REARRANGING THE DECK CHAIRS ON THE TITANIC:HAS THE MEDIA REALLY BECOME THE MESSAGE?
Karen McKellips
Cameron University
The most discussed, most written about event of my year as President of the Society actually occurred in 1912. As one whose interests, research and pedagogical activities usually focus on historical, rather than contemporary, events, I should have found this to be reassuring. I have not. There has been too much "rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic" to suit me.
Assured by everyone we know, young and old, male and female, at all levels of educational accomplishment, and holding a wide spectrum of metaphysical and esthetic views, that Titanicwas a great movie, my husband--a technophile, scientist, and adventure movie buff, and myself--a technophobe, a humanist lover of the quiet "relationship" movie, went to see it. WE hated it. All the way home from the theater, we took turns describing what was wrong with the thing. Obviously, no one in America, in the entire world, agrees with us . . . in spite of the fact that it is the first thing we have agreed about in thirty years.
Its records are astounding--over $1.5 billion at the box office. It is the number one all-time movie in Mexico, China, and who knows how many other countries. Its soundtrack album is the fastest selling of all time, and its making-of-a-movie-tie-in-book is the only one ever to make the New York Times' best seller list.
While one viewing was enough for me, and usually only 2% of a movie audience are repeat viewers, 20% of Titanic's audience is there for at least the second time.(1) On the television talk show Lisa on the day of the Oscar awards, a staff person admitted having seen it eighteen times. Newsweek reported a sixty-three-year-old man saw the movie three times, taking a roll of toilet paper to "stanch his sobs."(2)
The website for the movie received four million hits in one day. America On Line reported a message posted about Leonardo DiCaprio, the male star, every ten seconds.(3) DiCaprio T-shirts were sold in every tourist shop I visited in Greece this summer. People pay $250 a plate to attend dinners serving the same meal as the final one served on the Titanic. People are having "Titanic weddings," copying the clothing and Kate Winslet's hair style, and using Nearer My God to Theeas wedding music! Just as "a rising tide raises all ships," in February there were six Titanic books on the New York Times' best seller list, including Walter Lord's 1955, A Night to Remember.
The movie lasts thirty-four minutes longer than the time it took the real Titanic to sink. For much of that time, Jack and Rose are running, and occasionally swimming, in icy water as if in a heated swimming pool. Hypothermia is not allowed to get in the way of the romantic repartee. When Jack is handcuffed to a pipe in the bowels of the ship, as the frigid water rises to drown him, Rose puts down the axe which will eventually chop through his bonds, and they exchange witty bon mots.
Although Kate has a life jacket at the crucial moment she needs one, most of the time she is not so encumbered. One suspects the film makers did not wish to cover her most attractive bosom. Perched on the very tip end of the ship's bow which had risen perpendicular to the water preparatory to its plunge into the icy depths, the lovers show no fear but calmly discuss the fact that this is the exact same spot where they met.
Gloria Stuart's Academy Award nomination for her role mystifies me. It is not that her acting is bad, but that the role is. Ms. Stuart is a very well preserved eighty-seven-year-old who looks much younger. Indeed, I admire her wearing contact lenses at her age; I gave them up as vanity before I was thirty. They are very evident in her close-ups. (I didn't know they had contact lenses in 1912.) And her ability to climb on the ship's rail to pitch over some very valuable jewelry is also impressive at age eighty-seven. The script calls for us to believe that she is 103!
Explanations for the popularity of the film fill the media. Most often heard is the explanation that men love the movie for its action, the swashbuckling aspects of DiCaprio's character, and the scenes of great destruction visited upon the huge, beautifully appointed ship. The computer-generated people falling off of the sinking ship are more convincing than the little figures destroyed by King Kong or crunched by the original Godzilla, (not the new one.) Women are said to like the romance . . . Jack's sacrifice of himself for his lady love after freeing her from the clutches of her upper-class, selfish family and starting her on a life of feminist self-actualization.
Perhaps these explanations are accurate. But underlying both the action and the romance, lies the superb technological achievements of a computer-based presentation which allows the suspension of reality and transports us into a world of what "should have been," instead of what was, in a real, historical event, the sinking of the S.S. Titanic on 2:20 a.m., April 14, 1912, with the loss of 1,503 lives.
The power of technology to transform reality in the entertainment industry does not concern me as a member of this society. The power of technology to transform reality in the academic world does. Is the media now really the message, as Marshall McLuhan said it was a generation ago?
I am sure that my concern that academe is about to be utterly and forever changed by technology is related to my advanced age. I am a member of a group which I created and named myself. I am a charter member of "Hippies Hanging On." The first, and so far only, chapter of the organization is located at my institution, Cameron University. For a time none of the members, except myself, knew they were members, but recently I have shared with a few of my colleagues the fact that they belong, and none seem offended. If some of you would like to start a chapter, I would be happy to install you as the first President of your own group.
From my university catalog, I extracted the names of people who have been at the university since the 1960s. Anyone employed as a faculty member or librarian in 1969 or earlier, I, without their permission, made a member of the Hippies Hanging On Society. I presume everyone else wishes we would quit hanging on and make room for new people, but some of us just keep hanging on. The new technology will probably push us out of the university to make room for the new generation which is more competent with, and enthusiastic about, the current technological revolution. Like Rose and Jack, we will be pushed from the warm comfort of our own Titanic. Some of us, like Rose, may survive in a transformed state. Others, like Jack, will not.
It seems that my style of teaching is doomed by technology. Occupying a room with 20 to 40 students, lecturing, questioning, discussing, laughing, relating to one another, in the flesh, is about to vanish. Anything that is done that way can be done just as well, or probably better, via marvelous electronic means. Each student will very soon be able in his or her own space, at his or her own convenience, to learn just as much or more regarding those things now taught in the classroom mode that I love. Virtual reality, world-wide-web, interactive distance learning will enable every student enrolled in a class to interact with the teacher and with classmates, ask questions and get answers regarding subject matter, take tests, tap into libraries all over the world, without ever leaving home, hiring a babysitter, scheduling work hours around class time, etc. This is supposed to be a great advance in that it will aid those for whom coming on campus, even for a few hours a week, is a hardship.
I see that as only one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is that it increases the gap between educational experience of the haves and that of the have-nots. The elite can come on campus, go to class, interact in person with each other, enjoy the social life and camaraderie of the classroom while others can be educated in isolation, at home, after an eight-hour work day, while caring for a house, three children, and a dog. An article in my campus newspaper described Oklahoma's "Electronic Campus," the 600 courses which are now offered electronically by Oklahoma's twenty-five colleges and universities, under the headline, "Electronic Campus Makes Learning Easier." I suspect it would have been more accurate to have entitled the article, "Electronic Campus Makes Learning More Accessible."(4)
There will be no need for twenty institutions in Oklahoma offering English Composition I, or College Algebra, or Social Foundations of Education. The best teacher of each of these in the entire state can develop and teach the course to students over the entire state. Enormous amounts of tax money can be saved this way. The computer will do all the drill, testing, providing of examples, etc. One professor can develop and monitor the course. Transferability will no longer be an issue.
Our university's recently completed science building may be an anachronism, as were our dormitories. Cameron's dormitories were opened in 1969 with the presumption that our move from junior college to four year college status would result in a flood of eighteen-year-old single students. Enrollment did rise, but most were middle-aged, married students with families, and the dormitories were doomed never to be filled with sleeping students. They became a fiscal burden rather than an asset . . . buildings built for an out-of-date vision of higher education. Who now will use a science building when students take science in their homes with courses taught by Oklahoma University professors "on-line?" Perhaps the courses will originate from the lowest bidder institution, an obscure but minimally accredited institution operating from a website in the Bahamas.
Selfishly, I don't want it to be that way. When I was an undergraduate student, one of my favorite professors, a teacher educator, said to my class, "Don't go into teaching if you aren't somewhat of a ham. Only a person who wants positive feedback from his or her students, i.e., audience, will be a good teacher. The positive response of the people-to-people interaction in the classroom is what keeps a teacher working, adapting, improving."
While I agree with what she said, I'm afraid that only we Hippies Hanging On do. Perhaps I am guilty of wanting to be the "sage on the stage," instead of the politically-correct, "guide on the side."(5) The next generation of college professors will get the same thrill from making a machine respond that I get from making people respond.
It seems that the machine people have convinced the taxpayers and politicians that learning accomplished by technology is not only cheaper, but also better. They may be wrong. Technological advancements often go in directions not envisioned by their creators and those originally enthusiastic about them. One hundred three years ago, Roentgen discovered x-rays. Some early enthusiasts poisoned themselves, having to have limbs amputated or dying of radiation-induced cancer. One entrepreneur applied for a patent for women's underwear with a lead lining. It was to be marketed on the basis that it would prevent men with hand-held x-ray machines from being able to see through women's clothes. Jack did not have to have a hand-held x-ray machine to see Rose unencumbered by clothes.
While I am basically unenthusiastic about the technological revolution overtaking the university, I know that even if the worst happens, it won't be very bad when viewed within the broad scope of human history. I have recently listened to two books on tape which are helpful in keeping perspective . . . All Quiet on the Western Front and Their Eyes Were Watching God. The lives of Remarque's heros in the muck of World War I trenches and Hurston's depression-era woman working in the muck of Florida's tomato fields make my concern that most of us in this room are soon to be replaced by technology and one incredibly computer-literate instructor in the Bahamas laughably trivial.
Incidentally, I hope you noticed my saying that I listened to these books on tape; I didn't read them. I no longer have time to read because technological advances in the area of data gathering have allowed faculty time to be almost totally consumed with individual and committee work relating to assessment, putting course material on-line, updating university websites, and compiling accreditation reports. If one chooses to spend time on traditional concerns such as
preparing for classes, meeting face-to-face with students in one's office, or doing research, there is no time left for such activities as reading. One must listen to books on tape as one does laundry or drives to the university. (While the students can participate in classes from the comfort of their homes, faculty members are still expected to be at their university cubicles so that they can simultaneously keep their required office hours and respond to students on-line and in person at the same time.)
When the Hippie generation was beginning its time in academe, technology wasn't sophisticated enough for the agencies which control a tax-supported university to be able to demand, and get, the massive amounts of data from the campus that today they can, and do, demand. Technology has made it possible for massive amounts of minutiae to be gathered and stored--so it is. Most of such minutiae I, being a Hippie, see as bureaucratic response to political pressures. It is stuff that has to be done if funding and accreditation are to be maintained, and I admire those who do it well and cheerfully. I do it most uncheerfully.
There are those who say that advances in technology will make our lives less stressful because we will be able to get our work done faster and more easily and will have more leisure time. I doubt that. We will just be expected to do more because more is possible, so that the stress and time requirements of our lives won't be less, just different.
Those of you in administrative roles will have many new tools to help you evaluate faculty productivity. You can use "cookies" to keep records of your faculty members' response to students' queries once they are all done electronically, rather than through face-to-face classroom encounters. How many student-teacher interactions occur, the quality and accuracy of faculty responses, how long it took a faculty member to respond, the students' evaluation of the faculty member--all such data will be available instantly for use in faculty evaluation. It will also be available, of course, to higher level administrators, regents or trustees and the staff who work for them, state senators whose daughters didn't make an A, and the attorneys representing any person or group wishing to right a wrong committed upon your watch. You can be held accountable for the collision with the iceberg since constant monitoring of those you supervise is now possible.
I recently attended a conference entitled, "Washington and DuBois in the 21st Century." It was a most enjoyable experience where I was able to interact, formally and informally, with such people as Washington's granddaughter, DuBois' stepson, Julian Bond, Lewis Harlan, Charles Pace, Nikki Giovanni, and many others most highly respected in the American civil rights movement. Soon, it seems, personal attendance at such events will be replaced by contact through electronic means, with none of us having to waste taxpayer money by leaving our cubicles. Video-conferencing technology and virtual reality will bring us together without our being together. SOPHE won't just have a website; it will be a website.
At my conference I collected material--brochures, maps, the lesson plans and bibliography offered by a high school teacher who uses primary source documents, the thoughts of the resource director studying the slave population at Monticello. I shared this material with my class in Multiculturalism and American Education by making copies for my students and discussing them in class. In the future, I will be expected to locate and distribute such material on-line, with students down-loading and printing on their home computers whatever they can use.
Actually the task of a faculty member in the technological future will probably be to build a class of such gathered, assembled, edited material which is placed on the class website. Students will access it, e-mail questions about it, take multiple choice tests on-line, perhaps even cut and paste a term paper from material they have downloaded from various websites or bought from a provider located by their search engine, and get their grades and course credit. Such a class could be used forever . . . even after its developer is dead. The multimedia specialist/telemarketer in the Bahamas could take over at any time, providing a form of Lancastrian education with a machine replacing student monitors.
An article in the May issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education described the attempt of the University of California at Los Angeles to induce all faculty members to establish web pages including syllabi and other material now supplied as hard copy in their classes. U.C.L.A. provides "technology assistants," a luxury many institutions cannot afford, to construct and maintain web pages for professors who cannot, or prefer not to, construct and maintain their own. Some U.C.L.A. professors find the web pages to be valuable tools and enjoy constructing and updating them and communicating with students via e-mail. One professor includes Italian rap music, whatever that is, as background music for her rock video--I mean her syllabi. Other faculty members resent what they see as a violation of academic freedom and express fear that the university will market the materials professors have spent much time and effort developing. Intellectual property rights as a law speciality certainly has a bright future. A Northwestern University law professor claims that, "Virtually everything that I have written has been stolen and stuck on somebody's web site."(6)
Students have mixed reactions to the U.C.L.A. system. Most protests center on the fee they are assessed to pay for the service.(7)
Submitting papers by computer disk or e-mail is already standard operating procedure at many institutions, as is the practice of contacting instructors by e-mail for personal help with a course. One of my students, who can't afford a computer, now has to find a babysitter for her children so she can come to the university computer lab to type her papers on disk since many professors won't accept her term paper typed on her trusty IBM Selectric typewriter.
Now that students can e-mail questions to their professors, will they expect overnight responses to their queries? How many hundreds of students can an instructor serve in this way? How many times will the instructor answer the same question in these one-on-one interactions? One U.C.L.A. student who praises their program was thrilled by having posted a question on the professor's web page at 4:00 a.m. and receiving a personal response before 8:00 a.m. the same morning.(8)
Have we really established systems that will assure that the student whose work we are reading or whose test we are grading is Jack, and not Leonardo DiCaprio? (I am quite aware that much cheating goes on under the old-fashioned system of taking classes under the gaze of the instructor, but I do think I would notice if a new face showed up on test day.)
Francis Schrag said that in the last great technological leap, the leap from oral instruction to print instruction, "technological advance increased student passivity and dependency on authority."(9)Will this also result from increased use of computer technology? In Atlantic Monthly, Todd Oppenheimer reported a number of examples of students' uncritical acceptance of any information communicated or conclusions reached via computer, no matter how in conflict with human "real world" experience they were. At an earlier conference of this society, Mario Benitez spoke quite eloquently, as he does on any subject, of his reactions to his first experience with virtual reality. If Mario can be transported into an "attack mode" via technological magic, I shudder to consider its effect on an undergraduate student.
I have found in enrolling students whom I advise, that now that it is done on-line from my desktop computer, students accept with little protest the computer telling them they are ineligible to take a certain course or that the class section is full. Before enrollment was done by computer, they would argue vociferously with a human being who told them they could not get in such classes.
We old Hippies are probably just crotchety because we feel what we have accomplished has been devalued in the current educational climate. However, the concerns which I am trying to articulate seem to be congruent with thinking which has a long history in this society. Bill Fisher, in his 1984 paper for the society, chose to quote Bill Drake's 1961 paper for the society in which Dr. Drake said,
The mastery of the scientific and technological information which is to lay the groundwork for the new social order, even though involving assimilation of great quantities of data, can be accepted as a simple task when compared with the problems confronting man as a moral and political being. There will be constant pressure for efficiency, precision, adjustment and conformity as contrasted with the need for love, understanding, personal freedom, self-esteem and a sense of self worth.(10)I am still excited about educational history and my ability to get my students interested in it. I enjoy the give and take of a classroom in which eye contact, gestures, body language are a part of the communication among the people in the room. I enjoy informal casual discussions with individuals and small groups of students. Such events seem to me to be important to student development in areas deemed valuable by Drs. Drake and Fisher. None of what I do seems valuable anymore unless it can be done on-line. My successor need not know what I know, or be able to do what I do. The faculty member who replaces me needs only to be highly computer literate and able to create bombshell multimedia presentations which can reach maximum numbers via distance learning.
Looking like Kate Winslet or Leonardo DiCaprio won't hurt either. Students rate attractive "talking heads" higher than unattractive ones. Faculty who teach in our interactive t.v. program were given tips on what sort of clothing broadcasts best. One of my friends who teaches in the program found two giggling young women peering into one of her on-campus classes one day. When she asked them in, they blushingly admitted they were taking her "talk-back t.v." class and wanted to see what she looked like in person. She said she thought they might ask for her autograph. I would rather see Jim Van Patten's or Martha Tevis' face than DiCaprio's or Winslet's, but I have had the advantage of knowing them without the mediation of a machine.
Surely no one still views the purchase of computer hardware as a capital investment. Purchases are obsolete as soon as the funds necessary to approve their purchase make their way through the approval processes necessary to pay for them. Universities' budgets look unlikely to be able to afford the constant upgrades required to keep technology current without greatly increasing faculty "productivity." Productivity increases of the magnitude needed can only be accomplished at a university through reduction of the number of human beings to be paid, insured, etc. The elimination of support personnel and the increase of credit hour production per faculty member would appear to be the major avenues to shift funding from other functions to support the expense accompanying constant technological upgrading.
Public school boards and personnel realize that even when grants provide funding to purchase hardware and/or software, the resulting technology may be obsolete in just a few years. As technology budgets expand, students are bused on ancient, unsafe buses to old buildings suffering from years of neglected maintenance. Drivers' education, music and art classes are often sacrificed to find money for technology. A poll of public school classroom teachers ranked computer skills and media technology as more essential than study of European history, biology, chemistry, or physics.(11)
To secure a federal grant which would pay 90% of the cost to Oklahoma City Public Schools for such items as file servers and network software, the district found it would have to spend $7.1 million to place computers in all classrooms plus $5.1 million to upgrade electrical systems to handle these computers. For a district with buildings built as long ago as 1894, whose officials report the need to spent $10 million on an aging bus fleet, and who estimate they have more than $100 million in deferred maintenance needs, the decision to spend more than $12 million to qualify for the $7 million grant which would make Internet access possible is a difficult one. The decision is complicated by the fear that the system has a sort of built-in obsolescence.(12)
Perhaps we in higher education do not need to be concerned about these problems since we don't perform the "babysitting" service that public schools do and thus have no responsibility to provide bus service, or even classrooms, once distance learning is perfected. Actually, the only reason in the future to have a campus will be to have a place to practice and play football and basketball.
Can you get all the information you need on-line? Can you write without visiting archives or libraries? Are you willing to devote massive amounts of time to preparing documentation of what you know and do and what your students know and do to satisfy the desires of accrediting agencies and government bureaucracies seeking to determine what you are teaching is in line with politically-correct objectives and externally established "standards?" Are you willing to accept the fact that just as soon as you are comfortable with hardware or software being used at your university, it will be "upgraded" necessitating your spending hours, and your university spending all its faculty development budget, learning to use the new, "improved" version? These are the job skills which will make you a valuable employee. Since students will be able to "shop" for courses from many institutions regardless of where they live, scholarly accuracy may have to be sacrificed for a pleasing, exciting presentation format, just as the Titanic movie had to sacrifice scientific and historic accuracy in the interest of attracting an audience.
The view of the technological future held by young people at our conference should be, and probably is, more positive than mine. You young folks have the comfort of knowing that some of us old Hippies Hanging On are going to let go and make room in the lifeboats for you. As we sink below the technologically-enhanced virtual reality waves, we Hippies Letting Go may borrow the words from a movie of a technologically primitive era, long before Stephen Spielberg, James Cameron, et al, made the world of make believe real. As Margo Channing (Bette Davis) said to Eve (Anne Baxter) who had just replaced her as the reigning queen of the theater (sort of a "sage on the stage"giving way to a "guide on the side,") "Fasten your seat belts. It's going to be a bumpy ride."(13)
ENDNOTES
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.