Kirk Savage

Today’s universities find themselves in a perfect storm created by the financial panic of 2008, a long-term decline in public funding for higher education, and mounting student debt caused by steep annual increases in tuition.  One possible solution, often floated, is to take better advantage of the cost savings offered by the digital information revolution. Are cyber-universities the answer for higher education?

I’ve been thinking more about this as I tap away on my new iPad and experiment with cloud computing.  The future is already here: there is no going back, and higher education is going to have to figure out how to adapt, quickly.

Yet this is not entirely a new problem.  History can still help guide us.  Recently I came across a phenomenal passage on the plight of 19th-century universities by the British critic Thomas Carlyle in, of all places, his 1841 book On Heroes and Hero Worship. Carlyle, like Victor Hugo and many others, was deeply interested in the moral and cognitive impacts of the revolution in knowledge caused by the printing press.  These critics were writers and book lovers who nevertheless pined for an earlier time when experience was not utterly mediated by the written word.

Carlyle explained that universities originated in medieval times when books were unique manuscripts unavailable to most learners. In the thirteenth century, “if you wanted to know what Abelard knew, you must go and listen to Abelard.” Abelard was in Paris, and so in Paris a great university arose, “gathering learners around, face to face.” But then the whole model changed with the advent of printing:

“Once invent Printing, you metamorphosed all Universities, or superseded them! The Teacher needed not now to gather men personally round him, that he might speak to them what he knew: print it in a Book, and all learners far and wide, for a trifle, had it each at his own fireside, much more effectually to learn it!”

Carlyle did concede that “while man has a tongue,” there must still be “a distinct province for Speech as well as for Writing and Printing.” (After all, he wrote this very book originally as a series of public lectures that he gave for a fee). Then comes the takeaway:

“But the limits of the two [speech and printing] have nowhere yet been pointed out, ascertained; much less put in practice: the University which would completely take-in that great new fact, of the existence of Printed Books, and stand on a clear footing for the Nineteenth Century as the Paris one did for the Thirteenth, has not yet come into existence.”

Wow, does this sound familiar?  Why meet in a classroom, people say, when we can chat online, or stream a lecture on the Web?  I used to help teach professional development courses for secondary school history teachers in a classroom; now we do them as live-streamed webinars.  And yet I think we are still stabbing in the dark. To paraphrase Carlyle, a university that would truly absorb the digital revolution, and stand on a clear footing for the twenty-first century, hasn’t come into existence.

For Carlyle the issue was that reading was replacing listening.  For us the issue is a bit different.  The digital promise is not either/or.  We can listen and read and see and speak all at once online.  What remains unique about the traditional place-based university is Carlyle’s original starting point, the image of Abelard “gathering the learners around him, face to face.”

Face to face. What is it about this encounter that goes beyond mere listening or even seeing facial expression, which can now be done by videochat?  What is fundamental about face to face learning that can’t be replicated in a cyber-school? How do we assess the unique cognitive value of physical presence, in the company of a teacher and other learners?

And the problem is not just one for universities.  Why go to a museum or visit a monument when you can see all the materials and read them at your leisure at home, “each at his own fireside”?  Why does it still matter to be physically present before an object of value?

We all have our own reasons why we go to a ball game in a stadium instead of watching it on TV, or travel to visit relatives instead of merely skyping them, or hike into a forest instead of exploring it on a screen.  These reasons usually cluster around one or two things we still can’t get from computing machines: either some sensory component or some quality of human interaction.  But as Carlyle suggested, universities have not yet pointed out or ascertained the core value of this face to face experience, much less reorganized themselves around that core principle. Charlatans and other opportunists will come up with quick and easy answers, but the crisis of the university will continue as long as we fail to pinpoint why it is so important to “gather learners round, face to face.”

This will, I hope, be the first and last post I write on a strictly personal subject.  But I do so to honor the memory of my sister Michele, who was struck down by brain cancer in the prime of her life.  Like her sublings she was an overachiever.  She poured her love and energy into her church, her husband, and her eight children, and they returned her love in kind.  She was strong physically and emotionally, but sweet and gentle in spirit.

Why she would be taken from us in this way no one can answer.  But losing her makes me think of all the other parents and children who are taken every day of the year, everywhere on the globe, victims of disease or war or poverty.  No one can explain or justify any of these losses, or any of the suffering they cause.

We plod ahead, one foot in front of the other, trying to give comfort to ourselves and to others who need it.  And we hope, somehow, that we can honor those who have died by working toward a more just and forgiving world.

“My heart is broken,” said a father in Kuba, Istanbul’s neighborhood of poor castaways.  “Let other hearts not be broken.”  What a simple, but profound, and tragically difficult, plea.

Goodbye Michele.  My heart is broken, but your smile and your spirit are with me, always.  I hope I can do honor to them and to you.

Twelve fascinating new designs for selected portions of the National Mall in Washington, D.C. were unveiled this week. The Trust for the National Mall and the National Park Service are sponsoring a design competition for three key sites: Union Square, at the foot of the Capitol building (where the Grant Memorial is located); the Washington Monument grounds, particularly its southern edge (where the now defunct Sylvan Theater is located); and Constitution Gardens (where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is located). Four major design firms were invited to submit plans for each site, with a demanding technical program that emphasized sustainability, access, historical sensitivity, user-friendly amenities, and flexible spaces that can be utilized for democratic assembly and protest as well as cultural events and performances.

There is much to admire in virtually all of these proposals.  If any of them were implemented, they would go a long way toward restoring the biodiversity and human scale that once existed here before their eradication by the massive clearing operation, otherwise known as the “rape of the Mall,” that took place in the first several decades of the twentieth century.  But given the many competing demands of the program as well as the complexity of the sites themselves, it is hardly surprising that the designs disappoint as well.

First the winners, in my estimation:

•Andropogon’s entry for Constitution Gardens is phenomenally well thought out and presented.  It manages to reconnect the whole area to Constitution Avenue on the north and the Mall to the south, establish green infrastructure that creatively recalls the hydrological history on the site of Tiber Creek and the C&O canal, create new uses such as outdoor play spaces and indoor markets in zero-energy structures, all the while transforming a stagnant lake into a beautiful, ecologically diverse wetland park.

•Balmori’s entry for a “Sylvan Bowl” on the Washington Monument grounds is also very innovative,interweaving parkland and architecture like a mobius strip.  Its proposal for a spiralling, figure-8 shaped restaurant with green roof is the show-stopper of the design competition.  A grove of trees literally grows through the building, while the roof is designed to support a vegetable garden that supplies produce to the kitchen below.

•Two designs stand out for Union Square, in many ways the most intractable site in the competition.  With its disastrous reflecting pool (built in the 1970s) and huge shadeless expanse, this site fairly well sums up the worst problems of the whole Mall. Pei Cobb Fried’s solution is notable for its simplicity, elegantly connecting the formal landscape of the 20^th-century Mall to the picturesque 19^th-century landscape of the Capitol grounds by shrinking the pool into an oval and cutting two diagonal walkways through it, while also adding a spectacular arching fountain around the pool and gardens on the site’s perimeter.  Diller Scofidio & Renfro + Hood propose a more varied, complex program with a green infrastructure component and an audio system that transforms speech from the Congress and from visitors to the site into wave patterns on the reflecting pool; their theme is “multiple voices.”  Both designs have mechanisms to empty the reflecting pool to allow crowds to congregate there for special events.

So why the disappointment?

In a word, it’s about content.  None of the designs reexamines in a serious way our relationship to the monuments in these spaces, or, more broadly, to the democracy the Mall is supposed to represent.  The competition program did not exactly encourage this kind of work.  Its demand for “sensitivity to historical context” is more about highlighting the monuments already there, rather than than reinterpreting them, much less proposing new forms of public memory.  In Constitution Gardens for example, the program specifically asks the designers to “highlight and maintain” the memorial to the Signers of the Declaration of Independence.  But why do we even need a monument to the signers of the declaration, with a huge block for each name, when it is the words that have been so important and so bitterly contested in U.S. history? Why not try to reinvigorate this monument by creating a way to engage with the document’s meaning, the foundation of our democracy?

But I think the problem is deeper than the program. Last year I helped jury an ideas competition for the Washington Monument grounds which challenged entrants to confront its history and legacy.  The results in that respect were just as disappointing.

Diller Scofidio Renfro + Hood is the one firm in the competition that did try to engage democracy in a serious way.  Its proposal to convert political speech into “speaking waves” in the water on Union Square is a clever take on the idea of “making waves,” suggesting the unruly, roisterous debate that is the heart of any real democracy.  But in the end it is just a clever visualization, no substitute for the real thing.  It is discourse without content, which we already have in abundance on radio, TV, and the internet.  We have more media than ever but precious little content, less real debate, and even less listening.

Is it really asking too much to demand that our nation’s “democratic stage” (as the competition program calls it) actually function as such?  I keep wondering what an artist like Krzysztof Wodiczko would do here. He has dedicated his career to giving voice to the voiceless, to “making waves” in public space.  Whatever he attempted, real words would be spoken and people would listen.  It wouldn’t be easy though.

Today I published an editorial in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on a topic that has nothing to do with my scholarship: Pennsylvania’s exemption of pension income from state taxation.

Like many other states Pennsylvania faces a huge revenue shortfall, and the governor’s budget cuts disproportionately target education.  As an educator, I thought I should enter this debate with a constructive proposal for raising revenue: ending the state’s pension exemption.

So why did I float this politically suicidal idea?   I got the idea when I learned to my surprise that my mother-in-law’s federal pension, which had been taxed in Virginia, became tax-free in Pennsylvania when she moved in with us.

Before anyone complains that I am using my Pitt website to advocate a political position, let me emphasize that this is a nonpartisan issue.  No elected official of either party would dare to make this suggestion or to support my position.

Predictably, the hate mail is already starting to arrive.  To those of you who have expressed your disagreement without venom, a big thank you.  There are thoughtful arguments for treating pension income differently from regular income.  I disagree with those arguments, but I respect them.

Unfortunately I made a factual error in my opening.  Pennsylvania is an outlier state when it comes to taxing pension income, but not as much of an outlier as I claimed there.  Pennsylvania does appear to have the most sweeping exemption for pension income of any state, but there are two other states that effectively exempt almost all pension income, and an additional six states that exempt federal pensions like my mother-in-law’s.  Many other states allow extra credits or exemptions for age or low income.  Nevertheless, in most states with an income tax, my mother-in-law would pay a pension tax roughly similar to what she paid in Virginia.

My own proposal would expand tax protections for low-income pensioners, but would extend these same protections to all low-income households regardless of their source of income.  I argue in the editorial that income should be treated equally, and that certain groups struggling economically should not be favored at the expense of others.

Some people have written me that I am proposing in effect a double tax on some pensions.  For those (like me) who have defined contribution plans, we pay state tax (not federal tax) on the income that we contribute to our plans, so the argument is that this money has already been taxed by the state. Of course if those contributions have grown through investment, that investment income is not currently taxed.  Nor are the matching contributions that employers make. Double taxation could be avoided by exempting employee contributions on the front end, as the federal government does; for those who have already had their contributions taxed on the front end, that portion of their annuity could be made exempt from state tax.  These measures would of course reduce the revenue raised by my proposal.  I’ll have to leave it to the accountants to estimate how much.

One thing I am certain of: the issue of pension taxation is not going to go away. Unfunded public pension liabilities are a ticking time bomb.  Sooner or later, if we keep on the same track, we will find ourselves in a situation where we are forced to choose between funding pensions and funding classrooms, just as we are now having to cut transit routes to pay for pensions.  One of the main goals of my proposal was to avoid punishing public pensioners and to spread the costs more equitably.  It is morally wrong, in my view, to punish or blame public pensioners simply because they are drawing pensions that the government agreed to and that their own job contracts guaranteed.

If my editorial can help start a rational conversation on more equitable ways of taxing (and funding) pension income, I will feel that my act of hara-kiri was worth it.

Lately I have been reading a very particular 19^th-century genre, which has no counterpart today: the memorial volumes published to record the dedication of local soldier monuments after the Civil War.  Everyone of these volumes has its share of pathos, but one stands out as especially gut-wrenching.  The volume produced by Hingham, Massachusetts took six years to produce and mushroomed to well over 400 pages.  The committee in charge did something no other town attempted, to my knowledge; it compiled a biographical sketch of the life and death of every fallen soldier whose name was inscribed on the town’s monument. The impulse to personalize the war dead in this way belongs more to our time than theirs.  The committee clearly didn’t know what it was getting itself into, and for good reason the experiment wasn’t repeated elsewhere.

As the authors tell it, the biographical sketches were intended to give voice to the dead and to “thrill and inspire us at the mention of their acts of heroism and valor.”  In reality the straightforward honesty of these accounts disarms the heroic project and overwhelms the reader with tragedy after tragedy.  We are confronted with a series of painful, lonely deaths, mostly disconnected from any conventional story of battlefield valor.

Countless men died of disease, chronic diarrhea the most commonly named cause of death. Many were transferred repeatedly from hospital to hospital, while some were discharged when they were so sick they couldn’t stand up. Daniel Hersey was one such case, discharged from Fort Monroe in Virginia after only seven months in the army. Too weak to walk, he was so determined to return home that he crawled on his hands and knees toward the train station, until “a negro kindly bore him on his shoulders to the place of destination.” He did finally reach home in Hingham, a “mere skeleton,” unable to relate his war experience, and died a few days later.

Daniel Bell was attacked with night blindness and diarrhea in May 1864 but could not get proper hospital treatment for many weeks.  By the time he finally reached the ladies of the Sanitary Commission, he was in a steep decline, dying soon after in the hospital. The authors conclude, based on the dead man’s diary, that a combination of callousness and incompetence probably drove him to his early death.  “There was a lack of needed attention, want of proper treatment, and, at an earlier date, a degree of laborious service demanded which he had not the strength to perform.”

Some of the sick fell behind in marches and were then captured by the enemy. They ended up in prisoner of war camps where conditions were miserable and death was rampant.  James Churchill ended his life in Andersonville, the most notorious of the Confederate camps. He had a “delicate constitution” and did not last long. Told that he was about to die, he was still “full of faith that he should live to reach home, and enjoy the society of his relatives and friends.” But he never saw Hingham again, and left a widow there.

A dentist named Don Pedro Wilson, drafted in August 1863, was put to work in a surgical department administering medicine.  In Hingham he had been a respected practitioner, who in his free time loved horticulture and “rural occupations.” But out on the front, he quickly became ill.  While the army was retreating from Culpeper, Virginia, he fell behind and was apparently captured.  He died a prisoner of war in October, barely two months after being pressed into service. The contrast between his abrupt, anonymous death in the theater of war and his richly rewarding life in Hingham made his case, as the authors said, “doubly sad.”

Henry French also landed tired and sick in a POW camp. This was the ironically named Belle Isle, in the Confederate capital, Richmond, Virginia.  One day as he was returning to his “miserable quarters,” he was ordered to hurry up.  Unable to drag his body along any faster, he was shot and killed by an unhinged Confederate sentry. “War in its best aspect is horrible enough,” the authors wrote.  But the murder of an unarmed, feeble prisoner “furnishes an instance of human depravity which must be condemned throughout the civilized world.”

For Hingham, and most other communities, far fewer of their soldiers were killed in action. David Cushing was one of these unlucky ones.  Mustered into service on August 19, 1862, he was struck by a shell at Antietam less than a month later, leaving a widow and two children.  Most men killed in action died of wounds that would be easily treated today; a bullet in the leg or even the foot was enough to end some lives.

Even though most men volunteered for duty, there were some who did not want to serve and face these hellish prospects. The Hingham volume actually lists the men in town who avoided military service by paying for substitutes, and what they paid. A few men who couldn’t afford to buy their way out openly admitted their reservations. Sewall Pugsley was in poor health when he was drafted but he couldn’t persuade the authorities to exempt him, and he didn’t have the means to buy a substitute.  Shortly after mustering in, he landed in a hospital and a few weeks later was dead of chronic diarrhea.  His was one of a few cases of “coerced service,” as the authors explained; the “melancholy results, must be generally deplored.” Horatio Willard, a harness maker by trade, enlisted relatively early in the war thinking that his service would be limited to garrison duty. Before long, though, his regiment was needed on the front.  He managed to escape harm on the battlefield, but the long marches and constant exposure to the elements “soon broke down a somewhat enfeebled constitution,” and he died of chronic diarrhea in a Virginia hospital about a year after joining the army.

Of course the volume did include some sketches that struck the right chords of courage and valor, which the authors no doubt had in mind when they started the project.  A few men died at Gettysburg, for example, while others endured years of battle before finally succumbing late in the war. Wherever possible the authors included testimonials from comrades or commanding officers. Even these reports of Christian virtue and masculine fortitude, however, were sometimes double-edged.  Peter Ourish, who died of a battle wound, was not only a brave soldier but “a youth of pure character, one upon whom the vices and bad habits of camp-life made no impression.”  The trope of the soldier who avoided camp temptations was flattering to the individual but rather disparaging for the rest, who by contrast merged into a backdrop of widespread vice.

Reading through the stories of these individual men is a profoundly sobering experience. The more we learn of their personal histories, the less they conform to the generic rhetoric of heroic sacrifice.  The lesson from Hingham is that when a community takes the time and trouble to recover some of the voices of their war dead, they turn out to be a cacaphony.  They turn out, in other words, to be human.