Friday, November 11, 2011
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Public Diplomacy Footnote: When People Really Listened (long, long ago)
"Listening" by the public-diplomacy practitioner is increasingly recommended as a sine qua non for effective PD. But it's not always a sure thing that anyone actually "listens" to a public diplomat, even if he/she tries/pretends to be listening to others. As a footnote to such a situation, I offer this excerpt from The Times Literary Supplement (October 21, 2011, p. 29, review by Peter Marshall of
Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640), which recalls a time and place long, long ago when certain audiences truly listened to the speaker addressing them:
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Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English preachers and their audiences, 1590-1640), which recalls a time and place long, long ago when certain audiences truly listened to the speaker addressing them:
Hunt's book ... [is] a brilliant and original re-examination of the importance of preaching in later Reformation England. Strictly, Hunt's subject is not preaching but hearing: it is in the relationship between a preacher and his congregation (their "interpretative collaboration") that the true meaning lies. This requires imaginative reconstruction of venues and audiences: at Sunday parish sermons, weekday "lectures", and such set pieces as court sermons, assize preaching, and orations from the London pulpit of Paul's Cross. Hunt finds preachers tailoring the message to the audience in front of them, aware that listeners might vote with their feet. ...
Particularly valuable is Hunt's insistence on going beyond the published text in search of the spoken event. Printed sermons tended to be tidied up: eloquent and learned, but politically and theologically cautious. By contrast, the manuscript sermons Hunt has assiduously ferreted out show preachers employing homely language, and shamelessly tugging at the heart strings. In fact, unlike modern academics, desperate to get their thoughts into print, many preachers were deeply suspicious of the press, only gradually coming around to appreciation of its importance during the seventeenth century. The most committed preachers were Puritans, and for the "godly", the "Word of God" was not the bare text of Scripture, but a "latent force" to be activated in the hearts of believers by the living words of the preacher. In late sixteenth-century England, it was the deaf, not the illiterate, who had cause to worry about their prospects for salvation [my emphasis]. Hunt argues that it was an insistence on hearing the Bible expounded in preaching, rather than merely reading the text privately, that formed the key ideological fissure between Puritans and conformist Protestants.
Some ironies ensued: the notion that reading was insufficient without preaching looked alarmingly analogous to the Catholic position that the Bible was insufficient without tradition; "Anglicans" like Richard Hooker stressed the unique authority of Scripture more than their Puritan opponents. ...
Hunt finds pastoral sensitivity, and even empathy for popular culture, in the sermons of godly clergymen. Their task was not to "convert" the people to Protestantism, but to make more committed Protestants out of laypeople who already had some grasp of theological basics.
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Tuesday, November 8, 2011
Our Universities: Why Are They Failing?
Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? November 24, 2011
Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For
by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Ivan R. Dee, 195 pp., $22.95
The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters
by Benjamin Ginsberg
Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $29.95
The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
by Jerome Karabel
Mariner, 711 pp., $36.95 (paper)
Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
by Christopher Newfield
Harvard University Press, 395 pp., $21.95 (paper)
Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper)
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)
Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
by Anthony T. Kronman
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $27.50; $17.00 (paper)
Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education
by Nancy Folbre
New Press, 208 pp., $24.95
American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.
Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.
At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.
It’s not hard to see why colleges and universities resist simple evaluations. There are now almost five thousand universities and colleges—both two-year and four-year—in the US. Millions attend them, including around 40 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans and a great many older students. Postsecondary education stretches from the tree-shaded Olympuses of the Ivy-plus private group and the imposing quadrangles of the great public universities to urban community colleges that run twelve hours a day, surrounded only by vast parking lots that are never big enough to accommodate everyone. It’s private and public, mass and elite, ancient and ivy-covered, contemporary and cutting-edge. No generalization could do justice to this vast and varied scene.
Many—perhaps most—books on the American university fall into two categories. Jeremiads seem to pop off the presses every week. A fair number of them conform to a single type, one that embraces books as varied in their origins as The Faculty Lounges (2011), a blast at professors written by a distinguished journalist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and The Fall of the Faculty (2011), an attack on administrators written by a distinguished political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg. Instead of examining these complex communities from multiple points of view, they single out one group of actors as villains. Instead of offering detailed accounts of particular colleges and universities, which could give a sense of the rhythms and textures of academic lives, they pile up stories clipped from popular media and Web pages; describe individual experiences, often egregious ones, as if they marked a general rule; and recycle anecdotes already worn smooth by the handling they have undergone in previous polemical works.
Even so, not all their arrows miss their targets. Riley provides a well-informed and depressing account of the mistreatment of adjunct and contingent faculty. Ginsberg rightly points out that numbers of administrators and professional staffers have grown far more quickly than numbers of faculty, pushing up the costs that students and their families pay without enhancing the academic side of their experience. But when Riley dismisses most research as worthless because a few senior academics say it is, or Ginsberg dismisses the entire class of administrators as idlers interested only in the next pointless conference in Hawaii, both take flight into a realm of higher snark that is fun to read but ultimately unhelpful.
The other set of books is very different. Seriously researched, rich in data, and sometimes adorned with dozens of tables that the uninitiated may find cryptic, works like The Chosen (2005) by Jerome Karabel, Unmaking the Public University (2008) by Christopher Newfield, Crossing the Finish Line (2009) by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson, and Academically Adrift (2011) by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa focus on particular aspects of the system. They excavate a world of ugly facts and unsatisfactory practices that has the gritty look and feel of reality—a reality that has little to do with the glossy hype of world university ratings.
In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.
Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.
Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.
Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.
For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.
In Britain, as Simon Head has shown in these pages, teachers in university departments are subject to mechanical standards of productivity that are much resented.* But for undergraduates an established system of outside examiners keeps programs across the country honest, ensuring that standards are maintained, even if most students are weak, and providing opportunities for the ablest at every level of the system. American higher education has no comparable system of assessment, and the opportunities that it provides at every level depend on the generosity and engagement of individuals.
In many ways, universities have reshaped themselves over recent decades to support the current version of student life. Particularly in the natural and social sciences, professors are encouraged to feel that it is legitimate to devote most of their energy to research. When they make a discovery, they receive a reward: exemption from time in the classroom. Even those who don’t discover America, as the Italians used to say, spend as much time as they can in the lab or the library. Teaching has been reassigned, more and more, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to graduate students and adjuncts.
In theory, budgetary constraints have forced these measures on reluctant deans. In fact, though, they also make it easier to recruit and retain star academics, whose salaries and research support are costly. It’s a lot easier to convince a Deep Thinker to move to Old Siwash and cogitate for a few graduate students than it is to convince the same Deep Thinker to come teach 120 kids a term.
Even in these supposedly tight times, finally, well-paid administrators and nonacademic professionals proliferate—as do the costly extracurricular activities that they provide, from bonding exercises for freshmen to intercollegiate sports. The message is clear: no one sees classroom learning as a primary pursuit.
Is this a crisis? Arum and Roksa say no, since students and their parents continue to seek and pay for places at colleges and universities, and government and graduate schools continue to accept their products, and corporations continue to hire them (and to spend more than $50 billion a year to train their employees in the skills they need). But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact.
Many reform proposals are circulating—mostly the sort that will make matters worse. In Texas, where the debate about public universities has reached an especially sharp pitch, articulate and well-funded critics demand that faculty teach more students at lower cost. But there’s only one way to accomplish that: pushing still more undergraduates into enormous lecture halls where they have no personal contact with the professor, while putting smaller groups entirely into the hands of harried graduate students and adjuncts. Doing this won’t kindle the young to turn on their Kindles and read in their down time. Surely we don’t want to become even more efficient at turning off our students’ minds than we are already. Online courses, the other popular suggestion, can work well—so long as one also provides competent human supervision online, twenty-four hours a day, which makes such courses just as expensive as the traditional sort.
As William Bowen and his collaborators show in Crossing the Finish Line, our system fails on another level even more unequivocally than it does in generating academic engagement. Recent polemics about graduate education, especially in the humanities, have cited the high rate of attrition—around 50 percent—as clear evidence of a profound failure. Graduate programs certainly need scrutiny and reform. But their losses are hardly distinctive. Attrition is the American way in education at all levels. The whole Rube Goldberg machine leaks at every valve. Fewer than 70 percent of high school students graduate. Just over 70 percent of those graduates will enter some form of postsecondary education. But barely more than half of those who start BA programs will finish them in six years, and only 30 percent of those who start community college will win an associate degree in three years. After that point, most people don’t manage to graduate.
Consider the public universities that offer the vast majority of places in bachelor’s degree programs. A few of them—the University of Virginia, William and Mary, Berkeley—graduate 90 percent or more of their students within six years. Another fifteen or so have six-year graduation rates of 80 percent or higher. At the rest, the numbers are even worse. In New Jersey, the flagship state campus, Rutgers/New Brunswick, has a four-year graduation rate of 52 percent and a six-year rate of 77 percent. 5,835 freshmen begin studies there every year. Of that group, 1,342 will not graduate within six years. Ohio State, Indiana University, Florida State, and Iowa lose a similar proportion of each class. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, historically one of America’s greatest public universities, only 48 percent of undergraduates make it through in four years, though over 30 percent more finish within six years. Yet this is the top, the shiny part of the iceberg that rises above sea level. At some state colleges—and in the for-profit sector—the majority gives up long before graduation day. America, once the world leader in educating its population, is now tenth.
Dropping out may not always be the worst fate: sometimes staying in proves costlier. For whether students lose interest or leave their places, they and their families are now in hock to the eyeballs. During the great expansion period of the late 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of Americans with college and university degrees increased rapidly. So did the practice of requiring a degree for many positions for which the universities provided no technical training. So, finally, did the size of public investment, which came to provide the funds for most higher education. Since states financed a large share of university budgets from tax revenues, tuition charges remained low. Students could borrow the modest amount of money needed to pay their share of tuition, work enough hours to earn what they needed to live on, and still graduate in good order, with only modest debts. If they dropped out, they faced financial difficulties, but not catastrophe, since the amounts involved remained small.
Since the Reagan revolution, however—as Christopher Newfield shows in his detailed study of the California university system—states have transferred more and more of the costs of education from their own budgets to those of students and their families. Flagship state universities set their prices below those of elite private colleges. But they are not cheap by any other standard. At the University of Michigan, an in-state freshman will face total expenses of $25,204, a senior $26,810. At Penn State, an in-state freshman will pay $25,416 for tuition, fees, and living expenses this year. In a great many cases, family savings, student earnings, and scholarship aid fall short of these amounts, and students and their parents must borrow the rest. This year, students who borrow in order to study, as two thirds do, will end up on average owing $33,798 when they graduate—twice as much as the average debt ten years ago. So much for those four relaxed years in college, all too often purchased at the expense of ten subsequent years or more in debt peonage.
Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything. Poor students and students of color borrow more than white students. They also, perhaps because they know little about them, make less use than they could of the federal Stafford and Parent Plus programs, which are relatively cheap; they are more dependant on private lenders whom Dante would have consigned, with credit card administrators, to the lowest circle of the Inferno.
All this to pay for an education that—as we have already seen—means little, intellectually, to many of those who are courting debtors’ prison to pay for it. The unkindest cut of all, of course, is that those who drop out must still carry the full burden of the loans that so many of them have taken out—even though they will, in all probability, earn less and fare worse in hard times than graduates. Yet even unemployment among graduates has been rising—as have rates of student loan default.
Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.
It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off. Older students—and these days most are older than traditional university age—often have to work full-time and care for children or parents, or both. Those likeliest to encounter these problems are also the ones who haven’t been schooled since birth to find the thread that can lead them through the labyrinths of the bureaucracy. They aren’t confident that they will see an invitingly open door, where a friendly adviser or professor is eager to help them, and they don’t have parents hovering, eager to find that helper for them.
Happily, many students not only survive but flourish in the teeth of these obstacles. Many faculty members and administrators do their best to help. University cultures, like politics, are local. Many state schools are floundering—for example, the much-ballyhooed Arizona States. But many manage to cap class sizes and keep professors busy teaching. Dropouts and graduates differ, but they’re not the drowned and saved. Some transfer to other universities. Some join the military, straighten out their lives, and come back, powered by the GI Bill, to graduate too late to be counted with their class. Some find secretarial positions to support their kids, and earn BAs and better jobs in middle life. But those cases are exceptional.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The system runs, in part, on its failures. Administrators count on the tuition paid, from borrowed money, by undergraduates who they know will drop out before they use up many services. To provide teaching they exploit instructors still in graduate school, many of whom they know will also drop out and not demand tenure-track jobs. Faculty, once they have found a berth, often become blind to the problems and deaf to the cries of their own indentured students. And even where the will to do better is present, the means are often used for very different ends.
In many universities, finally, the sideshows have taken over the big tent. Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.
When critics argued that it made no sense to support football at the expense of teaching, an official spokesman replied: “The university’s direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of the Rutgers budget.” Presumably he counted on readers not to know that in any large organization’s budget, the entire amount of money that is not committed years in advance is no more than 1 or 2 percent—or, to put it more specifically, that athletics has swallowed the money that could otherwise have been used to improve the university’s core activities. Christopher Newfield is not the only sober, informed observer who believes that political elites are deliberately attacking middle-class education.
Perhaps it’s not a crisis. After all, as many observers have pointed out, this is the way we live now, and room remains for exceptions and for hope. Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. It would also be instructive to see engaged teachers like Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), a recent polemic against the corruption of the humanities, concern themselves with the concrete situation in which most American students find themselves. Polemics about the death of the humanities, however eloquent, won’t remedy the inhumanities that thousands of students encounter, predictably, year by year.
Best of all would be for enterprising publishers to find curious writers and have them describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects. The polemical books, even those that have some substance, end up slinging mud—which, as Huckleberry Finn pointed out to Tom Sawyer, isn’t argument—more often than laying out the evidence. The empirical studies, with a very few exceptions, are deliberately cast in such general terms, and written in such a value- and metaphor-free style, that they won’t reach anyone without a professional interest. Neither sort would give an intelligent outsider—say, a parent or student, a regent or a trustee—a vivid picture of a year’s life and work at a college or university, as it is experienced by all parties; much less a lucid explanation of how finance and pedagogy, bad intentions and good execution shape one another in the academic world.
It must be fun to howl “Read Your Greeks” and denounce evil conspiracies. But public discussion and scrutiny would become much more productive if informed writers captured the texture and flavor of the American university as convincingly as Thomas Ricks, Evan Wright, Elizabeth Samet, and others have done for segments of the military. The novelists discovered this territory long ago. Where are the great journalists? They will find students who manage to do excellent work and many more cases of wasted possibilities, and they might gain some insight into why.
Anthony Grafton, New York Review of Books
The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For
by Naomi Schaefer Riley
Ivan R. Dee, 195 pp., $22.95
The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters
by Benjamin Ginsberg
Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $29.95
The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton
by Jerome Karabel
Mariner, 711 pp., $36.95 (paper)
Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class
by Christopher Newfield
Harvard University Press, 395 pp., $21.95 (paper)
Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper)
Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper)
Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life
by Anthony T. Kronman
Yale University Press, 308 pp., $27.50; $17.00 (paper)
Saving State U: Why We Must Fix Public Higher Education
by Nancy Folbre
New Press, 208 pp., $24.95
American universities crowd the tops of many world rankings, and though these ratings are basically entertainment for university administrators and alumni, they do reflect certain facts. A number of American universities offer their faculty salaries and working conditions, laboratories and libraries that few institutions elsewhere can match. They spend more not only on their staff, but also on their graduate and undergraduate students, than their peers overseas. Though their fees seem enormous by European or Asian standards, they have worked hard in recent years to keep them from deterring poor students by offering more generous aid for undergraduates and by paying full fees for all doctoral students. At every level of the system, dedicated professors are setting students on fire with enthusiasm for everything from the structure of crystals to the structure of poems.
Yet American universities also attract ferocious criticism, much of it from professors and from journalists who know them well, and that’s entirely reasonable too. Every coin has its other side, every virtue its corresponding vice—and practically every university its festering sores. At the most prestigious medical schools, professors publish the work of paid flacks for pharmaceutical companies under their own names. At many state universities and more than a few private ones, head football and basketball coaches earn millions and their assistants hundreds of thousands for running semiprofessional teams. Few of these teams earn much money for the universities that sponsor them, and some brutally exploit their players.
At competitive private colleges and universities, admissions directors reserve places in each class for the children of alumni and potential donors; for athletes, many of whom will make less use of their academic opportunities than their classmates do; and simply for those who can pay. And at universities that boast of their commitment to undergraduate teaching, too many professors gabble through PowerPoint slides twice a week and entrust the face-to-face teaching of actual students to underpaid graduate students and Ph.D.s on short-term contracts, who do their best to impart basic skills in writing and quantitative analysis while earning only a few thousand dollars a course.
It’s not hard to see why colleges and universities resist simple evaluations. There are now almost five thousand universities and colleges—both two-year and four-year—in the US. Millions attend them, including around 40 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-old Americans and a great many older students. Postsecondary education stretches from the tree-shaded Olympuses of the Ivy-plus private group and the imposing quadrangles of the great public universities to urban community colleges that run twelve hours a day, surrounded only by vast parking lots that are never big enough to accommodate everyone. It’s private and public, mass and elite, ancient and ivy-covered, contemporary and cutting-edge. No generalization could do justice to this vast and varied scene.
Many—perhaps most—books on the American university fall into two categories. Jeremiads seem to pop off the presses every week. A fair number of them conform to a single type, one that embraces books as varied in their origins as The Faculty Lounges (2011), a blast at professors written by a distinguished journalist, Naomi Schaefer Riley, and The Fall of the Faculty (2011), an attack on administrators written by a distinguished political scientist, Benjamin Ginsberg. Instead of examining these complex communities from multiple points of view, they single out one group of actors as villains. Instead of offering detailed accounts of particular colleges and universities, which could give a sense of the rhythms and textures of academic lives, they pile up stories clipped from popular media and Web pages; describe individual experiences, often egregious ones, as if they marked a general rule; and recycle anecdotes already worn smooth by the handling they have undergone in previous polemical works.
Even so, not all their arrows miss their targets. Riley provides a well-informed and depressing account of the mistreatment of adjunct and contingent faculty. Ginsberg rightly points out that numbers of administrators and professional staffers have grown far more quickly than numbers of faculty, pushing up the costs that students and their families pay without enhancing the academic side of their experience. But when Riley dismisses most research as worthless because a few senior academics say it is, or Ginsberg dismisses the entire class of administrators as idlers interested only in the next pointless conference in Hawaii, both take flight into a realm of higher snark that is fun to read but ultimately unhelpful.
The other set of books is very different. Seriously researched, rich in data, and sometimes adorned with dozens of tables that the uninitiated may find cryptic, works like The Chosen (2005) by Jerome Karabel, Unmaking the Public University (2008) by Christopher Newfield, Crossing the Finish Line (2009) by William Bowen, Matthew Chingos, and Michael McPherson, and Academically Adrift (2011) by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa focus on particular aspects of the system. They excavate a world of ugly facts and unsatisfactory practices that has the gritty look and feel of reality—a reality that has little to do with the glossy hype of world university ratings.
In Academically Adrift, Arum and Roksa paint a chilling portrait of what the university curriculum has become. The central evidence that the authors deploy comes from the performance of 2,322 students on the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a standardized test administered to students in their first semester at university and again at the end of their second year: not a multiple-choice exam, but an ingenious exercise that requires students to read a set of documents on a fictional problem in business or politics and write a memo advising an official on how to respond to it. Data from the National Survey of Student Engagement, a self-assessment of student learning filled out by millions each year, and recent ethnographies of student life provide a rich background.
Their results are sobering. The Collegiate Learning Assessment reveals that some 45 percent of students in the sample had made effectively no progress in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing in their first two years. And a look at their academic experience helps to explain why. Students reported spending twelve hours a week, on average, studying—down from twenty-five hours per week in 1961 and twenty in 1981. Half the students in the sample had not taken a course that required more than twenty pages of writing in the previous semester, while a third had not even taken a course that required as much as forty pages a week of reading.
Results varied to some extent. At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some students performed at high levels, and some programs fostered more learning than others. In general, though, two points come through with striking clarity. First, traditional subjects and methods seem to retain their educational value. Nowadays the liberal arts attract a far smaller proportion of students than they did two generations ago. Still, those majoring in liberal arts fields—humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and mathematics—outperformed those studying business, communications, and other new, practical majors on the CLA. And at a time when libraries and classrooms across the country are being reconfigured to promote trendy forms of collaborative learning, students who spent the most time studying on their own outperformed those who worked mostly with others.
Second, and more depressing: vast numbers of students come to university with no particular interest in their courses and no sense of how these might prepare them for future careers. The desire they cherish, Arum and Roksa write, is to act out “cultural scripts of college life depicted in popular movies such as Animal House (1978) and National Lampoon’s Van Wilder (2002).” Academic studies don’t loom large on their mental maps of the university. Even at the elite University of California, students report that on average they spend “twelve hours [a week] socializing with friends, eleven hours using computers for fun, six hours watching television, six hours exercising, five hours on hobbies”—and thirteen hours a week studying.
For most of them, in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a diploma that signals employability and basic work discipline. Those who manage to learn a lot often—though happily not always—come from highly educated families and attend highly selective colleges and universities. They are already members of an economic and cultural elite. Our great, democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability—a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the economic and social box that they were born into.
In Britain, as Simon Head has shown in these pages, teachers in university departments are subject to mechanical standards of productivity that are much resented.* But for undergraduates an established system of outside examiners keeps programs across the country honest, ensuring that standards are maintained, even if most students are weak, and providing opportunities for the ablest at every level of the system. American higher education has no comparable system of assessment, and the opportunities that it provides at every level depend on the generosity and engagement of individuals.
In many ways, universities have reshaped themselves over recent decades to support the current version of student life. Particularly in the natural and social sciences, professors are encouraged to feel that it is legitimate to devote most of their energy to research. When they make a discovery, they receive a reward: exemption from time in the classroom. Even those who don’t discover America, as the Italians used to say, spend as much time as they can in the lab or the library. Teaching has been reassigned, more and more, from tenured and tenure-track faculty to graduate students and adjuncts.
In theory, budgetary constraints have forced these measures on reluctant deans. In fact, though, they also make it easier to recruit and retain star academics, whose salaries and research support are costly. It’s a lot easier to convince a Deep Thinker to move to Old Siwash and cogitate for a few graduate students than it is to convince the same Deep Thinker to come teach 120 kids a term.
Even in these supposedly tight times, finally, well-paid administrators and nonacademic professionals proliferate—as do the costly extracurricular activities that they provide, from bonding exercises for freshmen to intercollegiate sports. The message is clear: no one sees classroom learning as a primary pursuit.
Is this a crisis? Arum and Roksa say no, since students and their parents continue to seek and pay for places at colleges and universities, and government and graduate schools continue to accept their products, and corporations continue to hire them (and to spend more than $50 billion a year to train their employees in the skills they need). But those already born into the wealthy and professional classes benefit disproportionately from the best educations. Acquire any sort of college education, and you’ll make more money than you would have if you didn’t. But don’t expect you’ll make what you would have if you had studied applied math at Stanford. And no one knows how long families will be able and willing to pay for four years of largely symbolic training that steadily becomes more expensive and loses impact.
Many reform proposals are circulating—mostly the sort that will make matters worse. In Texas, where the debate about public universities has reached an especially sharp pitch, articulate and well-funded critics demand that faculty teach more students at lower cost. But there’s only one way to accomplish that: pushing still more undergraduates into enormous lecture halls where they have no personal contact with the professor, while putting smaller groups entirely into the hands of harried graduate students and adjuncts. Doing this won’t kindle the young to turn on their Kindles and read in their down time. Surely we don’t want to become even more efficient at turning off our students’ minds than we are already. Online courses, the other popular suggestion, can work well—so long as one also provides competent human supervision online, twenty-four hours a day, which makes such courses just as expensive as the traditional sort.
As William Bowen and his collaborators show in Crossing the Finish Line, our system fails on another level even more unequivocally than it does in generating academic engagement. Recent polemics about graduate education, especially in the humanities, have cited the high rate of attrition—around 50 percent—as clear evidence of a profound failure. Graduate programs certainly need scrutiny and reform. But their losses are hardly distinctive. Attrition is the American way in education at all levels. The whole Rube Goldberg machine leaks at every valve. Fewer than 70 percent of high school students graduate. Just over 70 percent of those graduates will enter some form of postsecondary education. But barely more than half of those who start BA programs will finish them in six years, and only 30 percent of those who start community college will win an associate degree in three years. After that point, most people don’t manage to graduate.
Consider the public universities that offer the vast majority of places in bachelor’s degree programs. A few of them—the University of Virginia, William and Mary, Berkeley—graduate 90 percent or more of their students within six years. Another fifteen or so have six-year graduation rates of 80 percent or higher. At the rest, the numbers are even worse. In New Jersey, the flagship state campus, Rutgers/New Brunswick, has a four-year graduation rate of 52 percent and a six-year rate of 77 percent. 5,835 freshmen begin studies there every year. Of that group, 1,342 will not graduate within six years. Ohio State, Indiana University, Florida State, and Iowa lose a similar proportion of each class. At the University of Wisconsin at Madison, historically one of America’s greatest public universities, only 48 percent of undergraduates make it through in four years, though over 30 percent more finish within six years. Yet this is the top, the shiny part of the iceberg that rises above sea level. At some state colleges—and in the for-profit sector—the majority gives up long before graduation day. America, once the world leader in educating its population, is now tenth.
Dropping out may not always be the worst fate: sometimes staying in proves costlier. For whether students lose interest or leave their places, they and their families are now in hock to the eyeballs. During the great expansion period of the late 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of Americans with college and university degrees increased rapidly. So did the practice of requiring a degree for many positions for which the universities provided no technical training. So, finally, did the size of public investment, which came to provide the funds for most higher education. Since states financed a large share of university budgets from tax revenues, tuition charges remained low. Students could borrow the modest amount of money needed to pay their share of tuition, work enough hours to earn what they needed to live on, and still graduate in good order, with only modest debts. If they dropped out, they faced financial difficulties, but not catastrophe, since the amounts involved remained small.
Since the Reagan revolution, however—as Christopher Newfield shows in his detailed study of the California university system—states have transferred more and more of the costs of education from their own budgets to those of students and their families. Flagship state universities set their prices below those of elite private colleges. But they are not cheap by any other standard. At the University of Michigan, an in-state freshman will face total expenses of $25,204, a senior $26,810. At Penn State, an in-state freshman will pay $25,416 for tuition, fees, and living expenses this year. In a great many cases, family savings, student earnings, and scholarship aid fall short of these amounts, and students and their parents must borrow the rest. This year, students who borrow in order to study, as two thirds do, will end up on average owing $33,798 when they graduate—twice as much as the average debt ten years ago. So much for those four relaxed years in college, all too often purchased at the expense of ten subsequent years or more in debt peonage.
Americans, as Malcolm Harris recently pointed out, now owe almost a trillion dollars in student loans, more than they owe in credit card debt. Student debt, he explained, “is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits.” The burden is distributed by the reverse of the Matthew principle: to him who hath not, no one gives anything. Poor students and students of color borrow more than white students. They also, perhaps because they know little about them, make less use than they could of the federal Stafford and Parent Plus programs, which are relatively cheap; they are more dependant on private lenders whom Dante would have consigned, with credit card administrators, to the lowest circle of the Inferno.
All this to pay for an education that—as we have already seen—means little, intellectually, to many of those who are courting debtors’ prison to pay for it. The unkindest cut of all, of course, is that those who drop out must still carry the full burden of the loans that so many of them have taken out—even though they will, in all probability, earn less and fare worse in hard times than graduates. Yet even unemployment among graduates has been rising—as have rates of student loan default.
Is the higher education bubble about to pop? I don’t know. The more thoughtful writers warn against monocausal explanations. Bowen and his colleagues, for example, test the effects of student loans on attrition rates. They conclude that it is not clear that debt is a primary cause of student failure. Still, these developments are interwoven, in the experience of many students if not in the intentions of legislators. Imagine what it’s like to be a normal student nowadays. You did well—even very well—in high school. But you arrive at university with little experience in research and writing and little sense of what your classes have to do with your life plans. You start your first year deep in debt, with more in prospect. You work at Target or a fast-food outlet to pay for your living expenses. You live in a vast, shabby dorm or a huge, flimsy off-campus apartment complex, where your single with bath provides both privacy and isolation. And you see professors from a great distance, in space as well as culture: from the back of a vast dark auditorium, full of your peers checking Facebook on their laptops.
It’s no wonder, in these circumstances, that many students never really internalize the new demands and standards of university work. Instead they drift from course to course, looking for entertainment and easy grades. Nor is it surprising that many aren’t ready when trouble comes. Students drink too much alcohol, smoke too much marijuana, play too many computer games, wreck cars, become pregnant, get overwhelmed trying to help anorexic roommates, and too often lose the modest but vital support previously provided by a parent who has been laid off. Older students—and these days most are older than traditional university age—often have to work full-time and care for children or parents, or both. Those likeliest to encounter these problems are also the ones who haven’t been schooled since birth to find the thread that can lead them through the labyrinths of the bureaucracy. They aren’t confident that they will see an invitingly open door, where a friendly adviser or professor is eager to help them, and they don’t have parents hovering, eager to find that helper for them.
Happily, many students not only survive but flourish in the teeth of these obstacles. Many faculty members and administrators do their best to help. University cultures, like politics, are local. Many state schools are floundering—for example, the much-ballyhooed Arizona States. But many manage to cap class sizes and keep professors busy teaching. Dropouts and graduates differ, but they’re not the drowned and saved. Some transfer to other universities. Some join the military, straighten out their lives, and come back, powered by the GI Bill, to graduate too late to be counted with their class. Some find secretarial positions to support their kids, and earn BAs and better jobs in middle life. But those cases are exceptional.
After such knowledge, what forgiveness? The system runs, in part, on its failures. Administrators count on the tuition paid, from borrowed money, by undergraduates who they know will drop out before they use up many services. To provide teaching they exploit instructors still in graduate school, many of whom they know will also drop out and not demand tenure-track jobs. Faculty, once they have found a berth, often become blind to the problems and deaf to the cries of their own indentured students. And even where the will to do better is present, the means are often used for very different ends.
In many universities, finally, the sideshows have taken over the big tent. Competitive sports consume vast amounts of energy and money, some of which could be used to improve conditions for students. It’s hard not to be miserable when watching what pursuit of football glory has done to Rutgers, which has many excellent departments and should be—given the wealth of New Jersey—an East Coast Berkeley or Michigan. The university spends $26.9 million a year subsidizing its athletic programs. Meanwhile faculty salaries have been capped and raises canceled across the board. Desk telephones were recently removed from the offices of the historians. Repairs have been postponed, and classroom buildings, in constant use from early morning until late at night, have become shabbier and shabbier.
When critics argued that it made no sense to support football at the expense of teaching, an official spokesman replied: “The university’s direct support to athletics represents only about 1 percent of the Rutgers budget.” Presumably he counted on readers not to know that in any large organization’s budget, the entire amount of money that is not committed years in advance is no more than 1 or 2 percent—or, to put it more specifically, that athletics has swallowed the money that could otherwise have been used to improve the university’s core activities. Christopher Newfield is not the only sober, informed observer who believes that political elites are deliberately attacking middle-class education.
Perhaps it’s not a crisis. After all, as many observers have pointed out, this is the way we live now, and room remains for exceptions and for hope. Still, the dark hordes of forgotten students who leave the university as Napoleon’s army left Russia, uninspired by their courses, wounded in many cases by what they experience as their own failures, weighed down by their debts, need to be seen and heard. Perhaps some of those who write seriously about universities could stop worrying so much about who gets into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton and start worrying about the much larger numbers who don’t make it through Illinois and West Virginia, Vermont and Texas. It would also be instructive to see engaged teachers like Anthony Kronman, author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life (2007), a recent polemic against the corruption of the humanities, concern themselves with the concrete situation in which most American students find themselves. Polemics about the death of the humanities, however eloquent, won’t remedy the inhumanities that thousands of students encounter, predictably, year by year.
Best of all would be for enterprising publishers to find curious writers and have them describe some universities and colleges, in detail, with all their defects. The polemical books, even those that have some substance, end up slinging mud—which, as Huckleberry Finn pointed out to Tom Sawyer, isn’t argument—more often than laying out the evidence. The empirical studies, with a very few exceptions, are deliberately cast in such general terms, and written in such a value- and metaphor-free style, that they won’t reach anyone without a professional interest. Neither sort would give an intelligent outsider—say, a parent or student, a regent or a trustee—a vivid picture of a year’s life and work at a college or university, as it is experienced by all parties; much less a lucid explanation of how finance and pedagogy, bad intentions and good execution shape one another in the academic world.
It must be fun to howl “Read Your Greeks” and denounce evil conspiracies. But public discussion and scrutiny would become much more productive if informed writers captured the texture and flavor of the American university as convincingly as Thomas Ricks, Evan Wright, Elizabeth Samet, and others have done for segments of the military. The novelists discovered this territory long ago. Where are the great journalists? They will find students who manage to do excellent work and many more cases of wasted possibilities, and they might gain some insight into why.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Memories of the Bush Administration
November 3, 2011
Memories of the Bush Administration
By ALAN BRINKLEY, New York Times
KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
A Memoir
By Donald Rumsfeld
Illustrated. 815 pp. Sentinel. $36
IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
Illustrated. 565 pp. Threshold Editions. $35
[JB Note: My unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell informing him of my decision to leave the US Foreign Service, as a gesture of opposition to the planned war in Iraq at. See also my "Too Parochial for Empire: The Bush Administration Conquers Washington," TomDispatch (2007)]
The administration of George W. Bush has already produced a remarkable body of contemporary history from a large group of talented journalists and writers — Jane Mayer, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Susan Faludi, Seymour M. Hersh, James Mann and many others. But in the last year, several members of the Bush administration have retaliated with books of their own. Among the most significant are former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Known and Unknown” and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “In My Time,” memoirs by perhaps the two most important figures (other than the president) in the years of terrorism and war. Both books have received mostly negative reviews — largely deserved. Rumsfeld’s book is dense and bloated, although modestly candid. Cheney’s is clearly written (with help from his daughter Liz Cheney), but with the exception of its last chapters, dry, earnest and dull. None of this seems to have had much impact on their sales. Both spent time at the top of the best-seller lists.
Political memoirs are normally unsurprising, but these two books are unusual for their defensiveness and occasional combativeness in the face of the broad popular contempt so many people expressed while Rumsfeld and Cheney were in office. The two men present similar arguments. Both rarely confess to making mistakes, though they often write sharply about others who have. But the most important question that these books raise is the one of their credibility.
That the two memoirs were published in the same year and are in many ways alike should not be surprising. Rumsfeld and Cheney have had a long and intimate relationship stretching back to the Nixon administration and into the present. But even before they met, they followed similar paths into politics and government.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were the sons of middle-class families — Rumsfeld raised in Chicago, Cheney in Nebraska and Wyoming. Both attended public high schools, excelled in athletics and enrolled in prestigious colleges. Rumsfeld attended Princeton, where he was a successful athlete and a popular social figure. Cheney went to Yale, but after two unsuccessful years moved to the University of Wyoming, followed by graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he hoped to get a Ph.D. in political science and become an academic.
Rumsfeld, who is nine years older than Cheney, became a member of Congress in 1962, while Cheney was still struggling through college. But in the early 1970s, their paths crossed, and they soon became close colleagues and friends. The relationship began when Cheney was a young, eager intern looking for a job in the Nixon White House. Rumsfeld — having abandoned a brief career in Congress — was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He hired Cheney as an aide — the beginning of a Horatio Alger-like rise — and their partnership shaped each other’s careers for decades afterward. In the aftermath of Watergate, Rumsfeld became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and took Cheney with him as his “stalwart assistant.” When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense in 1975, Cheney replaced him as Ford’s chief. Both men were Republicans with conservative leanings. But for many years, during which they often served simultaneously, they seemed to many people to be smart, pragmatic, nonideological young men who fit well into the moderate Ford administration.
When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, their paths diverged. Cheney was elected to Congress in 1978, where he remained throughout the Reagan administration. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed him secretary of defense, where he became a competent and generally respected figure. Rumsfeld moved into the private sector and remained there for 24 years, while staying active in a wide range of public service committees and commissions.
After the first President Bush left office, Cheney also moved into the private sector, spending time at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington before becoming the C.E.O. of Halliburton, one of the largest oil and construction companies in the world, with connections to militaries in several countries. When George W. Bush chose him as his vice president in 2000, Cheney helped persuade the new president to name Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense. Following the election, there was considerable relief that Cheney and Rumsfeld would be serving the new president, given the doubts that were being voiced about Bush’s capabilities. Even many Democrats were pleased that these competent, experienced figures would play a large role in the new administration.
Shortly before his election in 2000, when the vision of “compassionate conservatism” still seemed plausible, Bush said, “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’ ” But after the 9/11 attacks — eight months into his presidency — everything changed. “We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney recalled. “We are dealing here with evil people.”
A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to “get it right this time.” Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge — the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a “war on terror.”
But what did a “war on terror” mean? For Cheney and many others, and eventually for President Bush, it seemed to mean only one thing — a regime change that would send a message through the Middle East that, as Paul Wolfowitz predicted, would undermine radical regimes and build new ones more consistent with American ideals. Although it was reasonably clear that no political regime had organized the 9/11 attacks, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush came to believe that the regime most in need of destruction was Iraq, even though there was no evidence that the Iraqis had played any role in the terrorist events. By late 2002, the Iraq war was on a fast track, justified by Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. There was resistance from some members of Congress, some United Nations investigators and some individuals in the State Department. But Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were among the most determined people in the administration to promote the assault on Iraq, were not deterred by the fact that the United States had never before launched a pre-emptive war. Their public argument was the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it soon became clear that there were no such weapons.
This discovery caused a political earthquake worldwide. The war now seemed to have no rationale at all, but Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly came up with new ones. Cheney in particular takes no responsibility for this remarkable failure of intelligence. Instead, he argues that the absence of weapons did not make Iraq any less dangerous, and perhaps more. As he often does throughout his book, he argues through others — in this case, David Kay, who worked on the Iraq survey group that was sent to find W.M.D.’s. Cheney quotes him: “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war.” Charles Duelfer, another survey group member, insisted (with no visible evidence) that “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability . . . after sanctions were removed.”
Rumsfeld brusquely dismisses his failure to provide sufficient troops to avoid what soon became an out-of-control insurgency that continued for years. He responds in his book, as he did at the time, “Stuff happens,” a phrase he often used when confronted by failures. Among the stuff that happened was the absence of body armor in a highly dangerous country. Soldiers begged for it in vain for months during his occasional visits to Iraq. Rumsfeld’s response was that we had to fight with the Army we had. He is still fighting on the cheap, defending himself with his favorite phrase — “known unknowns” (which is even borrowed for the title of his book). It allows him to claim that it was all but impossible to determine what the military needed. But he also presents himself as realistic enough to understand that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner and his claim that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” would “haunt his presidency until the day it ended.” And he is candid enough to admit that he should have realized that the war would be a long and difficult one, that democracy in Iraq would be unlikely and that the American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had led the country into chaos by recklessly and incompetently disbanding the Iraqi police and military, and the Baath Party government.
The fact of a war of choice was perhaps bad enough. But the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan war as well) were fought not just by weapons and battles. They were also fought by torture. Rumsfeld brushes away the charges of torture in his book by noting either that the Defense Department did not participate, or that the techniques it employed were “legal and humane.” Cheney, however, makes clear from the start that “we would have to work ‘the dark side if you will,’ ” a statement he continues to defend in his book.
Cheney insists that the “enhanced interrogation” that he helped create was not torture. Waterboarding, he has said, was humane and effective because a few lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel said so. Many of their colleagues were aghast, but they were mostly ignored and in some cases dismissed. Even some high-ranking military officers called waterboarding criminal torture. So did Senators John McCain (no stranger to torture) and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans. Cheney passingly mentions other forms of enhanced interrogation in his book, but he does not describe what they were. Nor does he make any mention of the many terrorist suspects who were turned over through “extraordinary rendition” to other countries, where there was no inhibition to using torture.
By 2006, the Bush administration was falling apart. The president’s poll numbers were falling almost by the day. Democrats were on their way to winning majorities in both houses of Congress. Cheney — the most powerful vice president in American history — was becoming an increasingly lonely figure within the White House. Bush decided to make changes — in large part because of the administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (In his book, Cheney blames the failure on Kathleen Blanco, the Louisiana governor, for dithering.) Among the dismissed, over Cheney’s strong objections, was Rumsfeld. (The president timidly delegated Cheney to give him the news. Rumsfeld stepped down without complaint.) Cheney, of course, could not be fired as vice president. But he had now become the most toxic figure in the White House.
Cheney’s chief of staff and enforcer, Scooter Libby, was accused of leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, whose husband had challenged the claim that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. Libby was later convicted of perjury. The president commuted his sentence, but as Cheney writes, “I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president.” In the last weeks of Bush’s presidency, he asked again and, when denied, says that the president had made a “grave error”; he told Bush, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”
That was not the only time Cheney was repudiated. In 2007, Cheney pushed hard to bomb a nuclear reactor in Syria. When the president asked who agreed with the vice president, no one, including the president, raised a hand — a hard defeat for a man whom Karl Rove had long called “management.” “I was a lone voice,” Cheney pathetically writes. (The Israelis successfully bombed the Syrian reactor several months later.) By then, Cheney was one of the most unpopular political figures in America, often ridiculed as “Darth Vader.” The polls showed an approval rating of 13 percent.
Cheney did not take his loss of power easily, and the final chapters of his book are filled with bile and contempt. It was no secret that he had been a critic of Colin Powell through much of Powell’s tenure as secretary of state. He writes that Powell was “not only failing to support the president’s policies” but was “openly disdainful of them.” (Some people in the foundering administration believed that “the president’s policies” were often Cheney’s.) He “was particularly disappointed in the way” Powell “handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. . . . But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection.” And he was at least equally contemptuous of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She had, he writes, “made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds.” Cheney consistently complains about what he considered her weaknesses. He also goes after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, claiming that he was often speaking “for himself and not reflecting U.S. policy.” By the end, he even seems to be disappointed with Bush himself — a disappointment that was probably reciprocated. Although Cheney is cautious in his criticism of the president, it seems clear that he thinks Bush had slipped back into what the vice president calls a pre-9/11 mode.
Brent Scowcroft, Gerald Ford’s and George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, said about the man he had worked with in two previous administrations: “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” What had turned this capable, pragmatic, respected figure into the harsh and belligerent man who seemed toward the end to believe that only he understood the world of his time? Part of it was that he had become “really conservative,” as he told President Bush when he was invited to join the ticket in 2000. Certainly, he was convinced that 9/11 had dramatically changed the world and had radically transformed America’s role in it. And he was disturbed that so many people did not share his views. He also had serious heart problems through much of his life, which intensified during his tenure as vice president, and though he courageously fought to keep going, his poor health may have contributed to what Scowcroft considered his change.
The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.” Even Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his preposterous hints that he would run for president, gave an interview in which he accused Cheney of “lying.”
Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney served through many crises and many disasters. It is not surprising that in the turbulent post-9/11 years there would be contention, disappointment, failure, sniping and broken friendships. If they had written candidly about these battles, their books would be of real interest. Instead, both men have stuck to their defensive postures. Cheney said in a television interview that his book would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” For the most part, the explosions were tame. But perhaps the most remarkable explosion was one of Cheney’s own statements. Toward the end of his book, he boldly describes the Iraq war — one of the most disastrous events of recent decades — as a great American triumph. The fiasco that nearly destroyed Bush’s presidency was, according to Cheney, “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency — the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.” If that statement isn’t an “explosion,” it would be hard to know what is.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”
Memories of the Bush Administration
By ALAN BRINKLEY, New York Times
KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
A Memoir
By Donald Rumsfeld
Illustrated. 815 pp. Sentinel. $36
IN MY TIME
A Personal and Political Memoir
By Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney
Illustrated. 565 pp. Threshold Editions. $35
[JB Note: My unanswered email to Secretary of State Colin Powell informing him of my decision to leave the US Foreign Service, as a gesture of opposition to the planned war in Iraq at. See also my "Too Parochial for Empire: The Bush Administration Conquers Washington," TomDispatch (2007)]
The administration of George W. Bush has already produced a remarkable body of contemporary history from a large group of talented journalists and writers — Jane Mayer, Thomas E. Ricks, James Risen, Ron Suskind, Susan Faludi, Seymour M. Hersh, James Mann and many others. But in the last year, several members of the Bush administration have retaliated with books of their own. Among the most significant are former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s “Known and Unknown” and former Vice President Dick Cheney’s “In My Time,” memoirs by perhaps the two most important figures (other than the president) in the years of terrorism and war. Both books have received mostly negative reviews — largely deserved. Rumsfeld’s book is dense and bloated, although modestly candid. Cheney’s is clearly written (with help from his daughter Liz Cheney), but with the exception of its last chapters, dry, earnest and dull. None of this seems to have had much impact on their sales. Both spent time at the top of the best-seller lists.
Political memoirs are normally unsurprising, but these two books are unusual for their defensiveness and occasional combativeness in the face of the broad popular contempt so many people expressed while Rumsfeld and Cheney were in office. The two men present similar arguments. Both rarely confess to making mistakes, though they often write sharply about others who have. But the most important question that these books raise is the one of their credibility.
That the two memoirs were published in the same year and are in many ways alike should not be surprising. Rumsfeld and Cheney have had a long and intimate relationship stretching back to the Nixon administration and into the present. But even before they met, they followed similar paths into politics and government.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were the sons of middle-class families — Rumsfeld raised in Chicago, Cheney in Nebraska and Wyoming. Both attended public high schools, excelled in athletics and enrolled in prestigious colleges. Rumsfeld attended Princeton, where he was a successful athlete and a popular social figure. Cheney went to Yale, but after two unsuccessful years moved to the University of Wyoming, followed by graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin, where he hoped to get a Ph.D. in political science and become an academic.
Rumsfeld, who is nine years older than Cheney, became a member of Congress in 1962, while Cheney was still struggling through college. But in the early 1970s, their paths crossed, and they soon became close colleagues and friends. The relationship began when Cheney was a young, eager intern looking for a job in the Nixon White House. Rumsfeld — having abandoned a brief career in Congress — was director of the Office of Economic Opportunity. He hired Cheney as an aide — the beginning of a Horatio Alger-like rise — and their partnership shaped each other’s careers for decades afterward. In the aftermath of Watergate, Rumsfeld became President Gerald Ford’s chief of staff, and took Cheney with him as his “stalwart assistant.” When Rumsfeld was appointed secretary of defense in 1975, Cheney replaced him as Ford’s chief. Both men were Republicans with conservative leanings. But for many years, during which they often served simultaneously, they seemed to many people to be smart, pragmatic, nonideological young men who fit well into the moderate Ford administration.
When Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, their paths diverged. Cheney was elected to Congress in 1978, where he remained throughout the Reagan administration. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush appointed him secretary of defense, where he became a competent and generally respected figure. Rumsfeld moved into the private sector and remained there for 24 years, while staying active in a wide range of public service committees and commissions.
After the first President Bush left office, Cheney also moved into the private sector, spending time at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington before becoming the C.E.O. of Halliburton, one of the largest oil and construction companies in the world, with connections to militaries in several countries. When George W. Bush chose him as his vice president in 2000, Cheney helped persuade the new president to name Rumsfeld as his secretary of defense. Following the election, there was considerable relief that Cheney and Rumsfeld would be serving the new president, given the doubts that were being voiced about Bush’s capabilities. Even many Democrats were pleased that these competent, experienced figures would play a large role in the new administration.
Shortly before his election in 2000, when the vision of “compassionate conservatism” still seemed plausible, Bush said, “I just don’t think it’s the role of the United States to walk into a country and say, ‘We do it this way; so should you.’ ” But after the 9/11 attacks — eight months into his presidency — everything changed. “We were embarking on a fundamentally new policy,” Cheney recalled. “We are dealing here with evil people.”
A group of Republican neoconservatives and other political and government figures quickly gathered not only to respond to the 9/11 attacks but also, as they saw it, to restore the nation’s confidence and ideals. Cheney and Rumsfeld had privately deplored the decline of American power in the Nixon and Ford administrations during the Vietnam War. They saw in 9/11 an opportunity to revive American power and superiority, or as Cheney put it, to “get it right this time.” Much of what happened after the attacks would very likely have occurred no matter who was in charge — the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the building up of intelligence organizations and other changes. But from the start, Cheney and Rumsfeld began pushing for a much wider change, what the president called a “war on terror.”
But what did a “war on terror” mean? For Cheney and many others, and eventually for President Bush, it seemed to mean only one thing — a regime change that would send a message through the Middle East that, as Paul Wolfowitz predicted, would undermine radical regimes and build new ones more consistent with American ideals. Although it was reasonably clear that no political regime had organized the 9/11 attacks, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bush came to believe that the regime most in need of destruction was Iraq, even though there was no evidence that the Iraqis had played any role in the terrorist events. By late 2002, the Iraq war was on a fast track, justified by Saddam Hussein’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. There was resistance from some members of Congress, some United Nations investigators and some individuals in the State Department. But Cheney and Rumsfeld, who were among the most determined people in the administration to promote the assault on Iraq, were not deterred by the fact that the United States had never before launched a pre-emptive war. Their public argument was the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But it soon became clear that there were no such weapons.
This discovery caused a political earthquake worldwide. The war now seemed to have no rationale at all, but Cheney and Rumsfeld quickly came up with new ones. Cheney in particular takes no responsibility for this remarkable failure of intelligence. Instead, he argues that the absence of weapons did not make Iraq any less dangerous, and perhaps more. As he often does throughout his book, he argues through others — in this case, David Kay, who worked on the Iraq survey group that was sent to find W.M.D.’s. Cheney quotes him: “I actually think what we learned during the inspections made Iraq a more dangerous place, potentially, than in fact we thought it was even before the war.” Charles Duelfer, another survey group member, insisted (with no visible evidence) that “Saddam wanted to recreate Iraq’s W.M.D. capability . . . after sanctions were removed.”
Rumsfeld brusquely dismisses his failure to provide sufficient troops to avoid what soon became an out-of-control insurgency that continued for years. He responds in his book, as he did at the time, “Stuff happens,” a phrase he often used when confronted by failures. Among the stuff that happened was the absence of body armor in a highly dangerous country. Soldiers begged for it in vain for months during his occasional visits to Iraq. Rumsfeld’s response was that we had to fight with the Army we had. He is still fighting on the cheap, defending himself with his favorite phrase — “known unknowns” (which is even borrowed for the title of his book). It allows him to claim that it was all but impossible to determine what the military needed. But he also presents himself as realistic enough to understand that Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner and his claim that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended” would “haunt his presidency until the day it ended.” And he is candid enough to admit that he should have realized that the war would be a long and difficult one, that democracy in Iraq would be unlikely and that the American administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, had led the country into chaos by recklessly and incompetently disbanding the Iraqi police and military, and the Baath Party government.
The fact of a war of choice was perhaps bad enough. But the Iraq war (and the Afghanistan war as well) were fought not just by weapons and battles. They were also fought by torture. Rumsfeld brushes away the charges of torture in his book by noting either that the Defense Department did not participate, or that the techniques it employed were “legal and humane.” Cheney, however, makes clear from the start that “we would have to work ‘the dark side if you will,’ ” a statement he continues to defend in his book.
Cheney insists that the “enhanced interrogation” that he helped create was not torture. Waterboarding, he has said, was humane and effective because a few lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel said so. Many of their colleagues were aghast, but they were mostly ignored and in some cases dismissed. Even some high-ranking military officers called waterboarding criminal torture. So did Senators John McCain (no stranger to torture) and Lindsey Graham, both Republicans. Cheney passingly mentions other forms of enhanced interrogation in his book, but he does not describe what they were. Nor does he make any mention of the many terrorist suspects who were turned over through “extraordinary rendition” to other countries, where there was no inhibition to using torture.
By 2006, the Bush administration was falling apart. The president’s poll numbers were falling almost by the day. Democrats were on their way to winning majorities in both houses of Congress. Cheney — the most powerful vice president in American history — was becoming an increasingly lonely figure within the White House. Bush decided to make changes — in large part because of the administration’s incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005. (In his book, Cheney blames the failure on Kathleen Blanco, the Louisiana governor, for dithering.) Among the dismissed, over Cheney’s strong objections, was Rumsfeld. (The president timidly delegated Cheney to give him the news. Rumsfeld stepped down without complaint.) Cheney, of course, could not be fired as vice president. But he had now become the most toxic figure in the White House.
Cheney’s chief of staff and enforcer, Scooter Libby, was accused of leaking the identity of Valerie Plame, a C.I.A. operative, whose husband had challenged the claim that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. Libby was later convicted of perjury. The president commuted his sentence, but as Cheney writes, “I felt strongly that Scooter deserved a pardon, and I broached the subject on numerous occasions with the president.” In the last weeks of Bush’s presidency, he asked again and, when denied, says that the president had made a “grave error”; he told Bush, “you are leaving a good man wounded on the field of battle.”
That was not the only time Cheney was repudiated. In 2007, Cheney pushed hard to bomb a nuclear reactor in Syria. When the president asked who agreed with the vice president, no one, including the president, raised a hand — a hard defeat for a man whom Karl Rove had long called “management.” “I was a lone voice,” Cheney pathetically writes. (The Israelis successfully bombed the Syrian reactor several months later.) By then, Cheney was one of the most unpopular political figures in America, often ridiculed as “Darth Vader.” The polls showed an approval rating of 13 percent.
Cheney did not take his loss of power easily, and the final chapters of his book are filled with bile and contempt. It was no secret that he had been a critic of Colin Powell through much of Powell’s tenure as secretary of state. He writes that Powell was “not only failing to support the president’s policies” but was “openly disdainful of them.” (Some people in the foundering administration believed that “the president’s policies” were often Cheney’s.) He “was particularly disappointed in the way” Powell “handled policy differences. Time and again I heard that he was opposed to the war in Iraq. . . . But never once in any meeting did I hear him voice objection.” And he was at least equally contemptuous of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. She had, he writes, “made concession after concession to the North Koreans and turned a blind eye to their misdeeds.” Cheney consistently complains about what he considered her weaknesses. He also goes after Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, claiming that he was often speaking “for himself and not reflecting U.S. policy.” By the end, he even seems to be disappointed with Bush himself — a disappointment that was probably reciprocated. Although Cheney is cautious in his criticism of the president, it seems clear that he thinks Bush had slipped back into what the vice president calls a pre-9/11 mode.
Brent Scowcroft, Gerald Ford’s and George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser, said about the man he had worked with in two previous administrations: “Dick Cheney I don’t know anymore.” What had turned this capable, pragmatic, respected figure into the harsh and belligerent man who seemed toward the end to believe that only he understood the world of his time? Part of it was that he had become “really conservative,” as he told President Bush when he was invited to join the ticket in 2000. Certainly, he was convinced that 9/11 had dramatically changed the world and had radically transformed America’s role in it. And he was disturbed that so many people did not share his views. He also had serious heart problems through much of his life, which intensified during his tenure as vice president, and though he courageously fought to keep going, his poor health may have contributed to what Scowcroft considered his change.
The angry responses to Cheney’s book are evidence of how embattled the Bush White House became in its last years, and how central Cheney’s role was. Colin Powell has accused Cheney of taking “cheap shots” in his book. He has challenged Cheney’s claim that he had forced Powell out of the State Department. Powell himself had long made clear that he would serve only four years, and he charged Cheney with lying. Powell also called Cheney’s statements in the book “the kind of headline I would expect to come out of a gossip columnist.” He added, “I think Dick overshot the runway.” Rice responded to Cheney by describing his book as “utterly misleading” and an “attack on my integrity.” Even Donald Trump, in the aftermath of his preposterous hints that he would run for president, gave an interview in which he accused Cheney of “lying.”
Together, Rumsfeld and Cheney served through many crises and many disasters. It is not surprising that in the turbulent post-9/11 years there would be contention, disappointment, failure, sniping and broken friendships. If they had written candidly about these battles, their books would be of real interest. Instead, both men have stuck to their defensive postures. Cheney said in a television interview that his book would have “heads exploding all over Washington.” For the most part, the explosions were tame. But perhaps the most remarkable explosion was one of Cheney’s own statements. Toward the end of his book, he boldly describes the Iraq war — one of the most disastrous events of recent decades — as a great American triumph. The fiasco that nearly destroyed Bush’s presidency was, according to Cheney, “one of the most significant accomplishments of George Bush’s presidency — the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.” If that statement isn’t an “explosion,” it would be hard to know what is.
Alan Brinkley is the Allan Nevins professor of history at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of “The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century.”
Sunday, October 30, 2011
In Defense of the Humanities - The Case of Steve Jobs: NYT piece by Walter Isaacson
October 29, 2011
The Genius of Jobs
By WALTER ISAACSON, New York Times
ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.
But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.
So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.
He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)
Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit telling God what to do.)
Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.
Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.
In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.
In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.
In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.
This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.
China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
Walter Isaacson is the author of “Steve Jobs.” [and the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors]
The Genius of Jobs
By WALTER ISAACSON, New York Times
ONE of the questions I wrestled with when writing about Steve Jobs was how smart he was. On the surface, this should not have been much of an issue. You’d assume the obvious answer was: he was really, really smart. Maybe even worth three or four reallys. After all, he was the most innovative and successful business leader of our era and embodied the Silicon Valley dream writ large: he created a start-up in his parents’ garage and built it into the world’s most valuable company.
But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously. I thought about how Bill Gates would have gone click-click-click and logically nailed the answer in 15 seconds, and also how Mr. Gates devoured science books as a vacation pleasure. But then something else occurred to me: Mr. Gates never made the iPod. Instead, he made the Zune.
So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally. Instead, he was a genius. That may seem like a silly word game, but in fact his success dramatizes an interesting distinction between intelligence and genius. His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical. They were sparked by intuition, not analytic rigor. Trained in Zen Buddhism, Mr. Jobs came to value experiential wisdom over empirical analysis. He didn’t study data or crunch numbers but like a pathfinder, he could sniff the winds and sense what lay ahead.
He told me he began to appreciate the power of intuition, in contrast to what he called “Western rational thought,” when he wandered around India after dropping out of college. “The people in the Indian countryside don’t use their intellect like we do,” he said. “They use their intuition instead ... Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect, in my opinion. That’s had a big impact on my work.”
Mr. Jobs’s intuition was based not on conventional learning but on experiential wisdom. He also had a lot of imagination and knew how to apply it. As Einstein said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
Einstein is, of course, the true exemplar of genius. He had contemporaries who could probably match him in pure intellectual firepower when it came to mathematical and analytic processing. Henri Poincaré, for example, first came up with some of the components of special relativity, and David Hilbert was able to grind out equations for general relativity around the same time Einstein did. But neither had the imaginative genius to make the full creative leap at the core of their theories, namely that there is no such thing as absolute time and that gravity is a warping of the fabric of space-time. (O.K., it’s not that simple, but that’s why he was Einstein and we’re not.)
Einstein had the elusive qualities of genius, which included that intuition and imagination that allowed him to think differently (or, as Mr. Jobs’s ads said, to Think Different.) Although he was not particularly religious, Einstein described this intuitive genius as the ability to read the mind of God. When assessing a theory, he would ask himself, Is this the way that God would design the universe? And he expressed his discomfort with quantum mechanics, which is based on the idea that probability plays a governing role in the universe by declaring that he could not believe God would play dice. (At one physics conference, Niels Bohr was prompted to urge Einstein to quit telling God what to do.)
Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.
Mr. Jobs’s genius wasn’t, as even his fanboys admit, in the same quantum orbit as Einstein’s. So it’s probably best to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch and call it ingenuity. Bill Gates is super-smart, but Steve Jobs was super-ingenious. The primary distinction, I think, is the ability to apply creativity and aesthetic sensibilities to a challenge.
In the world of invention and innovation, that means combining an appreciation of the humanities with an understanding of science — connecting artistry to technology, poetry to processors. This was Mr. Jobs’s specialty. “I always thought of myself as a humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics,” he said. “Then I read something that one of my heroes, Edwin Land of Polaroid, said about the importance of people who could stand at the intersection of humanities and sciences, and I decided that’s what I wanted to do.”
The ability to merge creativity with technology depends on one’s ability to be emotionally attuned to others. Mr. Jobs could be petulant and unkind in dealing with other people, which caused some to think he lacked basic emotional awareness. In fact, it was the opposite. He could size people up, understand their inner thoughts, cajole them, intimidate them, target their deepest vulnerabilities, and delight them at will. He knew, intuitively, how to create products that pleased, interfaces that were friendly, and marketing messages that were enticing.
In the annals of ingenuity, new ideas are only part of the equation. Genius requires execution. When others produced boxy computers with intimidating interfaces that confronted users with unfriendly green prompts that said things like “C:\>,” Mr. Jobs saw there was a market for an interface like a sunny playroom. Hence, the Macintosh. Sure, Xerox came up with the graphical desktop metaphor, but the personal computer it built was a flop and it did not spark the home computer revolution. Between conception and creation, T. S. Eliot observed, there falls the shadow.
In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious.
This depended, in part, on his ability to intuit the relationships between different things. When he invented the battery, he experimented with it to produce sparks that he and his friends used to kill a turkey for their end of season feast. In his journal, he recorded all the similarities between such sparks and lightning during a thunderstorm, then declared “Let the experiment be made.” So he flew a kite in the rain, drew electricity from the heavens, and ended up inventing the lightning rod. Like Mr. Jobs, Franklin enjoyed the concept of applied creativity — taking clever ideas and smart designs and applying them to useful devices.
China and India are likely to produce many rigorous analytical thinkers and knowledgeable technologists. But smart and educated people don’t always spawn innovation. America’s advantage, if it continues to have one, will be that it can produce people who are also more creative and imaginative, those who know how to stand at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. That is the formula for true innovation, as Steve Jobs’s career showed.
Walter Isaacson is the author of “Steve Jobs.” [and the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors]
Saturday, October 29, 2011
Public Diplomacy: Suggested US-Israel conference
As the growing tension between the U.S. and Israel never ceases to end, despite hopeful intervals on the healing of the relationship, may I suggest that a think-tank with a public-diplomacy focus organize a symposium on the slightly provocative (perhaps politically incorrect, but I hope that would create an "honest" intellectual buzz) topic:
"What's Israel Done for (to?) the United States?"
(Of course, there could be also be a session on "What's the United States Done for (to?) Israel.")
The discussion on this topic would, assuredly, bring the attention of the media -- and, perhaps, the public -- in both countries, leading, let us hope, to a more honest, constructive relation between the two countries.
"What's Israel Done for (to?) the United States?"
(Of course, there could be also be a session on "What's the United States Done for (to?) Israel.")
The discussion on this topic would, assuredly, bring the attention of the media -- and, perhaps, the public -- in both countries, leading, let us hope, to a more honest, constructive relation between the two countries.
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