I finished my grading today, and so allowed myself a brief moment of apartment porn. No, I don’t mean browsing through Apartment Therapy, or Curbed, though both are always fun. I went straight to the mother lode, the New York TimesReal Estate Section. I’m definitely not in the market. Frankly, it seems very unlikely that my partner and I will be ever be able to afford to buy an apartment if we remain in Manhattan, and we are disinclined to leave. But, it’s a good time of year for window shopping, especially when you find something like an apartment on Pomander Walk.
Locals, no doubt, know all about Pomander Walk, but I was stumped. On the Upper West Side? Really? Google Maps was helpful. Odd, I thought, I have walked that block a dozen times and never noted another road. The first photo to the right (from Google’s “Street View”) shows you what the “street” looks like from 94th. It’s a cool Tudor pair of buildings, with what looks like access to a gated spot for trash or something. In Harry Potteresque fashion, however, the gate hides a private street created in 1922 by the King & Campbell architects, in celebration of a popular play of the time, Pomander Walk. The apartments on the mew were designed to look like an English street, complete with varying Tudor façades. The street has an illustrious history, home to Humphrey Bogart (after he lived up the street from us on 103rd), and used as a set for Hannah & Her Sisters.
Not only is the street an anachronistic, Disneyesque throwback in the middle of a downtown area, it has other oddities, like external dumbwaiters for half the units. It was a declared an historical landmark in the early 1980s, and now there is a small two-bedroom apartment for sale. A unit sold in 2000, before the boom, for $200,000, but unfortunately, the real estate boom coupled with some renovations means that a a tiny, antiquated apartment (linkrot will likely kill that link quickly) now lists well north of $800,000. Those of you reading from anywhere other than New York or California will likely gawk at paying that much for an apartment that is probably less than 800 square feet, but that price is actually well below the average apartment purchase price on the Upper West Side. If I had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars for the down payment, and didn’t eat for the 30 years it would take to pay off the mortgage, I’d be getting ready to move. As it is, I remain a happy renter.
That’s the question Richard Corliss, Time film critic, asks. He reports on the New York Film Critics Circle’s picks this year, and laments that some of the top grossing films this year did not make the list. He complains that films like No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Away From Her, movies that few actually saw, led the list. That this made him “realize that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us.”
He goes on to ask rhetorically whether The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or The Lives of Others will win out, and then goes on to suggest that these “obscure” films make readers restless. The thing is, these are obscure only because they show up in the art house theaters and not on the main screens. I agree that Ratatouille and Enchanted were very well made, entertaining films. But not everybody gets an Oscar just for making good cinema.
I understand that Time has a particular anti-intellectual stance on some issues, but I am convinced that the main reason No Country doesn’t pull in huge numbers of dollars is that distributors decide in advance how much money it is going to make and where. Critics play an important role in pushing people to see good movies, even when those movies don’t have a huge buy in television commercials and “soft” advertising (making rounds on the Daily Show, Letterman, etc.). The Oscars tend to do this as well; movies that are runaway award winners at the Oscars are now re-released and actually draw audiences. In other words, critics perform a correcting function for the industry.
Instead of complaining that critics like movies that most people have never heard of, perhaps we should be complaining about an industry that relentlessly pushes Transformers, while relatively ignoring a little gem like Juno. In sum, I don’t mind film critics’ connoisseur orientation toward movies. Why should people who love movies dumb down their opinions to match a public that uses movies as distraction? The industry already serves (and serves to inculcate) a movie-going audience that doesn’t want very much from their films; critics form a counterweight to that, even when they can be accused of their own groupthink.
I haven’t blogged about the ongoing saga of the Quinnipiac Chronicle, our student paper, which is facing administrative censorship. An editorial printed in the paper lays out the problems: efforts to constrain the way the paper represents the university and its policies. The president doesn’t like how his position has been portrayed in the paper, and the editor has been told it is not appropriate for him to criticize Quinnipiac policy, even when such policy hinders the way in which the newspaper operates. There are other issues, and like any sort of conflict, it’s a lot more gray than black-and-white. What is clear is that the university administration has taken a position that is regressive, and that hurts our reputation as a School of Communication, and, of course, our reputation as a university.
Tin Foil Hat
I have a pet theory. The president of the university, John Lahey, is nothing if not public relations-savvy. What is the guaranteed way of getting publicity for your campus newspaper? Threaten to shut it down, let things stew for a while, then make a firm statement that clearly endorses the autonomy of the newspaper. Think of this as a kind of “Pentagon Papers” for our own little newspaper. In a year the Chronicle may be seen as a beacon of student activist journalism, simultaneously propelling our journalism program to national prominence and dispelling the idea that the Quinnipiac campus is particularly apathetic.
It’s almost a given. If you want publicity, threaten the editor of the university paper when he criticizes an administrative policy. Even better, make sure that the president is directly involved. This is like sending an email to journalists saying “free hooks.” And at least a few of those journalists have bitten. An article appeared last Sunday in the New York Times detailing the conflict, and another article appeared earlier this week in Inside Higher Ed.
On the Other Hand?
On first blush, it looks like there is little to prop up the administration’s position. They offer two issues. The first is that they claim that things have been misquoted or taken out of context in Chronicle articles. This is almost certainly the case: after all, newspapers always fail at incorporating what everyone would like to see in the paper. Newspapers cannot please all of the people all of the time.
However, I am particularly cognizant of this criticism because of an exchange that occurred on this blog. I noted a quote in the Chronicle that seemed odd, and the person quoted argued that she never said what the paper said she said, or that if she did it was taken out of context. She complained to the paper, and the automatic response in these cases–the ethical response–is at the very least to make clear to the readership that the quoted individual disputed the article’s quotation. When I read a response on this blog that suggested that the paper was unwilling to do this, it raised serious flags for me: journalistic ethics require that reporters and editors are sensitive and responsive to their audiences and their sources. I think this is something that the paper should take seriously, and review their procedures for handling complaints about quotes and either publishing retractions or letters from sources contesting the quotation.
The second issue, which comes in a letter from the administration to faculty that I will not quote, suggests that there is an issue of legal liability: if the newspaper publishes content that is libelous, or that reveals protected information about the student (presumably issues protected by FERPA), the university could be held liable. I won’t hold them to this argument, since it seems not only misguided, but potentially damaging. If they are suggesting that by publishing the paper they are editorially responsible for it, I think they are setting them up for a fall down the road. It is almost inevitable that a media outlet will at least be *threatened* with lawsuit at some point. Even this lowly blog has received such threats from more than one corner. Does the administration really want it on record that they think they have an oversight role in determining content in the paper? If they assert such a role now, it will lead to a lot of back-peddling if and when the paper is sued and the administration tries to wash its hands of culpability.
In the end, what needs to happen is a clear statement from the administration that they have no interest or desire in acting as a censor for the newspaper. That is a vital first step. The second issue–whether university officials are allowed to speak to student journalists directly–is important to the quality of the education QU students receive, but if the administration chooses not to speak to the press, internal or external, there isn’t much that can be done about it. In some ways, the worst possible public relations is limiting your relations with the public. As the university seeks to become better known nationally and internationally, it needs to abandon parochial views and embrace a role that is very much in the public eye.
All of this comes back to an instigating issue. A number of racial epithets were scrawled on the doors of black students’ dorm rooms and elsewhere on campus. In some sick way, this makes Quinnipiac quite a bit like some other major campuses, where racial insensitivity is rising. Unfortunately, it represented yet another black eye for Quinnipiac, in part because of a (correct) impression that it is not particularly diverse. Quinnipiac ranks among the “top” ten whitest law schools in the US, and despite some interesting efforts, many of the students are strikingly unaware of the world outside of this little slice of the eastern seaboard, or outside of their own neighborhoods. It is important that the president not sweep racism under the carpet; like many social ills, it racism breeds best when kept under wraps, quiet, and unchecked. Many students on campus reacted against the racial incidents that occurred, and it is important to reflect the tolerance of our community proudly. We need to demonstrate our beliefs publicly, and conversations with our president should be equally open and public.
What Doesn’t Kill Us
As I said, I am hopeful that good can come out of this incident. As one commentator has noted, this act has energized otherwise placid students at Quinnipiac. She notes this rather ominous YouTube posting, suggesting that there is an undercurrent of activism on campus:
If there is such an undercurrent, it is well hidden. Many of the differences between this campus newspaper and that at the The Daily at the University of Washington are night and day, in part because the latter has successfully navigated efforts at censorship. It’s about page proudly trumpets its independence:
The Daily is the independent student newspaper for the University of Washington. The Daily is produced exclusively by students, with the exception of four non-student UW staff members who provide fiscal and administrative assistance. Any UW student may work for The Daily and will be paid for their work.
All content and advertising is approved by student staff members with no interference by UW staff or administration for an uncensored press. No non-student staff members review editorial content before publication.
A nine-member Board of Student Publications oversees the newspaper, reviews finances, resolves disputes and selects the editor and advertising manager. The board is comprised of representatives from UW administration, the Faculty Senate, the Department of Communication, ASUW, GPSS, a professional publication and The Daily newsroom.
The Daily began as the Pacific Wave in 1891. It became The Daily in 1909 when the paper began publishing five days a week. The Monday edition of the paper was dropped in 1933 during The Great Depression. The Monday publication resumed in 1985 and has run on schedule ever since.
The uncensored approach to student journalism has been controversial at times, but the First Amendment and Supreme Court decisions guarantee this right for students at the University of Washington.
Former UW Communications professor, Don Pember, stated “While freedom of expression has been considered a basic right for the press in this country for nearly 200 years, this right was not articulated for college and high school newspapers until quite recently. Until the 1960s, college and high school journalists enjoyed about as much freedom of expression as the newspaper’s advisor, the high school principal or the college dean was willing to allow.”
In the 1967 Supreme Court decision Dickey vs. Alabama, it was ruled “censorship of school papers is allowed only when the exercise of freedom of speech interferes materially and substantially with the requirement of appropriate discipline and order in the school.”
It remains as the law today.
UW faculty, staff and students can be proud that this university was a pioneer in clarifying the freedom of student press and that University presidents have defended that Constitutional freedom ever since.
The Daily won the Apple Award at the 2006 College Media Adviser Spring Convention in New York City for the best overall four-year college tabloid-sized newspaper in the nation.
Obviously, The Daily has about a century of a head start on the Quinnipiac Chronicle, but I hope that the current efforts to curtail its freedom act as a kind of annealing process, giving student media on campus a more common set of values and objectives.
How do you teach students to be critical users of information? Ban Wikipedia. At least that seems to be the answer for some terribly misguided teachers. One school district has gone so far as to restrict access to the Wikipedia website. Why? Because it is inaccurate.
The stupidity of this approach is manifold. First, it suggests that the other resources on the web somehow are accurate; that students need not be critical about sources. Second, it encourages not only a lack of media literacy, but a lack of search literacy. Go into any news room in the world, and you will find journalists making use of Wikipedia to get background and help them to find new information. Wikipedia is a wonderful way to start finding out about a topic. A ban also cuts students off from an important new way that people gather to collaborate and educate themselves. There are other reasons this is stupid (just as book-banning is stupid), but this gives us a good start. Frankly, if I had a kid in the Warren Hills Regional School District, I would pull them out of school, and give them a chance to get an actual education. I hate to think how these poor children are going to cope if they make it to college and have to learn how to research a topic–research that will often include going to Wikipedia.
To illustrate, what does a young student do when faced with a report on the city of Kamakura. In my day, the first thing students would do, often with the school librarian’s encouragement, would be to go to the “reference” section of the library where they would encounter an encyclopedia. Of course, you wouldn’t reference the encyclopedia, because your teacher or your librarian would tell you that this wasn’t appropriate: encyclopedias were not meant to be primary references, just a way to get started. Now that you knew the bare facts: that it was near Yokohama, that it was traditionally a producer of lacquerware, that it was the seat of the shogunate for a time, you would search for books or articles on these topics that would give you a more complete and authoritative understanding of the topic.
What does a student at one of these schools do now that Wikipedia is banned? If they search on Google for Kamakura, the first hit is japan-guide.com, which provides tourist information. They might follow that, and if they have been taught to evaluate sources, they might question the amount of advertising, and the purpose of the site. The second hit, Wikipedia, will be unavailable to them, at least until they go home and access it from there. (Here, we see that Warren Hills is doing more than just damaging the education of their students, they are disproportionately damaging the education of students who have limited internet access elsewhere.) Maybe they will go to MSN’s Encarta, a site that not only is (presumably) credible, but actually encourages student use, by having a “homework” link, and providing a citation students can copy and paste into their report. Apparently, unlike Wikipedia, Encarta hasn’t gotten the memo about encyclopedias not being good sources to cite. Even worse, they provide no indication of where their information comes from, or who has written the entry (often temporary student employees), leaving the student to rely on the word of Microsoft as to the truth of the two-paragraph entry.
What about the student who has access to the Wikipedia entry. Certainly, that student might simply trust what is written there, and cite Wikipedia, but only if that student’s teachers and librarians have been woefully inadequate in teaching the essentials of literature and web research. The good student will evaluate the information found. The very first sentence in each entry notes the location of Kamakura with respect to the modern Japanese capitol, Tokyo. One version of Encarta’s article notes that the city is “45 km (28 mi) southwest of Tokyo,” while Wikipedia’s has it “about 50 km south-south-west of Tokyo.” (Another version of Encarta doesn’t provide this distance.) It would seem one of these is wrong. 45 km is “about” 50 km, and from city center to city center it appears to be about 45 km. But as with anything, the truth isn’t black-and-white. Tokyo is a sprawling metropolis: do you measure from city center to city center, or from city limits to city limits, or perhaps in terms of the distance by train. These are the kinds of questions that comparing the two entries raises at the outset.
The Wikipedia article doesn’t tell you how to cite it. In fact, if you go to its “about” page, it pretty clearly spells out the strengths and weaknesses of the resource. Encarta provides no such help in evaluating the work, and provides a citation to use, incorrectly suggesting that it is worthy of citation.
Both articles provide internal links to further information, but the Wikipedia article also provides links to other sources. Of course, the quality of these links differ from article to article. The article on Barack Obama, for example, has 175 links to (generally) authoritative sources, while the article on Unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine has only two links, one to another online encyclopedia. Encarta provides none of its sources for an article on Obama, and (ironically), a search for dimethyl hydrazine points the user to Wikipeida. Paid placement links on Encarta pages, we may reasonably assume, may mislead many students.
We don’t know who wrote articles on either site, nor whether we can trust them, but at least in Wikipedia’s case, we can triangulate some of the sources and determine the degree to which we trust the sources provided. The sophisticated Wikipedia user is also likely to look at the discussion page and history page for an article to determine what statements in the article may be controversial. I fully recognize that Wikipedia is riddled with errors. Thanks to some of my students, a short Wikipedia entry about the ever notable moi, woefully misunderestimates my figjam. Nonetheless, if someone were to look for basic information about me, they could find far worse starting points.
“God created Arrakis to train the faithful.” Perhaps He created Wikipedia to train the researcher. Teachers who ban Wikipedia miss a massive “teachable moment.” None of the above should be read to suggest that Encarta should also be banned, though when you start banning sites, it is difficult to know where it will end. On the contrary, one wonders why a school would take the new global library and start burning particular books. Students should be wary of Wikipedia, and if anything should carry that wariness with them to other sources of information. We should be teaching our students to be curious and skeptical, not cloistered and credulous.
If Harry Potter lived in New York
Locals, no doubt, know all about Pomander Walk, but I was stumped. On the Upper West Side? Really? Google Maps was helpful. Odd, I thought, I have walked that block a dozen times and never noted another road. The first photo to the right (from Google’s “Street View”) shows you what the “street” looks like from 94th. It’s a cool Tudor pair of buildings, with what looks like access to a gated spot for trash or something. In Harry Potteresque fashion, however, the gate hides a private street created in 1922 by the King & Campbell architects, in celebration of a popular play of the time, Pomander Walk. The apartments on the mew were designed to look like an English street, complete with varying Tudor façades. The street has an illustrious history, home to Humphrey Bogart (after he lived up the street from us on 103rd), and used as a set for Hannah & Her Sisters.
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