cause this, or whether it's just a symptom of how commercialized literary culture has become, is a point that might be debated -- but it looks as though MFA programs are at least part of the problem. I have no particular brief for or against MFA programs; I've come to realize I've got to take my own three-yards-and-a-cloud-of-dust approach to getting my writing read and appreciated. Even so I filed Clementson's insights away to ponder at leisure.

And this week there's a rebuttal to Clementson from a Steve Almond. (I'm not going to pursue it beyond this observation, but neither Clementson's nor Almond's writing strikes me as especially polished, despite what must be much course work and years of practice -- I question whether either really ought to be in this line of work.) Almond takes a tack that I've also seem among defenders of PhD programs, a combination of ad hominem argument and brazen denial of the obvious:

What more likely happened is that a few people in publishing urged her to get an MFA, probably after having read her work and having decided — I'm just going to throw out a wild guess here — that she still had a few things to learn.

No editor or agent gives a sh[-]t whether a writer has an MFA or not. All they care about is the work.

If anything, there's a bias toward authors who don't have MFAs, because they are viewed as naturals who don't need some sissy workshop to produce works of genius.

Anyone who, like me, has spent the past year in the purgatory of agents' web sites will recognize that a quick google search produces evidence that simply refutes Almond's points about agents, editors, and MFA programs. For instance, one literary agent's site says,

Q. Now that I know I need an agent, how do I convince an agent that he or she needs me? In other words, how do I get an agent?

A. . . . The most important thing to know is that it is virtually impossible for an agent to sell a book by someone with no experience or credentials. If you are writing literary fiction, for example, you will have a far easier time catching an agent's eye if you graduated from a prestigious MFA program. . . . I KNOW that as a serious literary writer, the idea of doing all this yucky pandering stuff is probably disgusting to you, but you're just going to have to get over that, I'm afraid, if you want to see your book published by a major New York house.

Or let's take career advice for aspiring writers that appeared in Playboy. You can certainly say that Playboy is nothing but a mixture of conventional wisdom and adolescent fantasy, but conventional wisdom and wannabe aspiration is exactly what we're dealing with here:

Of course there are all kinds of ways struggling writers eventually get signed by an agent and land a book deal, but one common way to break down the barriers is to get a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in creative writing.

Po Bronson, author of The Nudist on the Late Shift, Susan Choi, author of The Foreign Student, Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia, Kerri Sakamoto, author of The Electrical Field, and Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, are just a few examples of young recently published authors who have an MFA under their belt.

Indeed, literary agents flock to the top-rated MFA writing programs, such as the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, to scout for new talent, according to Charu Gupta, a literary agent at the Alison Bond Literary Agency in New York.

But just like only a small number of lawyers graduate from Harvard Law School and get recruited by the top law firms, the graduates from the top-rated MFA programs enjoy a unique amount of agent attention.

So I'm inclined to side with Clementson in this argument. There's another issue Clementson raises, too, that goes to some of the attitudes that seem to motivate writers, a certain odd groupthink, a certain collectivist bias. As Charles Bukowski put it in Women, reflecting on a phony "poet" who wore "sandals and torn bluejeans; turquoise bracelets; a chain around his throat; he had a beard, long hair, orange blouse. He talked, and he talked."

There is a problem with writers. . . there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing; none of it helped at the typewriter.

Ezrza Pound, it seems to me, is a type of the talentless hanger-on who made a literary career from the phony brotherhood of phony writers. MFAs, as Clementson describes them, strike me as just another variation on the theme. But Elizabeth and Steve, if either of you reads this, whatever the merits of an MFA program, I hope it's not too late for either of you to think about what you really should be doing with your lives. If, after going through MFA programs and doing as much writing as I assume you've done since then, the product you submit for publication is as rough as it is, writing probably isn't it.
writing

NACSA -- VII

Roger Lee was the manager for one of the programming groups at Jacquard. He'd been impressed with the manuals I'd written on how to set up and operate the Jacquard desktop. He'd been one of the people who'd gotten me on the Piton project. I tried to do a good job on things like that, but I had a growing sense of futility: not many people were going to buy that machine. But Roger dropped in to my office every now and then to chat. One day around this time, he found me working with a stack of Piton blueprints.

"So what do you think of the redesign, now that you see it?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "I really wonder how many people are going to want to pay three times what a PC costs so they can bolt an extra box on the side of their desks." Saying something like this was death in an ordinary corporate environment. Running down your own product to a boss would normally have you out the door on some pretext or other. But Roger tolerated this from me, and Jacquard was a pretty loosey-goosey place anyhow. That you could say something like that there and get away with it was a good point about the place, but it was a little like enjoying the food on the Titanic.

"Let me tell you something about the PC," he said. "IBM isn't even making its own parts for it. Shouldn't that tell you something? It means they don't even take it seriously. They always make their own parts for things. Why should the PC be different?" This was a standard line from people -- and there were many of them -- who didn't think the PC would amount to anything. But of course, whether IBM did in fact bungle the PC and in the process made Bill Gates the richest man in the world would have little to do with the impact the PC had.

"I can't argue with what it's doing to the market," I told Roger.

"We'll get back in with the Piton." Roger, I fear, was a real Kool-Aid drinker.

"It's hard for me to think so. I mean, I'll do the manuals for it. But mainly to keep busy."

"What's that mean?" Roger asked. "You looking?"

"The handwriting's on the wall."

"They think a lot of you here. That's why you're doing the manuals on this. You're looking for another job to get a raise, is that it?"

"No, I think it's smart to have my options open."

Roger looked at his shoes. "I've been here four years. I'm happy with what they pay me. I like it here." I couldn't disagree, there was expensive wood veneer all over the place, everyone had a private office, free sodas, free espressos, free popcorn, free games in the lunch room, come and go as you please, the cushiest of high-tech deals.

"I don't know what you're making," I said to him. "But I'd be concerned about how long they're going to be able to pay anyone anything at all."

Roger gave me a look as if there was something wrong with me, and he got up and left. The thing that keeps puzzling me about Jacquard Systems is why they spent so much money on everything but minding the store. It had to have been clear to anyone with an MBA -- well, maybe not anyone with an MBA -- that they'd have to keep improving the product to meet future competition. A next generation of desktops was bound to come along. Instead, everyone there seemed to have hypnotized themselves into thinking things were great, and they'd always be just that way. And when the inevitable better mousetrap came along, everyone simply stayed in denial.
fiction
stories
writing

NACSA -- VI

I was beginning to get the picture on why the ad had been running so long for the position I was applying for at Origami Motors. It almost seemed as though the human resources lady was trying to chase potential applicants away. When she finally got in, she had no problem recognizing me: it was still early, and I was the only person waiting in the lobby. She still looked at me as if I was the one who was late. In fact, I almost think she was hoping I'd get mad or frustrated and leave when I found the lobby closed at a quarter to seven.

As I said earlier, if the ad was running for so many weeks, and my resume showed that I was a good fit for the job, and they didn't call me in, there had to be politics behind it. It was looking like the human resources lady was being stubborn. For whatever reason, she'd decided she wasn't going to fill the position. There was likely a tug of war going on between her and the hiring manager, and right then, I was the rope.

"Let's go back over why you left Synergon again," she said. Synergon was the place I left when I went to Jacquard Systems. This was turning into a real interrogation. The human resources lady was the bad cop. I kept waiting for the nice cop to come in and offer me a cigarette and a sandwich. "You say you left it because the company was going out of business." Her tone was heavy with skepticism.

"They lost an important contract and laid off 30 percent," I said. "They kept me on, but a few weeks later they lost another contract, and it was just about all over. One of my references worked there. He can tell you all about it."

"All right, then. One more time on Jacquard. Why do you want to leave?" Her eyes were getting beady. She almost seemed to expect me to break out screaming something like stop it, stop it, I can't stand it, yes, they're going to fire me. . .

Instead, I started to tell her about the Jacquard desktop, the IBM PC, how the PC was smaller, faster, and cheaper than the Jacquard computer, how nobody at Jacquard understood what this meant about the future, about the silly Piton project -- but her eyes glazed over. This bored her, and she likely didn't understand it. But if she didn't want to listen to the real reason I wanted to leave Jacquard, there wasn't anything more for either of us to say. I just sat looking at her expectantly.

She was going to have to send me on to talk to the hiring manager at some point. She didn't like me at all. It may have had something to do with me making my own decisions about my own career, rather than waiting passively for things to happen to me. But whether she liked me or not, I'd gauged my answers carefully, and she knew and I knew that she'd have to send me on.

"Well," she finally said. "I guess I'll have to send you on to Bob Walsh. But I'm not sure if this company is entrepreneurial enough for you." Her voice dripped with sarcasm and contempt. She didn't like applicants who thought for themselves, it appeared.

Bob Walsh's office turned out to be in the IS department, which was located in a cement block building two blocks from the main headquarters. "We've been having a hard time filling this position," Walsh said when I got in to see him. "Maybe you've seen our ad."

"I did notice it," I said.

"I'm new here myself. They hired me away from Deloitte. There was a really bad problem in last year's audit, and they finally realized they needed someone to straighten it out." He went on in greater detail. Yes, they had a really bad problem, and yes, they definitley needed someone to straighten it out. "They'd lost a good part of their source code," he said. "There was no way the auditors could check to see if the programs were doing what they thought they were doing."

"Someone could have written a program to round off the odd penny and put the balance in the programmer's secret account," I said.

"It wouldn't even need to be deliberate. Just a mistake that kept you from ever sending out some of your bills. You'd never be able to find it."

"It sounds like a big clean-up job."

"You're beginning to get the point," he said. "You're the first one to come in here who's even beginning to understand what it involves." He asked me if I could come back for a second interview. We set it up ourselves. It looked to me as if he knew the best course would be to bypass the human resources lady whenever he could. In fact, Walsh and I seemed to understand each other pretty well.
fiction
stories
writing

Nations Slowly Wise and Meanly Just

Gerry Jones's novel Ginny Good, which I discussed here a year ago, has won an award. My big reservation is that Ginny Good calls itself a "mostly true story," which, considering the reference (which Gerry Jones confirms) to Huckleberry Finn, suggests it's a novel, but the people who gave the award, as well as the Grumpy Old Bookman on the blog discussing the award, call it a memoir. I'm very much inclined to take the book's own word for its genre, and there are plenty of novels with real people in them -- for instance, Steinbeck's East of Eden, where he included many people in his own family. Nobody seriously tries to call that a memoir. I suspect there are various award-political and commercial concerns driving this -- and I also suspect Gerry's happy enough to get the award, whatever they call his book.

As I've said here, Ginny Good is a very worthwhile book, not least because it continues a literary tradition of non-academic authors doing good writing from their own experience and their own dearly-bought sense of what works, and not from some set of academic models or requirements. For instance, Gerry's site is actually one of the few that I would describe as a truly "literary" web site, as opposed to the great multitude of sites like The Valve, or Maud Newton, or Cup of Chicha, which are actually academic blogs, wordy, gossipy, precious, cliquish, and self-referential. What little is really happening in literature, as opposed to academe, is going on out of earshot and past the limited scope of blogs like these. Gerry Jones is about as different from such high-tea-at-the-rectory efforts as you can get.

Is it just a coincidence that The Atlantic Monthly has dropped short stories? The real market for short stories, of course, died with the Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. That The Atlantic would finally recognize that the parrot isn't just resting is a fascinating development -- apparently someone finally decided that nobody, but nobody, wants to see the vitiated output deemed appropriate by the academic-literary establishment.
writing

NACSA -- V

Continental Bank was the job I got after I realized Jacquard Systems was going to go bust when IBM announced the PC, which, as I've mentioned, was smaller, faster, and much cheaper than Jacquard's desktop. In fact, it was quickly becoming plain to everyone but the people at Jacquard that their big, klunky, expensive desktop was an idea whose time had come and gone. It was hard for me to avoid the feeling that the floor at Jacquard tilted a little farther each day, like a ship with a growing list. The Wall Street Journal had a story about it. ". . . there's been speculation about a sale of Jacquard Systems," the paper quoted an analyst, "but I can't imagine who'd want to buy."

There was a hush-hush redesign of the Jacquard box under way, in fact. They were going to make it smaller so it would look more like an IBM PC, but there were too many guts inside the box to be able to reduce the size in any significant way, so what the engineers did was split the big box into two smaller boxes. One box would sit on the desktop with the monitor on top of it and look like a PC. The other box, with the rest of the hardware, would bolt to the back of the desk so you didn't see it. They gave the new project the code word "Piton", after the rock climbing tool, referring to the second box's ability to hang onto vertical surfaces.

They'd put me on the Piton project. I was their best technical writer. In fact, I'd worked out for them -- I discovered that they'd hired me so they could fire another of their writers; by mistake I found the memo where my boss talked about it and said I was doing well, so they could go ahead and fire the other person the way they'd planned. What irked me was not so much that -- I didn't like the writer they'd fired anyhow -- as it was my boss telling the whole story to make it look like he was the one who was making everything work out. Hell, no. I was doing my job; the other writer hadn't been. My boss had very little to do with it.

So I had my resume out. One day I got a call from a lady in the personnel department at Origami Motors, one of the big Japanese car companies with US headquarters nearby in Torrance. The ad had been running for weeks. They needed someone with pretty much exactly my qualifications, but they hadn't called me for all that time, and the ad kept running. That's usually a bad sign that there's something political about the job. But the lady from human resources finally called, though she didn't seem very happy to have my resume.

"Mr. Bruce, I see you've only been at your current job for six months."

"That's right."

Her voice got snarly. "Would you care to tell me why you're sending out your resume?"

"I'm worried about the company's future."

"Really?" She sounded like she'd heard them all before, including this one. Next thing I was going to tell her the dog ate my homework. "You're sure you're not worried about your future with the company? Six months isn't very long to be at a place, you know. You're sure no one's asked you to leave?"

"No, I'm worried about the company's future." I love these people in human resources who have nothing better to do than call you up and waste everyone's time explaining at length why they don't want to talk to you.

"Well," she said, "if we made you an offer -- if we made you an offer -- we wouldn't be able to give you any raise over what you're making. It's not right to change jobs just to get a raise." She sounded like her human resources department was connected to the office of cosmic justice.

"Well, I guess we'd just have to look at that if you made me an offer."

"Can you make it in for an interview?"

"Sure, when?"

"Tomorrow morning? Early?"

"Any time you like."

"Good. How about a quarter to seven? I get started early."

I made it in at a quarter to seven sharp the next morning, only to discover that the lobby didn't open until seven. When it opened, the guard told me that nobody had gotten in to human resources yet, so I'd have to wait. The only good part of this was that there was a doughnut and coffee stand in the lobby, and I sat in a chair and sipped coffee and perused someone's Wall Street Journal until the lady finally got in, at twenty past seven.
fiction
writing
stories

NACSA (The National Association of Computer Security Administrators) -- IV

My blind date wasn't the only person who gave me trouble for working in computer security. As I mentioned, I'd started going back to church a year or so earlier, and one day I was chatting with The Rev. H. Slateford ("Slate") Thacker, the Associate Rector of St. ____'s Church. He asked me some vague question about what I did, and I told him I worked for a bank.

"Oh," he said with a self-satisfied chuckle, "I could never work for a bank. I'd just give all the money away -- to the poor, of course." Just like that, give all the money in the bank to the poor and move on to his next good work. Not his money, to be sure, just all the money that belonged to everyone else.

Right, I didn't tell him. Just like you'd give your Volvo, and your comfy home in an upscale neighborhood, paid for by the church, to the poor, which you haven't done. Slate Thacker, in fact, was paid about the same as they pay bank vice presidents, which is not a whole lot as these things go, but it's enough to drive a Volvo.

Not long afterward, I was chatting with Suzanne Thacker, who was Mrs. Slate Thacker, at coffee hour. The word had apparently been passed from husband to wife that I suffered from what the Buddhists would characterize as a lack of Right Livelihood. Those Buddhists have some good ideas now and then: there are some jobs you can't have and acquire merit. You shovel manure for a living and you won't attain nirvana. That the founder of Slate Thacker's church hung out with prostitutes and tax collectors didn't come into it; the Buddhists had a better take on these things. "Do you know what I think you should really be doing?" asked Suzanne Thacker. "I don't think you should be working for a bank."

"What?" I asked. Actually, everyone else at St. ____'s seemed to work for non-profits or government agencies. Unless, of course, they were doctors or lawyers. It was OK for doctors and lawyers to get rich. Actually, the Junior Warden was a lawyer who even worked for a bank, but the assumption seemed to be that was still OK; he never got too close to the money.

"I think you should be writing," Suzanne said. "You should be writing the great American novel." Anything to keep me hungry. She walked away before I could ask her if she'd pay my rent while I wrote it. Suzanne, in fact, was something of a babe, in a well-bred way, of course. If she was that devoted to the cause of literature, I could think of a way she might be of service, but her well-turned buttocks simply receded into the coffee hour crowd.

I don't think it ever quite registered on the Thackers, or anyone else at St. ____'s, that probably not everyone was called to work at the Armand Hammer Foundation, or the planning commission, or to produce great art, or even mediocre art. Some people are simply meant to help society work smoothly and as honestly as can be arranged, and they have a right to expect reasonable pay for doing it. "Poor John," they kept saying, "he just doesn't understand." They'd lower their tone to a whisper. "He works for a bank. . ."

But back to computer security. There are other aspects of ordinary work that reflect controls and precautions that have evolved over many years, things we normally don't notice, that can disappear once we convert business functions to work on computers. Some places, especially banks, require employees to take a two-week vacation every year. This is because it's hard to keep a scam going undetected if you're forced to be away and someone else is looking in on your job. It's a good idea to have functions divided between at least two people anyhow, simply to avoid secrets.

Right around this time I read about a big embezzlement scheme where a company's CFO was fired. The CFO was cooking the books. The trouble was that the IS department was working from the real data, not the phony numbers the CFO was putting out, and at the end of every month there would be a big discrepancy between what came off the computer and what was in the CFO's report. The CFO's response was to complain that the computer had screwed everything up again, and she'd make her people work late at every month-end "correcting" the data. Because everyone expected the computer to screw things up, and everyone admired people who worked late, it took a long time for her to get caught.

When I started doing computer security for Continental Bank, I found a similar situation. One of the first things I had to do was put in audit trails on all the computer files, to see who was updating them and when. I'd look at the audit reports every morning, mostly out of curiosity to see how the whole system worked. But after a while, I began to see something peculiar: programmers in a particular group were always working late. In fact, they were running jobs that were using actual account data. One of the normal controls in an IS department is that when you're writing and testing a program, you run it against test data.

This is only logical, since if you're testing a program, it's probably not quite perfect, and you don't want any possible mistakes screwing up a real customer's account. Then, when you're finished testing, somebody signs off and says the program is right, and the whole thing is turned over to an operations group to run every night against the real accounts. If there are problems after the program is turned over to operations, you get a call in the middle of the night, and the call is logged; either you have to come in to fix it right away, or you fix it as soon as you can the next day, and other people know about the problem, so you can't just blow it off. Ideally, it's a way for management to tell who's a good programmer and who isn't, but like anything else, the system can be gamed, and incompetents can be protected.

In this case, the programmers hadn't turned their programs over to operations, but they were running them against the real accounts, staying late to do it after the day's business was over. It was a short-cut at best, but of course everyone admired people who stayed late. And if there were problems, nobody needed to get a call from operations and have the wrong people find out. I had no choice but to tell Nestor, my boss, what I'd found. He sent it up the line, and several people were walked out the door -- from what I heard, the supervisor was claiming he'd met deadlines for having his programs finished when they hadn't been. Probably not everyone who should have been fired was.
fiction
writing
stories

The National Association of Computer Security Administrators -- III

I'm going to make our friends at the head table fidget impatiently for a little bit here while I explain some of the things they don't understand about why computer security is important. The first things are actually obvious, and possibly Ed, Cal, and Sheila could come up with a few of them on their own, if you gave them some time to think and maybe a couple of hints. When IBM lowered the price on the 3278 on line terminal, they made it possible for anyone who could get to the terminal (and who could obtain or guess a password) to see and modify anything on a particular company's computer. This would include salary information, credit information, accounts payable, and just about anything else that would be sensitive or would involve money.

Before then, when ordinary programmers just used punch cards, nobody who didn't work on the payroll system could know enough, say, to run a report on every employee's salary. Even if they could figure out that the payroll files started with the name PAYROLL, if they didn't have access to the documentation (which would be controlled, of course), they'd have to spend an enormous amount of time with trial and error getting the names of the files and figuring out how to print out and understand the information. But with an on line terminal, if you knew the files were named PAYROLL, not a hard leap of logic, you could start browsing files that looked interesting as easily as you might surf the web now, and you could see right away if you'd found what you were looking for. Even without documentation, you could begin to figure out what was in the files if you could recognize names and employee numbers. The rest would fall into place pretty quickly.

At that point you could do several fun things, like posting the salaries of everyone in the department on the lunch room bulletin board, or if you found the master file, you could give yourself a raise. Not big enough so someone would notice, of course, but enough to get yourself out of a jam. By the same token, you could cut yourself an expense check, or send a purchase order to your brother's company. Obviously this is all bad stuff, but interestingly, at the time IBM lowered the price on the 3278, it had only recently found a way to prevent any of this from happening on a System 360. And this applied just to files on hard disks; tape files were still much used then, and it was several more years before they could be protected.

But that's just the stuff that's obvious even to the big-picture types like Ed, Cal, and Sheila. When I started working for Continental Bank in 1981, they'd just fired a guy for running his own data processing business using the bank's computers. His customers would send him tapes, and he'd run their jobs on the bank's system, using its CPUs and disk drives. Then he'd get the tapes back and send the customers their new data. The bank didn't know this was happening, it went on for several years, and the guy was making a good income out of his business on the side. In the end, only the one guy got fired; his boss at least ought to have known what was going on, and for that matter the operations manager should have known, too, and they should both have been out the door as well, but that's how things always go. Lorne Ballardash, I was to discover, took care of his cronies.

But these are still obvious cases, people getting into payroll or credit or expense files and having fun with confidential information or giving themselves a bonus, or people stealing resources. That problem is just the start. The stuff that Ed, Cal, and Sheila have never really understood comes simply from the nature of work, which they don't understand, because they don't understand work. They stay as far away from that as they can get. There are ordinary checks and balances in work that come so much as second nature that we hardly notice them. Two people always count cash, for instance. If you make a cash deposit at a bank, why does the teller count it out in front of you and then give you a receipt? If the teller makes a mistake in counting it, you're there to point it out. If the teller gives you a receipt, it's then very hard for the teller to palm a couple of twenties and claim your deposit was for less than you thought it was.

For a while, in fact, I counted the offering on Sundays after church. Even for putatively religious people, there were still two of us doing the job. I don't think the intent of having two people involved is directly to prevent someone pocketing the odd five or twenty from the plate. Instead, the intent is to put the temptation at a greater distance. This was something Nestor Salinas told me when I started doing computer security work. "It is not humane," he said, "to expose people to too much temptation." Nestor, who was from Argentina, had a very Latin approach to these things.

Once during this period I had a blind date. Naturally, at an early stage, we got into what each of us did for a living. She, as I recall, did some sort of government grant type work. I told her I was doing computer security. We'd gotten along all right until I said that. All of a sudden, she stood up. "Why, that's just like trying to prevent shoplifting," she said. Her face was turning red. She was getting very upset. "You're just like some kind of store detective, trying to prevent shoplifting!" I hemmed and hawed and tried to talk about printing out the payroll file, but she wouldn't hear of it. "Companies spend all this money trying to prevent shoplifting! They probably spend more money on preventing shoplifting than whatever little bit people take out the door! Companies should just treat shoplifting as a cost of doing business! They shouldn't be trying to stop it!" She was so mad she was spitting little drops of saliva while she spoke. In fact, she seemed to be talking to someone other than me, someone who'd apparently been sitting at that cocktail table with us all the time, and I never knew it.

"Computer security! I think that's awful! You and your greedy corporate bosses don't trust anyone! It's as bad as trying to catch someone at shoplifting!" I tried to blurt out what Nestor had said about exposing people to too much temptation, but she was already stamping out of the bar in a rage. Sometimes blind dates go like that.
fiction

The National Association of Computer Security Administrators -- II

If you had checked an atlas or travel book in 1980, you would have read something like this: "Many people think of Los Angeles as the entertainment capital of the world, but the city is a regional banking and financial center, as well as a high-tech base." What you would have read in 1980 is no longer true. The days of LA as a banking center are as gone as the days of punch-card programming and green-line printouts.

This is one reason I chuckle when I think about Cal, Ed, and Sheila -- especially Ed and Sheila. Ed worked at the time for First America Bank, while Sheila worked for Pacific Surety Corporation, names that have disappeared as permanently as Packard or Nash. Their headquarters buildings still stand downtown, but the corporate logos have long since been painted out, and instead of floor after floor full of cubicles populated with diligent junior bankers performing menial tasks, the buildings have become server farms. They are so close to the main downtown Los Angeles telephone switching nexus that rates for connecting web servers to the national network are the cheapest available.

So even the buildings where Cal, Ed, and Sheila presided over the first meetings of what would become NACSA are inhabited mainly by ghosts. Between the savings and load debacle of the early 1990s and banking deregulation, the big LA banks are history, their data centers lying empty or razed to make way for condos. That Cal, Ed, and Sheila are still in LA, growing more than a bit long in the tooth, still presiding over an organization that got its start in a different kind of place, is one of the things that amuses me about this story. They're all a little like the reclusive old rich lady, sitting behind drawn shades in a run-down house, living in a long-gone world.

I first heard about what became NACSA not long after I started working for Nestor Salinas at Continental Bank, a smaller bank just down Flower from First America and Pacific Surety. Continental's as gone now as the other two, taken over by the Japanese. Somebody in Continental's executive suite had heard that a group of IS types at First America was putting together a monthly lunch meeting in their cafeteria where all the IS types who worked at local banks could talk about computer security. The word went down to Lorne T. Ballardash, Continental's CIO, that something needed to be done about computer security. And First America was running with the ball. Why wasn't someone from Continental going to that lunch? Ballardash, I'm sure, looked around for someone with time on his hands whom he wouldn't miss if the guy took an extra-long lunch, and his gaze settled on Nestor. Nestor called me in, told me about the lunches, and said we'd both go.

"This could turn out well for you," Nestor said. "If you get involved in setting this thing up, you'll get to be well-known in the business. That could be very good for your career." I did have a small question in the back of my mind when he said this -- why was it me that this was going to work out well for? Didn't he expect to be involved?

We both went to the first lunch. There was already a head table, and Ed, Cal, and Sheila were already sitting at it. Somehow they'd been in the computer security business before God even knew about it. Nestor and I were off to the side someplace. The people at the head table were big-picture types. Computer security was very important. In fact, it was going to be very, very important. They didn't have too much of a handle on why, and they got very uncomfortable if people mentioned terms that were current at the time like MVS, VTAM, 3270, CICS, IMS, or RACF. That was all for someone else to figure out -- someone, ideally, to whom the people at the head table would be able to give orders when the time came. That was their specialty: telling other people what to do. For now, computer security was just very, very important. Everyone needed to be aware of computer security.
fiction

The National Association of Computer Security Administrators -- I

Over the weekend I was spending some idle time googling the names of people I used to know, and I ran into the web site of the National Association of Computer Security Adminstrators, or NACSA. I'm sorry I can't give a link, because that's not the real name of the group. There are, I'm sure you understand, certain kinds of trouble I don't want to get into here, so nearly all names of people and organizations will be fictionalized.

What puzzled me about rediscovering NACSA, though, was how the group's officers were still exactly the same people who'd started the group 25 years ago. I know quite a bit about this, because in a past life, I was involved in starting that group myself. I got thrown out of it not long after I did a lot of the work to get it started, in fact, and that makes a story. That Ed Van Ness, Sheila Lamprey, and Cal Dripton are still there had me chuckling, but if you know them, that's simply part of the story.

Twenty-five years is a long time. Sheila must be close to retirement age by now, and Cal, when all this took place, had already retired from the Navy. He must be close to 80. They still have important sounding titles at NACSA like Chairman and CEO and President and Executive Vice President. They've set up a Hall of Fame for computer security administrators, and of course, they're all in it. The Hall of Fame is fairly new, but I knew this was the kind of idea -- especially the part about them being in it -- that they had in them back in the early 1980s. These were people utterly without talent or skills of any sort, save for self-promotion. If pressed, they could turn on a sort of reluctant, threadbare charm, though it was nothing that would gain them favor with any normal person.

Cal Dripton, in fact, was a dour, bad-tempered fellow who even at 55 gave the impression that life had let him down in some important way. He'd left the Navy well short of Admiral, but even in his office at the aerospace contractor where he worked, he had what government types call an "I love me wall", full of all the framed commendations he'd gotten in the Navy mostly for doing nothing, and photos of him shaking hands in front of a flag with some grim Admiral or smiling Senator as they handed him each award. From whatever history I could piece together from that record, it didn't seem like he'd ever spent much time on shipboard. Ed and Sheila were younger, sneakier versions of Cal, with all the thwarted ambition but without the Navy-officer polish. I'll get to them later.

Computer security arrived as a field with great suddenness. Several weeks ago, I talked about IBM's announcemeent in 1981 of its desktop personal computer and my reaction to it: I knew I'd need to get another job, because Jacquard Systems, where I was working, had a desktop that was bigger, slower, and about four times more expensive than the IBM PC. But as I think of it, IBM made another announcement a couple of years earlier that was even more influential. I remember that day clearly, too. I was working for Jim Larssen, who ran the USC computer center. Jim liked me -- one of the few bosses I ever had who did -- and he'd call me into his office just to chat. One day he called me in and said, "IBM has just lowered the price of the 3278." This was the start of much rumination on his part.

Most people don't know what a 3278 is, of course. For 15 years or so, it was a fixture of IS departments. It was the terminal you used to communicate with an IBM 360 series mainframe computer, the kind of terminal that had a black screen and green characters. Sometime around 1979, IBM made a big change in its strategy. Up to then, they'd sold the 3278 as an expensive and exotic piece of equipment. You only had them in a few places in your IS department. The operators had one in the machine room to monitor the jobs running on the system. The systems programmers had one or two so they could look at the system if anything went wrong.

Everyone else submitted jobs via punch cards, and a few hours later, or the next day, they checked cubbyholes outside the machine room to see if their output had come back. My last name is Bruce, so I'd check the B cubbyhole to see if there was a folded-paper printout with my job output on it, and my card deck returned as well, enclosed in several rubber bands. From the early 1960s up to the late 1970s, this was mostly how you did computing.

Apparently IBM began to realize that not only didn't things have to be this way, but as long as they stayed this way, IBM wasn't going to make as much money out of computers as they could. The time sharing system took advantage of the fact that a computer could run much faster than people could type. If someone took several seconds to keyboard a command, the computer could be using that time to listen to and execute commands not just from the one user, but from dozens or hundreds. If people just kept on issuing commands and entering data into the computer via punch cards, and waiting hours or overnight to get their results, it wasn't taking advantage of the computer's speed and its ability to run faster than people could type.

This wasn't new to computing, but it was new to IBM and the systems it was selling to corporations. The business of punching out system commands and program statements on cards was slow and error prone, and if you got right down to it, it limited how much money IBM could get from selling computers to its customers, since it allowed them to use the computer only in a slow, error-prone way. If they could get faster, easier access to the computer, they'd find more ways to use it, and they'd buy system upgrades.

This was Jim Larssen's thinking as he threw ideas off me in his office sometime in 1979. All of a sudden, somebody in IBM realized that the tool for making a computer easier and faster to use was right there, the 3278 terminal, but IBM had convinced IS departments that this was something expensive and exotic, to be used only by the most favored few. Then, wham, the IBM sales rep had come into Jim's office and, as Jim put it to me, made it look as if he couldn't afford not to buy several dozen more 3278 terminals for all his programmers. That was a quiet event, but within a few years it did away with punch cards and output cubbyholes next to the machine room. Jim knew how important it was. In fact, when IBM lowered the price on the 3278, it was probably more important in the scheme of things than the IBM PC.
fiction

Ezra Pound in the Asylum -- V

As long as we're on the subject of prizes, Pound's release from St.Elizabeths in 1958 came about in part due to the fear that he might receive a Nobel Prize. (If he got the Bollingen poetry prize, why not?) This was perceived as a potentially embarrassing event to the US if Pound were still institutionalized when he received it. An alternate scenario, also perceived as embarrassing, was if Pound were to die while in the institution, although all indications are that Pound's wife was happy with circumstances as they were (not least that his mistress was in Italy with Pound in the US); Pound had no particular wish to be released; and St.Elizabeths staff had seen no change in Pound's overall dotty mental condition.

Archibald MacLeish drove this movement. He estimated, correctly, that after the 1956 election the second Eisenhower administration had no special political interest in keeping Pound institutionalized, while enough time had passed to let memories fade, and the consensus was that Pound had served his time for whatever it was he'd actually done. MacLeish, an attorney, worked through the Justice Department, asking that they decline to prosecute the treasan case, which was still theoretically active. Strictly speaking, Pound could otherwise be tried for treason if at any time he were deemed competent to stand trial, though as a practical matter it would have been hard for the government to reassemble its case and find its Italian witnesses. St.Elizabeths was also reluctant to release him due to his mental condition, though legally there was no obstacle to granting Pound bail pending a trial if he became competent.

A big problem was that Pound still wasn't competent, and the St.Elizabeths staff had some concern over what would happen to him if he were released. One solution MacLeish proposed was releasing Pound to a private mental institution -- Pound's wife had a substantial inheritance, and Pound's own finances were good, since he'd been collecting royalties for a dozen years while in St.Elizabeths with no expenses of his own. He could easily have been maintained in a well-appointed private institution, which would likely have been the best thing for him. MacLeish, however, seems to have decided on his own that what Pound really wanted was to return to Italy.

Late in the process, MacLeish got Ernest Hemingway, T.S.Eliot, and Robert Frost to co-sign a letter to the Attorney General recommending that the Justice Department drop its treason case. Frost in particular, who had no fondness for Pound and hadn't (unlike Eliot and Hemingway) had any prior friendship with him, was remarkably generous in lending his support. Invited to a state dinner at the White House during this period, Frost made a point of speaking directly to Eisenhower himself about the matter. In due course, the Justice Department dropped the case with Eisenhower's direct knowledge and implicit permission.

St.Elizabeths released Pound in the custody of his wife. Pound himself was still legally incompetent to handle his own affairs. He returned to Italy, where he was able to play his wife, daughter, and mistress against each other, but he gradually withdrew into depression. I suspect that Archibald MacLeish's strategy was the correct one if his intent was to avoid embarrassment to the US if Pound received a Nobel Prize. If he got the Prize, he'd be back in Italy, and in domestic eyes the whole affair would be far away. By the same token, once Pound passed away, it would be in Europe and in obscurity. If Pound were in a private US asylum, of course, any adverse effect of getting a Nobel Prize would be partly mitigated, but I suppose in MacLeish's mind there might be lingering questions about whether his commitment was a political phenomenon. Certainly there'd be a crowd of reporters at the institution's door if Pound got a call from Stockholm, and there'd be no reason why he couldn't have them as visitors and say whatever nonsense popped into his head. Best overall have him in Italy where he'd be harder to reach and would fade from the public eye with each additional year of life.

Poetry has politics. MacLeish's solution to the political problem posed by Pound was cunning and ruthless, it seems to me. MacLeish, a second- or third-rate poet himself, negotiated politics far better than Byron or Shelley. He certainly didn't have Pound's interests uppermost. He avoided a potential kerfuffle that would have made the one over the Bollingen prize look small, though, and it sheltered the US political establishment from any further controversy in the Pound affair, letting the old nut case fade away as quietly as it could be managed.

Ezra Pound in the Asylum -- IV

An odd incident that illustrates the functioning of the "poetry" community and Pound's position in it occurred in 1948 with the award of the Bollingen Foundation's first annual "poetry prize". "The Bollingen Foundation," according to the Carpenter biography, "had been established a few years earlier by Paul Mellon, banker and art patron, initially to publish in English the collected works of Jung, from whose Swiss home the foundation took its name. . ." From spacey trustfunders, good Lord deliver us.

"In 1943 Allen Tate, that year's Poetry Consultant at the Library of Congress, had suggested to the Library that it appoint a body of Fellows in American Literature, who should award an annual poetry prize." Notice the high-falutin' titles and trappings of bureaucracy accumulating around, of all things, poetry. Plus, of course, a prize. Somewhere I'm sure there's a Law of Prizes ensuring that any such award is likely to go to some massively undeserving recipient. The formula expressing the law is probably one of the secrets of the universe lost with the meaning of Queequeq's tattoos.

And in 1948, Pound's Pisan Cantos were published in the US, to mixed reviews -- I have a feeling that the "mixed" part stemmed from a desire by reviewers to be polite, plus the inevitable back-scratching among poets unwilling to get into a public catfight. William Carlos Williams said the Pisan Cantos had their moments, but other words he used included "indifferent", "trash", and "incommunicable". So naturally, according to the lost Law of Prizes,

Even before the meeting it was assumed that the Fellows were going to choose The Pisan Cantos for the prize. On 18 November, Eliot, Aiken, Lowell and Tate were among those who convened at the Library, and Tate observed that 'the choice, now probable, of Ezra Pound's Cantos [sic] for the award might have implications embarrassing to the Librarian'. In fact the next day three other nominations were produced, but the only serious contender was William Carlos Williams's Paterson (Book Two), the latest installment of the long poem generally regarded as Williams's finest work. . . . Those who voted for Ezra included Auden and Louise Bogan (both apparently by postal vote), Lowell, Tate, Eliot, and Theodore Spencer, who was dead but would have been a Fellow had he lived, and whom everyone said would have voted for Ezra (the business was already assuming a bizarre character). . . . At one point Shapiro seemed likely to vote for Ezra, but then changed his mind; Allen Tate tried to persuade him that, since he was Jewish, to vote for Ezra would be to 'give anti-Semitism a telling blow', but Shapiro would not budge.

This outcome caused a quiet brouhaha in poetic circles, and the Fellows were asked to vote again, this time by mail. But the postal vote had the same result.

Allen Tate wrote to the Librarian a month before the announcement saying that they could have decided not to award a prize at all that year, but this would have been 'cowardly', while to give the prize to the second choice (Paterson Book Two) would be 'disgraceful, as Pound's book has been universally acclaimed as the most distinguished of the year. . .'

Tate concluded, "If we can win this battle, we shall have struck a mighty tough blow for intellectual integrity." The Pisan Cantos, of course, had been far from universally acclaimed. Pope should have been living at that hour; the story would have made another whole book of the Dunciad.

"[O]n 19 August [1949]," Carpenter continues, "the Joint Committee of the House and Senate on the Library of Congress ruled that the Library must abstain in future from giving any prizes or awards." Sometimes even politicians get things right.

Ezra Pound in the Asylum -- III

Yesterday we discussed the legal circumstances surrounding Pound's transfer to St. Elizabeths Hospital. The most important point is that having Pound committed to St. Elizabeths was not the brainchild of anyone, singly or in a group, in the literary scene to save Pound from execution for treason, though versions of this story are popular. The fact is that questions over Pound's mental state started while he was an Army prisoner in Italy, and it appears that all of the numerous psychiatrists who examined him thought there was something wrong. Ernest Hemingway and T.S.Eliot didn't need to say a word, and the commitment to a mental hospital required a legal proceeding and the involvement of a judge and jury.

But what was wrong with Pound? The diagnoses quoted in Carpenter's biography are often inconsistent. The director of St. Elizabeths, who was a literary hobbyist and took a personal interest in Pound, called him a "psychopath", which at the time simply meant someone who had mental problems that weren't overtly psychotic. Other psychiatrists at various times called him "schizoid" or "borderline personality disorder"; the most convincing to me is "narcissistic personality disorder". But none of these terms means a whole lot. As this site suggests over the term "passive-aggressive",

Say for instance that a coworker cheerfully agrees to refrain from a specified uncool act, then does it anyway. Is this passive-aggressive behavior? No, this is being an a[--]hole. Comforting as it can be to pigeonhole our tormentors with off-the-shelf psychiatric diagnoses, sometimes it's best just to call a jerk a jerk.

Over the years of Pound's stay in the mental hospital, the psychiatrists brought in various people who'd known him in the 1920s to see if they thought he'd changed. Interestingly, nobody thought he was any different from the way he'd been 20 or more years earlier. He tended to talk a blue streak, his attention span was short, he leapt from subject to subject, but if pressed, he could give intelligent, well-considered answers to questions. Nevertheless, he seemed unable to deal with practical details of life, especially including the details of defending himself against a treason charge. The people who ran the hospital began to suspect he was exactly where he'd always wanted to be.

In fact, there's a kind of Catch-22 about Pound's situation. If he had ordinary judgment and ability to deal with day-to-day life, he could likely have helped his attorneys get him acquitted on the treason charge. But if he'd had ordinary judgment and ability to deal with day-to-day life, he wouldn't have gotten into the trouble that led to the treason charge in the first place. His radio broadcasts, after all, were mostly just silly. He had the Italians shaking their heads over why he'd risk the trouble he did indeed get into over something as useless as the broadcasts.

Among the people who came to visit Pound at St. Elizabeths was Carresse Crosby, and this is one of the fairly minor issues I have with the Carpenter biography. Carpenter says she knew Pound in the 1920s -- yes, she did; she was the wife of Harry Crosby. Until Harry's suicide, they jointly ran Black Sun Press, which published many of the 1920s avant-garde. After the suicide, Carresse ran a little magazine that published James Joyce, as well as Charles Bukowski's first story. Carresse appears in the Carpenter book only to verify that Pound hadn't changed since the 1920s -- but in fact, her position in letters challenges the view that Pound was chiefly responsible for discovering and publishing James Joyce. Carresse also published him. I suspect a careful examination needs to be done, and it would likely show that Pound's "finds" are less exclusive than the mythology would have us think.

The way I see it, someone as undisciplined in mental habits as Pound isn't going to be a good writer, or even a good editor, or even a good talent scout. Leaving clinical labels aside, Pound was a first-class jerk. And this must eventually bleed through into his literary reputation.

More to follow.

Ezra Pound in the Asylum -- II

Yesterday we heard about how Pound's mental state raised concerns almost from the time he came under Army custody in Italy after the Second World War. The problem wasn't that he was "crazy" in a traditional sense, although everyone involved seems to have thought that psychiatrists needed to be consulted. The problem that emerged was whether he was competent to stand trial, which meant that he understood the nature of the charges against him and would be able to assist his attorneys in his defense.

Pound apparently wanted to represent himself, and his view of how he would do this was to bring the jury around to his position on Social Credit and usury. His main concern was whether he would have the strength to address them for the four hours he felt would be needed to do this. By this time, his own attorney, the Justice Department prosecutors, the judge in the case, and the psychiatrists who had examined him were unanimous that he wasn't competent to stand trial.

As a result, the judge held a hearing in front of a jury. All the expert witnesses agreed that Pound wasn't competent. The Justice Department had no problem with this, either -- speculation is that if the case had gone to trial, it would have been difficult to get a conviction based on the Constitutional requirement for two witnesses to each specific act of treason, as well as the vague and rambling content of the broadcasts. Pound's behavior in the hearing was bizarre. The jury stayed out for something like three minutes before returning with their own verdict that Pound wasn't competent.

What this meant was that the indictment against Pound for treason was still in force; it simply wouldn't be possible to try him at the time. If at some later point Pound became competent to stand trial, the trial could proceed. The law is a little bit fuzzy on this point, and Pound's attorney apparently hoped that once Pound was declared incompetent, there might be some way for the government to agree to release him -- the law didn't specifically say he had to be kept in custody until he could be tried. However, once he was declared incompetent, the government moved him from the mental ward of the D.C. jail to the criminal ward at St. Elizabeths.

All of this procedural detail is important, because it goes against the usual Pound mythology. Paul Johnson says of Hemingway in Intellectuals, for instance,

When Pound was in danger of execution for treason in 1945, having made over three hundred wartime broadcasts for the Axis, Hemingway effectively saved his life. . . . In the event it was Hemingway who was responsible for the successful insanity defence which got Pound incarcerated in hospital and saved him from the gas chamber.

Hemingway had nothing to do with it. Everyone involved, judge, lawyer, prosecutors, psychiatrists, and jury, decided Pound wasn't competent to stand trial, not that he was (as Johnson implies) not guilty by reason of insanity. No guilty or not guilty verdict was ever rendered in Pound's case. While a death sentence for treason was a possibility, it was remote; the UK's broadcasters who did Nazi propaganda were in fact executed, but Tokyo Rose served only a prison sentence, having been convicted on only one count of those alleged. Much later, in the 1950s, when Pound's friends were working to gain his release from St. Elizabeths, Hemingway signed a letter to the Attorney General along with T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost supporting Pound, but this appears to be the extent of Hemingway's involvement in the case. In the 1940s, in fact, Hemingway wrote to several people seriously suggesting the Army should have put Pound in a room with a loaded pistol, expecting him to do the right thing.

So much for literary mythmaking. And it's worth pointing out that neither Pound nor his wife was ever anxious for his release. After a short time, St.Elizabeths moved him from the criminal ward to more comfortable quarters in the main part of the hospital. He gradually acquired special privileges; his room and board were picked up by Uncle Sam; he had a steady procession of famous visitors; he was kept safe and out of mischief; and to his wife's satisfaction, his mistress, Olga Rudge, was out of the picture. (T.S.Eliot did have some input in the situation, unlike Hemingway; it was his advice to keep the "other woman" in Pound's Italian menage as far out of the publlic eye as possible.)

More to follow.

Ezra Pound in the Asylum

Ezra Pound is literally the crazy-old-aunt- (or uncle) in-the-attic of American literature. Exactly why he wound up at St. Elizabeths Hospital, which is the Federally run mental hospital in the District of Columbia, is the subject of much misinformation and myth, probably because nobody wants to look too closely at Pound's real position in American letters. Humphrey Carpenter's 1988 biography of Pound, A Serious Character, spends quite a bit of time on this subject, as it should. I'm not sure if the book has all the details on Pound's life right -- I think Carpenter is more sympathetic to Pound than he should be, and I may get to some of the odd omissions and semi-contradictions in the version of Pound's life and literary influence he gives -- but it's a good start, and Carpenter points to other sources on the treason case that may bear investigation. Pound's attorney, for instance, wrote a book of his own.

Here is a summary of what led to Pound's commitment to St. Elizabeths (Carpenter points out that the hospital name omits the apostrophe). In the 1920s Pound became interested in the Social Credit economic theories of Henry George; at roughly the same time he seems to have played the London little-magazine literary scene for all he could get out of it, and he moved to Italy. Once there, he became attracted to fascism and the Mussolini government, though characteristically, he was less an adherent of formal fascism than he was hopeful of converting Mussolini to his own views on usury and Social Credit. Surviving documents show Mussolini's staff never took Pound seriously, though he was able to wangle a half-hour audience with Mussolini at one point (the Duce ended the meeting punctually).

However, Pound began writing extensively for the Italian papers on Social Credit. The papers always seemed to regard Pound as a curiosity and even something of a joke, and since Pound's ability to speak and translate foreign languages has been widely overrated, they ran Pound's pieces in broken Italian as he wrote them with no editing or corrections, emphasizing the view that the Italians never saw Pound as much more than a curiosity.

Once the Second World War started, Pound was able to exploit contacts in the fascist propaganda ministry to get a spot on a radio program aimed at the US called "The American Hour". Few, if any, Americans, either in the US, or later, fighting as soldiers in Europe, ever took the program seriously. Pound's broadcasts began before the US entry into the war, and characteristic of him, they were generally disorganized and aimless, but the Italian fascists weren't popular with the US State Department even before the war started, and Pound began to have difficulties with his passport.

Pound stayed in Italy after the Italians declared war on the US and continued his broadcasts, although his Italian contacts became increasingly concerned that on one hand, the broadcasts were of absolutely no use to the fascist cause, while Pound was certainly getting himself into hot water given the inevitable outcome of the war (the Italians, this book confirms for me once more, have never been dummies). It seems that, especially once Mussolini was deposed as Duce, the provisional fascist propaganda ministry in Milan "filed" Pound's recordings without broadcasting them.

When the German forces in Italy surrendered at the end of the war, Pound was captured at his home by Italian partisans, who apparently were under the impression that there was a price on Pound's head. (The US Department of Justice had in fact indicted Pound for treason in absentia, but the Army had higher priorities.) Pound was taken to a US prison camp near Pisa, where he ingratiated himself with both the prisoners and the warden. Meanwhile, the Justice Department dithered over what to do with him, and the Army finally threatened to release Pound unless Justice took him off their hands.

Pound became physically ill and showed signs of mental disturbance early in his time in the prison camp, to the extent that Army psychiatrists examined him at the time (the camp warden displayed a great deal of sympathy for him). There was enough concern over his mental state that he was put directly into the psychiatric ward in the District of Columbia jail when he was flown to the US. His diagnoses were always somewhat vague and hard to pin down. No psychiatrist thought he was "insane" in the sense that he was delusional or hallucinating, but everyone seemed to agree that he'd have a hard time functioning outside of an institutional environment.

Here we get to the interesting puzzle. The problem with putting Pound on trial for treason was that the US Constitution requires two witnesses to each overt act of treason alleged in the indictment. Once you began to look at Pound's radio broadcasts, which were often incoherent, you had to establish what was treasonable about them, and then you had to find two witnesses (Italians, of course) who were in the studio at the time he made each broadcast. The Justice Department said it had the witnesses, but the more attorneys looked at the case, the more they thought it would be very hard to prove to a jury that this rather silly old man was a traitor. (All the same, US public sentiment was against figures like Pound and Tokyo Rose, and that had to be factored in; the UK hanged Lord Haw-Haw and other expatriate broadcasters during this period.)

The problem for Pound was that he wasn't in any sort of condition to assist in his defense. A sensible person in Pound's predicament should be able to cooperate with his attorneys. "OK," you might imagine them saying to him, "let's put together a list of all these broadcasts you made. We're going to have to go through discovery and get the Justice Department's transcripts. Then we're going to have to sit down and go through them, and you're going to have to explain what you really meant to say in them, who was a witness, how we can challenge the witnesses. . ."

Pound simply wasn't up to this kind of discussion, concentration, or hard work. Instead, he blithely insisted to his friends and attorneys that he ought to be advising Truman on the European situation, not piddling around with this court case. Pound wasn't "crazy", in the sense that he knew he was in the mental ward and knew he was in criminal hot water, but he couldn't focus on his situation long enough to provide any kind of assistance to his attorneys in putting together his case. Instead, he'd just chatter on about poetry or Social Credit. What's interesting is that if he'd been able to concentrate on his case, he might well have been acquitted, or at least had the charges plea bargained down, though in the immediate postwar atmosphere, with the Truman Administration under scrutiny, the charges wouldn't have been dropped entirely.

More to follow.

Academic Life and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

I was interested to see Stephen M.'s reaction in the thread on yesterday's post to Leiter's essay on the hermeneutics of suspicion and this on line teaser. I think Steve summarizes things fairly when he says Leiter, Edmund Gettier, and Paul Ricoeur attempt "to bring back Freud, Marx and Nietzsche as great mental forces with the underlying theme that all surface conclusions are suspect". As Leiter says,

In 1963, in a remarkably brief paper, Edmund Gettier convinced most philosophers that the received wisdom of millenia about the concept of knowledge was mistaken: “knowledge” was not simply a matter of having a justified, true belief, since one could adduce examples of beliefs that were both “justified” and “true” but which didn’t seem to be cases of “knowledge.”

Well, I don't know who Leiter/Gettier means by "most philosophers", but it seems to me that at least since Plato's cave, philosophers by and large have been skeptical of "true belief". In fact, isn't that the point of Plato's Apology of Socrates? I don't know where those French guys studied philosophy, but I read my Plato in Greek. Consider this passage:

After the politicians, I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. And there, I said to myself, you will be instantly detected; now you will find out that you are more ignorant than they are. Accordingly, I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them, thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.

The idea that we don't know things for sure, and that things ain't what they seem, is simply not new, guys. To act as if this is a big surprise, and then say Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche (oddly, nobody mentions Frazer here, but he always seems to tag along in these discussions) have the straight dope is, well, weird. I mean, major weird.

There are many things I could say about this, and maybe I will. But let's start with a basic one. If English professors (and it's largely English profs who ascribe to this set of beliefs) think this is the epistemological state of affairs -- in effect, we live in uncertainty (an exclusively post-19th century phenomenon, apparently), and the only cure to our uncertainty is a limited number of philosophers who tell us the truth, viz., Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, with their sidekick Frazer, then wouldn't we expect such a group to act in a more or less millennarian fashion? In other words, we have the truth. The rest of the world doesn't. We need to set up little colonies where we can live according to our beliefs and by-the-by reproach the ignorant masses.

By this reasoning, you would expect English departments to become little enclaves where private property has been abolished and everyone would be in Freudian analysis. How am I wrong here? Why does Prof. Throckmorton continue to own his home, his two cars (a Prius and a Volvo, to be sure), his jet ski, his John Deere lawn mower, his wide screen TV? Why does he not spend several hours a week on the couch? If English profs sincerely held such beliefs, wouldn't you expect them to become a sort of Amish-like cult, driving their electric cars, or even their teams of horses, sharing their wordly goods and perhaps their women as well, and making sure of their mellowed-out mindset with frequent visits to the therapist? Why, rather, do English profs actually emulate the haute bourgeoisie? It seems to me that Marx, at minimum, would denounce their bourgeois lifestyle and aspirations -- the role of the intellectuals is to lead the proletarian revolution. Where do I have this wrong? Instead, at most, the English profs are idly circulating petitions and angrily denouncing the cancellation of Ward Churchill's latest campus appearance.

I can only conclude that the academics who adhere to this view and who continue to follow a prosperous bourgeois lifestyle are utter cynics. I await the next visit of Jonathan Goodwin, who will dash something off that he feels is cryptic but is actually just goofy and think this refutes everything. (How, indeed, does Jonathan fit in? Seems like if academics were good Marxists, a useful idiot like Jonathan would have been dispatched to burn down the Reichstag or assassinate Kirov and sacrificed to the revolution some time ago. Instead, he's kept around as a kind of court clown. Maybe he thinks one of the other Valvesters will get him a job.)

Ezra Pound

I've finished the Humphrey Carpenter biography of Ezra Pound. My initial ocnclusion: he managed to have a major literary career -- he never did anything else for a living after being fired by Wabash College partway through his first year teaching there -- with no talent. And I'm not exaggerating. He had zero talent. Like many of our present-day English profs, he could hardly write a grammatically recognizable sentence, but that never stood in his way. From the 1930s onward, he expected a Nobel Prize. More to follow.

None So Blind. . .

I stopped over at The Valve yesterday for the first time in a week or two and found a post by Sean McCann linking to a piece on class in The New York Times that's gotten wide attention. The piece begins,

On television and in the movies now, and even in the pages of novels, people tend to dwell in a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land. This place is an upgrade, but not a drastic one, from the old neighborhood where Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Donna Reed used to live; it's those yuppified city blocks where the friends on "Friends" and the "Seinfeld" gang had their apartments. . . those airbrushed suburbs where all the cool young people hang out and where the pecking order of sex and looks has replaced the old hierarchy of jobs and money.

Our friend Prof. McCann says of this,

Lots and lots of doubtful claims and many a quick and dirty generalization in this piece. But the big idea is right on. It’s been sometime since contemporary American lit spoke forcefully about class.

Well, maybe in Sean's neighborhood. Just the other night I saw an ad for a new reality TV show, The Good Life, in which Kathy Hilton, Paris Hilton's mom, teaches ten young woman contestants "to fit into high society while staying at the Hilton Hotels' flagship hotel, the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City." This is a "a classless, homogenized American Never-Never Land"? Which part of the big idea is right on here, Sean? I love it when profs hand me straight lines this way.

And it's been sometime since contemporary American lit spoke forcefully about class, says our friend. Like just this March, when Michael Barone wrote on The Trustfunder Left:

Who are the trustfunders? People with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard. People who can live more or less wherever they want. The "nomadic affluent," as demographic analyst Joel Kotkin calls them.

These people tend to be very liberal politically. Aware that they have done nothing to earn their money, they feel a certain sense of guilt. At the elite private or public high schools they attend, and even more at their colleges and universities, they are propagandized about the evils of capitalism and globalization, and the virtues of environmentalism and pacifism. Patriotism is equated with Hiterlism.

Their loyalties, as Samuel Huntington explains in "Who Are We?," are not national, but transnational -- they are citizens of the world with contempt for those who feel chills up their spines when they hear "The Star Spangled Banner." They are taught to have contempt for the economic contribution they make to their country as investors and to feel guilty if they make no other contribution. Their penance is that they must vote left.

Sure sounds like someone speaking forcefully about class to me. The main problem, I suspect, is that people aren't saying what The New York Times and Sean McCann want to hear about class, which is apparently all about how poor people are exploited and can't rise. The Times can't conceal its nostalgia for a different literary day:

But there is also a darker version, the one that turns up in Dreiser's "American Tragedy" (1925), for example, where class envy - a wish to live like his rich tycoon uncle - causes Clyde Griffiths to drown his hopelessly proletarian sweetheart, and where the impossibility of transcending his lot leads him inevitably to the electric chair. (In the upstate New York town of Lycurgus, where the story takes place, Dreiser reminds us that "the line of demarcation and stratification between the rich and the poor ... was as sharp as though cut by a knife or divided by a high wall." )

Dreiser is often called a "naturalist", and this is a case where a literary label (unlike, say, "Romantic" or "modernist") has some descriptive value. "Naturalism", I was taught in grad school, is the literary use of philosophical determinism. In other words, Dreiser, and writers like him such as Erskine Caldwell and Jim Thompson, make thematic use of their characters' lack of options. (In tact, they sometimes make fun of their characters' lack of options; confer Tobacco Road.) If you want to believe nobody, or nobody in a particular class, has options, that's fine, but there's no requirement that you buy into it, and in fact Dreiser's and Caldwell's literary reputations have been steadily declining; Thompson's has had something of a blip.

It seems to me that there's a basic conflict in this class-based naturalistic view. If the social structure holds people down in unrewarding lives and thwarts their aspirations, what are these people aspiring to? Clyde Griffiths wants to "live like his tycoon uncle", but the knife-lke demarcation between rich and poor prevents this. But if it were wrong to aspire to wealth, as both McCann and The New York Times would have us believe, it seems to me, then why should we sympathize with Clyde Griffiths? He's just a bozo with false consciousness and deserves to die. Dog bites man. Where's the story?

We know from looking at his course syllabi that Sean McCann seems attracted to class-based critiques of society and appears to have some sympathy, for instance, with the view that the New Deal was a disappointing compromise. So it seems he favors literature that takes the view that people are held down by the social structure. The problem, as I see it, is that American society hasn't been cooperative in matching this model. Middle-class, otherwise known as "bourgeois", lifestyles, including suburban houses, multiple cars, expensive toys, and college educations, are widely available, to recent immigrants, minority group members, and people with non-traditional living arrangements. Just check my street in an affluent LA neighborhood. The poor, it's been observed, often have air conditioning in the US. This is not to say things are perfect; many people struggle to earn a living, but an oppressive social structure isn't necessarily the first thing a creative artist sees in US society. As Tom Wolfe has observed, in the post-World War II prosperity, contrary to the expectations of their social betters, American workers took the money and ran.

In fact, it seems to me that a major strain in American literature, to be found in Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Hawthorne, and Mark Twain, certainly from J.D.Salinger and extending through William S. Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, is the problem of absurdity and inauthenticity in ordinary bourgeois aspirations. These are not class-based critiques and thus lack the central contradiction in An American Tragedy. Bukowski points out several times in his autobiographical work how his father constantly preached to him the value of a steady job and the goal of retirement, but he dropped dead in the kitchen one night before he could retire, his necktie still neatly in place.

Bukowski left home convinced there was more to life than class aspiration; Holden Caulfield thinks the bourgeois adults he knows are all phonies, and I very much doubt it would fix things in his mind if one day they saw the light and all got jobs at an auto plant, or indeed if they all joined the Green Party (some of them probably already have). The problems writers like Salinger and Bukowski see aren't class-based. It's not enough for novels to insist that everyone has a right to wear a bourgeois necktie, or failing that, (or really, both at the same time) everyone should put on a blue work shirt and a cloth cap and denounce bourgeois decadence -- which is a position McCann and the Times begin to approach -- but this is a digression.

I think that blogging and other web-based writing is in fact highly class-specific. A certain amount of conflict has been taking place, with the web as a main focus, between what I would call the bourgeois centrists or anti-idiotarians, and the far left. What interests me is the social division this illustrates, and Michael Barone has pointed it out above: the trustfund left is both a political and a class phenomenon. The recent Dartmouth alumni trustee election, a campaign conducted largely via the web and which drew national interest, is another example: the typical Ivy trustee is, in fact, a member of the trustfund elite or a trusted retainer such as a white-shoe attorney. Peter Robinson, one of the insurgent trustees, made the pointed remark after his election that he'd be taking the redeye and the bus to board meetings, but he'd been told that other trustees flew in on their private jets. Given the chance, some thousands of bourgeois Dartmouth grads made their views known on how far they trusted the traditional elites with their institutions.

And in fact, the trustfund left is allied politically with the academic left. (Other presumptive members of the leftist coalition, like minorities and gays, seem less and less reliable, while labor has been ambivalent for generations.) One factor in this, I think, is the academic aspiration not to a bourgeois lifestyle -- they already have that, and would certainly not give up the suburban home, the multiple cars, the expensive toys, the fat pension, the free tuition -- but to a value system they associate with wealthy elites. It's not enough for Prof. Throckmorton to be fairly well-off; he's also, like many of his colleagues, a snob. Thus it's not enough simply to have a livelihood and prosper from it. Nor would your typical academic ever actuallly emulate a Caulfield or a Bukowski and resign from the comfortable, if inauthentic, middle state.

Instead, the goal is to be like those, as Barone puts it "with enough money not to have to work for a living, or not to have to work very hard." To be like them is to share their guilt at this predicament -- and it's a fine predicament indeed. So academics make common political cause with the very wealthy. This is a big puzzle to me: hasn't the academic left in fact done what Clyde Griffiths couldn't, risen to at least a simulacrum of rich tycoonhood? And they're happy as bugs! Their students, of course, must still read An American Tragedy.

And we shouldn't mistake the political alignment of the truly rich: they include Howard Dean and John Kerry, for instance. (The elitists who support Dean and Kerry nevertheless despise George W. Bush, who comes from exactly the same old-money-prep-school-and-Yale background as the others, because Bush affects bourgeois values and mannerisms.)

It seems to me that people, including writers, think a great deal about class, but the classes aren't the European ones that Marx observed (or more likely postulated; he apparently never went near a factory in his life). US politicians, seeking labor support, speak of a "middle class" that includes hourly workers, not a working class, and they're right to do so. The US bourgeoisie is very large and very inclusive, such that hourly workers and farmers often see their political interests linked with suburbanites, and many hourly workers live in nice suburbs anyhow.

When a finger is found in a bowl of fast-food chili, after all, it's a fraud and a joke, not fodder for a new Upton Sinclair -- and Upton Sinclair lived long enough to become something of a fraud and a joke himself. The world has changed a great deal; Sean McCann and The New York Times don't seem to be up to it. And the idea that professors themselves are anything but salaried bourgeois with class aspirations of their own, inauthentic as any, is, of course, self-flattery and self-deception.

Are College Professors "Professionals"? -- IV

Mallarme has posted a long and thoughtful response to my first three posts in this series at the Greater Nomadic Council. I appreciate that, because it's a springboard to my conclusions in this series. Mallarme says,

We now come to the impetus for Bruce's new bête noire: unethical or incompetent humanities professors. No one can reasonably argue that plagiarists, sexual predators, or simpletons should be retained as professors once their failings come to light. The only place in which to differ, then, is method. Bruce proposes a national qualifying exam, licensing, and a board with the power to sanction offenders. . . . A licensing board, however, seems a fair, reasonable, and common solution. It would not doubt make the discplinary process more transparent, a great boon for students when they do have problems. There should be no place at universities for bad professors. If the corruption is as rampant as Bruce makes out, surely something needs to change.

I think mallarme misreads many of my posts on academe. He feels I'm proposing reforms, which I'm not -- I've been saying over and over here that the national licensing exam I've put forward is a modest proposal, a thought experiment, because I'm realistic enough to know that no such thing will ever be implemented, at least under conditions as we know them.

What I've done in this series of posts has been to take Timothy Burke, a tenured academic, blogosphere welterweight, and ambivalent defender of the system that's been very, very good to him, up on his suggestion that I examine academe in the context of other professions:

All the professions [he identifies these as academia, law, medicine, psychiatry and so on] have some common problems and shortcomings that relate to your concerns, but precisely because they do, that might illuminate where your focus on academia is somewhat parochial in relationship to the things that worry you.

This is all I've meant to do in this series: examine academic claims (as espoused here by Prof. Burke) to "professionalism" in the context of the professions he mentions and others. (Psychiatry I take to be a field within medicine, but I did mention psychotherapy, which licenses and disciplines PhDs and MAs differently from the rest of academe.) It's entirely possible that individuals may look at one or another of the points where academe differs from other professions -- for instance, no required professional degree, no consistent qualifying exam, no board of licensure, no independent enforcement of professional ethics -- and feel, as mallarme does over some issues, that changes ought to be made. But they aren't going to happen. I wrote this series of posts from that point of view.

Insofar as I've discussed academe in recent months, it hasn't been from a perspective of proposing reforms. That would be a waste of time: I would either need to be a Robert M. Hutchins or a James B. Conant myself, or I'll need to get the ear of one pretty darn quickly to see any changes resulting from my posts here take place in my lifetime. Instead, I'm looking at what might be called the academic-leftist critique of bourgeois capitalist society and suggesting that it's invalid. I'm using one of the arguments for atheism in doing so: think about it for a moment. Look at the world as it is. Don't you think just about any nincompoop could run the world better than the way it's run? So why do we postulate an all-knowing and all-powerful deity if the world is such a mess?

By the same token, we have academics, both formally in the public forum, and informally in lectures and blogs, taking mainstream or red-state society to task for its imperfections. That may be well and good, but it's important to recognize that the academic world is not the arcadian paradise that professors imply when they complain about mainstream society. In fact, there's probably more racial, class, and gender bias, petty corruption, hypocrisy, institutionalized incompetence, and closed-mindedness inside the academy than outside it. In other words, how can academics presume to judge and criticize mainstream bourgeois society when they can't keep their own house in order?

There's no question that someone could give thought to the comparisons I've raised between, say, academics and medicine and come up with suggestions for academic reform. They might even save the current system, which it seems to me is at a point of fin de siecle decadence. But as I've outlined here earlier, the current system is run, a little like a Ponzi scheme, by early investors for their own benefit. In other words, the typical early investor, a professor who now has tenure, calculates that the system will continue to provide the level of benefits he or she has achieved (a lifetime sinecure and a good pension, assuming he or she elects to retire) for as long as he or she will need them. Whether it can provide the same level of benefits -- especially the number of new lifetime sinecures that could accommodate his or her graduate students when they get PhDs -- isn't a concern. He or she has it made now in the current system, and that's that.

As I've already said here many times, the factor that's likely to overtake any effort at reforming the current academic tenure model is the market, and I think most people who are looking at the academic market misunderstand what's happening. Demand for the overall educational product, as Stephen Karlson has pointed out many times, is at a record level. But the purchasers of this product, the bourgeois families who pay tuition or who take advantage of taxpayer subsidies, are purchasing a whole bundle of goods that make up the overall educational product. They are not buying just a particular kind of faculty. Parents and many students may not even know the difference between adjunct and tenured faculty, and they probably don't care; for every student who wants a "quality" educational experience, there are probably several dozen who want only a grade (a good one).

So it's the administrators who are acting as surrogate purchasers of faculty for the families who are simply buying a bundled college experience, which includes a social life, a maturing process, an index of social standing, a campus environment, perhaps a family tradition, a US News ranking, a future career, and many other factors that have almost nothing to do with faculty quality. So the administrators are buying fewer and fewer of the traditional academic product and more and more of the cheaper-but-nearly-as-good alternative, the adjunct. I suspect this wouldn't be happening if the traditional tenure-track faculty product were perceived as worth buying by the informed consumers, the administrators. And so far, the ultimate consumers, the bourgeois families who pay the tuition, aren't complaining.

Mallarme and others may disagree with me as to what reforms might reasonably suggest themselves from some of the points I've raised here, but actually, worthwhile as any such reform may be, it's probably far too late for any single reform or combination to save the current academic pseudo-professional model. The system is likely collapsing of its own unfulfilled expectations. That's my point in this series.

Are College Professors "Professionals"? -- III

Along with the article on the prevalence of faculty plagiarism that I cited at the end of yesterday's post, the Chronicle of Higher Education also published a special report discussing the problem of how to enforce professional canons regarding plagiarism and scholarly fraud:

Now you are at the threshold of the most contentious debate in plagiarism enforcement: Should scholarly associations or universities take the lead? In our hypothetical case, the perpetrator is a historian -- and the American Historical Association is no longer in the business of punishing misconduct. William J. Cronon, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a vice president of the association, says it made sense for the association to stop handling such cases. A majority of scholarly societies in the humanities and social sciences have made the same choice, he points out.

The most associations can do, Mr. Cronon says, is kick a perpetrator out of the organization. Other entities, by contrast, can impose meaningful sanctions. "Aside from those organizations like the American Psychological Association, which license practitioners, ... there really are no teeth in these professional organizations," he says.

On top of that, the Jim Lindgren post at The Volokh Conspiracy that I cited yesterday offers a glimpse into the food fight such enforcement actions would certainly become. He cites a new Harvard Political Science PhD, Alexandra Samuel, who is asking on her blog why the American Political Science Association shouldn't throw out or somehow otherwise disqualify Condoleeza Rice. The reasons Ms. Samuel gives for this action are unspecified (I assume she feels they're self-evident), but they presumably involve Secretary Rice's service on behalf of the bourgeois imperialist-fascist state.

And this in fact goes to the pleas that I've heard from self-described "conservative" academics like King Banaian and Michael Drout: if you fiddle around too much with the jerry-built system of unstated assumptions, unspecified procedures, and undisclosed responsibilities that characterize the current system of academic ethical enforcement, you'll bring down precisely this kind of terror on all us presumptive good guys. So go away. Please stop talking about this stuff, you don't know what the result will be.

Ninety-nine percent of the working academics, at least the tenured ones, who visit this blog or who find occasional comments from me on their blogs seem to view my opinions on this issue with deep distrust, probably because I simply don't see my mission here or elsewhere as preserving any particular person's or faction's tenure, whereas even the "conservative" sort of tenured academic seems to see his own tenure as paramount. But if the academic pseudo-profession can't do anything more than burn its own house down in the process of developing a more open and accountable form of ethical enforcement, that's certainly too bad, but not a catastrophe, as I see it.

If large numbers of professors were to lose their jobs in such a process, all I can say is that yesterday General Motors announced it would be laying off 25,000 employees, a typical number as such things go, and the main reason for this kind of layoff is that every time a company like GM makes such an announcement, its underperforming stock rises in price, and its top executives keep their jobs (and not incidentally, exercise some lucrative stock options). Cry me a river, Professor. Welcome to the real world.

Faculty plagiarism, of course, isn't the only ethical issue that the academic pseudo-profession isn't dealing with. Other professions, like medicine and law, have long-standing canons dealing with sexual misconduct and other conflicts of interest. As I showed yesterday, a very common reason for physicians to lose their licenses is hanky-panky with patients, which is forbidden in the Hippocratic Oath. The reason for this is clear and simple: we give doctors an extraordinary degree of trust over our bodies. Using this trust to gain sexual access to a patient is a violation of that trust. For the same reason, if we give a doctor the special trust to prescribe narcotics to the sick for pain relief, it's a breach of that trust if the doctor writes prescriptions to allow drug abuse.

Even though professors have traditionally been given similar trust and power over students in the form of grades, letters of recommendation, and the resulting access to awards, privileges, careers, and social prestige, there's only recently been a move to impose an equivalent requirement on college professors that they not abuse that trust and responsibility as a way of gaining sexual access to students. Often the same "conservative" professors who object to suggestions that academic ethical enforcement be conducted in a way more similar to the real professions object to this development as well. "It's simply none of anyone's business," they'll say. Or, "You're just a puritan trying to spoil someone else's fun." (Really, they say this.) Or, "Are you kidding? That's how I met my wife!" (Which one, your third one or your fourth one?) I've even seen the argument seriously advanced that professors are such asocial nerds, having buried themselves for their best years in PhD studies, that the only way they can get dates is among their students (who presumably are more impressed with them than some babe in a bar would be). This of course doesn't answer, and even emphasizes, the conflict of interest problem. Students aren't put there as a free dating service.

Nevertheless, some institutions have begun, slowly and belatedly, to proscribe sexual liaisons between students and faculty, since these often involve clear conflicts of interest, and the conflicts extend beyond the participants. If a graduate student has an affair with a powerful faculty member, will other faculty members give that student a low grade? Will that student be more likely to get awards, perks, benefits, fellowships, and the like, even if the powerful faculty correspondent doesn't directly control them? In fact, the student may never need to take a class from such a powerful faculty member to get preferential treatment from other faculty. It's not enough, as a result, just to forbid such relationships only if, or only while, a student is enrolled in a professor's class.

The best-known policy regarding such relationships is at the University of California. Some other institutions such as Duke, Yale, and the College of William and Mary have adopted similar policies. Other schools say they "frown on" such relationships, or alternatively, such relationships "raise eyebrows"; I'm not sure which facial expression is the more severe, but clearly no direct prohibition is implied.

The fact is that I'll believe these policies, implemented only here and there in any case, as soon as I see a well-publicized instance of a professor disciplined for violating one. These relationships must still take place even at schools that theoretically forbid them -- as I recall, one blogger reported a question to Cal's faculty senate on whether a procedure might be established to allow certain relationships to be grandfathered in. I haven't seen a disciplinary case yet; maybe someone has and can point it out. We're back to the problem the Chronicle of Higher Education discussed with faculty plagiarism. A complaint to an academic professional association is toothless, since they mostly don't control a license to practice. (The exception, of course, is the American Psychological Association, and a complaint that a licensed therapist had had sex with a patient will show instructive differences from a complaint to the others.)

But if the institution itself is responsible for enforcing the policy, whistleblowers will inevitably be penalized. A graduate student who becomes aware of the kind of relationship I outlined above, and who feels that important awards and fellowships are thereby being denied to other students who might be able to earn them on merit, would likely end his or her career by filing a complaint. And the examples of Michael Bellesiles, Ward Churchill, and others outlined in the Chronicle articles linked here suggest that complaints about even the most flagrant ethical violations won't be taken seriously by the institution in any case.

So it's not enough just to have a policy. The policy needs a credible and accessible mechanism for enforcement, which doesn't exist. Where does this leave the academy? More tomorrow.

Are College Professors "Professionals"? -- II

An anonymous commenter, "Peter", says in the thread on yesterday's post,

Well, your argument would apply if MDs or attorneys actually *did* discipline their defective members. They don't. They won't. I'm not sure if they even could if they wanted to. Much of what is lost in the "tort crisis" hysteria is that there are a few really incompentant doctors. If the medical profession actually policed itself, as you suggest, there wouldn't be anywhere the number of medimal suits that we currently have.

He may have had an idea of where I'd be headed in today's post, but he's still (like most of my anonymous semi-trolls) astonishingly ignorant. Discipline occurs routinely in many of the "real" professions, that is, those that, as I discussed yesterday, are governed by licensing boards and in which the members are subject to suspension or revocation of licenses.

Attorneys, for instance, are subject to disbarment proceedings. As my freqent commenter Stephen M., an attorney, says in the same thread, the lists of attorneys disciplined in each state, and the reasons for the discipline, are public records. An example of an individual disbarment proceeding is here.

In fact, there are usually agencies within the state licensing apparatus that are specifically tasked with resolving ethical complaints about their members. The site for New York State Professional Misconduct and Physician Discipline is here. It's possible to file an ethical complaint against a New York doctor on line at this site. The records of New York State physician discipline since 1990 can also be found on line at the site. A search of New York State disciplinary records since 1990 for physicians surnamed "Smith" is here. A similar listing in Ontario is here; it's notable that many of the physicians were disciplined for sexual impropriety with patients. However, a very common reason for doctors to lose their licenses is misusing their prescription authority to prescribe narcotics for themselves or others.

Certified Public Accountants are subject to professional discipline. An article on this subject in the New York State Society of CPAs CPA Journal is here. It says in part,

Despite the minimal weight accorded to professional responsibility issues by most states for purposes of both licensure and continuing education requirements, violations of ethics provisions can have significant consequences for an accountant’s finances, livelihood, and licensure. Transgressions, both subtle and egregious, can generate disciplinary action but, more significantly, may also serve as evidence of negligence or other malfeasance in malpractice actions. Additionally, behavior that violates professional responsibility standards may disqualify a practitioner from appearing before the IRS or performing SEC work.

An example of two CPAs disciplined by the Securities and Exchange Commission is here. The CPA magazine article discusses the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which tightens requirements for management and CPA firms to certify financial statements. Since the US requires extensive foreign investment in private financial instruments, it's in our interest to keep dishonesty and corruption in financial statements to an absolute minimum. Distrust of the existing CPA system was part of the reason for the bear market in 2001 and 2002. The reliability of CPAs is clearly a factor in stock prices, and this, I think, is in opposition to "Peter's" opinion that CPA professional ethics don't matter.

Again, while professors like Timothy Burke urge people like me to think of them as "professionals", the parallel breaks down. I pointed out yesterday that unlike doctors, lawyers, CPAs, and others, there's no licensing exam and no licensing board for professors. There's also no consistent ethical enforcement for professors as exists with other professions. If someone has reason to complain about a doctor's or attorney's unethical conduct, there's a definite place to file a complaint (sometimes, as we've seen, even online) and a staff to handle it. The complaints have a paper trail and can't be dropped down the memory hole.

Contrast this with well-known recent cases of scholarly misconduct. As noted by Jim Lindrgen at the Volokh Conspiracy:

After it was publicly exposed that in Arming America Michael Bellesiles had described the contents of over a hundred documents that never existed, the American Historical Association passed a resolution that specifically expressed support for both Michael Bellesiles AND HIS BOOK! With some of the country's leading historians praising the book, the consensus was so strong that most historians just did not think that they should spend an afternoon in a good library checking criticisms before going public with expressions of support. Later, some of those same leading historians wrote or told me that they were wrong. For several reasons, including because the AHA was embarrassed over having been taken in by Bellesiles, the AHA decided to end its practice of conducting ethical investigations.

It took years of public pressure to force Emory University, not the AHA, to act against Bellesiles for violations of professional ethics. The problem was in part that there wasn't then, and isn't now, an established channel for ethical complaints in the scholarly pseudo-profession. But scholars, as we see, are also free simply to disregard the complaints that are made.

And unlike the professions, there's no public record of discipline, so we have no way of knowing how many ethical complaints are made and how many result in discipline -- we're forced to rely on anecdotal evidence, and what we have, in the most notorious cases like Bellesiles and Ward Churchill, isn't good. In those and other cases, credible complaints of serious ethical lapses are ignored for years, and only national media attention can force resolution.

The only indication I've been able to find of how many professors face formal proceedings for loss of tenure is here:

Nationally, 40 to 60 faculty members with tenure face dismissal proceedings each year over issues related to job performance, said Jonathan Knight, director of the AAUP's academic freedom and tenure program.

"My sense is the large majority lose their jobs. Typically by the time an administration moves to this very serious step of beginning dismissal proceedings it will have marshaled a strong case, not always a winning case, but I think more often than not the faculty member loses," Knight said.

Knight made these remarks referring to the 2004 case of Nona Gerard, a Penn State drama professor who was successfully dismissed for insubordination when she refused to work with members of a new department after a reorganization. However, this was a tenure case that resembled much more an ordinary non-academic termination in an "at will" employment environment, where an employee refuses to do normal assigned work -- there's no real ethical issue here. There's no way to tell from Knight's remarks how many tenure cases of the 40 to 60 he cites each year are related to non-ethical issues like Gerard's. Cases of ethics-based terminations, while they occur, seem to be much less common.

Because data on discipline in the real professions is collected at the state level, and because no equivalent data on ethical discipline for the academic pseudo-profession is available, it's hard to draw comparisons. But a 2001 report by the Minnesota Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility from 2000 shows that about 500 complaints were filed that year, resulting in six disbarments, 19 suspensions, and ten probations. Taking just this information for one profession and one state, it appears that professional discipline is far more common among the real professions with licensing boards and established channels for ethical complaints than it is in the academic pseudo-profession, even though, as I discussed here on March 10, there's an ethical problem with academic faculty plagiarism that appears to be quite large. I cited in that post a Chronicle of Higher Education article from last December, entitled "Four Academic Plagiarists You've Never Heard Of: How Many More Are Out There?"

More on this tomorrow.

Are College Professors "Professionals"? -- I

Timothy Burke, in his fourth comment to my May 24 post regarding a modest proposal for a national PhD qualifying exam, said in part:

An additional thought: I think one of the comparative frameworks you need to bring in the picture is not academia vs. industrial workplaces, but the nature of all professions (academia, law, medicine, psychiatry, and so on). All the professions have some common problems and shortcomings that relate to your concerns, but precisely because they do, that might illuminate where your focus on academia is somewhat parochial in relationship to the things that worry you.

Doesn't this sound like the comment a prof would write on a term paper that didn't say what he was looking for -- "one of the comparative frameworks you need to bring in. . ."? See how he slips in academia as a profession with law and medicine? At Swarthmore, you'd have to be satisfied with that comment as an explanation for why you were getting a B-minus in the course. But this isn't Swarthmore, I've already gotten all the B-minuses anyone's ever going to give me, and as a matter of fact, while academics are fond of calling themselves "professionals", it is by no means clear that this is the case.

When I was in graduate school, the English Department faculty all styled themselves "Doctor", as in "Dr. Brown", "Dr. Smith", and so forth, as though they were making rounds wearing white coats and stethoscopes. I knew a faculty member, not thrilled with this self-flattery, who wasn't sure what to call his colleagues. "If I call them 'Doctor'," he said, "they might think they can operate on me. But if I call them by their first names, they might think I'm their friend." (Actually, I made that up. No prof would ever say that to a graduate student, even if he or she thought it, though that possibility is remote, too.)

Timothy Burke to the contrary, qualifications for professions are almost always specified in state laws. Here is New York's. While such laws list quite a large number of professions, from physician through chiropractor to hairdresser, there is no professional designation for college professors. This in turn leads to a key element that defines a "profession" as we normally think of it: a "professional" is typically certified by a state board and given a license to practice. Practice of a profession without a license is illegal and subject to penalty. In other words, if you call yourself a "physician" and haven't satisfied the requirements for a physician's license -- or your license has been revoked and you still practice medicine -- then you've broken the law and could potentially spend time in prison.

Clearly there are cases where designation of professionals is unreasonable, such as hairdressers. The process, as most politically-driven processes are, is vulnerable to rent-seeking. If you can get the state legislature to declare your occupation, whatever it is, a "profession" and limit access to it, you limit the number of people who can get in, and you're able to raise your fees and keep them high. Nevertheless, there's a consensus that the public is protected -- a person without proper training and exsperience can't call him or herself a doctor, lawyer, accountant, or architect. Not only that, but if a doctor abuses his or her ability to write prescriptions for narcotics, for instance, there are procedures to revoke that person's license to practice medicine. I'll address this side of professions in my next post.

So let's look at qualifications requireed for typical professions:

Physician

According to answers.com, a physician must have the following minimum requirements to obtain a license to practice in the US:

• A four-year undergraduate degree
  
• An M.D. degree from a medical school
  
• Completion of a residency program in the physician's specialty field, including a first-year internship.
  

According to answers.com, "All specialties hold a board exam (either written or written and oral) at the completion of training in order to confer 'Board Certification' in that specialty."

Actuary

According to this site

Passing the exams of the Society of Actuaries (the SoA) or the Casualty Actuarial Society (the CAS) is absolutely essential to a successful actuarial career; students that have passed one or more exams have much better employment opportunities and salaries for both permanent jobs and summer internships. As actuaries often joke: exams aren't important unless you want to get a job. . . .

An ideal Exam schedule for undergraduate students that become interested in actuarial studies as freshmen follows; students that undertake actuarial studies later in their undergraduate careers may well have quite different schedules. The exams can be taken in any order.

• Joint Exam P on probability: January or May of the Sophomore year, or later
  
• Joint Exam FM on interest theory: May of the Sophomore year, or later
  
• Exam M/3 on actuarial models: November of the Senior year, or later
  

Certified Public Accountant

According to this site, you must take and pass the state CPA exam and then satisfy the state board's requirements for education and experience -- this often includes working as an accountant for a certain number of years at a CPA firm.

College Professor
There are no specific requirements to become a college professor. You must convince a faculty committee, or someone powerful enough to override a faculty committee, to hire you into a tenure-track position. This is the sole qualification.

While it's helpful to have a PhD in a field related to the subject you're expected to teach, this is not a legal requirement in the same way that a physician is required to have an MD degree or an attorney is required to have a law degree. A cursory search of university web sites will show numerous tenured faculty who do not have PhDs, and who do not hold degrees in their field of specialty. A notorious, though by no means unique, current example is Ward Churchill. Interestingly, there are no serious proposals for academic reform in the wake of this scandal that would penalize anyone for being a professor without at PhD, even though University of Colorado administrators violated existing policy by promoting Churchill into a tenured professorship without one.

I find it interesting that Timothy Burke, who became quite exercised at my "modest proposal" suggestion that there be some type of national comprehensive exam for PhD candidates, took me to task for not comparing academics to other professions. But in most cases, real professions have rigorous licensing exams, just the sort of thing Timothy opposes. While pushing for a licensing exam for all PhDs isn't really my intent with this blog, it seems plain that if college professors do fancy themselves "professionals", it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect such a thing.

In fact, it seems to me that if professors actually wanted to be designated "professionals" in the same way doctors and lawyers are, they could have lobbied state legislatures to accomplish this, just the same as chiropractors and massage therapists have. That they haven't done so, and there seems to be no move to do so now, is telling, it seems to me. They want the prestige, but not the obligation.

Actually, in recent years there's been considerable discussion (for instance, here and here) on whether journalism is a profession. In fact, the first link here says,

The professional aspirations of such formerly unpretentious occupations as journalism, teaching, and politics is one of the most dangerous of the numerous anti-democratic currents of the day. Professionals hoard knowledge and use it as a form of monopolistic capital.

Note the inclusion of teaching as a field that has an unwarranted aspiration to "professionalism". But college professors won't be "professionals" in this sense unless the following conditions can be met:

• There is a state certification board that awards professional licenses to college professors
  
• There is a legal requirement for a particular level of education and experience to be a professor
  
• There is a rigorous and uniform exam recognized by a state certification board that all candidates must pass to become a professor
  
• There is a clear and regularly enforced set of professional canons for professors, such that violation will result in suspension or revocation of the professor's license.
  

One commentary on journalism suggests that journalism can never become a "profession" in this sense, because even if a journalist is fired by a media employer for one or another kind of dishonesty, there's nothing to prevent that journalist from starting his or her own paper and continuing to publish. Any prohibition on someone practicing journalism would be an unconstitutional restriction on free speech. The same argument might apply to college professors, although in this case the university provides a platform, a certain amount of prestige, and a salary to a professor. Terminating an individual's position on a faculty, or even revoking a license to serve as a professor and presumably issue grades and letters of recommendation, would not limit an individual's right of free speech. This would also be consistent with the legal view that there is no special right of "academic freedom" separate from, or greater than, any citizen's right of free speech.

I'll talk about ethics tomorrow.

More on Luther Blissett's Namesake

A visitor sent me the following e-mail relating to our long-winded and self- (or selves-) regarding cultural terrorist "Luther Blissett":

You may know this, but I didn't see it on the site you linked to: there actually was a Luther Blissett. He was a fairly undistinguished British soccer player who was hired by AC Milan - one of Italy's biggest clubs - in the early 1980s, allegedly by mistake. (There's a persistent rumor that the Italians intended to hire the great John Barnes, but got the two men mixed up because they were both black.)

I also suddenly realized that my remarks yesterday about Howard Zinn apply to Luther as well: he calls himself, or the Luther Blissetts call themselves, cultural terrorists, but this particular Luther insists he's a teacher, a parent, a husband, a musician -- sounds like a garden-variety bourgeois with delusions of revolutionary grandeur to me.

The Dog That Isn't Barking

I've looked over a few of the syllabi for courses that Sean McCann teaches at Wesleyan, and while I've found he teaches at least one with intellectual merit -- perhaps even because the 1950s, contrary to conventional wisdom, might be called a target-rich environment for stimulating content -- the overall picture of his courses is uneven. The course in the 1950s shows what he's capable of doing; the others suggest he often just coasts. How much does tenure allow a situation like this to take place? And as I pointed out, the relentless selection of texts based on the gender and ethnicity of the author (no gays need apply, though) suggests that this year's definition of political correctness trumps academic freedom, tenure or no. This says something about what tenure really buys us.

Yesterday I mentioned a dog that didn't bark in the sense that major twentieth-century writers who did work in the 1950s, from John Steinbeck to Robert Frost, didn't make the cut. I can attribute that in part to the declining reputations among many of those writers. But as I thought about things yesterday, there's another big dog that hasn't barked in two of those courses, and I noted it in discussing them: we have a course in the social vision of the 1930s that seems to underplay Stalin and the number of intellectuals who idealized the Soviet Union and took public sides in the Spanish Civil War; we have a course in the 1950s whose syllabus mentions neither the Rosenberg trial, the Alger Hiss case (Hiss's second perjury trial ended in 1950, and the case made Richard Nixon's career), nor Joseph McCarthy. This is a big dog indeed not to bark, no matter what the political views of the instructor.

A relative gave me a copy of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States last Christmas. Knowing the relative's poltical views, I suspect the gift was well-intended, and the relative didn't know the book's content -- it's written in a fast-paced, almost gushy style that seems aimed at twelve-year-olds, explaining all the dastardly things the rich have done to exploit native people, farmers, workers, minorities, and women since 1492. I've found that it's an intriguing window into what is probably academic-leftist conventional wisdom. Zinn is one of those academics, thoroughly bourgeois himself, who gives a heavily Marxist-influenced critique of what Marx would call bourgeois capitalism. That Zinn and his like-minded colleagues hold the lucrative jobs they do only because they're financed by tuition payments from bourgeois families, the income from capitalist endowments, and the tax revenues of the racist bourgeois-imperialist state, apparently escapes them.

So dipping into Zinn is an adventure, and an oddly revealing one. It's a good example of Rose Nunez's observation that among those with this mindset, you can't win for losing. If you don't act to correct an injustice, you're wrong; if you act to correct it, you're still wrong, because you've done it for the wrong motives, and you haven't done enough anyhow. When the Senate voted to censure McCarthy, for instance, it was wrong because it censured him only for conduct unbecoming a Senator, not for his specific views on Communism. When Truman desegregated the armed forces, it was to keep African-Americans from mutiny in the war he envisioned against the Soviet Union.

So why in Zinn's index are there only two references to Stalin (one of which simply says that the Soviet Union was no longer an expansionist power after his death, placing the burden of an extended Cold War entirely on the US). Why is there only one reference to V.I.Lenin? No reference to Hiss, who ought to have been served up as a victim of a Red Scare? The Rosenbergs appear, but in a highly sympathetic account that doesn't appear to have been revised since the release of Soviet documents that confirm their espionage. On the other hand, there are seven references to Emma Goldman.

I think this may be because Zinn's intent is to portray US radical left-wing politics as something home-grown, not influenced by foreign ideology, or indeed in the interest of a foreign state. In some cases this is true, but in others it's plain that US actors knew they were working for the benefit of the Soviet Union. I think Zinn knows well, and many who think with him do too, that it's not going to sell if radical left-wing politics come across as too European. The dalliance with Europe has been an issue in US literature from the start, and in the 1930s a writer could, like Hemingway, see Europe as a good place to get drunk, or like Ezra Pound and Whittaker Chambers, see in Europe an altogether more seductive alternate life, to the great detriment of both figures. It's worth pointing out that, while working underground, Chambers affected a slight German accent, and it was to Hiss's great surprise that he found Chambers was actually US-born when he surfaced. Chambers's account of Hiss's reaction to this information suggests that it was complex -- Hiss likely gave Chambers in his underground role far more credence because he felt Chambers was a wiser, more sophisticated European, and on finding Chambers was just an "ordinary" American, he felt doubly betrayed. This is still part of our unconscious heritage.

This is why I think McCann downplays fellow-traveling Stalinism in the 1930s and the reaction to it, the Hiss and Rosenberg cases, Richard Nixon, and Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s -- the less said the better, it's a sleeping dog better left to lie. On the other hand, entirely home-grown radicalism, like that of Clarence Darrow, say, is much more ineffectual than its Marxist-Leninist cousin. This is a problem for the New Left. The Weathermen seem to have blown themselves up as often as they blew up anyone else, while the Soviet espionage apparatus in the 1930s through the 1950s was quite efficient. But that's another subject.

Looking at Sean McCann's Courses -- III

Continuing with this week's theme, examining the course syllabi to see if Sean McCann's courses at Wesleyan have worthwhile intellectual content (so far, I'm not sure if we've reached a passing grade of 70), let's look at American Literature and Culture in the 1950s. Right away, I find he's included an unknown writer named "Allen Ginsburg", who seems to have plagiarized "Howl" from a much better-known poet, Allen Ginsberg. We're back to Prof. McCann's apparent focus on more important things than spelling.

I know I have a number of visitors who teach graduate students. I'd be interested to hear if any would be willing to chime in on what advice they might give, if any, or what other sort of action they might take, over a graduate student who consistently misspells the names of authors and book titles. Let's not limit this to Englsih -- let's say a History student who's dodgy on the names of French prime ministers or Soviet commissars, or a Physics student who turns in papers with the names of physicists routinely out of whack. It doesn't look like we've got just a problem with typos here. And what, Prof. McCann, would you do if a student turned in a paper to you on Thomas Pynshon or Robert Lowel?

I note On the Road reappears, though since it was recently in a "Great American Novel" course, perhaps Prof. McCann could give it a rest. What about Naked Lunch? What about Charles Bukowski? I'd want to do more to make it plain that the 1960s grew very much out of the 1950s; as Jeffrey Hart has pointed out in When the Going Was Good!, any but the most cursory look at the period will show it was hardly a time of conformity or middle-class repression, and knowing Prof. McCann's conventional habits of mind, I have a slight fear that he might say this. In fact, since this is an American Studies course, not an English class, I'm a bit at a loss to see no mention, say, of Hugh Hefner, though Hart doesn't mention him, either. Playboy published Nabokov and others on McCann's reading list.

I will say that this course shows better judgment than I've seen in his earlier courses -- there aren't any videos on the syllabus, for instance, and the requirement for papers is actually respectable (this is the first McCann syllabus I've seen where a student appears to have to write a real research paper). So this course isn't a gut, and I actually approve of some selections, like Flannery O'Connor, though if I were to teach Lowell as an important poet (actually I wouldn't), I'd include Bukowski, if for no other reason than his remark that Lowell left him cold, as he seemed to be a person who'd never had a toothache or flat tire in his life.

But I'm also interested to see a number of dogs not barking on the syllabus. No Hemingway. No T.S.Eliot. No Steinbeck (East of Eden, 1952). All did work in the 1950s, and all were Nobelists. No Robert Frost. And no Ezra Pound, no, no way (Hart doesn't mention him, either). What are we to make, though, of this eminence grise who hectors his uncouth fellow Americans, interchangeably from Europe or the insane asylum, for our political simple-mindedness? Pound is, it seems to me, a cultural archetype that ought to be making respectable literary poobahs, and the professors who emulate them, far more uncomfortable than they are. If I were teaching the course, there'd be a couple of slides of Pound in a lawn chair at St. Elizabeths and a few diverting paragraphs in one of my lectures on this topic.

So other than the egregious spelling error, which in the absence of more sage and experienced advice from working academics I will penalize with a reduction of one full grade, it's a passably good syllabus. Its main defect is a certain stolidness, a lack of imagination -- I would have given a full A if he'd given more emphasis to beat writers besides Kerouac and Ginsberg; a little more emphasis on liberalizing social trends (including prominent gays such as J.Edgar Hoover, James Dean, and Liberace). And I'm a little wary, especially in an American Studies course, that so little mention seems to be made of specific historical circumstances surrounding the Rosenberg case, Nixon, McCarthy, and the continuing fallout from Soviet espionage and alleged cultural infiltration in the 1930s and 1940s. So without the spelling error, B-plus; with the spelling error, C-plus.

But if you can locate a copy (used books via amazon.com is a good bet), look at Hart's When the Going Was Good!. That will show you what a course that gets a full A from me would look like, and it shows the difference, to my way of thinking, between the course quality you would expect from Dartmouth and what you get at Wesleyan. Even so, I'm glad to see McCann adhering in this course to the standards that ought to be expected of everyone in his profession. He ought to work to bring the other courses I've been looking at up to this standard.

Looking at Sean McCann's Courses -- II

I'm still looking at what appears to be the partial record of Sean McCann's classes at Wesleyan. Prof. McCann invited me to do this when he suggested I'd somehow distorted his teaching record there, enough to demand a retraction, but he seems to have backed down once I said I'd be delighted to review everything I could find about his classes in some detail. He now seems to feel I lack the requisite spiritual generosity to be something or other, but he's stopped demanding retractions. And he doesn't seem interested in answering questions that might help me clarify the facts and lead to an actual retraction, if one is necessary, such as the normal teaching load at Wesleyan and what courses he taught, if any, for the year where there's no record of such. Sean, if you're serious, answer my reasonable questions.

Even so, acknowledging the limitations of a syllabus for determining course content, it's often the only concrete record we have on a course. Especially since Sean has specifically asked me to look at all his Wesleyan courses, I don't feel I'm snooping, and to some extent I think what we can find on line may give a window, however imperfect and anecdotal, into what you really get these days with one of those $40,000 a year educations. (At least a BMW comes with a warranty.) If anyone feels I've distorted things here or given an incorrect impression, this is the web, and cogent clarification on any site (such as The Valve) would be in everyone's interest.

So let's look at another course Sean has mentioned he's taught (so we don't get the mistaken impression he just teaches gut courses in hard boiled detective fiction); Social Imagination of the Thirties. This has both a reading list and a list of films that will be shown outside normal class hours (just so nobody gets the impression the seminar is taken up with videos). Here are the readings:

James Agee and Walker Evans, LET US NOW
PRAISE FAMOUS MEN
James M. Cain, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE
John Dos Passos, THE BIG MONEY
Mike Gold, JEWS WITHOUT MONEY
Zora Neale Hurston, THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD
Meridel LeSueur, RIPENING
Clifford Odets, "Awake and Sing," SIX PLAYS
Tillie Olson, YONNONDIO
Nathaneal West, THE DAY OF THE LOCUST
Richard Wright, NATIVE SON

Well, before I say anything else, Sean's spelled one author's name wrong. Did you find it? Google did. It asked me (I knew it would) "Did you mean: "nathanael west"? Well, anyone can make a typo. I don't want to hit the guy for, say, transposing two letters and not noticing. That can happen to anyone, especially just once on something like this. So let's go on to the films we'll be seeing in the course:

A NIGHT AT THE OPERA, BRINGING UP BABY, FREAKS, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, GOLD DIGGERS OF 1935, IT HAPPENED ON NIGHT, LITTLE CAESER

Little Caeser? You didn't mean Little Caesar, did you Sean? And there's that typo in "It Happened One Night". Timothy Burke gets upset if I accuse others of sloppiness, but the fact is that getting spellings right, especially of hard words or foreign names, is a mark of professionalism. So I gauge Sean's professionalism in part by what I see here. This also gives the students in the class, or ought to, some idea of the course's rigor. The prof doesn't care about spelling, maybe we don't need to either. (Shouldn't some parent be visiting here and asking "$40,000 a year for this?")

Speaking of rigor, when I first saw the course title, "Social Imagination of the Thirties", frankly, I was expecting something other than what we see. In the real world, while Busby Berkeley was busying himself with the Gold Diggers, Whittaker Chambers, having set aside a literary career, was running Communist sleeper cells here in the US. In 1931, Edmund Wilson compared Stalin's first five-year plan to liberty loans; he proceeded to radicalize The New Republic and not a few of his fellow writers. In essays collected as The American Crackup, Wilson protested the New Deal's dilly-dallying with political compromise. Walter Duranty was winning the Pulitzer Prize for his dispatches to The New York Times denying that famine existed in Ukraine, though he reported privately to the British Embassy that ten million had actually starved to death. Interestingly, a course covering similar material to Sean's in the UK is entitled "A Low Dishonest Decade". (The speaker in Auden's poem is in New York, by the way.)

If I were to give a course in the social imagination of the thirties, it seems to me that, given the limitations of time, I would have to focus almost exclusively on the flirtation of US intellectuals with Stalinism. There are different takes on Stalinism during the period: some buy into it and are disillusioned; some buy into it and are never disillusioned (at least publicly); some never buy into it. But Stalin is the 800-pound gorilla of American intellectual life in the 1930s. I think you'd have to focus pretty much every class on the choices available to US intellectuals at the time, what they learned as the decade progressed, and how they responded. Those choices had reverberations into the 1980s and 1990s; you'd have to mention, at least, Hiss, the Rosenbergs, McCarthy, Nixon, the neo-conservative movement. . . . Whittaker Chambers and Edmund Wilson both show that sincere, highly talented and intelligent people could be drawn to Communism. In the last class you could do some cleanup with Gable taking off his shirt in It Happened One Night, just before you hand out the evaluation forms.

So just on the face of it, I'm a little taken aback at the reading (and film) list for Sean's course. What we see here is a gut course, an easy A, an academic peer of Music Appreciation 101. Where, just for starters, is Wilson's To the Finland Station? Isn't this perhaps the most complete and compelling version of the intellectual journey that many took in the thirties? Where is Chambers's Witness? We have Tillie Olson's retrospective Yonnondio -- but isn't Witness worth about eight of that book? Olson was something of a dilettante; Chambers was involved in Communism like a pig is involved in bacon. Where is e.e.cummings's eimi? It seems to me that students at Wesleyan ouight to be adult enough to read all these, and in fact the absence of these -- and I'm sure readers here can think of others -- suggests there's a certain lack of rigor here. We aren't going to read any Wilson, as far as I can see, but we're sure gonna catch Bringing Up Baby. That'll be more useful when we make small talk with the honchos at the local PBS station years from now anyhow.

We're back to the question I posed over Sean's "Great American Novel" course. We seem to have this politically correct compulsion to pick three from column A, three from column B, and four from either column C or column D, unless an earlier selction has been listed in two columns, one of either column A or B, and one of either C or D. Gay authors, however, must qualify by being included also in one of A or B, or they will otherwise be counted as ordinary hegemonist white males, now dead. This is the only explanation I can see for not selecting gay writers from the 1930s to complement the African-American and women's voices. No Hispanics, either. Maybe not enough go to Wesleyan. The emphasis on some groups and the exclusion of others is strange, arbitrary, and oh, by the way, detracts from any real historical or intellectual rigor in the course. We're playing politically correct patty-cake and in the process leaving out Stalin.

Tenure, by the way, assures academic freedom; the AAUP has told us so.

I can't help thinking that students who take this course will have their delicate sensitivities massaged -- as I've said earlier of Dartmouth, a major part of elite schools' mission continues to be inflating the self-esteem of spoiled rich kids. Sean McCann so far looks like he's with the program here. But nobody should be confused about whether they've learned anything about the 1930s: the picture you get in this course, as far as I can see, matches the time about as well as Main Street in Disneyland matches Main Street in LA.

"Blissett -- Luther Blissett."

I don't know what it is about a mysterious identity. First it's babes falling for Conscientious Objector, but now a lady's giving our peripatetic pseudonymous pest Luther the come-on. He says he's married, Rose, and there's that shack job at the same IP address with a Karen Eliot, but on the web, you just don't know. All these guys join the chat rooms and name themselves Ingrid, after all.