The Crisis at Cooper Union

The Cooper Union's Main Building
with student protest signs in
the windows, 2013

For most of its history, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art was free for all students who attended. Let me say that again, because I recall the first time I learned this and could not believe it. The Cooper Union, established in 1859, charged no tuition to any of the students who attended. This policy of full scholarships resulted directly from directives by its founder, industrialist Peter Cooper, who wanted to create a school along the model of France's École Polytechnique that would be open to qualified students regardless of their race, religion, sex, social status, or family wealth. This was an incredibly progressive vision 170 years ago, and would certainly qualify as such today, especially at time when most public and private institutions grow increasingly unaffordable for a large portion of the US population, leading to campus economic, social and racial-ethnic stratification and segregation. As a result of the zero-tuition policy and its excellent faculty, Cooper Union had long attracted a stellar student body and boasted of one of the highest enrollment yields in the US. Yet one thing I wondered while attending graduate school at the hyper-expensive university next door to Cooper Union was how long it could maintain its tradition of no tuition, particularly in light of New York's increasing gentrification.

It turns out that Cooper Union might have been able to maintain free tuition but for a series of moves, among them prior sales of land holdings in the West Village, and then the decision under the prior president, George Campbell, Jr., to build an admittedly acclaimed, LEED-certified, $175 million new building at 41 Cooper Square to house its engineering and art schools. This starchitect Thom Mayne-designed building was completed in 2009, and Cooper Union reported took out a fixed-rate mortgage loan, with an $81 million pre-payment penalty, to fund it, at a time when the school's revenue was basically nil beyond revenues from its $723 million endowment and annual payments it received from its ownership of the land beneath the Chrysler Building. (It had also apparently borrowed $51 million more, according to economist Felix Salmon, to fund "all the infrastructure needed to charge all those fees in the first place," along with "$8 million in additional fees to do so!) The engineering faculty had voted twice, it turns out, against the new building, and fundraising to support it came in below forecast. Despite a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Cooper Union had weathered the global financial crisis without problems, by 2011 there were rumors of financial straits, and in 2012 the Board of Trustees approved the policy sift to charge tuition for Cooper Union's graduate programs, beginning in September 2013, which augured the eventual levying of fees on undergraduates.

In May 2013, to protest the likelihood of undergraduate tuition, students occupied administrative offices in the Foundation Building for a week, which brought widespread media attention to the crisis underway, and several protesters stayed in new president Jamshed Bharucha's office for 65 days. The Board of Trustees, in conjunction  Bharucha, who had arrived two years before and immediately begun raising the issue of a serious budget deficit, voted to impose undergraduate tuition, up to $19,500 per year, on a sliding scale, for students admitted beginning in the fall of 2014. (Even this tuition, exorbitant in relation to the prior price policy, would make the school one of the least expensive private schools to attend in the US.) This shift spurred an investigation by the New York State Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman concerning the school's real estate dealings and a lawsuit by an alumni group, the Committee to Save Cooper Union. (I should note that although I have no ties to the Cooper Union, I have supported the Committee to Save Cooper Union advocacy group with small donations, since I think utterly necessary to preserve its unique, progressive vision, tradition and policies.)

Cooper Union's New Academic Building
(Hyperallergic.com)

Under pressure for Schneiderman's investigation, the board voted 13-6 in April 2015 not to renew Bharucha's contract for next year. Two nights ago, five trustees who had supported Bharucha and charging tuition resigned. They were Martin Epstein, real estate honcho and former board chair; Vassar President Catherine Hill; investment banker Monica Vachher; Cooper alumnus and starchitect Daniel Liebeskind; and architect and oil services heir François de Menil. Epstein blasted the rest of the student, faculty and alumni protesters and the board, with Artnet News reporting that he wrote, "I know that there are some in the Cooper Community that will take my resignation as a false victory of some sort....As a donor, I am withdrawing my financial support for the college." For his part, Liebeskind pointed out that "As an alumnus of the school who had joined the Board recently, I expected that in this difficult time of change, there would be a meaningful and open discussion—one which would assure Cooper Union's stability and future....My experience was far from that."

Then yesterday, Bharucha also resigned, and will take up a post next year as Visiting Scholar at Harvard University's Graduate School of Education. In his farewell letter, he argued on behalf of his tenure and the new tuition plan, stating that

The class completing its freshman year was the first to be admitted under the 2013 Financial Sustainability Plan, and the class just admitted will be the second....These two classes uphold Cooper’s unparalleled standard of excellence. With need-based financial aid, we have also been able to increase access to those who can least afford it, as shown by an increase in the proportion of students eligible for Federal Pell Grants.

In response to Bharucha's departure, the remaining members of the board praised his tenure, writing, "The financial exigencies with which [Bharucha] was confronted upon his arrival were not of his making and he deserves credit for sounding the alarm about the need to take urgent action to ensure Cooper Union’s long-term financial sustainability." Cooper Union's’s current vice president for finance and administration William Mea will become interim president until the board can find a replacement for Bharucha. But who in her right mind would take this job?

Felix Salmon has argued that the blame for Cooper Union's financial and administrative difficulties lies squarely not just with the prior president Campbell and with Bharucha, but also with the various rosters of the enabling Board of Trustees. Why, he has asked, did they greenlight a building for which the institution had not raised sufficient funds? Harvard, where Bharucha heads this fall, has an endowment of $36.4 billion as of last June--and rising, as it is now well along in a $6.5 billion fundraising effort that has already raised about 77% of that total--decided at the peak of the global financial crisis, when its endowment dipped temporarily to about $26 billion in 2009, not to build a new museum of contemporary art along the Charles River. Was it neoliberal hubris and a desire to transform Cooper into a very different kind of school that led Campbell, Bharucha and their board supporters to go the route they did? Does this ethos still exist among the remaining board members, and do they have a viable plan for the future?

Perhaps more importantly, who will possibly step into the breach at this point to lead a school that remains so internally riven? Will the next leader have board support to return Cooper Union's undergraduate program, at least, to full scholarship status? Or have the dice been cast such that there is no turning back, such that what was Cooper Union's unique calling card, will be lost for good? (New York (and nearby New Jersey) do have a wide array of high quality public and private art and engineering institutions, with a major one--Cornell Tech--under development.) And what about Cooper Union's students, who were once guaranteed not only relief from worrying about funding their educations but a unique intellectual freedom, within the school's academic constraints, to construct their educations as they saw fit and then, debt-free, to elect careers that did not depend on them having to pay back massive loans? I ask all these questions not to suggest that institutions should not change and evolve, but to ask, in the tumultuous transformation of  the Cooper Union, what have we, and American higher education more broadly, lost?

Chomsky on the Death of American Universities

(Copyright © Flickr / WorCehT)

In a recent issue of Jacobin magazine, scholar, theorist, critic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose work needs no introduction, offers one of the most succinct and powerful critiques of the direction of contemporary universities and colleges that I have read in quite some time: "The Death of American Universities." Much of what Chomsky says here, which is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks Chomsky delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, will be familiar to anyone in higher education, as well as any who have experienced--or closely followed--the travails of students and parents, contingent and permanent faculty, and institutions struggling to deal with budgetary cuts and economically unsustainable cost inflation, narrowing educational goals, the imposition of market-based ideologies, the effects of technological shifts, and various forms of anti-intellectualism, some of very long standing as the late Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, and others have argued persuasively, that have taken root in our contemporary society.

Perhaps the only area he does not touch upon is athletics, a subject he has commented on in the past. But in every other area what he says applies to every institution in the US, including the richest and most elite--think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, etc.--though in some areas, such as renewing a focus on the arts and humanities, feeling the pinch of federal and state cuts, and trustees who are more concerned with how the football team does rather than whether students are receiving the highest quality education for the complex world in which we live, a world which they will help to shape and transform, these institutions are still somewhat insulated. 

But even Chomsky's former home base, MIT, is not immune to the critiques he lodges or challenges he describes (the MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the major incubators of high-level business thinking in the US), and as he always does, he makes sure to broaden his discussion to larger issues in the society, noting how the "precariat" is not just an issue for higher education, but central to contemporary asset-based globalized capitalism. You might quibble with some of his assertions, but in general, I think he gets things very right, and I wish more than anything that upper-level university administrators and leaders, legislators and other public officials, college and university trustees, and members of the media would read this piece without blinders or prejudice, whether they ultimately disagree or not. I see up close what he'd talking about; getting those in positions of power to acknowledge and address what's going on is another matter. 

Here are a few quotes, but do read the entire article.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. 

At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.

and

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “the time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. 

At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.

and

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. 

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”

New Chancellor at Rutgers in Newark

Nancy Cantor, new chancellor
of Rutgers University in Newark
 (© John O'Boyle / The Star-Ledger)

Last week we learned that Rutgers University in Newark will have a new chancellor, Nancy Cantor, who until this month was the President of Syracuse University. This was an incredible and exciting bit of news; we had had a fine interim chancellor, Phil Yeagle, and expected another good and capable leader to step into the breach, but I don't think anyone outside of the search committee, of which I was not a member, thought that our branch of Rutgers would be welcoming such a dynamic, highly regarded figure, with a fairly progressive track record, to guide our campus, especially in the midst of the turmoil that Rutgers has witnessed over the last year. 

A recap, which I will try to condense: in June 2012, with the push and pressure of New Jersey's governor Chris Christie, the state legislature passed a law integrating the independent University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMNDJ), based in Newark, into Rutgers University, creating a new Rutgers University School of Biomedical and Health Sciences, effective July 1, 2013. That is, next Monday. (Only UMNDJ's School of Osteopathic Medicine will not become part of Rutgers.) There were a number of ironies surrounding this legislative move, among them that Rutgers, founded in 1766, had once had a medical school, one of the oldest in the country, dating to the late 1700s, which was often in competition with Columbia University's medical school, before it was disbanded, only to be reconstituted in the 1960s, and yet again cleaved off as UMNDJ (with the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, in Piscataway and New Brunswick remaining a component of Rutgers).

Another irony was that when UMNDJ was being created, state officials selected a predominantly working-class, African American neighborhood in Newark in which to locate the facilities, identifying the site and acquiring it by eminent domain, thus ousting the residents, which in part helped to fuel the infamous 1967 Newark Uprising, a series of events that negatively and publicly transformed the city for decades. 

A third irony persists: despite the legislature's and governor's strong support for the merger, a number of questions surrounding inadequate funding for the fusion of the institutions, and debts carried both by UMNDJ and Rutgers, remained; we still await the financial verdict of the integration process, which also includes the incorporation of UMDNJ's School of Osteopathic Medicine into Rowan University, in South Jersey, to be overseen by a joint Rowan/Rutgers University in Camden governing board. Given historic inequities in funding between Rutgers' three branches, which have long been viewed as three prongs of a "One Rutgers"system as opposed to the typical hierarchical public university system, students, faculty and staff at all three campuses have repeatedly and vocally expressed concern about how the funding gap would be addressed, and what effects the attempts to fill the gap would have on each of the campuses, especially Newark and Camden, which traditionally (and according to the figures Rutgers has supplied to the federal government) have received less money.

Yet another irony is that although UMDNJ has seen a good amount of scandal over the years, including  prosecution for Medicaid over-billings from 2001 to 2004, which led to accreditation problems, subsequently rectified by 2008; unethical behavior by a Senior Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs at the School of Osteopathic Medicine; and the conviction, after prosecution by then-US Attorney, Chris Christie, of a state senator for having been employed in a no-show job and a former UMDNJ dean for having bribed him, UMDNJ nevertheless has led the state among all universities (including Princeton University and Rutgers) in terms of federal research grant dollars, and has a distinguished faculty and more than 7,000 students.

As the merger process unfolded, Rutgers selected Robert Barchi, the former President of Thomas Jefferson University, a medical school in Philadelphia, to replace its retiring president, Richard L. McCormick. Having run a medical school, and having served as the provost of University of Pennsylvania, Barchi would appear to be well-poised to oversee the integration of the medical school, and took office in April 2012. 

Around the time the legislature and governor were passing the bill integrating UMDNJ into Rutgers, a situation that would receive national attention was unfolding. Former Director of Player Development Eric Murdock, also a former National Basketball League New Jersey Nets player, was told his contract would not be renewed, and went into Rutgers' athletic facilities to complain that his boss, men's basketball head coach Mike Rice, had been abusing players and treating them "like slaves," an outburst which was secretly recorded by another Assistant Coach, Jimmy Martelli. (Murdock has subsequently launched a wrongful termination suit against Rutgers, while he is also being investigated for possible extortion.) Murdock has said he initially told former Rutgers Athletic Director Tim Pernetti about Rice's behavior during the summer of 2012. Murdock later requested videotape of Rice coaching the team, compiled a clip, and then last fall brought the video clip to Pernetti. 

The video, which ESPN first broadcast in April of this year, showed Rice repeatedly and over a two-year period verbally and physically abusing players, including throwing basketballs at their bodies and manhandling them, and using obscenities and homophobic slurs against them. (This was a particularly disturbing situation given the facts and fallout around cyberbullying and LGBTIQ student issues after gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi committed suicide once he learned he was being videocammed without permission by his roommate, Dharun Ravi. Ravi subsequently was convicted on 15 counts, while another student, Molly Wei, entered a plea agreement to avoid prosecution.) Although Pernetti has said his initial impulse was to fire Rice, he did not. Instead, with Barchi's approval he suspended Rice but 3 games and fined him $75,000, even giving him a public endorsement at the end of a third losing season. He also gave the tape to Barchi, who admitted after it and the scandal erupted in the mass media that he had not watched it. 

The subsequent public outrage at Rice's behavior first led to Pernetti stating that Rice would attend anger management courses and have a monitor checking his behavior, and public contrition from Rice, but the brouhaha turned into such a fireball, from students, faculty, state legislators and residents, and Rutgers alumni and fans, that Barchi had to fire Rice, setting off a chain of departures. Martelli resigned, as did Pernetti and university counsel John Wolf, who initially was reassigned rather than let go. The fall 2012 timing for Pernetti's disciplinary actions against Rice is significant in part because it was at this moment that the AD sealed the deal to have Rutgers admitted to the Big Ten Conference (B1G), after its exit from the Big East, a major financial coup by any measure. Rutgers, which received an $18 million subsidy for its money-losing sports teams, and the University of Maryland will join B1G in July 2014, bringing the total number of member schools to 14 (with Johns Hopkins University participating in lacrosse, and the University of Chicago a member school of B1G's Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), which facilitates scholarly exchanges between all the member institutions).

Both the Rice debacle and ongoing unaddressed concerns about the merger, the status of the three campuses, funding equity, and more led to unprecedented public university town halls this past spring involving students, faculty, staff, alumni, New Jersey residents, and President Barchi. The one at Newark was packed and contentious. A group of Rutgers faculty across the campuses, I among them, called for Barchi to resign or be dismissed after the tape aired and subsequent information emerged about his failure to immediately and decisively discipline Rice, Martelli and Pernetti. Given the support Governor Christie has expressed for Barchi more than once, that was not and apparently is not going to happen. Two boards, the Board of Governors and Board of Visitors, oversee Rutgers, and both also have expressed support for Barchi. In response to the public furor, the university announced an independent review of the Rice debacle, as well as a new top lawyer.

But this wasn't the end of the university's problems. To replace Rice, Rutgers hired former NBA coach and former Rutgers star baller Eddie Jordan, touted as an alumnus, to resurrect the men's basketball program, yet it turned out that Jordan had never completed his undergraduate degree (he apparently never claimed he had, but currently is finishing it). To replace Pernetti, Rutgers hired Julie Hermann, the University of Louisville's associate Athletic Director, despite assurances that the university would take time to find the best person. As is now well known, every single student member of her University of Tennessee women's volleyball team wrote a letter in 1996 accusing Hermann, their head coach, of mental cruelty, saying that she humiliated and demeaned them; Hermann claimed she knew nothing about the letter, their appraisal of her behavior, or the behavior itself, though she did subsequently quit that job. She also lost a jury verdict awarding $150,000 to a former Tennessee assistant coach, Ginger Hineline, who claimed Hermann discriminated against her for having become pregnant, and is still in the midst of a suit by Mary Banker, a former assistant track coach at Louisville who went to Hermann about sexist and discriminatory behavior by her male superior, only to have Hermann fire her within three weeks after doing so. 

Nevertheless Hermann has assumed her post, and has the full support of Barchi, Christie and the governing boards. Moreover, Rutgers men's lacrosse coach Brian Brecht was suspended pending an investigation into allegations he verbally abused players; he was later reinstated. Like Rice, he has not posted a winning season since being hired.  A final scandal involves Gregory Jackson, a tenured English professor at New Brunswick, whom Barchi named as his chief of staff despite knowing that Jackson still faces a lawsuit by four employees at Rutgers' New Brunswick's career services office, which he oversee, for age-related discrimination, which forced their retirements. You can't make this stuff up, none of it looks good individually, and collectively it points to serious issues that need to be addressed, especially in New Brunswick.

Now, however, we return to the positive news at the start of this post. Amidst the maelstrom detailed above, Barchi appointed Cantor, an eminent social psychologist, who has garnered attention for her "Scholarship in Action" public-university partnerships at Syracuse, which she led for a decade, her fundraising prowess, and her strong support of women and minority faculty members and underrepresented students. (She also has faced questions about how she handled allegations against one of Syracuse's assistant coaches, who was accused of sexual abuse by several men, one of whom recanted, which led to charges against him being dropped. According to The Star-Ledger link above, she has said that were she to address the situation again, she would call in law enforcement right away.)

On one level given how much university presidents earn and the perks many expect and receive, Cantor's acceptance of the Newark chancellorship is startling, but also refreshing. She will earn 40% less than she did at Syracuse, overseeing an urban, public institution that has significantly fewer financial or infrastructure resources than the private one she has left, though Rutgers-Newark has achieved a high national ranking for its ability to do a lot with very little. She also will report to Barchi as opposed to holding the top post. On the other hand, she arrives at a campus that has been named the most diverse in the US for several years running, and that has one of the best and highest ranked national records of social mobility among its students; an institution that not only already has a significant research component but which will, with the UMDNJ integration, have more graduate students than both of the other campuses combined; a school with an enthusiastic faculty, staff and student body, which had its highest increase in applications of any of the three branches this past year; and a campus that has standing and growing relationships with New Jersey's largest city and most populous and prosperous region, as well as the New York City metropolitan area. With the addition of the UMDNJ components, these will only grow. Cantor's appointment is for five years. I cannot predict how things will unfold, but given the year the university and our campus have experienced, Cantor's appointment and arrival bid a change of fortunes at the least, and bode well for the future.

September It Is + Abolishing Tenure? + Warburg Institute Woes

Now that Labor Day is upon us I'm finally returning from my little blog hiatus. As I mentioned back at the beginning of August, I had a number of blog-post stubs from July that I needed to finish, but I ended up devoting my energies to other things for most of this month, so I ended up reconstituting most of them into the photo spreads that precede today's entry.  Out of necessity my focus has turned to the upcoming school year, which begins in a few weeks. I have two courses, a graduate fiction workshop and an undergraduate African-American literature class, both of which I'm excited about, and several graduate and undergraduate advisees that I've been working with. Things are humming along.  I'm not, however, looking forward to the seasonal, geographical uprooting.  But such is life. On to the rest of this post....

+++

Continuing on the higher educational theme, I've seen several different articles and blogposts over the past year on the topic of academic tenure and its possible tweaking or abolition, and have been meaning at the very least to point to them on here, but then I came across Christopher Shea's essay in today's New York Times, which revisits the issue in a brief discussion of two books.  One is Higher Education? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It (Times Books, 2010), by Queens College emeritus professor Andrew Hacker and journalist Claudia Dreifus, the other Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf, 2010) by Mark C. Taylor, a professor of religion at Columbia University.

I admit not to having read either of these two books, though I have followed Andrew Hacker's work for years, and have often found his arguments on higher education illuminating and persuasive, and I did read Mark Taylor's previous, above-linked New York Times piece, that Shea cites, "End the University As We Know It." I thought it unnecessarily outrageous.  In both cases, I will take Shea's word about the arguments of each book, which in Hacker's and Dreifus's case range from getting universities out of the research business altogether and focusing on teaching, to Taylor's push for greater cooperation with business and use of "efficiency-enhancing technologies" (the Internet?). Nothing that new in either case, really. Both, it appears, also believe that tenure, as it's currently constituted, ought to be abolished, and Shea points out that rather than coming from conservative critics, in the cases of Hacker and Taylor, both are ideologically on the left.

Sweet Tea + Podcasts + Farewells

So let's shift gears a bit. There are tons of things I've been meaning to post about, but here are a few.

Weeks ago I went to see my colleague E. Patrick Johnson perform pieces from his remarkable new work, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). A collection of interviews, with extensive, clarifying commentary, that E. Patrick conducted in 2004 and 2005, the work gives voice to a wide array of men who are rarely represented, especially so thoughtfully and with such complexity, in our culture. You can order the book online, and as I've urged friends, please do go see Patrick perform selected interviews if he comes to your city or town.

***

One of the major issues we face is the lack of affordable, universal comprehensive health care and prescription drug benefits. I am lucky to have employer-provided insurance, but despite having very good coverage, I can attest to how exorbitant my bills have been, and I know that without insurance, there'd be no way I could have paid for them. So many people either go without necessary health care and prescriptions, or go bankrupt as a result of necessary care, every single day. The SEIU wants to keep health care at the forefront of our new President Obama's agenda. You can sign on here to support their effort.

***

I went through about a week of Apple Appstore Appophilia--there're so many interesting ones! And they're free! And you can get ones that perform the most useful or obscure things for you, at least in theory!--but it waned quickly, right around the time I realized that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't properly record my voice on Jott and ended up writing down the list of library call numbers I'd been trying record to my phone. Then yesterday I saw my colleague John Bresland's video essay-in-progress about his fascination with iPhone Apps (and so many other things; it was outstanding) and that Appophilia started up again. Sort of--I've downloaded a few since yesterday, which I guess points to my suggestibility or something. But the truth is, I'm actually more enthralled now with iTunes' Podcasts, which I listen to when I'm driving to work, waiting to hop on the plane, working out at the gym...yes, I admit it. In place of Common, Jazmine Sullivan, Belasco, Ghostface, N.E.R.D., Janet Jackson, Q-Tip, and all the rest of my favorite playlist residents, I actually have been listening to (CUNY series) Mark Anthony Neal lecturing on rethinking contemporary Black identity; Paul Krugman on health care and the economy; (NYPL) Daniel Mendelsohn, James Wood and Pico Iyer (who has an almost surreally high voice and loves V.S. Naipaul far too much) on literature, criticism and new media; Frank Bidart and (92nd St. Y, 1968) Adrienne Rich reading their poems; John Edgar Wideman reading his fiction; and William Rhoden on Black athletes and responsibility, just to name a few.

Some podcasts are just inappropriate for an elliptical trainer or free weights, though. Saul Kripke, for example; why on earth did I think I could get through more than a few minutes of this, doing anything except sitting very quietly, notebook in hand, and concentrating to the full extent of my capacities? Or a very old (1961) pair of Nadine Gordimer stories from the 92nd Y, which were about as engaging as a piece of toast discovered behind a refrigerator. I managed about two minutes and then had to say enough. Yes to Gordimer, no to her voice and those pieces. Driving in New Jersey, I found listening to the New Yorker's podcast of Mary Gaitskill reading Vladimir Nabokov's "Signs and Symbols" so entrancing that I had to make sure I was watching traffic lights and stop signs. But Donald Antrim's enthusiastic version of Donald Barthelme's "I Bought a Little City" didn't grab me. So it goes.

I've never been a fan of audiobooks, since I love to hold the physical book in my hand, but I do love readings, lectures and talks, and conversations, and anything along these lines conducted by very smart people, so I can't get enough of these podcasts. What really got me going after my few early dabblings was when a particularly brilliant colleague also suggested I check out the iTunes U offerings. I haven't looked back. At the risk of singling out several universities, Stanford by far has the best offerings, while MIT's courses are the most thorough, and Yale has lots of material but a lot of seems geared towards Yalies. Other universities whose materials I've downloaded include Carnegie Mellon, Case Western, Oxford, SVA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, DePaul, Vanderbilt, and Villanova. The university doesn't appear to have any materials on iTunes right now.

A few times I've rewound the talks so many times trying to get into them that I realize, it's time for some music. And then I'm back to Janelle Monáe, Tom Zé, TV on the Radio, Ben Harper, Kelis, Kid Sister, Violator.... Looking at the iTunes offerings, I realized I haven't explored the video casts much beyond comedy shorts, so I'll have to try more of those, especially the lectures. There's a whole series on Kara Walker, including a reading by Kevin Young and a lecture by Dorothy Walker, that I've got to check out. On my list for a plane trip tomorrow: Claudia Rankine reading from her work and Elizabeth Boyi on African and Caribbean Francophone writers!

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Also, I must say goodbyes to Chicago icon, writer, historian, and social activist Studs Terkel, who passed away on Halloween; South African author Es'kia Mphahlele, who died on October 27; and the inimitable critic and visionary John Leonard, whose sentences could induce vertigo. He died on Wednesday. Last week Chicago Public Radio made my day by devoting a chunk of airtime to celebrating Terkel, and you can hear some of that material, and find links to other great stuff, like Terkel chatting with Langston Hughes, here.