These days, the naysayers like to ask: “What is a college education good for? What does it prepare you to do in the world?”
Here’s one compelling answer for you: Survive an Apocalypse.
Starting on May 12, Michigan State students can take an award-winning online course called Surviving the Coming Zombie Apocalypse — Disasters, Catastrophes, and Human Behavior. The course “brings together the latest thinking on how and why humans behave during disasters and catastrophes. Why do some survive and others don’t? What are the implications for planning, preparedness, and disaster management?” Along the way, students will form survival groups whose goal is to escape death, endure catastrophic events, and preserve the future of civilization. Together, they will learn a valuable lesson: survival depends not on the individual, but on the group. Unfortunately, the course is only open to MSU students and guest students for a fee. But you can watch the trailer above for free. Be warned, the film, and especially the Charles Manson-like character, is a little intense.
Update: The debate streamed live earlier this week on our site can now be replayed in its entirety. So if you missed it the first time around, here’s your second chance…
First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a prolific columnist and writer, with an impressive list of clips produced both during FDR’s tenure in the White House and afterwards. George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Projecttallies up her output: 8,000 columns, 580 articles, 27 books, and 100,000 letters (not to mention speeches and appearances). Many of those columns and articles can be found on their website.
Their archive offers every one of Roosevelt’s “My Day” columns, which ran through United Features Syndicate from 1936–1962. These short pieces acted like a daily diary, chronicling Roosevelt’s travels, the books she read, the people she visited, her evolving political philosophy, and, occasionally, her reflections on such topics as education, empathy, apathy, friendship, stress, and the scourge of excessive mail (“I love my personal letters and I am really deeply interested in much of my mail, but when I see it in a mass I would sometimes like to run away! I just closed my eyes in this case and went to bed!”)
The “My Day” archive is a little difficult to navigate—you have to browse by year, or search by keyword—but the archive’s short list of selected longer articles is a bit simpler to survey. Some of my favorites:
“In Defense of Curiosity” (Saturday Evening Post, 1935): Roosevelt often drew fire for her insatiable interest in all areas of national life—a characteristic that people thought of as unladylike. This article argues that women, too, should be curious, and that curiosity is the basis for happiness, imagination, and empathy.
“How to Take Criticism” (Ladies Home Journal, 1944): Roosevelt had a lot of haters. This longer piece mulls over the different types of criticism that she received during her public career, and asks how one should distinguish between worthy and unworthy critiques.
“Building Character” (The Parent’s Magazine, 1931): An editorial on the importance of providing children with challenges, clearly meant to reassure parents worried about the effects of the Depression on their kids.
“Good Citizenship: The Purpose of Education” (Pictorial Review, 1930): Much of this piece is about the importance of fair compensation for good teachers. “There are many inadequate teachers today,” Roosevelt wrote. “Perhaps our standards should be higher, but they cannot be until we learn to value and understand the function of the teacher in our midst. While we have put much money in buildings and laboratories and gymnasiums, we have forgotten that they are but the shell, and will never live and create a vital spark in the minds and hearts of our youth unless some teacher furnishes the inspiration. A child responds naturally to high ideals, and we are all of us creatures of habit.”
Rebecca Onion is a writer and academic living in Philadelphia. She runs Slate.com’s history blog, The Vault. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaonion.
Like so many great poets, Allen Ginsberg composed extemporaneously as he spoke, in erudite paragraphs, reciting lines and whole poems from memory—in his case, usually the poems of William Blake. In a 1966 Paris Review interview, for example, he discusses and quotes Blake at length, concluding “The thing I understood from Blake was that it was possible to transmit a message through time that could reach the enlightened.” Eight years later, Ginsberg would begin to midwife this concept as a teacher at the newly-founded Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Ginsberg taught summer workshops at the school from 1974 until the end of his life, eventually spending the remainder of the year in a full-time position at Brooklyn College. The Internet Archive hosts recordings of many of these workshops, such as his lectures on 19th Century Poetry, Jack Kerouac, Spiritual Poetics, and Basic Poetics. In the audio lectures here, from August 1980, Ginsberg teaches a four-part course on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (parts one and two above, three and four below), a play he often returned to for reference in his own work.
Ginsberg Class Three
Ginsberg Class Four
Ginsberg’s method of teaching Shakespeare is unlike anyone else’s. He’s not interested in exegesis so much as an open conversation—with the text, with his students, and with any ephemera that strikes his interest. It’s almost a kind of divination by which Ginsberg teases out the “messages” Shakespeare’s play sends through the ages, working with the rhythmic and syntactical oddities of individual lines instead of grand, abstract interpretative frameworks. Ginsberg’s pedagogy requires patience on the part of his students. He doesn’t drive toward a point as much as arrive at it circuitously as by the chance operations of his meditative mind. His first of four lectures above, for example, begins with a great deal of futzing around about different editions, which can seem a little tedious to an impatient listener. Give in to the urge to fast-forward, though, and you’ll miss the diamond-like bits of wisdom that emerge from Ginsberg’s discursive exploration of minutiae.
Ginsberg explains to his class why he thinks the Penguin G.B. Harrison edition was the best available at the time because it draws from the original folio and has “more respect than the actual arrangement of the lines for speaking as determined by the editions printed in Shakespeare’s day.” Harrison’s text, he says, recovers the idiosyncrasies of Shakespeare’s lines: “Since [Alexander] Pope and [John] Dryden and others messed with Shakespeare’s texts—straightened them out and modernized them and improved them—they’ve always been reproduced too smoothly.” Such was the hubris of Pope and Dryden. Ginsberg spends a few minutes “correcting” the punctuation of a line for students with more modernized editions. One can see the appeal of the first folio for Ginsberg as he insists that its text is “not all exactly properly lined up pentametric blank verse but is more broken, more irregular lines, more like free verse actually, because it fitted exactly to speech.” Much like his own work in fact, and that of his fellow Beats, whom he reads and draws into the discussion of The Tempest’s poetics throughout the course of his lectures. The Allen Ginsberg Project has more on the poet’s teaching of Shakespeare during his Naropa days.
When Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School with Anne Waldman in 1974, he and his fellow Beats had not taught before. They simply invented their own ways of passing on their poetic enlightenment. Invited to create the school at Naropa University in Boulder by his spiritual teacher and Naropa founder Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Ginsberg seemed to combine in equal parts the Buddhist tradition of spiritual lineage with that of Western literary filiation. He distilled this synthesis in his elliptical 1992 text “Mind Writing Slogans,”: “two decades’ experience teaching poetics at Naropa Institute” and a “half decade at Brooklyn College,” Ginsberg writes, “boiled down to brief mottoes from many sources found useful to guide myself and others in the experience of ‘writing the mind.’” This document is an excellent source of Ginsberg’s eclectic wisdom, as is his “Celestial Homework” reading list for his class “Literary History of the Beats.”
Ginsberg and company’s relationship to Trungpa’s Shambhala Buddhist school, and to the artistic community of Boulder, was not without its detractors. Poet Kenneth Rexroth and others accused Ginsberg and his teacher of a kind of cultic exploitation of Buddhist teachings, of “Buddhist fascism.” The conflict between Ginsberg’s guru and poets like W.S. Merwin—who apparently had a humiliating experience at Naropa—is documented in Tom Clark’s polemical The Great Naropa Poetry Wars. Others remember the Naropa founder much more fondly. Two documentaries offer different portraits of life at Naropa. The first, Fried Shoes, Cooked Diamonds (above)—filmed in 1978 and narrated by Ginsberg himself—presents a raw, in-the-moment picture of the anarchic Kerouac School’s early days. Former Naropa student Kate Lindhardt’s “micro-budget” Crazy Wisdom, below, offers a more detached look at the school and asks questions about what she calls the “institutionalization” of creativity from a more feminist perspective.
Ginsberg’s Tempest course will be added to our collection of 875 Free Online Courses; the films mentioned above can be found in our collection of 640 Free Movies Online. The Tempest and poems by Ginsberg can be found in our collection of Free eBooks.
When I first entered college in the mid-‘90s, the phenomenon of pop culture studies in academia seemed like an exciting novelty, bound to the ethos of the Clinton years. Often incisive, occasionally frivolous, pop culture studies made academia fun again, and reinvigorated the world of scholarly publishing and college life in general. All manner of fandom ruled the day: we took classes in hip hop videos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alanis Morrissette redefined irony, and nearly everyone got hired right after graduation (see for reference the cult classic 1994 film PCU). These days I don’t need to tell you that the prospects for new grads are considerably reduced, but I’m very happy to find academic societies and journals still organized around TV shows, fantasy novels, and pop music. Today we bring you two examples from the world of Classic Rock & Roll Studies (to coin a term). First up we have BOSS, or “The Biannual Online-Journal of Springsteen Studies.”
Springsteen Studies is not new. In fact, a massive Springsteen symposium called “Glory Days”—jointly sponsored by Virginia Tech, Penn State, and Monmouth University—has taken place twice in West Long Branch, New Jersey since 2005 and is currently preparing for its next event. BOSS, however, only just emerged, the first scholarly Springsteen journal ever published. The first issue will appear in June of this year, and the editors are now soliciting 15 to 25 page academic articles for their January, 2015 issue. Describing themselves as a “scholarly space for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy,” BOSS seeks “broad interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to Springsteen’s songwriting, performance, and fan community.” Springsteen scholars: check the BOSS site for deadlines and contact info.
Unlike most scholarly journals, BOSS is open-access, so fans and admirers of all kinds can read the sure-to-be fascinating discussions it fosters as it works toward securing “a place for Springsteen Studies in the contemporary academy.” Springsteen Studies’ advocacy appears to be working—Rutgers University plans to add a Springsteen theology class, covering Springsteen’s entire discography, and other institutions like Princeton and the University of Rochester have offered Springsteen courses in the past.
In another first for a specialized pop culture field, the first-ever academic conference on the work of Pink Floyd will be held this coming April 13 at Princeton University. Called “Pink Floyd: Sound, Sight, and Structure,” the event promises to be a multi-media extravaganza, featuring as its keynote speaker Grammy-award winning Pink Floyd producer and engineer James Guthrie. (See Guthrie and others discuss the production of the surround-sound Super Audio CD of Wish You Were Here in the video above). In addition to Guthrie’s talk, and his surround sound mix of the band’s music, the conference will offer “live compositions and arrangements inspired by Pink Floyd’s music,” an “exhibition of Pink Floyd covers and art,” and a screening of The Wall. Papers include “The Visual Music of Pink Floyd,” “Space and Repetition in David Gilmour’s Guitar Solos,” and “Several Species of Small Furry Animals: The Genius of Early Floyd.” Admission is free, but you’ll need to RSVP to get in. The town of Princeton will join in the festivities with “Outside the Wall,” a series of events and specials on drinks, dining, art, and music.
While these events and publications may seem to locate pop culture studies squarely in New Jersey, those interested can find conferences all over the world, in fact. A good place to start is the site of the PCA (“Pop Culture Association”), which hosts its annual conference next month in Chicago, and the International Conference on Media and Popular Culture will be held this May in Vienna. Pop culture and media studies still seem to me to be particular products of the optimistic ‘90s (due to my own vintage, no doubt), but it appears these academic fields are thriving, despite the vastly different economic climate we now live in, with its no-fun, belt-tightening effects on higher ed across the board.
Just a few short years ago, the world of digital scholarly texts was in its primordial stages, and it is still the case that most online editions are simply basic HTML or scanned images from more or less arbitrarily chosen print editions. An example of the earliest phases of digital humanities, MIT’s web edition of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare has been online since 1993. The site’s HTML text of the plays is based on the public domain Moby Text, which—the Folger Shakespeare Library informs us—“reproduces a late-nineteenth century version of the plays,” made “long before scholars fully understood the proper grounds on which to make the thousands of decisions that Shakespeare editors face.”
The scholarly Shakespeare editorial process is far too Byzantine to get into, but suffice it to say that it matters a great deal to serious students which editions they read and the newer, often the better. And those editions can become very costly. Until recently, the Moby Text was as good as it got for a free online edition.
Other online editions of Shakespeare’s works had their own problems. Bartleby.com has digitized the 1914 Oxford Complete Works, but this is not public-domain and is also outdated for scholarly use. Another online edition from Northwestern presents copyright barriers (and seems to have gone on indefinite hiatus). In light of these difficulties, George Mason University’s Open Source Shakespeare project recently pined for more: “perhaps someday, a group of individuals will produce a modern, scholarly, free alternative to Moby Shakespeare.” Their wish has now been granted. The Folger Shakespeare Library has released all of Shakespeare’s plays as fully searchable digital texts, downloadable as pdfs, in a free, scholarly edition that makes all of its source code available as well. Taken from 2010 Folger Shakespeare Library editions edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, the digital plays constitute an invaluable open resource.
You will still have to purchase Folger print editions for the complete “apparatus” (notes, critical essays, textual variants, etc). But the Folger promises new features in the near future. Currently, the digital text is searchable by act/scene/line, keyword, and page and line number (from the Folger print editions). Folger touts its “meticulously accurate texts” as the “#1 Shakespeare text in U.S. classrooms.” Perhaps some prickly expert will weigh in with a disparagement, but for us non-specialists, the free availability of these excellent online editions is a great gift indeed.
As you know by now, Shakespeare’s plays can always be found in our collection of Free eBooks.
Every revolutionary age produces its own kind of nostalgia. Faced with the enormous social and economic upheavals at the nineteenth century’s end, learned Victorians like Walter Pater, John Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold looked to High Church models and played the bishops of Western culture, with a monkish devotion to preserving and transmitting old texts and traditions and turning back to simpler ways of life. It was in 1909, the nadir of this milieu, before the advent of modernism and world war, that The Harvard Classics took shape. Compiled by Harvard’s president Charles W. Eliot and called at first Dr. Eliot’s Five Foot Shelf, the compendium of literature, philosophy, and the sciences, writes Adam Kirsch in Harvard Magazine, served as a “monument from a more humane and confident time” (or so its upper classes believed), and a “time capsule…. In 50 volumes.”
What does the massive collection preserve? For one thing, writes Kirsch, it’s “a record of what President Eliot’s America, and his Harvard, thought best in their own heritage.” Eliot’s intentions for his work differed somewhat from those of his English peers. Rather than simply curating for posterity “the best that has been thought and said” (in the words of Matthew Arnold), Eliot meant his anthology as a “portable university”—a pragmatic set of tools, to be sure, and also, of course, a product. He suggested that the full set of texts might be divided into a set of six courses on such conservative themes as “The History of Civilization” and “Religion and Philosophy,” and yet, writes Kirsch, “in a more profound sense, the lesson taught by the Harvard Classics is ‘Progress.’” “Eliot’s [1910] introduction expresses complete faith in the ‘intermittent and irregular progress from barbarism to civilization.’”
In its expert synergy of moral uplift and marketing, The Harvard Classics (find links to download them as free ebooks below) belong as much to Mark Twain’s bourgeois gilded age as to the pseudo-aristocratic age of Victoria—two sides of the same ocean, one might say.
The idea for the collection didn’t initially come from Eliot, but from two editors at the publisher P.F. Collier, who intended “a commercial enterprise from the beginning” after reading a speech Eliot gave to a group of workers in which he “declared that a five-foot shelf of books could provide”
a good substitute for a liberal education in youth to anyone who would read them with devotion, even if he could spare but fifteen minutes a day for reading.
Collier asked Eliot to “pick the titles” and they would publish them as a series. The books appealed to the upwardly mobile and those hungry for knowledge and an education denied them, but the cost would still have been prohibitive to many. Over a hundred years, and several cultural-evolutionary steps later, and anyone with an internet connection can read all of the 51-volume set online. In a previous post, we summarized the number of ways to get your hands on Charles W. Eliot’s anthology:
You can still buy an old set off of eBay for $399 [now $299.99]. But, just as easily, you can head to the Internet Archiveand Project Gutenberg, which have centralized links to every text included in The Harvard Classics (Wealth of Nations, Origin of Species, Plutarch’s Lives, the list goes on below). Please note that the previous two links won’t give you access to the actual annotated Harvard Classics texts edited by Eliot himself. But if you want just that, you can always click here and get digital scans of the true Harvard Classics.
In addition to these options, Bartleby has digital texts of the entire collection of what they call “the most comprehensive and well-researched anthology of all time.” But wait, there’s more! Much more, in fact, since Eliot and his assistant William A. Neilson compiled an additional twenty volumes called the “Shelf of Fiction.” Read those twenty volumes—at fifteen minutes a day—starting with Henry Fielding and ending with Norwegian novelist Alexander Kielland at Bartleby.
What may strike modern readers of Eliot’s collection are precisely the “blind spots in Victorian notions of culture and progress” that it represents. For example, those three harbingers of doom for Victorian certitude—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud—are nowhere to be seen. Omissions like this are quite telling, but, as Kirsch writes, we might not look at Eliot’s achievement as a relic of a naively optimistic age, but rather as “an inspiring testimony to his faith in the possibility of democratic education without the loss of high standards.” This was, and still remains, a noble ideal, if one that—like the utopian dreams of the Victorians—can sometimes seem frustratingly unattainable (or culturally imperialist). But the widespread availability of free online humanities certainly brings us closer than Eliot’s time could ever come.
Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection provided a scientific answer to a philosophical question: must design imply a designer? To the dismay and disbelief of many of Darwin’s contemporaries, and a great many still, his theory can answer the question in the negative. But there are many more questions yet to ask about seemingly designed systems, such as those posed by Alan Turing and John Searle: might such organized systems, natural and manmade, themselves be intelligent? The history of these inquiries among philosophers, scientists, and writers is the subject of Prof. James Paradis’ MIT course, “Darwin and Design.” The class explores such a diverse range of texts as Aristotle’s Physics, the Bible, Adam’s Smith’s Wealth of Nations, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, and of course, Darwin’s Origin of Species.
Alongside the scientific conclusions so-called “Darwinism” draws are the implications for human self-understanding. Given the thousands of years in which humanity placed itself at the center of the universe, and the few hundred in which it at least held fast to concepts of its special creation, what, asks Prof. Paradis, does Darwinism mean “for ideas of nature and of mankind’s place therein?” The class explores this question through “manifestations of such undesigned worlds in literary texts” both classical and contemporary. See the full course description below:
Humans are social animals; social demands, both cooperative and competitive, structure our development, our brain and our mind. This course covers social development, social behaviour, social cognition and social neuroscience, in both human and non-human social animals. Topics include altruism, empathy, communication, theory of mind, aggression, power, groups, mating, and morality. Methods include evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology and anthropology.
Prof. Paradis taught the class in the Fall of 2010, but thanks to MIT’s Open Courseware, all of the lectures (above), assignments, and course materials are freely available, though you’ll have to purchase most of the texts (you can find some in our list of 500 free ebooks). You can’t register or receive credit for the course—so you can skip writing the papers and meeting deadlines of around 100 pages of reading per week—but if you work through some or all of the lectures and assigned readings, Prof. Paradis promises an enlightening “historical foundation for understanding a rich literary tradition, as well as many assumptions held by people in many contemporary cultures.” Given that this is an MIT course, Prof. Paradis assumes some familiarity on the part of his students with the basic Darwinian concepts and controversies. For a broad overview of Darwin’s importance to a wide variety of fields, take a look at Stanford’s online lecture series “Darwin’s Legacy.”
“Darwin and Design” is but one of over 800 free online courses we’ve compiled, including many on evolution, anthropology, philosophy, and cognitive science.
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