Posse Bacheloratus: A Great Idea at the Time

Finally concluded my review of Alex Beam's book on highbrow flim-flammery and the classics on campus, and it's here. It's a bit longer than the usual book review, but I used the opportunity to tease out my initial reasons for requesting the book from the publisher: class-based anxiety.

A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books. By Alex Beam. PublicAffairs Books, 2008, 245 pages, $24.95.

Are the liberal arts a con job?

Was the four years I spent earning a bachelor’s degree, exhausting an inheritance and leaving the class of my birth, was it a waste?

Should I have spent my money — my mother’s money, left in trust to her minor son when she died; money, I see now as a member of the chronically insecure middle class, that doesn’t come around again — more wisely? Started a business, bought a home, gone into a more remunerative field?

I picked up A Great Idea at the Time looking forward to Alex Beam’s picaresque history of college education and bourgeois aspiration, and I got that. But I was also looking for someone to blame. If ever we broke and dismayed liberal-arts graduates form a posse (posse, hell, we’ve got the numbers for an army), if we ever ride out and round up the culprits who gamed us into thinking a degree in literature, history, the arts, or philosophy was a worthwhile expenditure of sweat and treasure, we might posthumously indict Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins.

Adler and Hutchins were what Beam calls an intellectual Mutt n’ Jeff routine, a trollish philosopher and his boy-wonder leader whose friendship spanned the better part of the 20th century and who made their names shaking up the University of Chicago in the 1930s and ’40s. Hutchins, as university president, did the unthinkable: he abolished the football team. And he and Adler began a freshman elective class dubbed the Great Men’s Fat Book Class, in which the students got, not textbooks or lectures, but heaping helpings of the Greeks and Romans. This week the Iliad, next week the Odyssey. This week Plato, next week Pliny. In small group discussions, students were subject to the enlightenment and mental bullying of the Socratic dialogue, and forced to mount rhetorical counteroffensives. Their fusillades were at least amusing.

Socratic dialogue made an indelible smear on my early adulthood. I will never forget my legendary prof Marvin Levich leading me from Homer to St. Augustine in Humanities 110; Levich, who college lore was said to have bested William F. Buckley Jr. in debate, covertly smoked in his office, violating college rules, and would gesture with a phantom cigarette at our conference table. Marv and his gravelly voice and his blue eyes, his Greco-Roman beard, his dispassionate demeanor; he was formidable. He was also about to retire. I remember the silences.

But the discourse caught on at the University of Chicago, and Adler and Hutchins knew you didn’t have to matriculate to benefit from a close read. They took the fat books downtown, putting the hog butcher scions and their wives to work on questions of truth, beauty, justice, and appetite. In 1943 there were 165 Great Books students in Illinois, and by 1946 5,000 people in the Prairie State were puzzling over Aristotle or marveling at Rabelais’ expert scatology. Circuit riders for the Great Books Foundation passed the torch around the nation. Then Hutchins and Adler assembled a disputatious committee of tenured experts to render the canon for mass consumption.

What they came up with, and Encyclopedia Brittanica printed was this: 54 volumes of the Greeks, Romans, and their spawn rendered in poor off-the-shelf translations and printed in two columns of nine-point type. From Descartes to Darwin, there were no explanatory notes, only the Syntopicon, a neologism of Adler's invention ("index" was too common a word) that guided users through the Great Ideas contained within the Great Books. The edition's financier budgeted fifty grand to compile the Syntopicon; Adler devoted an entire floor of the university's Social Sciences building and blew through nearly a million, and was still, his peers complained, pretty much useless.

“The Syntopicon emanated a distinct odor of flummery,” writes Beam, quoting a fellow prof, “It was ‘neither a scholarly nor interpretive aid, simply Mortimer getting his staff to blow up to a monster his own bogus tricks of research, scissors and paste mixed with his today's current position in philosophy…. People will be disgusted and angry, if they ever look at it.’”

Phenomenal hubris? Maybe. But the “colorful furniture” also furnished a kind of map into postwar Pax Americana. The Great Books of the Western World implicitly made this kind of eponymous offer: So, you’re a great power now. Well then, you might want to read us.

At first, people didn’t, not until publisher Encyclopedia Britannica realized the ideal demographic: America’s newly affluent professionals afflicted by status anxiety. One typical ad read: “The ability to Discuss and Clarify Basic Ideas is vital to success. Doors open to the man who possesses this talent.” Door-to-door salesmen used deceptive tactics, posing as university professors or declaring that some household's youngster had been shortlisted for a scholarship, and if they wanted to get ahead, why, they'd need these.

In sum, Mammon came along and ruined things for Clio, as he’s wont to do. Base commerce didn't ruin the sound principles underlying the Great Books of the Western World. I may be a member of the overextended and anxious middle class, and of course I'd like more money, but by the time I finished A Great Idea at the Time I felt I could throw away my posse’s rope. I happen to believe that great books, lowercase, belong in everyone's hands, that works of art, history and philosophy can enlighten and enthrall without the use of explanatory notes, and that an attentive reading by anyone, high, low, or middlebrow, is a wonder-working thing. While the vast libraries of a globalizing society necessitate anthologizers, editors, and well-informed guides, they have nothing if they don't have an ardent audience.

Beam's book features a few intellectual everymen eternally grateful for Adler's evangelism. Britannica sponsored an essay contest for the children of families who'd bought the great books; after his working-class parents got a $400 set in the 1960s, Michael Dirda and his three sisters, writes Beam, "racked up $2,500 in essay prize money, and won four complete sets of the Great Books for their high school." Dirda, now a Washington Post book critic, “lost interest in the set, which ‘invited worship rather than discussion…. Not the sort of books one reads under the covers with a flashlight.’”

The Britannica series combined the optimism and cant of the middle of the 20th century; like a TV dinner in a foil tray, it looked nourishing, and looks were the main point. The sets, writes Beam, collect “potentially awe-inspiring work mummified in cheapo-depot, public domain translations. To have them on one’s shelf, as I do, is to experience their serried, sepia-toned reproach: Why haven’t you finished Plato’s Symposium? they ask. Lord knows I tried, but I had no idea who the characters were, and furthermore, why is Alcibiades hitting on Socrates? Dear Mr. Hutchins: Enquiring minds require explanatory introductions, and footnotes.”

So the books are still around, compact and durable as books are, less inviting than they should be, only a doorway, not a destination. I finished Beam's book with that sense more firmly in mind, and I haven’t since regretted the lifelong path my liberal education plunked me down, penniless, on. And, let’s be honest, a bachelor’s degree is the entry card into the middle class; bypass it and you’d better be rich or in a really, really strong union.

Cheers to Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins for having the guts to say the best education for the best is the best education for all. The two friends died believing they were failures. Seeing the cost of college tuition, in a sense they were. But Mr. Beam, and I, would like to think a little of Adler and Hutchins live on, showing up for Oprah’s group reads, in the classics on tape, with the 1,001 Books you Must Read Before You Die, anytime three or more people gather in a public library with the same texts in hand. They may not be reading a Great Book, but heck, they’re discussing an abstraction in an orderly manner, and that’s always a great idea.

Blogger, I must confess

...that I've been using Twitter. It's kind of fun, I can post pithy little messages about what I'm up to (in case you wanted to know). I use Twitthat to share articles w/ people (similar to Google's reader interface that's posted on this page, but a little more sleek), and I follow a few friends.

And, just now, I wrote a series of posts that amount to a kind of book review of Alex Beam's A Great Idea at the Time, a fun little story about the salesmen of an encyclopedic "Great Books of the Western World."

Writing long-form but episodically on Twitter is sort of fun to keep the thread going, and I hope the posts, read as I put them there, provided some sense of suspense. Dunno. When I amalgamate them into a real book review I'll post it here.

More advice for Barack Obama

I wrote a better version of the review post on Kuttner's book. Here it is:

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. By Robert Kuttner. Chelsea Green, 2008. Paperback, 200 pages, $14.95.

One of the most popular pastimes in the history of politics has got to be counseling a winner. After all, what do you say to the loser? Except: Go home. With a respectful nod to my main influence here, progressive economist Robert Kuttner’s ballsy new book, here’s counsel for president-elect Barack Obama.

First: You know that thing Bill Clinton did for eight years, that “triangulation” thing? Forget it. It doesn’t work. You’ll just validate conservatives and alienate progressives. Republicans “have been clear and unequivocal in having a core set of principles, and in taking political risks to advance it,” writes Kuttner. Copy them.

Second: Educate. FDR described the financial crisis in one of his most famous fireside chats: where government regulation had gone wrong, how new laws would help, and what ordinary people could do. Leaders’ jobs consist of “staking out a position not held by a majority of voters, and bringing the people around,” writes Kuttner, describing how Lydon B. Johnson in his finest moments framed the civil rights movement as quintessentially American. When told early in his term that he ought not waste political capital on the divisive issue, he replied, “Hell, what's the presidency for?”

You might start by telling us what you know: that the economy isn’t working. If the hundreds of millions of private financial crises going on in households across America can’t be described as a public crisis, “a national disgrace amenable to national remediation,” then we’re getting somewhere.

Third: Spend lots and lots of money. Think trillions. As credit dries up and pink slips arrive, a significant federal outlay can keep us from another Great Depression. You’re said to have pledged to blue-dog Democrats that you’d be a pay-as-you-go kind of president, offseting a spending program here with a budget cut there. A Republican president can spend eight years battering the treasury with warfare and tax cuts, but a Democrat must approach this crisis weighed down with a conservative fiscal tenet? Break that promise.

From professionalizing the human service sector to managing the labor market, Kuttner’s proposals are forcefully argued and often persuasive. Finished this summer, this little book’s gutsy timing is its greatest asset. Now that its subject is certain to take office, it’s supremely relevant. And if the outcome had been different? At least the publisher used recycled paper.

"Hell, what's the presidency for?"

A book review:

Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. By Robert Kuttner. Chelsea Green, 2008. Paperback, 200 pages, $14.95.

The book was issued in September; if McCain had won, well, at least Chelsea Green printed its gamble on recycled paper.

From professionalizing the human service industry to centrally planning the labor market, the details of Kuttner’s policy proposals can be minute, but they don’t detract from his thesis: that Barack Obama may follow Lincoln, FDR, and LBJ in their most celebrated moments by renewing people’s faith in government as a force for good and uniting Americans behind a vision of a post-bubble economy we can all live with.

One large factor in whether a president is “transformative,” whether he can speak to people’s concerns and change public opinion and, in this case, renew people’s faith in government’s ability to help them protect themselves and fulfill their dreams, is a president’s ability to educate. Obama needs to make a public issue of the million private financial problems of American households. Then he needs to propose solutions that walk all over the fiscal restraints laid down by conservatives and centrists. Solutions that cost money, lots and lots of taxpayer money.

Name a policy initiative Obama has proposed and Kuttner would double, triple, or times by 10 the public outlay. Alternative energy, for example: Obama promises to support research and development with $150 billion over 10 years. A typo in his initial press release said $150 billion annually — more like it, says Kuttner, who might have added that that’s slightly less than the amount Congress may soon give to the dinosaurs of Detroit.

How to pay for it all? Roll back the Bush tax cuts, get out of Iraq; reduce military spending; close loopholes; tax Wall Street; and still spend more than we take in, with the rationale that a deficit is better than a Great Depression.

Obama’s Challenge is fresh reading to anyone who’s not steeped in policy minutia; it offers some plain discussion of how much moderate Democrats have conceded to a conservative low-tax agenda (“a race to a bottom that we never can reach,” in the words of Kuttner’s colleauge, Miles Rappaport) and hints at how Obama comes to the land’s highest office with the strength of character and independence of mind that might allow him to do what true leaders do: “staking out a position not held by a majority of voters, and bringing the people around… It is never simply a case of seeing where the country is, and going there.” Lincoln did this well with bringing the people around slowly to the idea of emancipation; LBJ did too, vowing from day one to enact civil rights legislation. When his aides told him he ought not spend his good reputation so early in his term, he replied, "Hell, what's the presidency for?"

Politics being what it is, a game of focus groups and strategists in which the liars guard the locks, Kuttner looks at Obama’s life history and sees a progressive to the core. Here’s hoping he’s right. More than that: Another factor in making a transformative president, perhaps the most important, is what the times demand. And what the times demand is often defined by what the people say. That’s where we come in.

Ralph Nader calls Obama a Uncle Tom

Obama gets an election-night slur not from the right, but the left.

There was a time I could have seen Ralph Nader leading thousands in pushing Obama leftward. No longer. If I had just one vote in my lifetime I could take back, it would be the one he got in ’96.

The next morning

It's morning in America, to coin a phrase, and I'm doing something I should do more often: listening to KEXP's live feed. At home this morning John played songs in honor of the election results: Bowie's "Changes," Public Enemy's "Brothers Gonna Work It Out." Now there's the joy of "Good Fortune" from PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and an iconic song I've known, I realize now, that I've known and loved half my life, "Teenage Rocket." Now, "Big Day Coming" from Yo La Tengo. They're framing my ebullience very well.

We've got a few months left of an administration apparently bent on national destruction, and the remnants of his damage for years and decades to come, but the mending of a broken world has never seemed so doable to me than it does this morning.

Nike and the UW

I wrote this for tomorrow's issue of Real Change, having reported on the breakdown of a University of Washington committee dealing with labor abuses at factories licensed to make sportswear with its logo. One such factory has taken heat for illegally firing Guatemalan workers -- a revelation discovered by UW International Studies students on a fact-finding trip this spring.


UW has pledged to have Huskies licensed apparel made in a humane environment. How will it back up that promise?

Nike and the University

By ADAM HYLA, Editor

When the UW Board of Regents meets Oct. 16, one item of business will be a new contract with one of the university's largest business partners, Nike, which since 2000 has supplied the school with most athletic gear and all the athletes' apparel.

The Regents will be looking at a 10-year contract worth $39 million — a remarkable amount of money, offered up in a fashion that's remarkably disappointing to people on campus who have worked hard to prevent the making of Huskies gear in intolerable conditions.

Consider two datelines.

Aug. 1, 2008: an Australian television reporter breaks the news of a Nike subcontractor in Malaysia keeping indentured workers in conditions of modern-day slavery: 350 men from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and other poor nations sharing a small dormitory and a trickling faucet; working off a year’s pay to those who provided them passage and then, after they signed a contract in a language not their own, took their passports. These conditions had been extant for more than a decade.

Aug. 8: A press release from the university announcing the tentative $39 million contract, representing, said athletics director Scott Woodward " a resounding endorsement of the future of Husky Athletics from the world's leading sports brand."

This announcement shocked and dismayed activists in the UW Student Labor Action Project. Some of them sat on the Licensing Advisory Committee, the student-faculty-staff body charged with upholding the university code of conduct with apparel contractors.

Formed by president Mark Emmert last year, the LAC never gained the full trust of the students, who, regarding the president as the real decisionmaker, continued to bring sweatshop issues up with him. They also looked askance at the committee’s staff members from the Athletics and Trademarks and Licensing departments — staff paid to negotiate, renew, and extend apparel makers’ contracts. Without investigative or managerial powers, or a clearer mandate from Emmert himself, the committee dissolved in September after a season of breakdown and mistrust. The Nike contract — which Athletics staffers on the committee, confirming students’ suspicions, never disclosed was being hashed out — was the last straw.

It’s a vast understatement to say that Nike workplace abuses are old news. It’s been 14 years since a Portland-based group of justice activists started the Justice Do It campaign to get their corporate neighbor to own up to labor abuses, and those years have yielded little more than empty corporate avowals of improved in-house monitoring, which does little good. A cycle of scandals and pledges ensues, each revelation, to those paying attention, producing less of a shock.

Activists and scholars know that this won’t change unless the global apparel system does.
Brands exist to recruit loyal customers; they're not interested in owning factories or putting people to work. They buy low and sell high, issuing bids for work that factories, like the one in Malaysia, respond to. The Champion label right now may be asking those companies: Can you make 40,000 commemmorative Apple Cup t-shirts shipped out by Nov. 17? Whoever will do it cheapest, wins.

This setup gives the brands a fall guy, and it makes their buy-in vital in pressuring any factory to change its ways. This summer, in a rare case of high-level negotiation, a corporate oversight group has been instrumental in arranging compensation for wronged Guatemalan workers [“Seniors find problems with Husky apparel,” Sept. 10-16]. The UW alone could not have applied enough pressure to make the factory’s Singapore owners pay.

The Justice Do It campaign eventually gave Nike a royal case of the victim complex, with CEO Phil Knight complaining that he was being unfairly picked on. Perhaps he was; activists knew then, as they know now, that changing how one apparel giant does business could very well improve the lot of all garment workers.

The same logic applies on campus, only not so impressively. A large Pac-10 school's instituting a fair-trade certification system is not going to alter the garment industry, which makes only 2 percent of its products for the collegiate market. What the UW can do is simply what’s right, regardless, by leading other schools forthrightly toward a real system of monitoring and sweat-free certification.

When the $39 million contract is delivered to the Regents Oct. 16, it will be worth asking what form of oversight Nike would accept after it’s signed. Probably none; Athletics Dept. officials who negotiated the deal respond defensively to critics that Nike has a long record of corporate responsibility.

Among big schools who have faced the sweatshops question, the UW is uniquely capable of setting a new course for conscientious contracting. With the former members of the LAC and the commitment of the student activists in SLAP, it has the expertise. It has already declared its intention to implement one model for this system. The next steps must proceed from president Mark Emmert’s office. The question is: Will he take them?