PR-Bridge

Rather than cover the intense fighting in southern Afghanistan, which took the lives of four NATO servicemen yesterday, or focus on President Obama’s speech later today in Las Vegas, where he will launch a $1.5 billion plan to help the states most hit by the housing crunch, the media storm hovers over Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, waiting with bated breath for Tiger Woods to break his self-imposed vow of silence.

Yawn!

I cannot decide if the saddest aspect of this whole pseudo-press conference is that it makes (yet again) a mockery of the press or that people seem to care at all. Let’s just all take a collective deep breath and admit that there are about a million more important, pressing events and issues that need attention.

Yawn!

Given the rules that Tiger and his camp have imposed on today’s “event,” let’s drop the “press” from “press conference” and just refer to it as a conference. Outraged, the national golf press corps responded by voting to boycot the event — as if they were invited anyway. But, all this boo-hooing from golf experts and other media talking heads is just too much to take.

Yawn!

All of the sudden, golf writers (don’t forget…covering golf) are indignant because they cannot ask Tiger Woods questions about his private life? Where were these junior league Woodward and Bernsteins the last decade? Please let me know if you can remember a golf journalist ever asking Tiger a difficult question. Can’t do that…might get one exiled to the outer reaches, covering the lesser lights outside Tiger’s universe.

Yawn!

Remember, though, this public falling on the sword is media-driven. Countless men and women around the world have affairs and get divorced. I usually fall into the “you wanted to be a celebrity, so deal with the consequences” camp, yet this circus (after a lifetime of watching “public apologies,” from Magic Johnson to Bill Clinton) is just too much.

Yawn!

Without Woods’ star power, many golf writers might be out of work, which adds another dimension to the story. Hardcore journalist types often lament (or even hate) public relations, marketing, advertising, and other organizational communications as evil or somehow impure compared to their chosen trade. Perhaps a little self-reflection is in order today…as all those boycotting golf writers try to figure out a way to continue talking about Tiger Woods, long after he finishes, or until his next appearance.

Image by striatic/hobvias sudoneighm

I am a college teacher. I write books. Keeping up with the Chronicle of Higher Education is an occupational necessity. Usually, I read the online version, which is easier to access, in addition to the daily and weekly e-mails that alert me to the contents. I also enjoy commenting on articles, such as Jere P. Surber’s controversial essay this week, attempting to explain why liberal arts professors are liberal (look for user name “Batchro”). What I enjoy most is that the Chronicle covers topics and issues that are pertinent to professors and others around college campuses.

Occasionally, though, an essay so daft slips into the mix, that I feel compelled to critique it. Elif Batuman wrote such a piece this week, “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar.” What is even more agonizing is that the essay is drawn from a book to be published in a week or so by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This piece is bad on so many levels, I can’t even begin to place them all under a microscope, from the ridiculous title to the blazing sense of entitlement Batuman reeks.

I feel so strongly that I have to repost what I said on the comment section:

“The primary challenge in today’s confessional, peek-into-the-medicine-cabinet society is that this kind of drivel is viewed as an affirmation. Are Chronicle readers supposed to emulate Batuman here or gain inspiration from her story? Or, is Batuman’s story one of poor work ethic and entitlement?

Let’s take a closer look at what she outlines. First, imagine the angst of the teen Batuman so “oppressed” by “the tyranny of leisure” that she can’t do anything more than spend weeks “flopped on my grandmother’s super-bourgeois rose-colored velvet sofa, consuming massive quantities of grapes, reading obsessively.” This incident, though, stands counter to her teenage determination that she should not “read too many novels.” She also admits that she not intellectually curious, and “uninterested by what I knew of literary theory and history… I didn’t care about truth; I cared about beauty.” Here “beauty” is jargon used to elevate privilege over critical thinking or the hard work required to gain knowledge.

Next, Batuman is uninterested (perhaps the theme of her young life), in linguistics because her professor required her to think. Her sense of entitlement leads her to believe that she knows more than the professor with the typical millennial excuse: “I could not imagine a more objectless, melancholy project.” Instead, she focuses on the professor’s looks, another indicator in our celebrity-obsessed world. She takes the easy route, rather than working to understand the subject, “I couldn’t face linguistics again—it had let me down, failed to reveal anything about language and what it meant.” College instructors will certainly recognize this trait – it’s the teacher’s fault, not the student that did not actively work to learn. In response, Batuman takes the easiest path, a degree in literature, “the major with the fewest requirements” and only reading 7-8 novels.

Then, Batuman decides to write a novel (again, from a person who has not read widely or shown the ability to work hard), but does not want to go to an M.F.A. program that would actually require her to read deeply or demean herself by paying tuition, attending classes, or (gasp) “analyzing the writings of a bunch of kids like me.” Being too privileged for this, she decides an artists’ colony is the answer, but later backs out of that too when the amenities are not up to her standards.

Batuman hits the lottery when Stanford accepts her and gives her financial support, though in the essay she writes this in passive voice, probably an attempt at modesty: “I had been offered five years of financial support.” Realizing that being a grad student at Stanford requires all the messy things grad school entails (“classes, conferences, teaching, and endless lunches…[and] term papers”), she drops out to write a novel, which she also cannot accomplish.

Somehow a magazine editor gave her an assignment to write about short stories. Rather than learn from the experience, she blasts the writers in the Best American Short Stories anthologies (edited by writers you might have hear of: Lorrie Moore and Michael Chabon) because they think of writing as a “craft,” as if the choice between it and thinking of writing as art is an all-or-nothing decision. In response, she labels the work in the anthology, “a nearly unreadable core of brisk verbs and vivid nouns.” Let’s review some of the writers Batuman places in this category: John Updike, Alice Munro, Edward P. Jones, T.C. Boyle, and Joyce Carol Oates.

Then, in the tradition of Lifetime movies and confessional bloggers, Chronicle readers are given the payoff, the big “a-ha” moment, after Batuman falls while jogging and breaks her elbow: She loves literary theory after all! Ohh, the humanity! Seeing the reality in a $1,700 hospital bill, she takes “a cold, hard look at the direction my life was headed.” Luckily, Stanford threw her a lifeline.

So, I return to my original question: are we supposed to admire Batuman or gain some kind of special insight from her story? I shudder to think about what her tale says about Stanford, entitlement, or millennial navel-gazing fueled by self-absorbed blogging and Facebook. The outcome of celebrity-obsession as manifested in today’s society is that everyone now believes that their story is meaningful. The entitlement of thinking one deserves Warhol’s 15 minutes of fame is rampant. Batuman is a case book example.”

Please, tell me I am crazy for being so harsh or pointing out these egregious statements. Or, am I on the mark?

Bill Sledzik is a thoughtful guy. Like many other communications professionals around the world, I find myself thinking about a topic or big picture issue in the field, and sure enough, Bill has blogged about it at ToughSledding. His most recent post centers on critical thinking, which over the years has developed into one of the central issues in my life. But, that obsession is part of the “challenge,” because I am always aware of critical thinking in a world that rarely values or supports the idea.

The devaluing of critical thinking starts early in the United States. For example, our K-12 teachers are hamstrung by focusing on standardized tests, rather than providing students with a broad, liberal education that forces them to reexamine their developing world views. Critics lament the notion that educators have to “teach to the test,” but do not attempt to change the system. As a matter of fact, I would estimate that most intelligent people realize that standardized testing has hurt the American education system, yet it remains the central focus of the public education system.

In the work world, one is constantly confronting the lack of critical thinking. In communications, that often means relying on what worked in the past, rather than do the necessary hard work required to analyze, assess, evaluate, and create. Often, the conservative notion of doing what worked last month, year, or decade is built on a tower of ignorance — the executive does not really understand the communications function or the sales force does not really appreciate the IT staff, and the list goes on and on. The results of “silo-ed” thinking is dysfunctional organizations that have too many leaders protecting their turf, rather than doing what is best for the entity as a whole.

Teaching college students about critical thinking — whether new freshmen or graduate students — is arguably the most important task of faculty members. Particularly when dealing with undergrads one must realize that long after they have left the classroom and forgotten much of the material we yearn to get in their heads, they will retain the basic tenets of critical thinking if the concepts have been presented, discussed, and modeled.

Last evening, Kent State University hosted Ken Bain, the renowned teacher and author of What the Best College Teachers Do. He outlined the categories college students often lump into as learners. Surface learners are motivated by fear and resort to memorization and other basic tactics to get through material. Strategic learners are motivated by recognition (most often grades) and learn to provide the “correct” answers. Deep learners are motivated by meaning and a need to know the answers to questions that intrigue them.

As educators, we want classrooms filled with deep learners, unfortunately, many of the best students are strategic learners — over their time in the school system they learned to map out a strategy for getting good grades, but often at the expense of conceptual learning. One does not need to look back very far into their pasts to see how the emphasis on standardized testing and grade fear played a role in this development.

The post-college outcome, however, is shocking. Everyone has met a strategic learner-turned-organization-leader who assumes that they know everything based on their successes in college and the outside world that equates good grades with wisdom. So, the high-flying attorney thinks they know how to write because they got an “A” in English Comp and know how to write contracts, or the business executive who thinks they have insight into employees because they minored in Psychology.

The challenge is in the assumption that people make about what they think they know. Success has caused people to cement their world views into place because achievement fueled the idea. The basic deficiency, however, is that people are not willing to question their own thinking. Society rewards and celebrates people who make decisions, right or wrong, when the reward should go to people who make thoughtful decisions after consideration of evidence, etc.

Their is a glaring disparity between critical thinkers and non-critical thinkers, yet we are surrounded by a system that rewards the “gut” reaction and decision, good grades over deep learning, and speed over meaning. This leaves college professors in a difficult situation: Does one help students become the kind of future leader who reacts or thinks? Clearly, the former is valued more in the work world than the latter.

The easy answer is to say “both,” yet in practicality there must be a core belief that guides one’s teaching and there may simply not be enough room for pursuing both paths. My decision to this point in my teaching career is to create a learning environment that fosters critical thinking using the concepts of the class as tools in building those skills. As a result, sometimes my students react negatively to my charge of “be creative,” when they would prefer to have the instructions laid out piece-by-piece, as if learning were simply gluing together a model airplane.

But, I’m still learning…