I was at MLA this year, but I avoided the Conference Sex panel. Everyone I know thought of it as a sort of prankish session -- which doesn't excuse it as a waste of time and panel space. (However, I think anthropologists could do -- and probably have done -- serious work on sexual habits at professional conferences. There is something fascinating about any profession's conference, with the mix of high seriousness and Mardi Gras release.)

On the subject of hand-outs to universities, I'm wondering if it's as cut and dry as Shaw would have it. To my knowledge, this money would be a one time thing. So sure, colleges could temporarily lower tuition, but they'd have to hike it back up once the hand-out money was spent. A building could theoretically serve more students over a longer period of time.

And let's not forget that many buildings on university campuses are horrendous. I'm not sure if Erin had this experience, but when I taught as a grad student at Penn, I had a classroom with a crumbling, leaking ceiling; a classroom that was a storage dump for the building; a classroom with cracked and unfunctioning blackboards; a classroom with no desks, only chairs; and a classroom with no heat. (Partly this has to do with long-term renovation schedules. Once a building gets within 5 to 7 years of its official renovation date, no one is going to drop money to fix it up.)

In any case, I'm sure my knowledge of economics is faulty, but I still wonder if a building might not be a better long term investment than a temporary tuition reduction.

I saw a film, "The Visitor," on New Year's Eve which depicted the vacuousness often found in academe, and contrasts it with realities both harsh and lovely. I won't give a review here. But it, and your MLA commentary, put me in mind of a stirring moment in the film version of a thirty-plus year old play, "Butley." When the latter is asked by a colleague if he had read a recent "must-see" novel, Butley responds: "Read it? Hell, I haven't even taught it yet!"

I'm suspicious of people--in business as well as in academia--who are overly concerned with the buildings. Obviously we don't want leaky roofs, but we don't need monuments, either. Focusing on things that are of secondary or tertiary importance tends to detract attention from the things that should be of primary importance.

"colleges could temporarily lower tuition, but they'd have to hike it back up once the hand-out money was spent"...depends how the money was handled. You could treat it like an endowment and invest it to provide a perpetual income stream.

Regarding "equipping (the buildings) with the latest technologies," see thoughts from Michael Schrage...search for "sparkly tools" at my blog.

I just linked over to the Higher Ed piece for a quick look and wanted to say that I couldn't agree more with your characterization of this sort of academic posturing as self-indulgent and narcissistic. So glad that I opted not only to stop ever reading PMLA, but also to stop attending MLAs. It is enough to chase one away from one's profession....

I'm not sure that deploring the latest MLA fad is any less self-indulgent than participating in it...

I remember my department chair saying nostalgically that people weren't having as much sex at conferences any more -- and that was ten years ago.

Maybe it was just him?

So, guez, what should the non-self-indulgent person do?

Guez, I'm not posting your comment. Ad hominem attack is not welcome on this blog.

So how was my comment any more ad hominem than your original posting, which went after not only the panelists but also anyone who would deign defend such "masturbatory ruminations"? (How snotty! How predictable!) Is it because I used your name? (Should I just refer to you as "the blogger" next time?) Or is it because you are a sensitive soul (who does not deign to lower herself to substantive criticism) and I'm a mean-spirited antagonist?

Although I do not generally agree with you, I often find your comments to be thoughtful. This blog entry and your holier-than-thou response to my second comment are an exception. This is your blog and you are free to moderate it as you like, but I would like a little more explanation. You can feel free to respond off-blog.

Guez,

Basic rule of thumb: If you want to comment on this blog, treat me and everyone in the comments section with civility and respect. Be as aggressive as you'd like when arguing ideas and issues -- but don't call anyone names, don't personalize the debate, and don't try to bait people into emotional responses. My post harshly criticizes an academic pattern that I know well. It concentrates on a phenomenon well exemplified by the MLA panel. Your comments attack me. That's the difference between legitimate argumentation and ad hominem attack. If you want to disagree with me, and defend panels like the MLA's Conference Sex panel as substantive and legitimate endeavors, go right ahead. But don't call me names--particularly while you are yourself posting anonymously--and then act surprised when your comments don't get posted.

So, as Shaw puts it, "this is about pork-barrel politics. It’s not about helping the kids." Seems to me it's about both. Where I teach, our relatively new science building (which would not have been built for decades were it not for a multimillion-dollar private donation) has meant a lot to the students who use it. Some of my students got pretty decent construction jobs out of the deal, too.

I agree that "It's easy to prove you've built a building. It's far harder to prove you've improved educational quality." But guess what? That statement would be true even in the most accountable of all possible worlds. Even under ideal circumstances it would be next to impossible to demonstrate the degree to which educational quality was improved specifically by a one-shot infusion of cash of the sort we're talking about here.

If I'm asking for money, and I have two ways to frame my request, and the first way makes it difficult for the prospective donor to gauge the efficacy of the gift, and the second way makes it easy, then I'm gonna go with the second. When someone offers me money, I'm not going to make it any harder than necessary for them to give it to me. So, yes, I suppose one could attribute the focus on capital construction requests to "a reluctance to attract funds that could come attached to complicated demands for accountability and outcomes assessment"--but not necessarily because higher ed is opposed to assessment per se. It's just that capital construction is the surest means of cashing in on this sudden one-time opportunity. What good would it do to take Shaw's argument to heart--and then get outplayed by more politically astute competitors? Surely $5 million for a new science building is better than $0 for tuition discounts.

Presumably, most of these capital construction projects are already in line for state funding. I would expect a smart administrator who gets the capital construction money from the feds to later go to their state and negotiate a reallocation of the no-longer-needed state funding--perhaps funneling it in ways that would directly benefit students.

I understand that it's the Pope Center's job to criticize higher education, and that (at least as it seems to me) Critical Mass's job is to amplify that criticism--but this one really seems a stretch. Shaw seems to be asking higher-ed administrators to do something pretty dumb.

David,

Thanks for your comments. But to clarify -- I don't have any "job" that consists of "amplifying" anything the Pope Center says.