June 29, 2014

Government web pages

After the American Century

I often have the same experience with web sites set up by governments and monopolistic organizations supported by government:  dysfunctional pages, where the services are hard to use. It requires many clicks to find the information or perform a simple task. For example, when one tries to use the website of the Danish post office system, to tell them when one is on vacation and does not want mail delivered. This proved an impossible  task in over half an hour of trying.  The site kept crashing on me and sending incomprehensible error messages.

In contrast, I had no trouble buying a plane ticket, making hotel reservations, or finding lots of useful information, all provided by people who need to survive in the marketplace.  I realize that this might make me sound like a Republican who wants to reduce government to national defense and farm subsidies, but that is not at all the case.

Some government websites do work well, notably those that provide weather information, which is often of life-and.death importance.  But all too often public services are digitized in order to save money, and to become "more effective," which is often means firing staff and forcing the public to deal with whatever website is substituted.

The solution might be to compare services in different countries and use those that work best as models for others to adapt to their own cultures and circumstances. Most of the needed innovations are probably out there, waiting to be emulated.

So, an example. The Danish tax system, which successfully collects the highest taxes in the world, at least is user-friendly. The citizen can see his tax situation on-line, where most of the needed information is automatically gathered from banks, pension plans, employers, and other institutions. Not only this year's tax is there, but several years previous as well. This particular Big Brother is watching, but they are also communicating what they see, and the taxpayer has a chance to correct or modify it. The taxes may be high, but at least they are extracted with little pain,  and there is a dialogue between citizen and government institution. It is not always the happiest dialogue, of course!

In contrast, another advanced industrial economy, I will not name names, which lies somewhere between Niagara Falls and the Baja California, estimates that a citizen filling out its standard tax form needs a total of 15 hours, or two entire days, to read and understand the basic forms and advice, and then do the calculations needed. The form is blank at the start, and the citizen has to try to remember everything and make no mistakes. (The Danish form is filled in by the tax authorities, and the citizen only has to check the facts, and then make additions or changes.) I know a few people from the other nation, and they tell me that it is often not possible to complete the form in 15 hours without assistance. There is an enormous amount of information on-line, and there are numbers to call for more information, too. But it is a much harder process to negotiate, and once the forms are filled in and delivered, I have it on good authority, one often never hears anything back.  

In Denmark, feedback on all tax returns is made available on a particular date, and the whole country tries to find out at the same time. Now that can cause a cyber traffic jam.

March 18, 2014

Is the Internet Shortening attention spans and undermining long term cultural memory??

After the American Century

I have been silent for longer than at any other time since this blog began in 2007. I might blame this on any number of events. But my silence has much to do with increasing doubts about the overall effects of the Internet on our lives. The increasing commercialization and the wholesale acquisition and resale of knowledge about everyone using the Internet are disturbing.


It is not just the NSA that invades our privacy. So do many others. Some do so openly.  My opinions, friends, likes and dislikes, and much else is gathered by Facebook. Credit card companies gather data about the purchases of their cardholders. Google has built up an enormous mine of data for resale. As one analyst put it, Internet users have become the product that Internet companies sell.

Many others invade our privacy illegally, prying their way into on-line identities, extracting money from digital bank accounts, or assuming false identities and telling us lies in the hopes that we will give them a pin code or a social security number. Cyber criminality is big business, and the ordinary individual does not have many weapons to fight back.

Once, enormous corporate advertising budgets went to magazines and newspapers, and in exchange one had a vibrant news media. This is all changing today, and it is not yet clear to me that the Internet is an improvement. Yes, everyone can publish, including myself. But there are so many voices competing for attention that only a tiny fraction get an audience. The older media often seem to be dominating the Internet, in any case, and, more and more, they are charging for their services. Is the overall result positive? It is too soon to be certain.

A similar pattern is evident in book publishing. There are far more authors than ever before, but most titles are now self-published. Bookstores are dying. Academic publishers are struggling. The reading audience does not seem to be growing as fast as the population. Moreover, the newspapers seem to review fewer books, and they seldom take note of academic titles, compared to the situation 20 years ago.

For about a decade the answer to these worries seemed to be that e-publishing would expand the market. But in 2013 sales of e-books in fiction fell just slightly, the first time this had ever happened. Overall, e-book sales have flattened out after rising quite rapidly in the first years. At present, the e-book is eating into sales of hard copy books, but the overall sales are not increasing. Predictions seem to be that e-books will surpass printed volumes in the very near future, but the market as a whole is not necessarily growing. 

Moreover, the number of books actually being read is probably falling, if my own experience is any measure. I have purchased many inexpensive e-books and downloaded quite a few free ones, but I have read very few of them. I got them because they were free and made it possible to search a large corpus quickly. This is admittedly an advantage. But when I buy the complete works of Mark Twain for a few dollars, in order to search them easily for certain materials, such a multivolume purchase falsely suggests a larger reading public than is actually is out there.

The kind of public that surfs the Internet constantly is not thinking long and hard, it seems. The attention span dwindles. Like students who browse the Web during classes (which they have seldom prepared for, in any case), the Internet seems to support banter and jokes on Twitter more than thoughtful, long analysis.

In short, the pluses may be gradually outweighed by the minuses of the Internet. This is particularly clear in Denmark, where the government has decreed that all communication between the state and the citizen must be conducted digitally. More, they have created systems that only work with new computers, so that anyone, like myself, who has a 32-bit computer literally cannot log in. I know a number of older people who do not even know how to use email, and they will effectively be cut off. I intend to make a personal and a written protest, along with a request to be allowed a tax deduction for purchasing an other wise unnecessary new computer. 

In a similar move, the Danish state schools are beginning to demand that all parents supply their children with a laptop or an Ipad for use in school every day. Imposing this expense while saving money on textbooks is wrong. Asking children under 10 to carry around a valuable computer is an invitation to thieves and bullies. Expecting teachers to solve the software problems that will ensue because children have different systems and machines is an idiotic waste of their time. Assuming that technology makes education better without public discussion is dubious.  I could write a column about this issue alone.

But to keep to the larger perspective. The new reality is that banks, government, schools, and employers now demand that everyone has a new or recent computer. It is fast becoming impossible to pay taxes, seek a job, pay a bill, or keep track of expenses without mastery and continual updating of multiple accounts, including continually changing passwords.

Worst of all, I suspect that in the long term this vast digital system is going to suffer memory losses. On a personal level, I cannot now access the things I wrote and in many cases published in the 1990s. The software and the hardware has changed too much. Does anyone really believe that if a tax or financial or legal issue arises that requires older records, that these will really be available? The jury is necessarily unable to decide this issue, and we will just have to wait several decades to find out.

Last year I was in a small courthouse in Iowa, and wanted to see some records from 1894. They were handwritten, easily retrieved, and perfectly legible. Will the same thing be true of our digital records 120 years from now? I doubt it. 

Is the Internet shortening attention spans in the short term, and undermining long term cultural memory? Is the state beginning to abuse the Internet and demand "participation" in digital systems simply to save money and to distance itself from actual contact with citizens? Are state institutions, such as schools, substituting technology for books and other physical resources, and transferring the cost to citizens? In the name of efficiency and convenience, we seem to be entering a digital prison, with short-term advantages but long-term costs, not the least of which is collective memory loss.



On Becoming A Knight

I was knighted in Copenhagen on Monday, 27 January.

Such ceremonies are private, with no reporters or photographers allowed. Even family members are not permitted to attend or to wait inside the palace. I had originally thought to write up the experience, but I have realized that it would be considered improper for me to write at length about this happy event. Not everything is open to public scrutiny!

The medal that one receives cannot be sold or transferred to anyone else. It remains the property of the Queen, and must be returned after one passes away. It must be worn whenever I am in the Queen's presence. I have not yet needed to wear it a second time.





January 02, 2014

The Longterm Perils of Fracking

After the American Century

Fracking is much in the news. This new way of extracting oil and natural gas is controversial because, while it lowers energy prices and generates jobs, it has an environmental cost. If North Dakota is booming and crying out for more labor, deep beneath the surface of the state fracking is pumping chemicals into the bedrock.  No one knows with certainty how this may affect the ground water a generation from now. North Dakota is extracting oil using this method, while it is being used in Pennsylvania and New York to extract natural gas.



Regardless of where fracking is taking place, the public does not know what exactly is being injected into the ground, because industries regard this as a trade secret, and no legislation forces them to disclose what exactly they are doing to the land. However, some of these chemicals used in fracking are known, including hydrochloric acid, boric acid, sodium chloride, and ammonium chloride. Many of the chemicals are "biocides" that are intended to kill bacteria.  Others seek to change the ph of the water.

It may seem amazing, but the "Safe Drinking Water Act" has an exemption for hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). The act specifically does not control or regulate, "the underground injection of fluids or propping agents (other than diesel fuels) pursuant to hydraulic fracturing operations related to oil, gas, or geothermal production activities." (See the Environmental Protection Agency.) There are rumors that some oil and gas drillers are using nano-technologies whose environmental consequences are not known.

Fracking demands large amounts of water, between two and eight million gallons for a single well. Permits have been issued for more than 80,000 wells, and these typically have pools of waste water nearby. Lawsuits in several parts of Pennsylvania and New York have established that this chemically charged waste has polluted drinking water. The contamination is necessarily a mix of chemicals injected by the drillers and substances already in the ground that were released along with the oil and gas. These also include the methane being sought; Duke University scientists found methane in many wells near fracking operations in Pennsylvania. It may be that methane is not toxic in small does, but it definitely is "an asphyxiant in enclosed spaces and an explosion and fire hazard." A methane-polluted well is unsafe as a domestic water supply.
Safe Water Drinking Act to remove a special exemption for hydraulic fracturing - See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/201203097069/natural-resources-news-service/cuomo-and-corbett-ignore-health-concerns-from-gas-fracking.html#sthash.iZpPPkht.dpuf
Safe Water Drinking Act to remove a special exemption for hydraulic fracturing - See more at: http://www.dcbureau.org/201203097069/natural-resources-news-service/cuomo-and-corbett-ignore-health-concerns-from-gas-fracking.html#sthash.iZpPPkht.dpuf

The long-term pollution of water is an obvious danger that is being downplayed in the rush for quick profits, but there is another danger that is less discussed. Fracking has given the oil and gas energy regime a new lease on life. Just five years ago one could argue that both national security and the danger of global warming pointed to the need for a rapid conversion to alternative energies. But in 2014 US oil and gas production is soaring to the point where the government is under pressure to allow the nation to become an oil exporter again. The falling cost of natural gas is making the US highly competitive in some industries, in contrast to Europe where gas prices are noticeably higher. In the short term, this stimulates the economy, but in the longer term it encourages Americans to remain high energy consumers, embracing an unsustainable style of life.

The current American oil and gas bonanza will delay, perhaps for an entire generation, the transition away from fossil fuels to sustainable homes, vehicles, and consumption levels. Leadership in the new technologies of wind, solar, and bio-fuels may continue to slip away from the US to foreign competitors. Germany, for example, has made a major commitment to becoming more energy efficient, even as it is abandoning nuclear power. The Danes have developed one of the world's largest and best windmill industries.The Chinese are investing heavily in solar energy and have out competed the US for foreign markets.

Fracking may be good for the American economy in the short run, but in the long run it cannot be very good for the land itself. Furthermore, it misdirects economic development toward an inefficient, high-energy dead end. It will not reduce the cost of oil, because that is shaped by world demand, which is rising rapidly. It will retard transition to a sustainable energy regime, and it may well undermine US competitiveness in the growing area of alternative energy technologies.

The United States is opting for a strategy of quick profits and "pollute now, pay later."  Most of the costs will be paid by later generations.

December 21, 2013

NSA Violations Undermine the US Abroad: Is this Obama's Legacy?

After the American Century
This is the 400th blog entry for After the American Century.


More revelations about the NSA's snooping are being discussed in the world press, and it is increasingly clear that the NSA has undermined US relations with allies. How much distrust it has created cannot be quantified, but every Danish person I have discussed this with dislikes what the NSA is doing, including colleagues, teenagers, pensioners, students, neighbors, and taxi drivers. All can see that some spying is needed for national security, but hoovering up all the data available seems not just expensive, not just overkill, not just excessive, but the actions of a rather paranoid international bully.  Sorry, my American readers, but this is the bad news the domestic press is not saying too much about.

Because the underlying reputation of the United States in the world has been adversely affected, news is beginning to appear about American businesses losing contracts abroad because of fears of NSA surveillance, fears that trade secrets are being stolen, fears that negotiations and bidding on lucrative contracts are being spied on, and so on. Many foreign businesses want to avoid saving data on US systems, because of these fears. Some estimates suggest that the IT industry alone may lose $180 billion in foreign business because of the NSA revelations. Little wonder that the largest technology companies wrote an open letter to President Obama protesting the NSA's over-reach.

Likewise, many ordinary people abroad wish they could stop using American-owned sites, such as Google, Facebook, Twitter, and all the rest, because the newspapers have confirmed that all these corporations are compromised. In the end, it matters little whether they intentionally shared date with the NSA or were hacked by the NSA. The lack of privacy is more than disturbing; it is driving a wedge of distrust between the US and the rest of the world.

The average person assumes that if the German Prime Minister is not safe from NSA snooping, if the Israeli Defense Minister is not safe, if the diplomats of the EU are not safe, then of course no one else is safe either. The assurances that  information gathered is not shared with other government agencies rings rather hollow. After all, Mr. Snowdon was able to obtain huge amounts of information about all sorts of things. There appear to be thousands of others with the same security clearance. Have none of these men and women ties to other US government agencies? Are all of them able to resist pressure to help out a friend in another government agency? Are none of them corrupt? Who can seriously believe that the federal access to information is limited to NSA?

Unhappily, this ongoing scandal may become what President Obama is remembered for. On the one hand, he spent hundreds of billions on a global paranoia project to gather more information on more people than ever before in history. On the other hand, he did not allocate sufficient funds or find sufficient expertise to put Obamacare into working order. This is bad leadership.

The conclusion I reached in June still seems valid. Then I wrote that "The problems of the Obama Administration are to a considerable degree of its own making. Presidential second terms are often difficult, and this one seems to be no exception. Think of Lyndon Johnson after his re-election, when antiwar protests dogged his every step. Think of Richard Nixon's second term, engulfed by Watergate. Think of Reagan's second term, and Irangate. Think of Bill Clinton's scandal-ridden second term and the attempted impeachment. And finally, think of George W. Bush's second term, when his approval ratings sank below 25%. Since 1963, not one  president found a way to escape controversy and unpopularity in a second term. Obama unfortunately seems headed toward a similar fate." President Obama's popularity rating has sunk by more than ten points since this time last year. Recent second-term presidents have often had ratings around 50% at the end of their fifth year. Obama's rating is 43% according to CBS, but only 40% according to Gallup.

What an irony it will be if the American economic recovery is compromised by the NSA and Obama's slow correction of its excesses. How ironic that a president who began his term with tremendous good will abroad has squandered it.

The sad spectacle seems to justify the title of this Blog itself. The American Century perhaps could be dated from 1918, when the US emerged from World War I as the wealthiest power, with the world's largest industrial plant. The US reached the apogee of its economic power in the early Cold War, but its hegemonic position has gradually eroded as a percentage of the world's economy since then. To some extent this was unavoidable, as other nations industrialized and digitized. But there is also a purely internal decline into dysfunctionality that is not primarily due to external foes. No outside power eviscerated public education. No foreign government forced the US to have unworkable immigration laws. No international agency failed to monitor and control its banks. No nefarious outsiders are responsible for the foolish tax policies of the Bush years or the problems created by the "sequester." No outsiders force Americans to purchase ever more weapons for personal use. These egregious and unnecessary errors are just part of a catalog of mistakes that would drag down any nation, if persisted in long enough. The United States seems intent on undermining and defeating itself. The excesses of the NSA are part of that pattern.

December 05, 2013

Education: Pisa Test Results, 2012

After the American Century   

Pisa rankings have been developed, based on extensive testing in 65 countries.  Students at age 15 were tested in math, reading and science. When taking all three tests scores into account, the first forty nations are ranked as shown in the list below. Note that the first three scores are for cities, not nations. Impressive as they are, they cannot easily be compared to entire countries. South Korea and Japan have high scores for a much larger sample, including a cross-section of the entire population.

In general, the top twenty are improving, in some cases remarkably. But most of those with composite scores below 1520 are not improving or only improving a little. Geographically, Asia leads, followed by Eastern Europe, and then Western Europe plus New Zealand and Australia. Well below the middle one finds the United States. There is a dismal tie between Latin America and the Moslem World for the weakest showing. The real last place may be somewhere in Africa, which was not included in the study.

                                                        score in 2009        improvement
1. Shanghai                   1783             1731                     52
Above 1600
2. Singapore                  1666            1630                    - 36
3. Hong Kong               1661             1637                   - 24
4. South Korea             1628              1623                   -  5
5. Japan                        1621              1588                    33
6. Taiwan                     1606               1558                    48
Above 1550
7. Finland                     1588               1631                  - 43
8. Estonia                     1578               1541                    37
9. Liechtenstein           1576                1555                    21
10. Macau-China         1568               1523                    45
11. Canada                   1566               1580                    14
12. Switzerland            1565               1552                    13
13. Poland                    1562               1503                    59
14. Netherlands            1556               1556                    no change
Above 1500
15. Vietnam                  1547                n.a.                     
16. Germany                 1546               1530                   16
17. Ireland                    1534                1489                   45
18. Australia                 1534                1556                   22
19. New Zealand          1528                1559                   21
20. Belgium                  1519                1528                  - 9
21. United Kingdom     1507                1500                    7
22. Czech Republic       1500                1473                  27
23. Austria                     1502                1503                   1
Above 1475
24. France                       1499              1491                    8
25. Slovenia                    1496              1496                   no change
26. Denmark                   1494              1497                   -3
27. Norway                     1488              1501                  -13
28. Latvia                        1482                n.a. 
29. United States             1476              1489                 -13
From 1422-1469
30. Italy                          1469
31. Luxembourg             1468
32. Spain                        1468
33. Portugal                    1464
34. Hungary                   1459
35. Lithuania                  1455
36. Iceland                     1454
37. Croatia                     1447
38. Sweden                    1446                1486                 - 40
39. Russia                      1443
40. Israel                        1422

Latin America (selected scores)
Chile                            1309
Costa Rica                   1277
Mexico                        1252
Uruguay                      1236
Brazil                          1206
Argentina                    1190
Colombia                    1178
Peru                            1125  (last place in all categories)

Moslem World (selected scores)
Turkey                        1386
Unit. Arab Emirates   1324
Tunisia                        1190
Jordan                         1188
Qatar                          1148
Indonesia                    1153 (next to last place overall)


With the notable exception of Finland (which declined from a high position), the Nordic nations made a poor showing. They have collectively fallen toward the bottom of the league table. If their decline continues, within another decade one of them might be relegated and formed to move en masse to Argentina.

Decline in education may well be a predictor for a decline in economic development a generation later.

November 25, 2013

The Bay Song Book (1640) Auctioned for a record-breaking $14.2 million

After the American Century 

On 26 November Sotheby's auctioned off a copy of The Bay Psalm Book, which was the first book published in what became the United States of America, in 1640. The timing of the sale two days before Thanksgiving seemed well-chosen, as most Americans associate that holiday with the first settlers of Massachusetts. (However, the first such Thanksgiving dinner was celebrated by the Pilgrims in Plymouth, not the Puritans who produced the book, but only landed in Boston in 1630.) 

To produce this book, the Puritans had to purchase a printing press and paper in London, at a time when they might have spent money on horses, millstones, or other practical necessities.This was just ten years after they first arrived and founded Boston, and four years after they established Harvard, to train clergy.



The Bay Song Book was a new, metrical translation of the psalms. The Puritan settlers included a number of scholars who knew both Hebrew and Greek, and they were determined to have a translation that was close to the original texts. The book also expressed their sense of the unpredictability of God. For example, at one point their translation ran:

The Lord will come and He will not
Keep silent and speak out.

Later generations found such passages contradictory, but they are impressive when sung to the melody provided by the Psalm Book.

The book at Sotheby's auction fetched a higher price than any other American book, ever, and more than even a Gutenberg Bible. The most expensive US book, previously, was John James Audubon's Birds of America, which sold for $11.5 million. This high value is not due to the psalm book's quality as an example of the printer's art, for there were many small errors in the first edition. Nor was the Bay Psalm Book considered particularly valuable in the first years after it was printed. Rather, it was constantly in use, and most copies of the first edition were literally worn out. 

As a result, only 11 of 1700 copies from the first edition still exist, and almost all of these are in major libraries that will never sell them. Quite possibly, the one sold by Boston's Old South Church (which has another copy that it will keep), will be the last one ever sold at public auction, unless, of course, someone discovers one more in their attic. If you find one, do not toss it in the trash, no matter how battered, because this copy sold for $14.2 million. 

November 09, 2013

Technology: The Machine in the Garden, 50th Anniversary

 After the American Century

Remarks made at MIT celebrating the fiftieth anniversary 
of the publication of
Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden

 


I first heard about The Machine in the Garden when a freshman at Amherst College in 1964. I saw it reviewed in the local newspaper, and I went out and bought a copy in hard cover, as a Christmas present for my father. He was interested in the history of technology, but I was not, or so I thought. I did not consider reading it myself, until I had a course with Leo Marx the following year. 


Amherst prides itself on a low student-faculty ratio and small classes. But Professor Marx’s survey of American literature was so popular that he taught in the largest lecture room on campus. About 150 students took the course every year, which meant that about half of all the Amherst student body chose to take it. He lectured on the Puritans, natural depravity, attempts to define "what is an American" from Crévecoeur onwards, the pastoral dream of America, the madness of Ahab in Moby Dick, Thoreau's theory of civil disobedience, and Whitman's barbaric yawp heard over the rooftops of the world. For those of us taking the course, this literature often seemed to be a meta-commentary on our times. The generals in the Pentagon were our Ahabs, the leaders of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements our Thoreaus, and Bob Dylan was our version of Whitman’s barbaric yawp. Our best hope, it seemed, was to survive the coming apocalypse as the Ishmaels of our generation. This was not the thrust of Professor Marx's course, I hasten to add, which was a most inspiring and coherent set of lectures on nineteenth century literature.  I then bought a second copy of The Machine in the Garden, by then in paperback. Reading it, I could hear Leo’s wonderfully engaging voice, which at times has an almost hypnotic quality when he reads from and explicates literature. The survey course made such an impression that his seminars were oversubscribed, and I was one of the lucky 20 who managed to get into one of them.

When each Amherst class graduated, the custom was to select a faculty member as an honorary member of the class. Shortly before graduation the faculty member selected gave a final lecture to the entire class in the College chapel. My class of 1968 selected Leo Marx, and he lectured on technology in American society, with considerable reference to Lewis Mumford’s Technics and Human Development, which had appeared the previous year. I cannot claim to recall his argument in detail, but it linked the themes of  The Machine in the Garden with sociology and philosophy, notably Martin Heidigger’s understanding that the essence of technology lies in the mind not the machine. The tensions analyzed in The Machine and the Garden were not new, but had emerged in antiquity, as with Mumford’s example was the building of the pyramids. Classical references were also in Leo’s book, notably his discussion of the emergence of the pastoral genre in ancient Greece and Rome and its re-emergence in early modern Britain.

Let me draw a few conclusions based on these Amherst years. Before its publication, Leo’s book developed to some degree through his teaching. Many close readings of particular authors were presented and no doubt refined in front of his students before the volume itself appeared. Through the process of teaching, it seems, Leo found compelling ways to make his argument. The ideas themselves had first been nurtured at Harvard in the 1940s, where he studied with F O Matthiessen and Perry Miller, and where he was Henry Nash Smith’s TA. But he reworked his dissertation for over a decade. He was not forced to rush into print in order to gain tenure, as is the unhappy practice today. This is a great book partly because it was closely linked to teaching and because its author was able to give it time. 

My copy of The Machine in the Garden went with me to the University of Minnesota, where Leo had once taught, and where Alan Trachtenberg [who spoke just before I did] was one of his students. His former colleagues recalled him fondly, particularly Barney Bowron, who taught me much about late nineteenth century American literature. The Machine in the Garden was highly regarded at the Center for American Studies, and I found it useful not only in courses but also in framing my PhD thesis. Only in graduate school did I fully understand that this book was quite interdisciplinary. At Amherst the combination of history, literature, fine art, and the social sciences had seemed quite natural, but at Minnesota the faculty at these departments did not always share a commitment to interdisciplinarity. Notably, the New Criticism was still strong in the English Department, and I found that I had to defend the “myth and symbol” approach and to find arguments for the practice of American Studies itself.  To my surprise, I discovered many arguments along these lines in The Machine in the Garden, in paragraphs that had not seemed so important when I was an undergraduate. I more fully understood its importance in shaping the development of the field of American Studies. It offered a model for how to combine sweeping analysis with close readings of texts, including literature, political speeches, government reports, and much more. It was genuinely interdisciplinary, drawing on classics, history, psychology, philosophy, popular culture, and  fine art, even as it kept the main focus on literature.

By the middle 1970s when I was out of graduate school, academic fashions were changing rapidly. The field of American Studies was going through a transformation that emphasized social history more than literature and that focused on racial injustice, class tensions, and gender inequality.  These matters were not excluded from the American Studies I had known at Amherst, and it has always seemed to me that they were very much part of the tradition of American Studies that Leo represented. Nevertheless, each academic generation seems to establish itself by attacking those who went before. The so-called “myth and symbol school,” which in fact never formally existed or identified itself by that name, came under attack. This is not the place to rehearse the debates of the 1970s and 1980s. Suffice it to say that while it is true that the book might have included such writers as Willa Cather or Ralph Ellison, their addition would not have undermined or compromised the argument, but rather showed its strengths. There is an enormous difference between leaving someting out because it does not fit a line of argument and leaving something out because not all of American literature can be discussed in a single book. In any case, The Machine in the Garden has outlasted its critics, most of whom  are little remembered today except by specialists. It remains in pint, and people continue to cite it today. It is so well-known that other books refer to it in their very titles. In 1994 appeared, The Garden in the Machine (Princeton), in 2004 The Machine in Neptune’s Garden (Watson Science), and in 2001 The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place.  The journalist Joel Garreau has written an essay, "The Machine, the Garden, and Paradise" (1991). There is also a gothic/darkwave musical duo who call themselves “The Machine in the Garden”. No doubt there are more examples.

Throughout my academic life both Leo and his book have preceded me. When I went to Spain on a Fulbright, I found that Leo had been there lecturing the year before, and The Machine in the Garden  was a celebrated work. When I went for a year to The Netherlands, I found that he was friends with several people there, and that he had apparently lectured at all their universities. He had also spent a Fulbright himself in Britain, and he was well-known in Germany. Furthermore, Leo spent enough of his childhood in France to speak that language. It is difficult to find a European professor of American literature who has not read The Machine in the Garden. I could give many more examples, but one final one. A month ago I sat down at a random table in an airport restaurant waiting for my flight. At the next table a Finnish woman was talking about a lecture she was going to give in Stockholm about ecology and literature. It turned out that one of the first books cited in her paper was The Machine in the Garden.

When I bought that first edition for my father fifty years ago, I could never have imagined how much it would come to mean for me, for American Studies, and for the history of technology. As environmental concerns become more urgent, it is also being rediscovered by a new generation of scholars in other fields. It remains useful in my research and teaching. A colleague at the University of Texas told me that the new graduate students are quite interested in it. One of my classmates from Amherst, Gordon Radley who has a high position at Lucas Films, tells me that The Machine in the Garden has been influential in the formation of some of their motion pictures. If a comprehensive study were done of this book's influence, many more such stories would come to light.

After half a century of prominence, The Machine in the Garden has become an important part of  American culture. It is one of those rare books that is, at the same time, a primary source and a secondary source.  We read it both as one of the highest achievements of American Studies in its first two decades, and as a compelling meditation on the place of technology in American society. 

November 02, 2013

Education: Danish Universities Need to Learn from the International Competition

After the American Century

The Danish Ministry of Research, which funds university education, is determined to "reform." To do so, it has appointed a committee to make proposals about how to improve the universities. Unfortunately, while each member of this committee is probably a reasonable choice, the group as a whole lacks breadth and international perspective. The committee does not have a single humanist and even more remarkably, not a single scientist. One member of the committee comes from the University of Bergen, but given that Norwegian universities resemble those in Denmark, this does not make the committee very international.


According the the London Times' ranking, neither Norway nor Denmark has even one university in the world's top 116. The top Danish university is the engineering school, ranked 117, and the top Norwegian institution is Oslo, ranked 185. All such surveys in recent years have concluded that the best universities in the world are in the United States, Britain, and Australia, and there is a sharp difference between those in the top twenty or so and the next twenty. Universities ranked lower than 100 are all far behind the world's elite.

One might think the Danish government would put at least one person from the world's elite institutions on the committee. There are Danes abroad who work at these top institutions. There are also expatriates living in Denmark who received their education at such schools. But none of this expertise will be on the committee. Of course, members of the committee have visited some of these elite schools, but a visit, even one lasting a semester, will not provide the same kind of insight as studying for a degree in such a place, much less being a permanent part of the faculty.

The committee is narrow in yet another way: most of them are closely associated with Copenhagen University (currently ranked 150) and they live in the same part of Denmark. (There are some who view Copenhagen as a fossilized institution because it hires much of its faculty from its own graduates.) Three of the five Danish universities are not represented at all.

No one on this committee has the daily experience of being at one of the world's best universities, and as a group they are not likely to think outside the narrow, claustrophobic and insular box administered in Copenhagen. They will likely write a report to the liking of the Minister, who has strong views, but himself does not have enough education to be hired for an entry level position by any university. That said, he is streets ahead of the political clowns who preceded him.

If a major corporation wanted to research a problem, it would not create such a homogeneous group, with no scientists, no humanities, almost no one from outside Copenhagen, and no one from the world's best institutions.

Denmark invests  a good deal in education. However, it has a problem balancing quantity and quality. It wishes to educate a high proportion of people at university, and none of them charge tuition. This makes it quite expensive. At the same time, in these egalitarian societies there is a resistance to either establishing hierarchies or to rejecting candidates. The desire for democratization of higher education tends to water down quality, because no one likes to set up barriers to entry.

Denmark has five universities and one technical university. All are public institutions, all faculty work to the same wage scale, and students receive the same amount in scholarship funding. This egalitarian approach has much in its favor, of course, but it does not necessarily push either faculty or students to do their best. The state rewards universities for quantity production of candidates, that is to say, departments receive money each time a student passes an exam or completes a degree. Whether the student has a high or low grade point average makes no difference.

In almost all educational systems, the most talented students usually do well, and the occasional genius is not really produced by the system. Getting the other 90% of the students to learn is the challenge. And here, egalitarianism and the monetary incentives to admit and pass as many as possible have encouraged Danish institutions to lower standards.

For example, in Denmark receiving a BA, no matter how poor the grades, entitles a student to go on to an MA, regardless of talent, motivation, or achievement. Automatic admission to graduate studies is hardly the norm at the world's best universities. Admitting all BAs to study for the MA is a wasteful and pointlessly egalitarian approach to education. If students knew that they had to do well at the BA level in order to go on to the MA, both undergraduate and the graduate education would be improved. And this would not cost the state more money, but less.

At the level of individual courses the Danish system is also lax. There is no requirement that students attend classes, and they do not even need to be inside the country during term. I have had students go abroad for weeks in the middle of term or miss the first week to go skiing. Since class participation cannot be counted at all in determining grades, students need not give oral presentations, nor can teachers give mid-term exams that count toward the final grade. In most courses, grades are determined entirely by a paper or exam at the end of term.  Contrast this with any of the top universities in the United States, where class participation counts and teachers have considerable freedom in developing and using various means of assessment. In Denmark, if a student seldom comes and never says anything, it has no consequences.  Passivity is therefore widespread.

Furthermore, Danish students have the right to re-examination at no cost if they fail a course, and they  can take any exam three times, even if they did nothing but turn in a blank sheet of paper on the first and second attempts.  If they fail three times, they can petition for the right to retake the exam (or turn in the paper) a fourth time. Contrast this with top universities around the world, which often do not have re-examination at all but tell students to retake the course and pay the fees again, or in some cases charge a fee for a second (and usually final) attempt to pass a course.

When Danish students take a term abroad in Britain or the United States, they all come back saying that they had to work much harder there. Few fail their courses, because they know that they cannot take those exams over again.

Danish universities also have problems in the way faculty are recruited, retrained, and rewarded,  and they could learn much from the international competition. There are foreigners like myself who have been in Denmark for years, who understand alternative systems, and who could make constructive suggestions for improvements. However, my experience is that no one listens to such suggestions. Danes seem congenitally unable to hear comments from outsiders.

In short, if the Danes really want to improve their universities, they do not need to spend vast additional sums of money. But they do need to learn from the best practices at the best universities. They need to demand from students attendance, participation, and real attempts to complete courses. They need to set better norms for behavior and set higher standards for admission to the MA. They need to open the PhD to more students and learn how to make use of PhDs in the broader labor market.

These are just some of the things that Danish universities could change to raise their international ranking. It is unfortunate that their system is so centralized and so controlled by bureaucrats, especially since most of the staff of the Ministry itself do not have a PhD much less any teaching experience or academic publications. It seems unlikely that any worthwhile ideas will emerge from the Ministry.  One can only hope that somehow its homogeneous committee will develop an international perspective.