Monthly Archives: May 2011

Hopes and Dreams and Money

I had a long post regarding the cancellation of the fiscal year 2011 Fulbright-Hays competition written up.  It – mostly a ‘What winning the Fulbright-Hays has meant to me’ post – depressed me too much, so I’ve deleted most of it.  I was recently told I was being “practically nihilistic” about the future of America and American academia, and this is one reason why.  Even though I have won a Fulbright-Hays and have that money safely in the bank (literally and figuratively), the news was devastating for what it signals about our priorities and the future.  I hope, though, that this tremendous shock to those of us in fields that rely on the Hays and similar grants to get our work done will mean a more positive, active direction for the future.  I’d like to feel less nihilistic, and a lot of us would like for our future to look a little brighter – and maybe we can make it so.

A few links to relevant posts on the issue (also see the Facebook group that has sprung up):

The official cancellation notice (US Department of Education)

Acknowledging the Value of Fulbright-Hays Research Grants (The China Beat)

Has the Fulbright-Hays Cancellation Affected You? (China Dissertation Reviews)

Killing Fulbright-Hays (Sean’s Russia Blog)

The Fulbright-Hays is Cancelled.  Do Something (Christine & Rokas)

What follows below are  a few notes on what this whole disaster has stirred up in my mind, as a recipient of a FY2010 Fulbright-Hays (that would be last year’s competition).

For many of us, tucked alongside the leap from “PhD student” to “PhD candidate,” the crafting of dissertation prospectus, and putting committees together is the scramble to secure funding for our fieldwork abroad.  In the case of doing research in China, we have to put in serious time: even accessing archives can be a true test of patience, and one that requires cooling one’s heels while trying to rustle up letters and introductions from the right people.  It’s possible to fund such ventures on your own, of course, but since a life in academia is generally a losing proposition financially, it doesn’t make much sense to go into debt over it.  And it’s difficult to acquire a nice big nest of savings on a teaching assistantship – or it is at many schools in many areas.  So we write, edit, rewrite, edit some more, solicit letters of recommendation, order transcripts, write, and edit in the hopes that one of those nebulous “committees” will read our applications and deem our projects worthy of funding.

It’s a crapshoot at the best of times.  What do the committees want?  What’s going to catch their eye?  Writing a proposal is partially a game – a game of showmanship.  Knowing what to say, how to say it, and how to frame your proposal to generate the maximum appeal is a fine art.  I was lucky enough to have professors who turned a critical and knowledgable eye towards my essays and CV and helped me put together an application that was, in the end, successful.  It was step one in really learning how to play the funding game.  A successful application meant that I could move to China for a year and research my dissertation – a crucial, unavoidable part of writing a dissertation on modern Chinese history, funding or no.  It’s a step I would have had to take at some point, but winning a Hays meant that I didn’t have to dip into my own (non-existant) funds to do so.  It also meant I got to stay “on track” with my graduate career, and didn’t have to stress about how I was going to put food on the table and work on my dissertation.

Unfortunately for this year’s applicants, the rules of the game were changed on them last minute.  Actually, the rules weren’t changed: the game was just axed entirely.  The Fulbright-Hays program (which includes more than just the Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA) component) was totally defunded at the last minute.  Well – not even last minute.  Last year, we were notified in late April of our application status.  This year, after weeks of being told that decisions were coming, the competition was cancelled in late May.

On the one hand, we’re used to bad news in higher education.  On the other, losing the Fulbright-Hays – for only a year, or even more terrible to contemplate, forever – is more than just bad news.  Maura Cunningham at the China Beat succinctly summed up my feelings on why this is really, really bad news:

What concerns me most about the cancellation of the Fulbright-Hays isn’t necessarily its immediate effects on my colleagues and myself, though those aren’t insignificant. Rather, it worries me—even frightens me—that with this action the U.S. government is signaling its lack of commitment to education and forging bonds with communities abroad. Programs like the Fulbright-Hays grants aren’t just about supporting individual scholars; they have a larger mission of promoting work that collectively helps all of us contextualize the world we live in and recognize how it has come to look the way it does. By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.

I have a shelf full of books whose acknowledgements indicate that American leaders grasped the significance of this mission in the past. I am now concerned, however, that few are willing to continue it into the future, and this loss, surely, will be to the detriment of all—not just graduate students.

An easy target for those of us in area studies is area studies itself.  Lots of books exist on the subject; certainly we could spend all day talking about Cold War formations of knowledge and power structures.  There’s no doubt that there were and are problems with that structure, and I appreciate the fact that many dream of alternatives.  But there are legacies that aren’t so negative – such as the Fulbright grants.  In an era when universities are more interested in making money than promoting scholarship and education, there were (and are) funding sources that give money simply for the purpose of advancing knowledge and broadening our view of the world.  And as huge a difference as the Fulbright-Hays has made for generations of graduate students, its funding was really a drop in the bucket compared to other national issues – the FY2010 competition clocked in at under $6 million, funding nearly 150 projects on incredibly diverse topics.

One of my favorite essays, and a particularly terrifying one, comes via the edited volume Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies (Duke, 2002).  I first read Masao Miyoshi’s “Ivory Tower in Escrow” towards the end of my first year, while in my Japanese history course at UC San Diego (the article was originally published two years prior in boundary 2, the version I quote from below).  Miyoshi describes the “ivory tower” in the United States as increasingly bound to corporate R&D interests (and the increasing irrelevance of the humanities to that project), and considers the role academics in the humanities have played in allowing the humanities to become increasingly irrelevant.  It is startling – saddening – that Miyoshi’s article was published 11 years ago.  How far we have come (?).  What would this essay read like today?  Yet it seems more important than ever to take heed of his warning, issued over a decade ago:

It is pathetic to have to witness some of those who posed as faculty rebels only a few years ago now sheepishly talking about the wisdom of ingratiating the administration—as if such demeaning mendacity could veer the indomitable march of academic corporatism by even an inch. To all but those inside, much of humanities research may well look insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant, if not useless, harmless, and humorless. Worse than the fetishism of irony, paradox, and complexity a half century ago, the cant of hybridity, nuance, and diversity now pervades the humanities faculty. Thus they are thoroughly disabled to take up the task of opposition, resistance, and confrontation, and are numbed into retreat and withdrawal as ‘‘negative intellectuals” —precisely as did the older triad of new criticism. If Atkinson and many other administrators neglect to think seriously about the humanities in the corporatized universities, the fault may not be entirely theirs.

If all this is a caricature, which it is, it must nevertheless be a familiar one to most in the humanities now. It is indeed a bleak picture. I submit, however, that such demoralization and fragmentation, such loss of direction and purpose, are the cause and effect of the stunning silence, the fearful disengagement, in the face of the radical corporatization that higher education is undergoing at this time. (48)

I don’t know how world shaking my Fulbright-Hays will be.  I don’t know what my future career looks like. But I know that whatever comes in the future, I don’t want it (or me!) to be labeled  “insubstantial, precious, and irrelevant” or “useless, harmless, and humorless.” I was fortunate enough to win a Fulbright-Hays, an opportunity that this year’s applicants won’t get, and future graduate students may not get, either.  It’s symptomatic of a very diseased whole, and I sincerely hope that the sudden shock of this cancellation means that we will take a good hard look at ourselves and our institutions. I hope that we’ll rise to the challenge that Miyoshi set out eleven years ago.  The time for silence has long passed.

I hope that this year is a fluke (though I fear otherwise), and that life-changing emails like the one I got will start flowing again soon.  But it’s not going to happen by keeping quiet and allowing the status quo to continue.  We have been too silent, allowed ourselves to be too fragmented, and lacking in direction.  This is yet another wakeup call for all of us – maybe we’ll listen this time.

April showers bring May slugs & fierce debates

A more picturesque dream of sluggishness: Ingres, L'Odalisque à l'esclave (1839)

After a delightful two week trip to Beijing, I returned home to (quoting myself from elsewhere) “a horror scene of slug trails, dead and dying slugs all over the floor in my main room. Luckily I didn’t notice that one had been cruising around on my bed until the next morning.   I had noticed trails here and there on my carpet (but not thought ‘Oh, slug problem’) and caught a few parked on sponges in my kitchen a few months back, but thought it was an isolated issue. I thought wrong, clearly.”

It took several rounds of hysterical calls to my landlord and the dedicated efforts of his wonderful handyman to fix the issue (mostly).  And gross as it was, the Great Slug Infestation of 2011 (the first and, I sincerely hope, only time I will have to deal with such an issue) somehow spurred me out of my own, well, sluggish period.  The past 6 months haven’t been “as” productive as I would have hoped, but I’m back on track and not feeling as slow as the slugs that were having a field day in my kitchen.

Still, a couple of recent events reminded me that I’m pretty terrible at being immediately relevant.  I look in awe upon people who can magically whip up a response to writers and current events instantaneously – while I’m a pretty zippy writer, all told, it’s quite difficult for me to write unless a deadline is looming and/or a piece is writing itself.  I guess I’ve got a bit of slug in me, since in the past month I’ve had at least 3 hot button issues I’ve started to respond to & then simply abandoned.  OK, perhaps “abandoned” is too strong a word; I’ll get around to finishing them … someday … maybe.

The most recent was Daniel Cook’s “A Blunt Critique of Game Criticism” (its current form is an edited version of the one a lot of us first saw).  The original essay had me pretty frothy with rage for a few days, and while I sat down to write a response, only unpublishable snippets of text came out.  There were plenty of things I wanted to respond to with barely contained indignant fury – the slights against “game illiterates,” academics, all the other unworthies; the intimation that somehow, all those bits and pieces of writing that Cook disagreed with were crowding out stellar pieces of “worthy” game writing written by game literate people; the idea that fluffy humanities people were crowding out the “real” researchers (scientists); the arbitrary typology of writers that didn’t make much sense.  A lot of people jumped into the fray while I was sputtering up sentences here and there (Ben Abraham made a handy list), and said a lot of things as well or better than I could have (clearly).  But I typed away while cataloging archival finds, determined to finish an entry.

Then I thought … what’s the point?  Like a lot of these discussions, we’re chasing our own tail.  What Cook wants is more (better) writing for his particular niche interest (design and development); what I want is more (better) writing for my particular niche interest (not design and development); what we’re lacking overall is high quality, thoughtful writing that’s not geared toward niche interests.  Is there a lot of atrocious writing out there?  Yes.  Would I like to see a wider variety of quality writing, no matter what its thrust?  Yes.  Do I think poking sticks at those of us who aren’t designers or developers – nor, in some cases, particularly interested in writing about that side of the industry – is going to improve “game criticism”?  Absolutely not.  What Cook’s “call to arms” for people who “ought” to be writing “proper” game criticism is missing is a simple fact: a lot of people can’t write cogently, never mind thoughtfully and in a manner that holds the attention span of people who are interested in the subject.  While Cook points out that developing games doesn’t mean one can write about them, he pegs this as a problem of selecting one’s viewpoint.

… If only! There’s a lot of bad writing out there on all subjects.  Most pertinently for this discussion, there’s a lot of bad writing out there on games.  Period.  It’s not confined to academics coming from the humanities or eighteen year old fanboys.  I wonder how much time Cook has spent poking through the nooks and crannies of blogs on Gamasutra: there’s good writing, sure.  There’s also a lot of terrible writing on a wide range of subject matter.  Being “game literate” to Cook’s standards doesn’t mean being culturally literate and capable of writing to my standards.  It’s not that these things are mutually exclusive (obviously not, there are plenty of examples – including Cook! – to show that you can be quite technical and adept with language at the same time).  But as the blurb at Lost Garden says, “You’ve found a rare treasure trove of readable, thoughtful essays on game design theory, art and the business of design” (emphasis mine).

I also find the narrow view of what constitutes “game criticism” (and writing on games more broadly) troubling. Cook muses that “[in] all of this I sense an odd fear. What is so dangerous about being an engineer-geographer-historian-poet-lawyer? I only see benefits to the community as a whole. The only risk is that individuals comfortable in their current niche might need to change and grow.”  However, the assertion that there is one form of game criticism (discussion of game design from a design/ers perspective) that is more desirable, or intrinsically more valuable than other forms strikes me as the position that is cutting off possibilities that rise from the hyphenated “forms of being” Cook throws out.  I’m not running scared of developers or designers, and I’m happy to defend my position – I also think I have a record in the blogosphere that attests to the fact that I’ve been quite open to reading, writing about, and publicizing a really wide variety of writing from a number of angles.  I have certainly never advocated for a position that needlessly insults a number of talented individuals, regardless of whether I personally found their niches captivating.

I say that as someone who has been linked on Critical Distance (and used to write for Kotaku, “promoting” – or at least giving a bit of page space – to all sorts of writing that I liked very much, from Cook’s prototyping challenges to “I” pieces written by students and academics).  I don’t see myself fitting in particularly well to Cook’s typology of “game criticism”; I suppose the area that would come closest would be “Connecting games with the humanities: An academic exercise in which various aspects of games are described as being part of an ongoing structure of philosophy, movie criticism, literary criticism, art history, rhetoric, etc.”  Except that doesn’t fit at all.  On the most basic level (leaving aside Cook’s really narrow definition of what constitutes “the humanities,” at least based on that list), I’m generally less interested in writing about the experience of games than I am about the discourse surrounding games, just as I am generally less interested in the performative aspects of opera than I am about the discourse surrounding opera.  This is a position that opens me to criticism from a number of sides, which I’m OK with – at the foundation of research is doing things we enjoy and we find interesting.  I am not interested in picking apart design issues (nor am I qualified to beyond an experiential reaction).  Ergo, I generally don’t write about specific games in any of the ways that Cook lays out as types of “game criticism.”  A lot of people who Cook is, by default, taking aim at don’t – but that doesn’t mean that we don’t have something to contribute.

Simply put, we don’t have such an excess in terms of really, really good writing that there’s not enough room for everyone.  Really.  Cook may dream of better writing of the type that he wants to see, to the exclusion of what he takes as useless noise on the internet; I dream of better writing across the board, better research, better understanding on the whole.  We can all enjoy our own niches without resorting to belittling the positions of others. Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer said it much better than I can:

I accept Dan Cook’s encourgement to deepen my understanding of games from a designer’s perspective, and I’m persuaded that I can benefit from doing so. I hope he and others will accept the value of experiential, comparative, theoretical and other forms of criticism as no less vital to the evolution of video games as an art form worthy of careful consideration from many points of view. I can tell you from first-hand experience that territorialism and boundaries of expertise have played pernicious roles in academia. We mimic those behaviors at our own risk.

[Finally, on a bit of a personal note. The following characterization of historians is quite possibly one of the saddest views of history (and the historian’s craft) that I’ve ever read:

I understand that there are people who prefer to be historians and catalogers of culture.  There is still room for both catalogers and people who dream about the future.

Some historians – not all, but a great many – are dreamers, and dream not just of the past but of the future.  Much of written history reflects more on the author’s present than on the past, and often points to a “dreamed of” future – whether we agree with that projected future or not.  I’m certainly not spinning my wheels in archives so I can simply catalogue a phenomenon; my hope is to do work that will say something about where we are now, how we got there, and where we’ll be going. So too with my work that isn’t “properly” historical: how can you dream of a future without understanding where you’ve come from and where you are at present?  Cook and others may not be interested in the work that many of us do, but that doesn’t mean we’re not dreaming and it certainly doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the future.]