The Breaking Time

Ending rape culture: less apologies, more consequences

An apology would be good. Firing all three would be far better.

In the wake of the Steubenville rape verdict and the despicable reactions of CNN's commentators, there's a petition demanding a public apology from CNN.

That's laudable, but I think the approach leaves something to be desired. Rape culture's incredibly deeply embedded in many different parts of society, depressingly so. A big part of decreasing that is education and changing cultural norms. But consequences are also vital, and they don't get as much attention. While the military has an epidemic rape problem, for example, Helen Benedict's groundbreaking reporting found that "if a commander won’t tolerate the mistreatment of women, it will not happen." Something about the prospect of life in Leavenworth tends to focus the mind.

So whether organizations like CNN help spread this nonsense or not has far less to do with how apologetic they personally feel and far more to do with how scared they are of public backlash. Public figures stopped spouting as much racist tripe when it became clear it would ruin their careers and their social lives.

Likewise, vital as education is, rape culture will start truly crumbling when anchors, administrators, managers, and bosses that ignore or actively encourage it get fired or turned into social pariahs. It will take another hit when sentences for rapists are measured in decades instead of months, when police devote actual resources to catching them, and when prosecutors hand out less lenient plea bargains.

Deterrence and changing the power dynamic can, hell must, play a role in social progress if it's to have any lasting impact. Next time, the push should focus less on statements of repentance, and more on measurable consequences to show some change is actually taking place.

Violence isn't it: time to address gaming's real problems

It's my pleasure to welcome Ian Boudreau to the Breaking Time with this intelligent piece on shifting away from the old "gaming causes violence" mess to deal with real problems in the subculture and industry

This isn't a social problem

Writing about video games after a violent tragedy like the one late last year in Sandy Hook is a delicate thing. One doesn’t want to appear too reflexively defensive, but at the same time, it’s important to express the frustration caused when some well-meaning politician or advocate suggests that video games may have had a hand in a massacre.

Video games simply aren’t the cause of violent behavior. There’s no evidence suggesting they are – and a set of data provided by the Washington Post helpfully illustrates this. In a set of ten developed nations, per capita spending on video games – including violent games – roughly correlates with a slight downward trend in violence. The only clear outlier is the United States – suggesting our problem with violence has its roots in something other than Doom or Call of Duty.

A fellow blogger suggested to me that the science does indeed show that a relationship exists between games and violence – that valid research has been done and that it shows “spikes in aggressive thoughts and expectation” after playing sessions of violent video games. (A good summary of this research, and the counterarguments, is provided by gaming site Kotaku.)

In the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, Vice President Joe Biden met with top industry brass from across the media spectrum, including the big video game publishers. On his recommendation, President Barack Obama announced a $10 million grant to the Centers for Disease Control to study the effects of video games and other “violent media.”

“We shouldn’t be afraid of the facts,” Biden said in a subsequent Google Hangout on gun violence.

Indeed not. However, it’s a shame that this discussion – and the grant money – are focused on a problem that doesn’t exist rather than one of the many that do within the games industry and community.

Hierarchy has its place

Sometimes, this is actually the right way to go

Megan Erickson has a great Jacobin piece defending the concept of public education against the "unschooling" fads. While it's full of great points, it also has some interesting bits on hierarchy, like this:

Why shouldn’t kids be asked to put away their crayons and go to lunch at the same time? Why do we assume that clear boundaries, a schedule, and a sense of hierarchy are so threatening to students? Why must the individual’s vision be so carefully and serenely sheltered from other people, who are experienced in this framework as interruptions? There is value in being pulled out of a daydream. There is value in learning to cope with a little coercion, in knowing what it means to cooperate on a daily basis with someone who doesn’t love you, someone who’s not your family member.

Yes, yes, and yes. This doesn't get said nearly enough, and along with her point about the difference between privilege and authority, it takes this from a good essay to a great one.

While Erickson's piece is focused on education, the same assumptions behind "unschooling" — extreme suspicion of any power structure — underlie a whole slew of other movements, from open source to consensus protest groups.

Sometimes, in some arenas, this approach works just fine (with information especially) but in many it doesn't. Sometimes hierarchy is exactly what's needed.

There is no Normal

It's my pleasure to welcome m1k3y to the Breaking Time. Our longtime readers might remember him from our comrades in future dissection, Grinding, and as the other side of the Grinder Dialogues from this site's early days. Here he brings us an energetic, eclectic look at the roots of "normal."

Are you a wizard? Seriously, this is a legitimate question. I recently finished reading Alan Moore's incredible, highly mythic comic series Promethea, and it concludes with a very simple message: all we have ever done is sit by some evolution of the campfire — television is just the latest progression — and tell each other stories, literally imagining the world into existence. Unless you've only sat there passively spellbound, you've been a wizard your whole life, from the moment you mastered the first art, the first technology: language.

Our lives are constructed from language, and the words we use matter. One of these most powerful, spelt, words is Normal. 

Mr. Forbes' powerfully simple axiom, the tagline for this blog, is "There is no They." Last year, as part of our ongoing dialog, I took the liberty of extending it, to what I dubbed its first corollary: There is no Normal.

What is normal? What makes it a word of power? It's that subject that I seek to explore here, in what will be an occasional series of posts examining this subject from a variety of angles. Today, we start with pharmacology and history.

Bill Friday's ignored fight against tuition hikes

Photo by David Wilson, UNC Greensboro

The General Assembly shall provide that the benefits of The University of North Carolina and other public institutions of higher education, as far as practicable, be extended to the people of the State free of expense.

 -Article IX, North Carolina Constitution

"I'm really concerned that what we're doing now is making price and the ability to pay the first standard that must be met by young people to go to college. That's not what built this state; that attitude did not make North Carolina great."

-William C. Friday, 2012 

Former UNC President William Friday died early this morning at the age of 92. A flood of tributes naturally followed.

For those of you from outside NC, Friday was responsible for giving the state a world-class, affordable college system. This helped to make education more widely available, especially in a state with many poor and rural residents. A lot of us working class kids who ended up going to a good college for a price we can conceivably pay off in our lifetime owe him our thanks.

But among all the accolades, one thing that's being largely forgotten is that Friday spent the last decade of his life fighting hard against a major trend in higher education, including actions carried out by many of the same administrators currently singing his praises.

The ignoring of Friday's advice on this issue illuminates one of the main causes behind the increasing difficulty of accessing higher education: in his lifetime, low tuition went from sacrosanct to expendable.

A proud "low tuition man," Friday called the trend of institutions constantly ratcheting up their prices "dangerous." At my own school, Appalachian State, tuition began rising sharply around 2000. It was still a relative bargain during my time there, but the perpetually increasing cost did cause some real difficulties of the "having food and paying rent" variety.

As one of the architects of a better South, Friday saw widely-available knowledge as a way to overcome poverty and isolation. The belief in public education was one of the things the industrial nation-states got, on the whole, right: it's hard for us to imagine a time when even basic literacy was the province of the elite. But now that achievement is receding in places from the South to Europe, and student debt exceeds credit card debt.

So among all the deserved tributes, let's remember that a good portion of the people doing the talking ignored Friday's advice when it was most important, and continue to. Let's also hope there are more voices against those too shortsighted to pay for a functioning society.

Adjuncts and the collapse of the university

Photo from opacity

Here's a devastating piece from anthropologist Sarah Kendzior about the links between the increasing use of poorly paid, badly treated adjunct faculty and the crumbling of the American university:

It is 2011 and I'm sitting in the Palais des Congres in Montreal, watching anthropologists talk about structural inequality.

The American Anthropological Association meeting is held annually to showcase research from around the world, and like thousands of other anthropologists, I am paying to play: $650 for airfare, $400 for three nights in a "student" hotel, $70 for membership, and $94 for admission. The latter two fees are student rates. If I were an unemployed or underemployed scholar, the rates would double.

The theme of this year's meeting is "Traces, Tidemarks and Legacies." According to the explanation on the American Anthropological Association website, we live in a time when "the meaning and location of differences, both intellectually and morally, have been rearranged".  As the conference progresses, I begin to see what they mean. I am listening to the speaker bemoan the exploitative practices of the neoliberal model when a friend of mine taps me on the shoulder.
"I spent almost my entire salary to be here," she says.

And it only gets worse from there:

According to the Adjunct Project, a crowdsourced website revealing adjunct wages - data which universities have long kept under wraps - her salary is about average. If she taught five classes a year, a typical full-time faculty course load, she would make $10,500, well below the poverty line. Some adjuncts make more. I have one friend who was offered $5000 per course, but he turned it down and requested less so that his children would still qualify for food stamps.

Needless to say, adjuncts also have no benefits and slim prospects. Even while they're teaching an increasing share of the classes, they're largely locked out of the extremely expensive world of academic publishing, cutting off another route forward. I've known this was a problem for awhile, but this piece hits the nail on the head like no other I've seen.

Kendzior also points to the absolute hypocrisy of more entrenched academia in this regard ("I spent almost my entire salary to be here"). Among the most ostensibly leftist subcultures in the country, this is a group that has allowed the practice of paying their own younger colleagues slave wages to go largely unchallenged. This same subculture — despite concentrating on the ability to analyze damn near anything down to the most minute details — also seems unaware that it's gutting its own existence in the process. Many of tomorrow's thinkers aren't getting the chance to thrive because they're too damn worried about starving.

In my own stint in college (2001-05), I noticed this absolute cluelessness all too often. The same graying professors who would protest war in Iraq would turn right around and push for the end of the book rental system or another tuition hike. I remember one full professor, when asked how cash-strapped students were supposed to afford the latest tome, remarking "ask your parents for more money." Mine didn't have any, and I was far from alone. 

Later, I would hear some of the same people wonder why academia had lost its cultural relevance. Few of them looked in the mirror.

To be fair, there were exceptions — teachers I still greatly respect — but they were in the minority. 

The title of Kendzior's piece is "the closing of American academia," and she's right. Increasingly expensive education taught by impoverished faculty overseen by aging dons is recipe for eventual collapse. 

So how can the university be saved? If it can't, what can replace it?