Chronicle Vitae--David Gooblar

Fear not, oh academics!  The following essay will be fully ignored/rejected by your ivory tower.  The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed despise alt-opinions and vigorous debate, cornerstone of a thriving democracy.  They push career, not rude-truth telling.  They will publish plenty of vacuous articles like “How to Prepare for Class without Overpreparing” (Prof. James Lang) and “Why I’m Easy:  I’m Giving Lot’s of A’s” (Prof. Gary Laderman).  “5 Tips on Surviving Your First Year as a Department Head” is another such article (Profs. Rob Kramer and Peter J. Mucha).  “Chairs are notoriously stuck in the middle, serving everyone in all directions,” argue the two authors.  Well, intellectually-corrupt chairs—and there are plenty of them—do NOT serve rare professors who possess the courage to call them out and risk career in doing so.  Rather than five superficial tips, I’d suggest one tip for all academics placing career far above truth telling like the large majority of chairs:  fortify your modus operandi of turning a blind eye, backslapping, and self-congratulating.  That indeed might even help you get into a deanship.  The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed have been rejecting my alt-opinion essays for years now.  Below is one I recently wrote and submitted to the former.  The response from the faceless (nameless) editors was identical to the last response received (hyper-polite and hyper-vacuous—higher ed in a nutshell):  

Dear Dr. Slone,

Thank you for sending us this essay. Several of us have read it, and we regret to say that we are unable to publish it. Because we receive dozens of manuscripts each week on all sorts of topics, we have to make some tough choices. And, unfortunately, that large number also precludes us from responding to each in depth, but we very much appreciate your thinking of The Chronicle.

Sincerely,

The Editors

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Truth or Career? How to Teach Literacy in an Era of Academic Marxist-Ideology

[The fundamental question confronting every academic is truth or career—open heresy or turning a blind eye.  Choose the latter and get tenure; choose the former and get intellectual integrity.  Sadly, in most cases (99%), one cannot choose both.] 

Rhetoric can be a synonym for bullshit… and there is a ton of that in the ranks of academics, whose very careers depend on producing it ad nauseam.  “Information literacy” is another instance of academic rhetoric.  In his Chronicle Vitae (Chronicle of Higher Education) column, “How to Teach Literacy in an Era of Lies,” David Gooblar defines the curious concept as “the capacity to understand, assess, evaluate, and apply information to solve problems or answer questions.”

The essay title—ideology always manages to seep out of the cracks of faux-objectivity—seems to imply that somehow the “Era of Lies” began with Trump, despite the numerous proven lies of Hillary and Obama.  Gooblar argues “To succeed in college and in life afterward, students need to be able to tell a truth from a falsehood. And clearly, that is not as easy as it seems.”  Yet in today’s PC-controlled ivory tower, to succeed in college perhaps really means to open wide and swallow the plethora of PC-information dished out by ideologically-bound professors, not in the least bit interested in truth and reason, let alone freedom of speech and vigorous debate, democracy’s cornerstones.  Truth demands courage.  Academics are not known for courage.  

The likely reality in academe of ideology over truth tends to control not only students, but also professors, especially those seeking tenure.  Gooblar suggests, “Start by talking with some experts. Librarians on your campus have been thinking about these issues for a long time, and many now regularly collaborate with faculty members to teach research skills to students.”  And yet if Gooblar had any real experience with librarians—testing the waters of their fiefdoms—, he’d know they served as gatekeepers of information, which means they might eliminate (or block) from their shelves information they do not like… on ideological grounds.  Try finding a book or periodical critical of librarians and the American Library Association on library shelves!  The American Dissident contains such criticism in each and every issue, and not one library in Idaho will subscribe!  

With that regard, read my dialogue de sourds with James LaRue, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, “Notes on the Office for Intellectual Constraint.”  In it, LaRue rationalizes librarian censorship and banning.  Would Gooblar expose his University of Iowa students to it?  Would he even respond to this counter essay?  [He did not respond!]  Perhaps it would help open student eyes a bit… to information literacy.  After all, how to trust those who seek to censor truths they do not like with helping to determine what is truth and what is not?  In fact, how to trust the Chronicle itself, which would likely never publish this counter-essay?  [It did not publish it!]  And would Gooblar even use it in his classes?  [Certainly not!]  Over the decades, I have grown to know quite well the academic beast.  How to trust cultural Marxist professors with teaching students “information literacy”?  What was info lit like under Stalin’s or Castro’s grip?  What would it be like in Gender or Multiculti Studies classes?  How would those professors “guide students in handling information wisely”? 

Critical thinking in the Humanities is essentially dead.  Reason is dead.  What is alive in the Humanities is loud bellowing:  “RACIST!  RACIST!  RACIST! NAZI! NAZI! NAZI!”  Ideology is alive and kicking!  That is the real information literacy in academe today.  However, Gooblar argues, “But learning how to find accurate information, and how to sort out what’s true from what’s false, is integral to most courses and most course assignments.”  So, in what courses is it not integral?  Gender studies?  Well, he dares not mention.  

Gooblar does make a good point:  “It’s more important for students to be able to evaluate claims than sources, per se.”  However, what if students do not have access to all sources, thanks to their gatekeeper librarians?  Gooblar favors so-called “professional fact-checkers,” but fails to mention how a number of them have been outed for being ideologically-restricted and thus making false conclusions.  Indeed, how might ideology affect fact checking?   Google Scholar is mentioned, but not the fact that Google has been involved in censoring, shadow banning, and firing those who disagree with its ideology. 

“Information literacy thus moves beyond determining what is true and what is false to an investigation into why we are so easily fooled, and why we so easily fool ourselves,” argues Gooblar.    And yet the answer, once again, is quite evident and does not need a plethora of scholarly research papers and op-eds to find it.  Ideology is the enemy of reason and truth.  That is the answer.  Google, Facebook, and YouTube are enemies of reason and truth, though friends of PC-ideology.    

Gooblar concludes, “How can students succeed in any intellectual pursuit if they cannot tell what’s true from what’s false?”  But I’d argue, how can students succeed in any intellectual pursuit if their professors (and well-indoctrinated peers) are constantly pressuring them to echo multiculti-diversity party-line dogma?  

Finally, if one does not actively test the waters of democracy, one will never know just how murky they are.  Clearly, Gooblar has never tested them in academe.  To do so would be highly destructive to his career and pension benefits.  In fact, can Gooblar even profess to be information literate, regarding things academic?  Can he even possess the requisite information literacy to process this essay, which questions and challenges his very modus operandi?  Moreover, I am not convinced that critical thinking or so-called “information literacy” can even be taught.  During my years as a university student, I don’t remember having been taught such things.  I learned them on my own.  I learned them by actually testing the waters of democracy on my own—and risking career.  

An Experiment in Democracy: University of Iowa

Business-as-Usual Shoes to Fill at The Iowa Review
N.B.: The URL for this blog entry was sent to over 65 English faculty members at the University of Iowa. It was also sent to the university's student newspaper. Will any of them respond... in the name of vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy? See below for names.

A friend sent me an editorial from the Press Citizen, “Our View—Big Editorial Shoes to Fill at The Iowa Review,” which immediately grabbed my attention right from the beginning where the editorial seemed to praise the retiring literary editor, David Hamilton, for his rhyming of the names of contributors “arranged into four couplets and a tercet” on the back cover of the latest issue. Wow, I thought, could high-brow writing have really gotten that low? If that literary stunt were any indication of Hamilton’s purported “vision, energy and personality,” which helped create the “magazine's national reputation as a premier literary journal,” then we were indeed in trouble. On another note, journalists—as so many tend to be today—should not be in the business of hackneyed hagiography. They should rather be in the business of caustic questioning and challenging of the powers that be, both grand (e.g., Obama) and small (e.g., Hamilton).
The in-coming editor of The Iowa Review, Russell Valentino, chairman of the University of Iowa Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature (Hamilton will be continuing in that department as tenured professor), noted the journal had "a quiet quality […], contemplative as well as playful.” Could it get any more mind numbing? When big university literature becomes “quiet” and “playful” and praised for it, the nation may very well be in trouble… democracy may very well be in trouble! Imagine the likes of Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, Emerson and Thoreau admiring those purported qualities! Literature needs to holler—it needs to be serious in these times of war all the time, corrupt corporate CEOs all the time, and PC censorship all the time.
If The Iowa Review is indeed “such a success,” perhaps we need to rethink what “success” has really come to mean. And if indeed the contributors and collaborators of the journal include an “impressive number of smart, creative, committed folks,” then we also need to rethink what “smart, creative, and committed” have come to mean. Indeed, apparently those glowing epithets must be reflected by the following sentences cited in the editorial taken from Hamilton’s story published in the latest issue: "The fish tasted fine, by the way, grilled, with chemicals infusing the olive oil and lemon. Maybe an occasional fish from the Iowa River is like shots I used to take as a kid, little bits of many things making my allergies manageable. But I wouldn't want to count on that."
What Hamilton writes (and likely teaches) is as banal and safely disengaged as it gets. Indeed, it couldn’t possibly offend in any manner whatsoever the proverbial old ladies amongst us. Perhaps we need to feel badly for the students studying in that English department. In fact, as a little experiment, I will send this to the University of Iowa student newspaper just to see if the student editors have been fully indoctrinated in the mores of the academic happy face.
“The magazine is an expression of his personal connections," noted Valentino regarding Hamilton. But since when did inbred result in quality? What “personal connections” end up giving us is less than best writing. Examine any given anthology of David Lehman’s yearly The Best American Poetry to see what I mean. In any case, with the likes of Hamilton and Valentino at the helm, we can be assured that the University of Iowa Writing University taskforce will not be recommending: 1. more risk-taking in writing, as in encouraging student writers to be critical of their immediate surroundings (e.g., the university and professors); 2. inviting dissident writers critical of the academic/literary established order; 3. writing against the “playful” happy-face grain and 4. real vigorous debate on the issue of writing itself.
According to the editorial, Valentino will be trying to balance the journal’s supposed “inclusiveness and high standards, humor and sophistication.” Yet how has inclusive come to mean excluding dissidence? And doesn’t “high standards, humor and sophistication” sound a lot like euphemisms for business-as-usual bourgeois good taste and established-order friendliness? Indeed, Hamilton will be reading at the Old Capitol Museum Senate Chamber in an evident manifestation that writing and writers have become so castrated today that they are quite welcome by the nation’s politicians and chamber-of-commerce business FOLK.
Finally, that “very welcoming magazine” (i.e., The Iowa Review), as the editorial refers to it, would certainly not be very welcoming to those like me who do actually dare, now and then, “go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson). In our wildest dreams, could we imagine The Iowa Review publishing this short essay? Of course not… and that, dear thinking citizens of Iowa City, is precisely what renders such magazines less than successful… at least in the eyes of democracy.
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NB:  Surprise!  The student editors never responded.

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russell-valentino@uiowa.edu; David-Hamilton@uiowa.edu; katherine-thorpe@uiowa.edu; ryan-vanmeter@uiowa.edu; carol-desaintvictor@uiowa.edu; paul-diehl@uiowa.edu; hualing-engle@uiowa.edu; john-grant@uiowa.edu; john-harper@uiowa.edu; john-huntley@uiowa.edu; robert-kelley@uiowa.edu; carl-klaus@uiowa.edu; llj@ia.net; john-mclaughlin@uiowa.edu; alan-nagel@uiowa.edu; rfsayre@mchsi.com; daniel-weissbort@uiowa.edu; Fredrick-Woodard@uiowa.edu; bluford-adams@uiowa.edu; Linda-Bolton@uiowa.edu; Florence-Boos@uiowa.edu; Lori-Branch@uiowa.edu; Matthew-P-Brown@uiowa.edu; Corey-Creekmur@uiowa.edu; john-philip-dagata@uiowa.edu; Huston-Diehl@uiowa.edu; Kathleen-Diffley@uiowa.edu; david-dowling@uiowa.edu; Barbara-Eckstein@uiowa.edu; Mary-Emery@uiowa.edu; Ed-Folsom@uiowa.edu; Patricia-A-Foster@uiowa.edu; Claire-Fox@uiowa.edu; Eric-Gidal@uiowa.edu; Miriam-Gilbert@uiowa.edu; loren-glass@uiowa.edu; blaine-greteman@uiowa.edu; robin-hemley@uiowa.edu; Cheryl-Herr@uiowa.edu; lena-hill@uiowa.edu; michael-hill@uiowa.edu; adam-hooks@uiowa.edu; kevin-kopelson@uiowa.edu; marie-kruger@uiowa.edu; rudolf-kuenzli@uiowa.edu; Priya-Kumar@uiowa.edu; stephen-kuusisto@uiowa.edu; Brooks-Landon@uiowa.edu; Kathy-Lavezzo@uiowa.edu; Susan-Lohafer@uiowa.edu; Teresa-Mangum@uiowa.edu; christopher-merrill@uiowa.edu; Dee-Morris@uiowa.edu; Nazareth@uiowa.edu; Judith-Pascoe@uiowa.edu; Horace-Porter@uiowa.edu; Jeff-Porter@uiowa.edu; John-Raeburn@uiowa.edu; Maryann-Rasmussen@uiowa.edu; Laura-Rigal@uiowa.edu; Phillip-Round@uiowa.edu; robyn-schiff@uiowa.edu; Tom-Simmons@uiowa.edu; Alvin-Snider@uiowa.edu; Claire-Sponsler@uiowa.edu; anne-stapleton@uiowa.edu; Harilaos-Stecopoulos@uiowa.edu; garrett-stewart@uiowa.edu; bonnie-sunstein@uiowa.edu; miriam-thaggert@uiowa.edu; lara-trubowitz@uiowa.edu; Jonathan-Wilcox@uiowa.edu; Doris-Witt@uiowa.edu; David-Wittenberg@uiowa.edu

Acknowledging the International ESTABLISHED-Writers Program

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I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”

[N.B.: Jeff Charis-Carlson, Opinion Editor, Iowa City Press-Citizen did respond to this blog in an email, informing me that the International Writing Program was not the same as the Writers' Workshop. Erroneously, I had thought it was and that was partly due to Merrill's drifting thoughts between the two. In any case, I admit having had that wrong thought and have altered a few statements, including the title of this blog (removing "cookie-cutter" and replacing it with "ESTABLISHED" since the IWP invites "established writers"). Charis-Carlson suggested an Iowa City resident write the counterpoint op-ed or that I truncate this blog to 500 words. I suggested, he publish the first 500 words and link it to this blog.]

A friend of mine from Iowa City informed me of an article written by University of Iowa International Writing Program Director Christopher Merrill. The article concerned Merrill’s new title as “2008 Press-Citizen Person of the Year.” Press-Citizen was an Iowa City newspaper. Merrill had obtained that recognition by working to get the city named the “world's third City of Literature” by UNESCO. The first two such cities were Edinburgh and Melbourne. I read the article… and was inspired. "Just think, the first literary city in North America is little Iowa City," had said Merrill earlier in an interview. "Sure, there are still the New Yorks and San Franciscos of the country, but there's a way in which Iowa City has been quietly producing these great writers for years, and the world knows it."

Well, those "great writers" came out of the Writers' Workshop, not the International Writing Program (IWP). But what was a "great writer"? Far too many citizens—educated ones even!—were intellectually docile. They opened their mouths, said ahh or rather "great writer" or "established writer" or "poet laureate," then simply swallowed—no questioning and challenging at all!

According to Charis-Carlson: "Although the Writers’ Workshop continues to churn out MFAs, no one really graduates from the IWP. It’s an annual 10-week residency program for about 40 already established writers from around the globe. It’s a chance for them to meet with American counterparts, to give readings across the nation and hopefully gain some new material to write about."

But a thinking citizen would have to ask what "established" means and implies, and which established “American counterparts” the international “established writers” got to meet. Certainly, they would not get to meet me because I was not "established," at least not in the established-order sense. Indeed, "established" generally indicated that a writer did not overtly question and challenge the established order, which was why it tended to accord him/her prizes, invitations, and publication opportunities. The logic was clearly there.

When a college professor became anointed “person of the year,” as in the case of Merrill, a red flag ought to be raised immediately in the minds of thinking citizens because such a designation likely indicated the professor in question tended not to make waves, not to go against the established-order grain, not to buck the literary system, and not to question and challenge the hands of power that fed him security and money, including the Iowa City Chamber of Commerce. Now, what kind of college professor would that make? Well, in these trying times for democracy, it tended to make a rather common and poor one, though well remunerated.

Oddly, Merrill vaunted his modesty—half of the op-ed concerned that purported character trait: “I confess that when my name was put forth as a candidate for the Press-Citizen Person of the Year I was mortified. After all, I wrote a book about Christian monasticism, and if I learned anything from the monks on Mount Athos, in northern Greece, it is the virtue of humility. And if I am not unaccustomed to appearing on stage, I am by temperament more comfortable introducing and interviewing writers than being in the spotlight.”

Yet Merrill certainly could have rejected the honor and made a statement similar to the one made by Emerson above. Indeed, if he cherished modesty so much, as he underscored over and again, then why had he directed the push to adorn his city with such an immodest, vainglorious title? In fact, why would a truly modest man have adorned titles himself, as in full professor or program director or Dr.? What might his monk friends think of those titles?

“More than once he [a Scottish military monitor Merrill had met] said, ‘I have no wish to go down as anybody in history.’ My favorite writer is named Anonymous—and so it is a little disconcerting for me to stand before you now,” wrote Merrill. A questioning citizen would have had to wonder, however, why Merrill’s IWP likely invited anyone (i.e., "established") but Anonymous. Merrill himself enumerated in the op-ed the non-Anonymous writers issued from the Writers' Workshop, including Vonnegut and Graham. Besides, imagine all the politicking and turning of a blind eye it took for Merrill to rise in the dubious, though collegial, ranks of academe to become a Director of a state academic program?

“What is a writer anyway?” asked Merrill. He then answered the question in a fluffy, innocuous sort of academic way: “Someone who works in our common medium—the language—to reveal the contours, nuances and textures of our time here below; to find meaning in the tangled web of our experience; to delight and instruct, console and inspire [but not to expose and “speak the rude truth” about IWP and its writing instructors!]. And it is the writer's responsibility to name the world, as Adam named the animals in the Garden of Eden.”

Perhaps I stood at antipodes to Merrill. For me, a writer was someone who dared let his “life be a counterfriction to stop the machine” (Thoreau), who “goes upright and vital, and speaks the rude truth in all ways” (Emerson), and "who must never cease warring with it [the machine], for its sake and for his own” (James Baldwin). Part of the machine in question was of course the very academic/literary established order of which Merrill formed an integral component. Did the IWP offer the other side of the coin of what a writer ought? That was the question citizens of Iowa City should be posing, as opposed to what kind of signs and events the city and university ought to be erecting and sponsoring in a modest effort to vaunt the new vainglorious designation.
Merrill noted that “insight into the nature of the creative process” was “a core mission of the writing programs at the University of Iowa, which offer different ways of understanding the production of poems and plays, novels and nonfiction works. And what they have made is a community that fosters creativity.”

Well, that sounded fine and dandy, but one must wonder what ways might have been purposefully ignored if not suppressed and what forms of “creativity” not favored by the “community,” including and especially criticism of the “community” (e.g., University of Iowa).

“Exploration leads to expression, which leads to more exploration—a rich environment for everyone,” stated Merrill in quasi-religious exaltation regarding the writing programs at University of Iowa. Beware the leader, however, who states “everyone”! My “expression” was certainly not welcome by “everyone.” Certainly, it would not be welcome by the IWP, which would hardly consider it beneficial to the IWP’s “rich environment.” Ah, but I was not a graduate of one of the writing programs; I’d actually learned to question and challenge! Writers who exalted writing as something quasi-religious or godlike exalted themselves by doing so. Why the need for self-exaltation, especially for a self-professed modest Director?

What Merrill wrote under the section “Literature and Democracy” was distressing, to say the least. An honest academic would have simply avoided addressing the subject. UNESCO handed a cookie to Iowa City, so the professors of University of Iowa would now likely have to remain silent regarding the dark side of UNESCO. “I am grateful to have had the chance to point UNESCO toward the source of our vitality—the spring from which writers drink with the hope of creating works that will outlast them,” boasted Merrill. But The Guardian noted regarding UNESCO some time ago (see www.guardian.co.uk/world/1999/oct/18/jonhenley1) that “Such cronyism reaches into almost every corner of Unesco, according to young professionals who despair of salvaging the organisation they work for. Nepotism is also rife, they say, after watching well-paid jobs go to mistresses and family members.” One must wonder what kind of University of Iowa horse trading went on behind the scenes with UNESCO! Indeed, and when it comes to horse trading, how not to think of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich?

Perhaps it was high time we cleaned up our democratic act before bragging about it overseas. Hopefully, Merrill’s Syrian students of yesteryear were sufficiently intelligent to realize that America was ruled by wealthy elites, corrupted by powerful corporate lobbyists, and otherwise intellectually castrated by tenure in its universities. American democracy had indeed become quite limited. Few American universities today, if any, are following the model of Thoreau and Emerson. Today, they follow the model of AIG, Merrill Lynch, City Group, Enron, and Worldcom (i.e., growth, growth, growth and image, image, image).

“It is said that the genius of the workshop lies in its democratic vision of literature—that you need not be descended from great wealth or privilege to participate in the invention of life,” noted Merrill. “It is said,” but who the hell said it? Perhaps one need not be descended from wealth, but to participate, one had better adopt the bourgeois taste and aesthetics of IWP and Writers' Workshop professors and, above all, avoid—like the proverbial plague—questioning and challenging them.

“And that is the beauty of the model that Iowa City has bequeathed to the world. For wherever writers gather to discuss a new poem or story, from Denver to Damascus and beyond, they follow the model developed here,” vaunted Merrill. But what was wrong with a fellow like him to make such a pompous, self-serving statement? I for one did not even know what the hell that “model” was, let alone emulate it, or use it whenever discussing writing.

The truth was that many professors in America, Merrill and cronies likely included, had all but excluded vigorous debate, cornerstone of democracy, from their ivory-tower agora of ideas. What they were good at was formulating campus speech codes to help bolster them as campus power mongers and buffer them from criticism (see “Public Universities Overwhelmingly Violate First Amendment” at www.thefire.org/Fire_speech_codes_report_2009.pdf). Open questioning and challenging of professors was generally prohibited. Indeed, it was a certain death sentence to a career in academe, whose literary journals systematically rejected any writing of a highly critical nature, especially where they were concerned. Professors tended to work hand and foot with business leaders, not with citizens.

Would the Press-Citizen even permit me to write an editorial on the subject? When in Louisiana as a professor several years ago, I had to fight tooth and nail over the period of a whole month just to get one such letter published by the Monroe daily, News-Star, in response to the 52 published weekly columns written by one professor glorifying his university (see www.theamericandissident.org/Op-Ed-NewsStar.htm). As for The Chronicle of Higher Education, it wouldn't even run such a counterpoint op-ed. Far too many newspapers and journalists today had sold out to become merry organs of the local Chamber of Commerce.

A year and a half ago, the Academy of American Poets, sponsor of National Poetry Month, censored my comments off its website and banned me from participating in its online forums. That story interested not a single newspaper editor. Also, I’d mentioned it to about 130 academic and pseudo-academic publishers of literary journals. Not one of them proved interested in it, let alone concerned about it (see www.theamericandissident.org/AcademyAmericanPoets-LitSurvey.htm). All of the Academy chancellors were tenured or retired university professors. Not one of them agreed with me that censorship was bad, especially when effected in the academic/literary milieu, the very core of the nation’s intellect. Famous Beatnik turned Academy Chancellor and tenured professor Gary Schneider refused to even respond. Would “person of the year” Merrill give a damn about that incident of censorship? That would be highly unlikely. Would the IWP like to hear about and discuss the incident during its poesy brouhaha ineluctably spurred by National Poetry Month in April? That too would be highly unlikely.

Finally, if graduating writing students of the Writers' Workshop were incapable of perceiving the truths emanating from the cracks in Merrill’s op-ed, then clearly it had failed them. If some of those students were in fact capable of perceiving, but would never dare write an essay such as this one for it would evidently be career damaging, then clearly it had failed them too. In fact, in both cases, a clear failure regarding democracy would be manifest.