Primrose Road

In today's New York Times Magazine (The College Issue), David Leonhardt takes into account the intersection of the categories of low-income students and minority students, and indeed points out that

"many of the beneficiaries of the preferences end up being upper-middle-class minority students, since they tend to have better test scores than poor minorities."

Even with affirmative action in place, universities tend to favor students from middle- to upper-middle-class families.

"The colleges apparently put even more stock in the polish that comes with affluence — the well-edited essay, the summer trip to Guatemala, the Arabic language lessons. In any case, the poor lose."

Then, Leonhardt alludes to what may be the most problematic aspect of college admissions: even in the era of affirmative action, they rely on outmoded forms of intelligence testing:

"Intelligence, indisputably, is in part genetic; and every intelligence test shows a gap between black Americans and others. For a long time, scientific research wasn’t very good at explaining this gap. But it has gotten better lately. For one thing, the gap between white and black adults has narrowed significantly since 1970, according to work by the noted researchers William Dickens and James Flynn. Four decades is too short a time period for the gene pool to change, but it’s not too short for environment to improve. Most intriguing, Roland Fryer and Steven D. Levitt, two economists (the latter is one of this magazine’s Freakonomics columnists), have found there to be essentially no gap between 1-year-old white and black children of the same socioeconomic status."

It seems that "socioeconomic status" is the key here: despite the many adjustments ETS has made to the SAT in the past few decades, the idea underlying the test and standardized tests like it (even if most of us no longer subscribe to this kind of thinking) is that low-income students should be kept out of the ol' Ivory Tower. Even today, students who have attended well-funded schools, can afford a $1500 test prep course, and even have a working knowledge of Latin have an automatic advantage on tests like the SAT.

Affirmative action, as it currently stands, seems to be based far more on politics and "good ideas" than it does on actual research in educational psychology. Meanwhile, the SAT and GRE are based on 1920s and 1930s testing methods designed to keep out low-income students (and there is, of course, a sizable intersection between "low-income" and "minority" in this country). In my view, an alternative to overly-politicized, not-really-student-centered affirmative action policies would be a radical rethinking of admissions testing. While SAT administrators have taken a step in the right direction by eliminating analogy questions (which often took the form of the infamous RUNNER:MARATHON::OARSMAN:REGATTA one), I believe that we would benefit from an alternative test (one that would eventually eat the SAT alive, perhaps) based on unbiased educational psychology research.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I teach test prep classes to supplement my adjunct-o-riffic income. And I've seen firsthand what a difference a few thousand dollars and a few extra hours of leisure time can make in terms of students' SAT, GRE, and LSAT success.]

There is a Shakespeare and Derrida conference going on at Cardiff University today; I'm curious to know what ideas will come out of this conference, which apparently will look at how Shakespeare might have influenced Derrida and how Derrida would have thought Shakespeare.

Towards the end of his life Jacques Derrida wrote how he would have liked to have ‘become (alas, it’s pretty late) a “Shakespeare expert”,’ and that his desire would remain ‘to read and write in the space or heritage of Shakespeare, in relation to whom I have infinite admiration and gratitude.’ The aims of this conference are to commemorate the elective affinity between the French philosopher and English dramatist, to consider the importance of Shakespeare for Derrida’s thinking, and to project ways in which Derrida’s work might influence the future understanding of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare critics have been slow to acknowledge the implications for Hamlet studies of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, while a recent highly-regarded biography of the philosopher never once mentions Shakespeare.

Courtney Lehmann has examined the "hauntological" possibilities for Hamlet on stage and on film, and I think the Shakespeare-Derrida "affinity" is worth further exploration -- especially here in the US, where it seems that a number of grad students new to the game are still mobilizing Derrida for the purpose of "deconstructing" colonizer/colonized, male/female, empowered/disempowered binaries in Shakespeare's plays.

My eternal love and respect will go to anyone working on a Shakespeare-Derrida thesis or dissertation that does not mention the word "binary."

In other Daily Nebraskan news: According to a representative at UNL's Counseling and Psychology Services center, loneliness can cause strep throat and shingles.

If I'm right in my suspicion that this is a far more touchy-feely than medical idea, I can't wait to see the day students with strep throat, bronchitis, and/or flu line up at the health center, demanding psychological counseling because of their infections.

The Daily Nebraskan reports that UNL now has a policy "on the books" for the use of Safe Assignment, a system in which students submit their papers via Blackboard; the papers are then scanned and assigned a "matching score" based on how much material from the paper appears to be copied directly from other sources. The big issue here has been whether professors are violating students' intellectual property rights, because the papers are saved in Safe Assignment's database and then used for comparison with future submissions. In other words, students are contributing their work, without compensation, to a commercial service (as the DN's article points out).

It's rather interesting that questions of intellectual property are arising here. Some departments now request that instructors not leave boxes of student papers outside their offices (previously, the large box was a great way of collecting and returning papers), out of concern that someone who is not the instructor or the student could read the paper. At the same time concern for students' intellectual property seems to have heightened, we're seeing changes (thanks to the good ol' Internet) in what "intellectual property" means, and these changes seem to have affected new students' understanding of what constitutes plagiarism in the first place.

While students still outright cheat using essay mills and other sources of pre-written papers, there are also those who walk into college without an understanding of when to use quotation marks, and when and why to attribute ideas to someone other than oneself. My freshman comp students, who were born in 1989, have grown up with the info-at-your-fingertips (well, sort of) Internet; when they were born, I was writing book reports and learning how to use Print Shop on an Apple IIGS!

I'm in the process of collecting my thoughts for a proposed essay on "immersive" new media technologies and Shakespeare studies. I'll most likely post some of these thoughts once I've actually responded to the call for papers with a full abstract. Basically, the essay will consist of my usual shpiel about how when we're talking theater/performance, immersion may be one of the less promising aspects of this decade's computer culture. Brecht believed that audiences couldn't intellectualize if they were forced to identify with the characters on stage; in a role-playing game that takes place in a detailed "world," it seems, audience and actor/character are irreducibly connected.

It may be a while before I have all my thoughts together on this, since I've been ordered to avoid caffeine for the next few months (conveniently, until the last part of my qualifying exams is complete!). So far, I'm not operating at 1000%, as was evidenced when I struggled to spell "verisimilitude" on the blackboard. (My students are probably going to spell that word wrong for the rest of their lives now. Alas.)

Getting back to business (not really), the FAQ for the Arden: The World of William Shakespeare project (part of the Synthetic Worlds Initiative at Indiana University) is an informative and entertaining read -- it has a few not-so-frequently-asked questions thrown in --

"35. Will there be fireballs and levitation?
No. There is no elemental magic in Shakespeare."

For some reason, I feel as though I've had that same exchange with people several times in my both my academic and personal spheres.

There's a documentary titled Yiddish Theater: A Love Story coming to New York and LA this November. Dan Katzir, the documentary's director, posted news of the screenings to the Yugntruf mailing list last week, noting that the film tries to get across a "message about the importance of keeping Yiddish theater alive to a larger community."

"Enter the funny, larger-than-life world of Yiddish Theater today through this documentary film about the amazing woman who has kept the oldest running Yiddish Theater in America alive. Zypora Spaisman is a Holocaust survivor who conquers all hearts in her passion for art, life and Yiddish.

This heartwarming story of one unique woman's struggle portrays the fight of both an old art form to stay relevant and an old actress to find meaning and a stage in a society that worships youth.

Shot in real time in one of the coldest winters in NEW YORK over the eight days of Hanukkah, Zypora's theater has one week to raise funding to keep their show going. Many miracles occur during this week. But will they be enough to save this critically acclaimed Yiddish show?"

Passion, miracles, melodrama, larger-than-lifedness: sounds like Yiddish theater all right! I'm not much for "miracles," but I'm definitely looking forward to seeing this.

To sum up: In arguing that that "orthodox scholars claim that there is no room for doubt that Mr. Shakspere wrote the plays and poems traditionally attributed to him," the Declaration of Reasonable Doubt About The Identity of William Shakespeare sets up a Straw Man: in actuality, scholars do not claim that there is no room for doubt, but rather understand that "authorial identity" meant something entirely different (if it meant anything at all) in the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras.

For an excellent critique of the anti-Stratfordian "evidence" that doesn't resort to ad hominem attacks (well, except maybe in the case of Delia Bacon, but ...), see Bill Bryson's article in London's Sunday Times.

A few points brought up by other bloggers:

(1) It's really not that unlikely that a glovemaker's son would write plays, because Marlowe's father was a shoemaker, and Jonson's and Middleton's fathers were bricklayers.

(2) The "Declaration" claims that Shakespeare's will does not refer to his plays, and "contain[s] no clearly Shakespearean turn of phrase." So, The Playgoer asks,

"Yes, if you were a great playwright, wouldn't your checkbook be more alliterative? Your customer service accounts have better story arcs?"

(3) But leaving his wife his "second-best bed" was kind of 'Shakespearean', no?

(4) If we accept Sir Derek Jacobi's idea that "an author writes [only, he implies] about his own experience, his own life and personalities," Judeopundit asks, then are we to also assume that "de Vere was a Venetian Jew, a mythical ancient British king with three daughters, and a Moorish general?"

Here's to straw men, conspiracy theories, burden of proof, and invisible pink elephants in the room.

Yes, Walt Whitman seems to have believed that Francis Bacon wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare: he wrote a poem about the matter, discussed the "cipher" with Horace Traubel, and DoubtAboutWill.org quotes the following from November Boughs:

"Conceived out of the fullest heat and pulse of European feudalism — personifying in unparall'd ways the medieval aristocracy, its towering spirit of ruthless and gigantic cast, its own peculiar air and arrogance (no mere imitation) — only one of the 'wolfish earls' so plenteous in the plays themselves, or some born descendent and knower, might seem to be the true author of those amazing works — works in some respects greater than anything else in recorded history."

I'm going to take the high road here and *not* mention that Whitman also believed in Phrenology. (I suppose I just did.) E.M.W. Tillyard made an argument similar to Whitman's (minus the "authorship" claim, of course) in 1942: Shakespeare's plays seemed to reinforce a view of an hierarchically organized world order. Except Tillyard, Whitman, and those who would claim that Shakespeare's plays reflect the point of view of a nobleman overlook CONTEXT.

First, the "world order" speeches are more often than not placed in the mouths of tyrannical (or senile) kings. Second, the "degree" speech in Troilus and Cressida to which Tillyard and others refer:

How could communities,
Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,
Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,
The primogenitive and due of birth,
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, laurels,
But by degree, stand in authentic place?
Take but degree away, untune that string,
And, hark, what discord follows! (T&C 1.3)

is spoken by Ulysses, the Greek solider trying to explain to his men why they don't seem to be winning the war. This assertion of ideology is followed by a second speech, in which Ulysses explains what the actual problem is: Achilles, who should be their best solider, is lying in bed with Patroclus all day and mocking the Greek generals. Far from reinforcing "degree," Ulysses' speeches reveal how sharp a divide there can be between ideology and practice, especially when it comes to war.

So, while this doesn't conclusively "prove" that Shakespeare wasn't a nobleman, it surely undercuts the argument that evidence of Shakespeare's supposed noble status is in the plays themselves.

While posting an excerpt from Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet screenplay the other day, I couldn't help but wonder if anyone else out there was disappointed that the final Harry Potter book did not include a chapter in which Gilderoy Lockhart, Sybil Trelawney, and Bellatrix Lestrange were all in the same room.

I received an email forward this morning from a woman I'd traveled with in Israel, claiming that "every memorial of the Holocaust" had been removed from the British school system, "arguing that it hurts the Muslim population." The email is reprinted below; then we'll play 'what's wrong with this picture':

Disgrace for England!

This week in England every memorial of the holocaust has been removed from the school study programs, arguing that it hurts the Muslim population that denies the holocaust.

That is a sign of an upcoming worldwide disaster, terrifying evidence of how easily countries can give in to anti-Semitism.

It has been more than 60 years since the end of World War 2 in Europe as England didn't lift a finger to save the Jews that were butchered by the Germans and now they are Boycotting Israel Academics and removing the holocaust from the schools study programs. .

This email has been sent in order to create a chain of memory for those 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1900 catholic priests, that have been murdered, raped, burnt, starved to death, and humiliated by the Nazis.

Now, more than ever, considering the efforts of Iran and others ' denying the Holocaust , it is most crucial to do whatever it takes to ensure that the world never forgets .

This email should reach at least 40 million people in the world.

Join us and become a link in the chain of memory for those who have past in the terrible events of the Holocaust. Help spread this email around the world so others may understand and help as well.

Please send this message to at least 10 of your friends or contacts. Please do not delete this email; it only takes one minute to pass it on. Thank you for your efforts.

Reasons why this is obviously a hoax:

(1) It asks the recipient to pass on the message to at least 10 of his or her friends or contacts, the sign of an ordinary chain letter.

(2) While Muslim extremists have indeed railed against anything that seems to sympathize with a "Jewish cause," and while the British have (unfairly, in my opinion) boycotted Israeli academics, this email is rather racist, suggesting that the entire Muslim population of England is responsible for taking the entire history of the Holocaust out of textbooks. And what's suggested here runs counter to the actual climate in Europe, where, for example, the French government banned headscarves (which would affect both Muslim and Orthodox Jewish students) in government-run schools.

(3) "That is a sign of an upcoming worldwide disaster." (In other words: forward this email to ten of your friends, or else, apocalypse!)

(4) And finally, the "ban" described in this email didn't happen.