ABlog

Memorial Day Weekend: not, for me, the official start of summer but rather the start of “my time.” They don’t own me and now it’s official. Classes have ended, the grades have gone in, I’ve sat through graduation, smiled at the parents and aunts and sisters and nieces, e-mailed out last comments on my students’ writing. (In fact, of
course, with e-mail nothing ever officially ends…so I just opened a message that made me sigh, from a talented young writer whose work on a novel I mentored in the last semester of her senior year. She wants me to advise her on how she can go about finding a publisher for her half-finished manuscript. Honey, I want to say, if you find one, let me know. I can't deal with my own publishing woes, let along yours. At least you're young, so maybe they'll snap you up. Run along now--good luck!--and leave me to my sorrows.

I’ve had the fight with my neighbor over her two enormous guard dogs that lunge at the short chain link fence, barking furiously, every time I tiptoe out the back door. And apparently I’ve been heard—she’s keeping them inside. So I’ve been spending time in the green, unruly back yard, messing around, transplanting herbs and annuals.

I used to think of my home and the surrounding neighborhood as a haven of sorts, a touch of the real Brooklyn, out-of-the-way but quirkily fecund in the people department, happily untouched by the competitive, gentrifying wave that has engulfed so many parts of Manhattan, and with it my employer, the New School. But this spring my ’hood has been under siege from forces remarkably similar to those that have made this past year of teaching so unpleasant. Now it's six of one and half a dozen of the other: go to work and confront the Mindlords, Reformers of curricula, Managers of diversity, Enforcers of allegiance to departmental standards imposed from above, Suppressors of students objections, Deciders of faculty fates. Come home and confront the Landlords, the folks who buy up rent stabilized buildings with the more-than- ordinarily-horrible rentier objective of driving out long-standing tenants and bringing their units up to so-called market rates. Actually, the parallel gets a little more complicated. The Mindlords of the New School have been focused on real estate, and the Landlords of my corner of Brooklyn have found potent backup in the person of a Builder, one Henry Herbst, who plans a 24-story glass tower for Lincoln Road near Ocean Avenue, about three blocks from my house and right above the Prospect Park subway stop on the “B” and “Q” trains.

Why would I compare the process under way at the New School to a kind of intellectual gentrification? Well, for one thing, it’s about appearances. The owner of a decent but unspectacular apartment building complex who wants to gentrify might refurbish the elevators, redo the lobby, put in some new landscaping and lighting on the grounds—voila! luxury housing at terrifying prices. (I watched this happen in Peter Cooper Village a few years back—first came the inconvenience of scaffolding and the creaky service elevator; before you knew it, a housing development built with government subsidies that had long been affordable for middle-class tenants was up for sale, and long-term residents feared getting pushed out.) The ruler of a “tuition-driven,” not-quite-major-league university in Greenwich Village who wants to gentrify might create a tenure system for his hitherto untenured full-time faculty—thus instilling great anxiety in junior faculty and senior term faculty alike--make some high profile hires, move increasingly toward a departmental system and away from interdisciplinarity, and make things generally tough for the practicing artists on the faculty, requiring that they either justify their contribution through market values (i.e. having a show at a trendy gallery or publishing a book that gets mainstream attention) or by making themselves look more scholarly than arty. He would likely try to develop a “more competitive” student applicant pool and would boast of rising SAT scores. He would turn graduation into a competitive rite, handing out an ever-increasing number of awards for various kinds of “excellence,” and designating the highest student achiever in each discipline. He would tout the values of traditional canons and develop uniform lists of books that “all students” in a particular field must read. He would dismantle the last remnants of academic programs that once represented a different, more progressive and critical approach to learning—even when these programs had a devoted constituency among an energetic if fractional portion of the existing student body. In order to justify this move, he would take pre-emptive action, ridiculing even the idea of “progressive education” as a copout for people who are too lazy or weak (or—could it be?—though this is not said aloud) just not smart enough to embrace legitimate scholarship and true intellectual rigor.

Like tyrants everywhere, he would heavily reward loyalists. Flaunting a distinctive mix of Bush-era opportunism (the sort that scorns “reality” as wimpy while openly celebrating the glories of nakedly instrumental power), free market ideology, and the embittered revanchism of a remnant academic aristocracy still indignant at its losses during “the Sixties,” he might justify it all by appealing to the notion of survival of the intellectually fit: Social Darwinism for the tenure track crowd. (Watch what you say and do—and especially what you think—lest you fall from the grace of “tenurability” into the ranks of immiserated adjuncts.)

The not-so-secret point of all this activity is, from an institutional perspective, hardly the love of knowledge or the fervent desire to provide our nation’s young with a stellar education, but rather the imperative to take advantage of the university’s perch in lower Manhattan, a location regarded by a large and apparently growing number of affluent youth from the hinterlands as an attractive site for their college experience. (Sadly, many of them appear to have formed their ideas of New York largely through viewing “Sex and the City” or too many “Law and Order” reruns). And so our hypothetical Mindlord would then proceed to “grow the business” (boosting enrollments and hiring like mad) at a rate hardly commensurate with either good pedagogy or prudent institutional planning. Struggling to cope with the influx of students, he would soon realize that the old, individualized approach of seminar learning wasn’t going to work, and would instead move towards lecture-based instruction. He would put in place a variety of bureaucratic procedures to insulate the university from blame for its failure to meet individual students needs—appointing clerks of diversity management, offices of disability runaround, and functionaries (known as “advisors”) to relay the academic rules to bewildered students in much the same fashion as those folks at your HMO who explain to you why your claim is being denied. As for relations with the large part-time faculty: there, too, the insertion of a layer of low-level managers to process the routine denial of union grievances would prove cost-effective.

All of these things have happened at the New School, controlled by not just one Mindlord (President, Un-indicted Vietnam War Criminal, and Iraq Invasion Booster Bob Kerrey) but a whole phalanx. The effects are starkly evident at Eugene Lang College, the formerly “progressive” and seminar-based undergraduate division where I happen to teach. But one other move takes the gentrification image from the realm of metaphor to a rather more literal description: over the last few semesters, almost everything that happens at the New School has revolved, quite literally, around real estate.

When was it that the university administration first announced plans to erect a massive tower at Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street, where the Albert List Center, popularly known as the “GF” (for Graduate Faculty) now stands? That date is lost to me in the churning mists of academic time. All I know is that, for what seems like donkey’s years, everyone at the New School has been holding his or her breath as we await the objectification--the avatar--of our newfound Excellence: the “Signature Building” promised for that site. This edifice has been touted as the solution to all the New School’s space problems (ever more acute, naturally, with the boom in admissions) and a chance to really put ourselves on the map (literally) with a 300-foot all-glass monolith, rising straight up over the entire site, another 50 feet of setback penthouse construction perched on top. While this building would be wildly out of character with the surrounding residential neighborhood (a point forcefully made by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation at a public meeting held at the New School this past spring), for those in the “chain of command,” from vice presidents to maintenance workers, it’s been clear that institutional loyalty and academic patriotism precluded any nitpicking. After all, having our very own glass tower was, so we were told, the perfect catalyst to motivate a wonderful (though disconcertingly vague) re-visualization of our academic mission. The resultant turf wars consumed a lot of energy, the various schools and departments eaten up with greedy angst over how the promised pie would get carved up by the Folks on the Eighth Floor.

In late April, the Free Press, a student newspaper based at Lang, reported that the demolition of the existing Albert List building, slated for this summer, has been moved back (supposedly to early in 2009), and that fundraising for the overall project is severely in arrears. Can it really be that the University’s “academic mission” has fallen afoul of a plunging real estate market and a tanking economy that has sent potential donors running for cover?

P.S. Late last Friday afternoon, the eve of a three-day weekend, coincidentally the favored time slot for governments to issue press releases regarding matters they would prefer receive minimal media attention, President Bob Kerrey sent an e-mail announcement to the university community to inform us that Ben Lee will be stepping aside as Provost after a two-year term. He will become Vice President for Something or Other having to do with international programs and the Provost job will be assumed by one Joseph Westphal, a Ph.D. in political science whose credentials include the chancellorship of the University of Maine and stints as head of the Army Corps of Engineers and Secretary of the Army. According to the President’s announcement, Westphal “currently is Vice President and Director of the Tishman Environmental Design Center where, working with the Office of the Provost, he established our two newest undergraduate programs – a BA and a BS – in Environmental Studies at The New School.” (How typical of the B. Kerrey mentality to choose for the head of a university effort on the environment a man with a background in the Army Corps, one of the foremost trashers of North American ecosystems, from the dams to the Everglades to the levees of New Orleans that failed during Hurricane Katrina.)

The career of a Mindlord is often a volatile thing, as witness the brief tenures of our last two Provosts. Ben Lee’s predecessor was Arjun Appadurai, who assumed his post with great fanfare in 2004 and was out roughly two years later. Maybe a Provost doesn’t really do much; maybe a steady and experienced hand on the helm of the “academic side” isn’t all that necessary. Or maybe the New School is floundering badly, at least so far as its “academic mission” is concerned. It’s pure speculation (colored, I admit, with tincture of schadenfreude) but I do have to wonder whether the questions swirling around the planned construction of a “Signature Building” for the New School played a role in Ben Lee’s early exit. Wouldn’t it be great if the woes of the real estate market put a crimp in the style of both the Mindlords who make my work life miserable and the Landlord-Builders who’ve set their greedy sights on my beloved neighborhood?

My next post will cover the nascent struggle to keep a glass tower, and galloping gentrification, out of my part of Brooklyn.