Regular readers of this blog know that in the fall of 2018
and again in the fall of 2019 I taught at Columbia University. Todd Gitlin and
I co-taught an advanced seminar that I devised called Mystifications of Social
Reality. I enjoyed the opportunity enormously. Each Tuesday I would get up
early, drive to the airport, take a plane to New York and a bus to Columbia and
teach for several hours, then retrace my steps getting home late that night.
Needless to say, the arrival of the virus put an end to such things. Columbia
has been torn up for the past 10 months and is still unclear how it is going to
handle its courses going forward. I read in the student newspaper that the
undergraduates have organized a tuition protest, calling for Columbia to reduce
its tuition by 10%. Since the tuition now is roughly 1200% larger, in constant
dollars, than it was in 1950 when I started my Harvard education, even though
the education Columbia is giving its students now is not notably better or
indeed notably different from the education it gave to it students 70 years
ago, a request for a 10% reduction strikes me as entirely reasonable, but that
is neither here nor there.
With the arrival of the vaccine, I have started daydreaming
about the possibility of once again teaching at Columbia, although at this
point I have not the foggiest idea whether that is a realistic hope. Rather
than going back to teaching the course I taught earlier, I have been thinking
about creating a new seminar that I would teach by myself rather than with
Todd. I have given it a deliberately provocative name: Marx, Freud, Marcuse:
Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. The idea would be to introduce the students to
the thought of Marx and Freud in very much the way that I did in my YouTube lectures
and then read several books by Herbert Marcuse to study the ways in which the
Frankfurt school sought to fuse the insights of Marx and Freud into a unified
understanding of the ideological structure of mature capitalism. I think the
course would be a hoot if I could find a department willing to host it.
We shall see.
Professor,
ReplyDeleteMy daughter likes Marx and his thoughts, but I can't get her to touch Freud because of some prejudices she has he a cokehead, etc. How do I get her to at least examine what he is about? Is there anything I can say?
You might try her out on my first YouTube lecture and see whether she likes that approach since I focus so heavily on his medical experience rather tthan on his worldviews. But hey, I am like that about Hegel so sometimes you just have prejudices you cannot overcome :-)
ReplyDeleteA question for the economically minded on this blog:
ReplyDeleteCan someone explain WHY tuition at Columbia is up +1200%, when the education offered, at least in a seminar classroom, is little changed from that offered in 1950?
(and please, no tirades about rock-climbing walls and Title IX administrators...)
Course is a splendid idea!
ReplyDeleteWhy don't you include Erich Fromm as another Marx-Freud synthesizer, especially since Marcuse explicitly trashes Fromm in Eros and Civilization. Students then can compare
Fromm and Marcuse. I recommend Fromm's Escape from Freedom as a starting text.
RMD - when speaking to a "progressive" audience, schools like Columbia claim that high tuition and other fees are actually a means of funding higher education for lower-income students; the idea is that by collecting exorbitant tuition and fees from high-income families, especially foreign students, universities are able to offer significant financial aid packages to low-income students and high-potential students. So it's supposedly part of a wealth transfer that benefits low income students.
ReplyDeleteBut of course, that argument is pretty circular - low income students wouldn't need such huge financial aid packages if tuition and fees were reasonable.
The other claim is that faculty salaries and research are expensive and increase year over year; Columbia University's Philosophy department alone, for example, has 25 members identified on its faculty website to teach approximately 9,000 undergrads, only a small fraction of whom major in philosophy. That's a lot of money, most of it goes to research instead of teaching, and student fees and tuition pay for it.
As an aside, what many people forget is that the cost of a college education at a place like Columbia is only about 50% tuition and fees, even if tuition alone is around $50k/year or something. The other half of the cost is room and board - which in a place like NYC is astronomical - like 2k/year to share a studio apartment. Which means that even students who get big financial aid packages still end up taking out student loans to pay rent and buy food.
The libertarianish explanation for the fees, on the other hand, is that federal student loans basically let universities charge what they want; students will take out student loan debt that matches private school tuition and fees, those debts are federally insured, and students are unable to discharge the debts through bankruptcy. So tuition and fees inflate to the extent that the Department of Education keeps issuing student loans to match the fees set by schools, which is in effect guaranteed money for universities. So the solution is to cap federal student loan disbursements - which doesn't happen in a meaningful way because congress is packed with elite university grads who are unwilling to turn off the federal spigot to their alma maters.
ReplyDeleteRPW, some 40 years ago I taught virtually the same course you're proposing -- essentially a class in how to read Marcuse's Eros and Civilization. It was called "The Critical Tradition" back when 'critical' had a different connotation from its current use. It was indeed a "hoot" and I hope you get the opportunity do offer it. Any chance of putting it online so we old timers could review it as well?
ReplyDeleteGreat minds think alike! Where did you teach it? I do hope I get a chance, I think would be great fun. No idea whether there is any way of putting it online unless of course I must zoom it in some way. These are strange times.
ReplyDeleteI was teaching at Lafayette College at the time. Apropos anonymous' comment about his daughter's aversion to Freud, the turning point in the class was a description that I gave students of my first serious French dessert. It was in Loche at a medieval inn, and consisted of freshly made raspberry ice cream, covered with a raspberry confit and fresh berries, then topped with a dollop of creme fraiche. It was luscious, transporting even, and I used it as an example of polymorphous eroticism and the pleasure principle. Your daughter might resonate with that; my students certainly did.
ReplyDeleteWhat are your thoughts on Wilhelm Reich?
ReplyDeleteWhat, no mention of Norman O. Brown?
ReplyDeleteWow - I haven't seen a reference to Norman O. Brown since I was an undergrad at UCSC! Thanks, marcel proust.
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