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September 28, 2015 / Tyler Clauson-Wolf / 0 Comments

The Dickinson Film Club was founded last year by Charlie Leitner ’15, and is still in its infancy as an organization, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t taken the campus by storm by putting out spectacularly hilarious shorts (though I may be a little biased, seeing as I am the current President of the organization). The Club, which is devoted to creating high quality video content, first got recognition at the end of this past spring semester when they released their “This is Dickinson” videos parodying the popular SportsCenter commercials.

Now that school is back in session, the club is looking to expand on the incredible reception the campus gave them in the spring. This evening the group released their newest installment in the “This is Dickinson” series. It can be viewed above and is also available on YouTube. You can also “like” the Dickinson Film Club on Facebook. And don’t forget to subscribe on to the club’s YouTube channel to see future videos.

If you wish to get involved with the Dickinson Film Club, send me an email at clausont@dickinson.edu.

michael whelan anne mccaffrey pern the white dragon

The Original Dragon Lady

September 18, 2015 / Moira Mahoney / 0 Comments

Do you remember growing up, how your mother would always say, “Don’t judge a book by its cover”? Of course, she was referring to that weird lab partner you were always complaining about, but the principle has much broader applicability, because when I picked up Get Off The Dragon, I literally judged the book by its cover. And I’m going to be honest and say I was less than thrilled to have to read it for my Sword and Sorcery class. I have never been one to read fantasy fiction for pleasure or even consider reading science fiction work. I find the make-believe, magic, dragons and whatever else you want to classify as “fantasy” completely boring and unrealistic. But, after reading Get Off The Dragon, I have to give Anne McCaffrey serious props. The book was well written and not too long, and although many would classify her writing in the fantasy realm, I would say it’s more futuristic than anything, which helped make it more interesting to read. Many of the stories in this collection are believable, and if they aren’t, they are too entertaining to care! So, I’ll admit I was wrong to judge her book by the cover, but if I’m being honest, the book’s cover cover isn’t particularly representative of the content anyway.

Let’s start with the cover art. We have, a ferocious dragon breaking through the fragile walls of its shell, with a sickly boy covered in bloody bandages stumbling in the background. There are no signs of females or horsemen, or unicorns for that matter, which seems strange considering the title of the book is Get Off The Unicorn. Originally, Anne McCaffrey planned to title her book Get Of The Unicorn, meaning the offspring of a particular animal. In her introduction, she informs her readers that the mistake “although it fits most of the stories if you know the old tale about unicorn-bait, comes from a misprint in the Ballantine roster of unfilled contracts.” The publishing company, Ballantine, had accidentally printed her book with the wrong title, and rather than changing it, she just went with it.

Interestingly, the two titles appear to contradict themselves. While Get Off the Unicorn hints at the idea of removing oneself from the mythical creature, Get Of The Unicorn refers to the continuation of the species through reproduction. A contrasting parallel is drawn by this mistake, but one has to wonder, what is the symbolism behind the “unicorn” McCaffrey references? Why a unicorn? There are literally no unicorns in any of the stories in this collection, so why title it that? Traditionally, unicorns have appeared as a symbol of chastity and an emblem of God, embodying a sense of mystery and divinity. They are usually white, which hints at their innocence and perfection, as well as their purity and virginity. When Get Off The Unicorn was being published in the 1970’s, Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories were extremely popular in the sword and sorcery genre, depicting images of masculinity, grit, and bloodshed. Perhaps McCaffrey was trying to shift the focus and content of current fantasy /science fictions books from blood and gore to a gentler world with humanistic and relatable content? Being a female writer, it could also be that she wanted to create a gender-friendly fantasy world, one without the hypermasculinity that was so common in Howard’s books.

Published in 1977, at the height of the sword and sorcery craze, Get Off The Unicorn is a collection of short stories, most of which were previously published in science fiction magazines and fantasy anthologies. Many would also later come to be incorporated into larger fictional projects. “Lady in the Tower,” first published in a 1952 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, is one of McCaffrey’s earliest stories. After its publication in Get Off the Unicorn, she would return to it as the basis for her 1990 novel The Rowan, the first book in a continued series about telepathy, psycho-kinesis, and other psychic talents. “The Smallest Dragonboy,” a standalone story originally published in Science Fiction Tales in 1973 and again in 1977 in Creatures of the Cosmos, later became part of the McCaffrey’s famous and long-running Dragonriders of Pern series (consisting of more than twenty-two books!) in a collection titled A Gift of Dragons in 2002.

An Author at the Top of Her Game

Aesthetically, Get Off The Unicorn looks grungy. The cover art isn’t particularly captivating and, as I’ve noted above, has no connection to the title. The misprint makes it clear that the book was significantly less important than McCaffrey’s other works. Why then did Ballantine publish it in the first place? Interestingly, McCaffrey actually acknowledges the book’s insignificance. In her introduction she writes, “Most of you kind people who are buying this volume will have done so because of the author’s name on the cover. I say this with due modesty because, Gentle Reader, you would certainly not choose to buy a book of short stories unless you liked other work by the author.”

When Get Off The Unicorn was published, McCaffrey had completed and published many different books and stories, as well as received a number of prestigious awards including the Best Novella Nebula award for Dragon Rider in 1968 and the E.E. “Doc” Smith Award for Imaginative Fiction award in 1976. By the time Get Off The Unicorn was published and available to the public, McCaffrey was a big deal in the science fiction/fantasy world. Being one of the first female writers taken seriously in this genre, readers admired her for her different approach to fantasy fiction writing. Rather than presenting her readers with archaic language, masculine heroes, and graphic violence as writers like Howard and L. Sprague de Camp did in Conan, McCaffrey considered her work more science fiction than fantasy, and tried to make it appealing to readers of all sexes and ages.

She believed dragons had a universal appeal, one that was not limited by gender, the color of one’s skin, or one’s economic status in society. McCaffrey’s dragons were the most notable elements in her books. She made her dragons so realistic through the enormous amount of background information she created for her readers, including a history of how the dragons came to be, descriptions of their eating habits, accounts of their interactions with humans, information about their emotions and psychological development, and examinations of their psychic abilities. Pern was a world where humans and dragons lived together in harmony and actually needed one another to survive. McCaffrey set out to subvert both the clichés associated with dragons from old European folklore as well as the negative slant given to the creatures by modern fantasy fiction. Her dragons are entirely friendly to humans and are not viewed as magical creatures, but rather as members of society. McCaffrey’s dedication to the creation of her dragons helped the popularity of her stories take off.

From her many popular books, a wide franchise of Pern merchandise was born. People could not get enough of the world of Pern. In the late 1980’s, a substantial amount of companion books were created using McCaffrey’s fantasy world of Pern. In the 1990’s the first graphic novel was published called DragonFlight. In addition to these prodcuts, there was original music, a television series, film adaptions, and several video and board games. So, if you were like me, wondering whether Anne McCaffrey and her books were actually legit, it’s pretty obvious that people loved her writing.

What’s happening in the World?

In Get Off the Unicorn, McCaffrey organizes the short stories into different sections, each starting with an introduction explaining why she wrote that particular story, if there are any important elements the audience should be aware of, and basically how she feels about her own work. She explains, for instance, that some of the stories were aimed at a younger audience, which is why she focuses on issues that young people can relate to: fashion, romance, education, identity, and family. These issues, which I definitely experienced as a teenager and am still experiencing as a young adult, are ones that enabled me to relate to the characters in the short story “Daughter.” She also notes in the story’s introduction, “I also had enough homosexual male friends–even before the Gay Liberation developed–who were bitter they could not adopt children because of their sexual preferences. I have never felt capable of writing a full-length novel about this situation as it should be written” (59). Her stories are not literally about the lives of gay men, but she presents stories that focus on the struggle of gender roles in society and how they affect the lives of her characters, similar to what gay men and other individuals not conforming to the norms of society were experiencing during the time this story was being written.

“Daughter” concerns twins Nick and Nora, who live in a futuristic world built on the belief that every individual contributes to society in some way, whether it be farming, computer programming, animal husbandry, or simply staying at home. This complex system keeps structure within this world through both gender roles and where people place during their “educational advancement” exams. This exam determines what a person is good at, and helps that person continue his or her education on that subject when at the university. Nora, who hates being forced to abide by these ridiculous societal rules makes a deal to help Nick with his duties if he finishes hers. Nick is pleased with this idea, since he isn’t good at farming anyway. Unfortunately, her Father discovers their secret when Nick accidentally plants turnips on his family’s farm, the Fenn Farm Complex, a foolish mistake, especially for a boy who is born to be a Fenn farmer. This story focuses on issues of family unity as well as identity acceptance.

In “Dull Drums,” we follow Nora, who greatly succeeds in her Educational Advancement, to university where she studies special Cybernetics, one of the most prestigious programs offered to qualified students. Nora’s experience at university focuses on issues of self-acceptance and romantic relationships. Due to her gender, she was mistreated and isolated at university and struggled with her identity. The underlying themes of both stories are ones that reflect real world issues occurring during the time McCaffrey was writing them, as well as today. Individuals struggling with their identity, either sexually or not, found comfort reading McCaffrey’s books. The fantasy aspects of her books are an escape from reality, while the realistic issues and storylines make them relatable and believable.

An Ode to Anne McCaffrey…and Dragons

Unfortunately, Anne McCaffrey passed away in November of 2011. Seeing how popular she was in the science-fiction world, I decided to do some research on her fans and how they handled her death, and let me tell you, her fans were heartbroken. Many felt close to McCaffrey due to her books and claimed that her work changed their lives for the better.

The Pern Museum & Archives, created by Hans van de Boom, caught my eye immediately. Not only is it an extremely well-organized site, but also you can tell that this guy really loved Anne McCaffrey. The website is set up like an actual museum. Different links lead you to different sites, focusing on many of the different elements exhibited in her books. There is the Dragon Room, devoted to all things dragons: Dragon art, McCaffrey’s inspiration for dragons, their relationship with humans, and fans’ perceptions of dragons. The Map Room has every map of Pern every created during McCaffrey’s lifetime. The Art Gallery displays official cover art from her books and fan art. I could keep going, but trust me, once you’re in this site you are in it for the long run. He even has a page devoted to character bloodlines from her stories.

In 2013, McCaffrey’s son, Todd, wrote and published Dragonwriter: A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey and Pern, a collection of memories and stories about his beloved mother and author, along with insights into her world of writing. Dragonwriter: A Tribute to Anne McCaffrey and Pern was the thing to buy if you loved McCaffrey’s work. After reading a chapter in the collection that consisted of fan appreciation, it became vey clear that McCaffrey’s stories brought people together. Her works encouraged millions to create fan sites and share their own work with each other.

While McCaffrey was the cause of an eruption of fan-based activity, she also created fan-fiction policies, which her fans respectfully followed. Her fans were not allowed to publish any work that involved white dragons or canonical characters. There were to be no plot crossovers, and all fan magazines were to be approved by Anne herself. She also prohibited any fan from creating a pornographic site based on her literary world of Pern (that would have been pretty interesting right?).

It’s obvious that McCaffrey’s work touched the lives of millions during her lifetime and today continues to affect the lives of her admirers. So, was I wrong to judge Get Off The Unicorn when I first picked it up? Is this book, and her other novels, meant to be collecting dust on shelves, or is it a beacon of hope for some dragon-loving individual just waiting to be read? If you’re like me, I heavily judged her work and I believed the book to be of little importance. After learning more about her life and how her work has changed the science fiction world, affected the lives of her readers, and is still very popular today, it’s pretty her work deserves credit.

Between American Comics and Hollywood

September 14, 2015 / Harris Risell / 0 Comments

During the summer months, Dickinson College’s campus is largely uninhabited, save for a small collection of staff members, faculty, and students. So when folks who saw me at the college then asked me to explain why I chose to spend my vacation from the academic halls and the library—where I exhausted countless hours studying, writing papers, and snacking on Kashi granola bars and Chobani yogurt cups (I admit that I am among the few who survives without caffeine)—back in those spaces, you might imagine, reader, that I felt motivated to offer some spectacular response. To satisfy most inquiries, saying very plainly “I’m doing research on comic books” was an exciting enough phrase.

In the presence of interrogators who possessed stronger senses of doubt, though, I needed to elaborate in order to show them that research on comics is a real thing; “Greg Steirer, a professor in the English department who taught of few of the classes I have taken, is writing a book with Alisa Perren, a professor at University of Texas at Austin, about the relationships between Hollywood studios and American comic book companies,” I would start.

“What got you interested in that topic?” one questioner asked at some point.

“I haven’t read many comic books and generally enjoy films, but what interests me most is my professor’s approach: he intends to move away from looking at the language, be it words or images, of comics and focus on how they function as products of industry: titles and symbols are trademarks, characters are copyrighted properties, and markets change as printing and film technology becomes more sophisticated,” I typically responded.

“Oh, so you won’t be comparing stories to their adaptations?” another interrogator asked.

“Only if the differences revealed through that kind of comparison affect the legal actions carried out by a company or studio, the money earned by comics artists and directors, producers, etc., adaptations for television, spin-offs, or the promotions and selling of ancillary products like toys, clothing, DVDs, and video games,” I have replied.

“You know, I have not thought about it much before now, but I have noticed a ton of comics-related things around within the last few years. I can see how you could learn a lot using that kind of approach,” the freshly convinced admitted.

Though I experienced several a-ha moments of my own as I was working on my project, many of them were similar to ones I witnessed others having: there existed this shared notion that comic books as well as films and merchandise inspired by comics have been a part of American popular culture for a while, yet the fact that this phenomenon would be examined in academia is generally surprising.

“Where Did You Begin?”

My first task was to familiarize myself with the terms in use within the works that discuss comic books. Effective research addresses the basis of knowledge about a topic or field that is maintained by a particular academic community before covering new ground, by using either traditional methodologies to add information to that basis or by suggesting that different tools be implemented to expand the breadth of the topic. To do this, I looked to two texts—Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (2013) and Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story (2012)—that Professor Steirer assigned to me in order to gain a better sense of the history of comics as a medium and some of the prominent comic book artists who helped keep the art form alive (with some attention to its place within film, television, and other entertainment industries). Gabilliet’s book offers a comprehensive, yet not exhaustive, description of the birth and evolution of comics, highlighting different eras in which comic books were marked as pure entertainment, censored for being detrimental to the lives of American youth, hailed as art, and acknowledged as forums for ideological agendas.

Howe’s book focuses on the story of the founding and growth of Marvel Comics, one of the largest comic book companies to date, describing the artists, writers, corporate heads, organizations, and families involved in the creation of iconic characters, the most popular of whom are superheroes like Spiderman, Iron Man, Elektra, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and the Incredible Hulk. Using personal interviews, recorded conversations, letters, and hearsay, Howe presents the company’s moments of decline and extreme commercial success during the Golden (late 1930s to the early 1950s), the Silver (late 1950s to around 1970), the Bronze (1970 to 1985), and portions of the Modern Ages (1985 to the present) of American comics. It is during this latter phase of time that comic book companies in the United States begin to integrate with Hollywood studios in order to build franchises around popular characters that inspire the development of ancillary products and allow both industries to thrive.

While I was reading through those books, Professor Steirer also shared with me his essay “The State of Comics Scholarship: Comics Studies and Disciplinarity,” in which argued that there is no established academic community for comics scholars and hence little opportunity for debate about what methodologies are to become standard and what theoretical direction ought to be taken within comics studies. He goes on to say that most of the research produced about comics either presents facts about the medium or puts forth critiques about the language within comics, their implicit ideological pretenses, authorship, the medium’s effect on readers (i.e. fan culture, social studies on children), and the comic book’s place as a commercial entity.

As a result of the prevalence of these kinds of isolated analyses, “comics studies” is often grouped together with traditional academic fields like literary studies, culture and media studies, and American studies rather than treated as its own discipline. Without any formal disciplinarity attributed to itself by comics scholars, research on comics does not have its own institutional locus. The solution to this lack of administrative organization and clarity of objective that Steirer offers redirects scholars’ attention to the fact that comic books were first printed to satisfy one goal: to earn money and continue selling products. Companies like Marvel, DC Comics, Image Comics, and Dark Horse have helped turn comics into a fully-fledged and continuously expanding industry. What is more, the Modern Age of American comics would likely have already ended and comics would largely be obscure by now if most comic book publishers did not combine forces with Hollywood studios such as Warner Bros., Sony, Disney, 20^th Century Fox, and Universal Pictures, among others.

Both comic book companies and film studios in the United States now share the more sophisticated goal of mass-producing popular and accessible fare that is franchise-able. Thus, Professor Steirer identifies the industrial approach to the study of comics as the most productive mode of analysis on the subject of comic books because of their relationship to issues like production, marketing, consumption practices, and intellectual property law and because of the success of this approach in film and media studies. He does reference some examples of comics scholarship that explore texts through this lens, but he explains that these few pieces exist in the margins of an already marginalized scholarly space.

“What’s in the ‘doing’? What were you looking for?”

After I had finished reading through the basis of knowledge on comic books and comics studies, I was better equipped to search for information directly relevant to Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book. Since industry-oriented scholarship on comic books is not a common approach, the sources of information about deals between publishers and studios, legal battles over the copyrights on a particular character or name, and advertising techniques used to promote comics, movies, and ancillary products is buried, so to speak, in non-scholarly articles, reports, and databases. I was tasked with the job of searching through the digital archives of the trade magazine (a general resource for news targeted toward people working in a particular industry) known as Variety, which publishes articles about issues related to Hollywood. I sifted through roughly a thousand separate pieces using search terms like “Marvel Comics,” “Avengers movies,” “Batman,” and “comics and television” in order to find reports that could give Professors Steirer and Perren a greater sense of how issues within these industries are handled tonally in comparison to legal documents and other online forums that mention comic books, movies inspired by comics, or the individuals involved in the processes that maintain these industries’ activity and influence their success. I compiled these writings into a digital annotated bibliography that can be viewed at any point of the book project’s development. Currently, there are over 300 applicable entries listed and summarized.

“What have you gained from this experience and where do you go next?”

Professor Steirer and Professor Perren’s book is scheduled to be published a few years from now, so the work I completed for them was rather simple compared to the work that is going to need to be done at the later stages of the project. However, Professor Steirer and I have discussed the prospect of our picking up where I left off next year. Aside from the large amount of knowledge I have learned this past summer, I have discovered an interest in research and at the moment have not ruled it out among my post-graduation goals. Also, as a student who now has worked and studied using both techniques typically utilized in literary studies and those that are more unconventional, like looking at the commercial or industrial issues, I have become much more aware of and sensitive to what common words like “book,” “art,” “study,” and “American” can mean.

Interview with Patricia Thomas

September 12, 2015 / Brooke Serra / 0 Comments

Patricia Thomas is a Lead Educational Adviser for the Young Scholars Program at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Before joining Jack Kent Cooke, she taught college courses in education and trained K-12 teachers to serve students with a variety of needs, background, and interests. She has also worked as a foreign language instructor and assistant teacher in gifted and enrichment education at both public and private schools.

BROOKE: To start off, can you tell me a little bit about your educational background and what degrees you got in undergrad and how you got to where you are?

PATRICIA: Sure. I was a foreign language major as an undergraduate student. I’d had a passion for French and Spanish all through high school—and actually earlier than that for French. So I majored in French and Spanish and minored in Education and I got my teaching certificate at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Then I went to Teachers College, the graduate education school at Columbia University, and first I did a Master’s Degree in general Curriculum and Teaching and then I did a Masters of Education in Curriculum and Teaching but with a specialization in Urban and Multicultural Education. I taught for a while while I was there, and then I went to Emory University for my doctoral program, where I got a Ph.D. in Educational Studies with specializations in Second Language Acquisition and Urban and Multicultural Education.

Getting my Ph.D. was a really good experience. I learned a lot from it. And when I started here in my Educational Adviser role, I wanted to keep learning: specifically, about advising. So I did a graduate certificate program through Kansas State University in Academic Advising, then a graduate certificate program through George Washington University in Counseling. I did this program because I had been thinking about getting a graduate degree in counseling and I wanted to get a sense of whether I wanted to pursue it fully. George Washington has a certificate program in Counseling Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Persons, so I took a few classes there, got the certificate, really enjoyed it, and decided to stay and do a Master’s Degree in Clinical Mental Health Counseling.

BROOKE: What sparked your interest in urban education?

PATRICIA: I think that it was a little bit the circumstances of where I was. I’ve always been interested in education, but while I was getting my teaching certification at Wake Forest, my teaching advisor and mentor put me in touch with some instructors and professors at Teachers College and it just so happened that one of the people that I networked with was the professor for a sort of education and cultural diversity course. Once I got to Teachers College, it became my favorite class. I really enjoyed the course topics and the types of projects we did, and I wound up TA-ing for that professor for several semesters. And in doing that, I saw that there were some interesting issues that I could explore within the combination of urban and multicultural education. I was also teaching in New York at the time. I taught in a private school and also did after school work and teaching assistant work at two public schools. The differences among the three schools was enormous. And that just kind of got my thoughts percolating.

BROOKE: How did you get from New York and those positions to where you are now?

PATRICIA: I think originally my thought was that I was enjoying teaching but I wanted to participate more in teaching teachers. So I thought that the main way to be able to do that was to get a doctorate in education. I had a couple of friends at Emory that I had worked with years before and Emory had a small doctoral program, so it seemed like it’d be a really welcoming, cozy community. I applied there and got a chance to do a lot of work with the prospective teachers that they had in their Master of Arts in Teaching program. I think that I would have continued along that path, but I got to a point that many doctoral students get to which is that your funding is over but you are not finished. So I had many ups and downs with advisors leaving, retiring, going on sabbatical, and it wound up taking me five years to finish instead of the four that I was on track for. So I needed to find work for that fifth year.

I looked around Atlanta for jobs and wasn’t really finding something that I thought would be a good fit, so I decided to look around up here in the DC area instead because I grew up here and my family is still here in Maryland and DC. I decided not to look for teaching positions right away because some of the other veteran doctoral students had said, “If you start teaching while you’re still trying to finish your dissertation—if you actually leave your program, leave your campus and start teaching somewhere else—you’re going to be too distracted. You’re gonna love the teaching and you’re not gonna want to work on your research and your writing.” So I wound up taking a look at some jobs outside of teaching.

I was just looking at the Chronicle of Higher Ed website—they have a jobs board—and I started getting interested in the idea of advising, which would still be connected to education but would be different from designing a curriculum for a whole semester and grading papers and that kind of thing. So just on an off chance, I looked in the nonprofit section of the job boards and there was this position to be an Educational Adviser for a nonprofit organization and as I was looking through it, I thought, “The characteristics that they’re looking for are things that are interesting and important to me and things that I think that I can do.” The population was one that interested me a lot because the Foundation works with students who have financial need—so are from low to moderate income backgrounds—but kids who are really, really bright. I had worked with kids in a gifted education program in New York and in gifted summer programs for several years during college and the early part of grad school so it felt like a really good fit.

BROOKE: So if you could describe your current position, what is your job title and what does your job involve?

PATRICIA: It’s a little bit of a lot of things. The position I have now is Lead Educational Adviser. I started off as a regular Educational Adviser and I had a caseload of students that I worked with. I still have a caseload now, just a smaller one, and I also supervise other Educational Advisers. But the nuts and bolts of the Adviser position are to work with these students from 8^th grade through 12^th grade and help them and their families navigate the educational system, and get access to rigorous, challenging, interesting educational opportunities. Things like getting into a high school that is going to offer all the advanced coursework that they would benefit from, getting connected to lessons in art and music and sometimes sports or dance, things like that.

We help challenge them to set high goals for themselves and become leaders in their schools and their communities and help them pursue experiences that will help them learn how to do that. We also get them connected to each other and we also fund them via a tailored scholarship budget for enrichment opportunities like summer programs; almost all of our advisees do a summer program each year. There may be other programs that they’re involved in during the course of the year like an internship or a conference related to some of their interests, so we kind of lead them through getting connected to all of those kinds of good opportunities and then also get them prepared for college. So talking to them about what their options are and what the landscape of college looks like, taking them on visits, helping to make sure they’re prepared for SATs and ACTs by getting them appropriate preparation if they need that, helping them through the decision making process. Just basically taking every student from where they are in 8^th grade and making sure they have a really strong educational experience all the way through high school and that they get placed well for college.

BROOKE: So do you fund all of that then, through the foundation?

PATRICIA: We fund a lot of it. Every student has a scholarship budget that kind of fits them and we try to put several priorities on there and then also try to accommodate students’ own wishlist items. So the first priority is going to be to make sure that the students are in a really strong high school or have access to some really good high school courses. Sometimes a student isn’t really in a position to go to a high school that is particularly well-suited to them, so we might have them go to the high school that is closest but also supplement courses at the local community college or through distance education or something like that.

We’ll make an effort to see that the priorities for a strong high school education are paid for. We generally negotiate. A lot of our students are going to a private high school, for example, but we’re not really a high school scholarship, so we’re not going to pay a $40,000 tuition to a boarding school; but we will help negotiate at that school, so that our students get really good financial aid. And then we fill in the things like a laptop or flights to and from home, books and uniforms, maybe the family contribution if it’s a couple of thousand dollars, fees for activities, things like that. We do pay for a summer experience each year, and then many other little things.

It’s a program that’s focused on filling in the gaps, so the our students have the things that families with greater financial means would usually be able to provide for their children. We’re trying to provide some of those things and we’re trying to provide the resources and the experiences that are going to allow the students to really live up to their potential. There are so many kids who come into the program in 8^th grade and when we start talking about the scholarships and the resources that we’re going to be able to provide during the course of their time, their parents will say, “Oh yeah, we always wanted to do this summer program” or “We always wanted to have her in piano lessons, but we just couldn’t afford it. She was excited about it, really wanted to do it, and the only thing standing in the way was money.” So I think we’re trying to remove some of those little barriers.

BROOKE: You work for them for a long time, so I’m assuming you gain pretty strong relationships with them as well?

PATRICIA: Yeah, definitely. It differs from student to student, but I’ve been here now almost eight years, so I’ve had a chance to see a few of my cohorts of students all the way through from 8^th grade through 12^th grade and there are some really nice bonds that get formed. Some of those students I am already keeping in touch with as they go off to college and I know that we will stay connected for the long term. With others, maybe we don’t see or talk to each other that much once they finish high school, but there are events within the foundation that they sometimes come back for. We sponsor a few summer events and we just started an alumni event that’s held in the spring, so I think they stay connected to the community at large even if they don’t stay connected to me personally for a long time. Which is fine, I like that they know they have a nice network of peers.

BROOKE: I am assuming your job sort of changes on a day-to-day basis, but if you could describe your typical day, what would that look like?

PATRICIA: It does change a lot. My attention goes in a lot of different directions in this job. But on a given day, I’ll probably spend a portion of my time talking to students. I check in with the kids in my caseload about once every two weeks, so I will probably have a couple of half-hour phone calls scheduled in the afternoon. I might also be calling a vendor to see if I can set up lessons for a student. Today, for example, I have to follow up on someone who is going to give one of my students clarinet lessons and I need to call a stable for a student who wants to take riding lessons. So I’ll do a little bit of self-education around that.

I will be reviewing and revising goals today. The students are getting ready for—well, we’re getting reading for—planning for next year, and all of them will have individualized learning plans that include their goals, as well as the resources and programming we’re going to provide for them, their scholarships and budget. Lots of students have been completing their goals for next year and I’ll be reading a lot of those.

I’ll be checking-in with the advisors that I supervise. We also do that about once every two weeks formally, but pretty much every day somebody’s stopping by with a question about a students or a budget, or some sort of programming that we’re doing within our department. So I’ll do some chatting around that and do some documentation—we always have to take good notes about things, so I’ll be checking up on my notes. I’ll probably also correspond with a couple of parents. We talk primarily with the Scholar, as that’s where we’re trying to build our strongest rapport and because it’s the student’s education that we are trying to nurture, but the parents are the ones who are there 365 days a year and they know a lot of things about their children that we wouldn’t be able to be aware of. Most of our students are pretty far away from our office here. We have a couple of local students, but most of them are scattered far and wide across the country. Parents are a really helpful resource with checking in with them; it gives us a lot of good information, and they have questions too, and things that they’re wondering about. So we will chat with them maybe about the college process, or some questions about the interests that the student has, or there might be a financial change in the family that we need to follow up on, things like that. So I’ll probably have a couple of interactions with parents as well today.

BROOKE: What do you think is the most rewarding part of your job?

PATRICIA: I think there are a couple of things. Seeing students get a chance to do things that they’re really capable of but might not have had a chance to do otherwise is fantastic. So seeing them stretch and travel to places during the summer that would’ve been hard for them to imagine going to, seeing them become really good leaders, seeing them get access to a strong education—that’s really wonderful. And forming bonds like we were just talking about—that is very, very rewarding. I have a handful of students right now who I’ve worked with previously and they’re off at college; maintaining connections with them really makes me feel good. I feel like we’ve grown together and have all developed in really positive ways because of that connection.

I also think that having really kind, interesting, and talented colleagues is pretty amazing. Our Young Scholars program has a fairly big staff—at least, for a small organization. About 55 people work at the foundation, and the Young Scholars team has 18 people. So we are pretty big, but we are a really nice team and I think we complement each other well and we learn a lot from each other and depend on each other. So it feels really good to have the support of all of these other people and to be able to give that support back.

Those are probably the main things: the connections, personal connections. I’ve said several times that I put my counseling degree to use a lot within this job, even though it’s not a counseling position, per se. But just the interpersonal part of counseling, helping people figure things out, figure out difficult situations, or set goals for themselves, or work through something difficult. All of those things come up on a daily basis here and I think being able to apply lessons and concepts and practices from the different parts of my education to this job—that is really rewarding too.

BROOKE: So going off of that, what is the most challenging part of your job?

PATRICIA: Well, as I mentioned earlier, my energy has to go in a lot of directions, and that takes a lot of organization and the ability to multitask at a really high level and at sometimes a frenetic pace. That’s hard for me. I am a pretty calm person, so looking at my desk at the end of the day and seeing 8 or 10 different things that need to be followed up on is challenging.

I think, too, that even though we’re able to do a lot with the Scholars and their families, we still can’t do everything that we would like to. Our scope is primarily educational; that’s pretty much going to be the priority. That is fantastic and I think that does a lot for the students, but then there will always be other situations going on in their lives that we can’t fix. I’ve had students who have had incarcerated parents, or parents who have some sort of significant physical or mental illness, students who have other kinds of family difficulties or have had periods of homelessness, and a lot of times, that is something that their families have to figure out on their own, or with other resources in their communities. It can be hard to get on the phone and say, “Okay, let’s talk about the classes that you’re gonna take next year,” when you know that there is some other really difficult situation that’s going on in the background. So that’s hard. In the last couple of years, I’ve had a few students too who’ve had their own emotional and mental health difficulties, and I’m attached to them, and I care about them, and it’s difficult to see them go through that and know that they have to carry some of the burden on their own. I can’t fix it all.

BROOKE: You have students all over the United States, then?

PATRICIA: Yep, we all do. I think we have Scholars in 46 or 48 states, something like that.

BROOKE: If you could leave the reader with one final comment about your job or your passion for education, or really anything, what would you want it to be?

PATRICIA: I would recommend to other people to become really good listeners—really dedicating yourself to the art and practice of listening is important. I say that because I think there are points in life where you have to listen to yourself and to where you’re being called to do your work and live out your life, and you need to be thoughtful about that and responsive. Sometimes people ask me, sort of like you were just doing in the interview, “How did you get from this place to that place to the other place? How did you decide to do this educational program or that one?” It was just sort of a continuous process of discernment, listening to myself and thinking about what I needed to do to get to this next step in life, or recognizing when something really felt appealing to me. I had thought about doing counseling a long time ago, and that little voice in my head that said “you should try this out” never really disappeared and finally I got to a point where I listened to it and actually tried it out and I felt very grateful afterwards. So there’s a listening to yourself and the voices that guide you.

But also listening to other people. I think that is probably the most important thing that I can do and have done in any of my jobs or any of the roles within a particular job: just sit there and listen very actively and as compassionately as I can. It’s amazing how much better people feel, even if there’s nothing else that I’m able to do. If the person I am sitting with feels heard and feels cared about, then they may feel a little bit better. I think for me, working at that, working at being a good listener has been extraordinarily helpful and I think that is something that all of us could try to do a little bit more of, especially in those situations where your desire to help can only take you so far. As you know, when you go into education, it’s complex. There are going to be a lot of issues that you’ll come up against, and some of them you’ll be able to address and some of them you won’t. But if you’re able to help other people feel heard and empowered—or at least feel at ease—I think that will be a positive step and something that will be appreciated.

A Little More Consideration: James Ponsoldt’s The End of the Tour

September 3, 2015 / Noah Fusco / 2 Comments

The character of David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour is an overpowering presence. Director James Ponsoldt is a more than capable director, yet here his direction comes off as uneven, perhaps because of the charismatic enormity of Wallace as both a character and a thinker. Continue reading

Cosplay vs. Nerd Elitism

June 16, 2015 / Theo Xenophon / 2 Comments

If you’ve been to any comic, manga, or video game convention within the past twenty years, chances are you’ve encountered some convention-goers masquerading as fictional characters in colorful, creative costumes. What you’re seeing are not amateur actors, untimely trick-or-treaters, or delusional folks going through cartoon-based identity crises. These are passionate fans, dedicated to representing their favorite TV, movie, game and comic book characters. These are cosplayers.

Cosplay, coming from the Japanese term, kosupure (コスプレ), is a portmanteau of the words ‘costume’ and ‘play.’ It’s a growing hobby in which fans create and wear costumes in order to show them off at conventions, enter contests, meet fellow fans, and further embrace their interests in the characters they’re portraying. Though originally the majority of cosplay was devoted to anime characters, the hobby has expanded to include characters from a variety of genres including science fiction thrillers, blockbuster action movies, and even occasionally characters that are entirely made up by the cosplayers themselves. Some are incredibly complex, such as the woman with sword and pink hair pictured on the left below, while some, like that handsome devil on the right, are a tad simpler.

You’d think such a niche hobby would fit wonderfully into the sort of “nerd culture” associated with conventions and pop culture. And yet here’s what Pat Broderick, a popular comic book artist who has worked on such characters as Batman and Captain Marvel, had to say about cosplay via Facebook: “Today’s heads up. If you’re a cosplay personality, please don’t send me a friend request. If you’re a convention promoter and you’re building your show around cosplay events and mega multiple media guests don’t invite me. You bring nothing of value to the shows, and if you’re a promoter pushing cosplay as your main attraction you’re not helping the industry or comics market. Thank you.”

There seems to be a pushback against the hobby, even from some professionals in the comic industry such as Broderick. Broderick goes on to denounce cosplay as “selfies in costume” and as a blatant form of “narcissism” that has been gaining a disturbing amount of support from fans and others in the industry. Complaints such as these put cosplay on the front of a growing conflict between casual and “hardcore” nerds.

A sort of elitism has grown around this conflict, leading to a form of “gatekeeping”–that is, the process by which one group keeps another group out of its culture (Ravishly). Some self-proclaimed “real nerds,” such as blogger Tara “Tiger” Brown, seem eager to draw a distinction between themselves and those they view as “fake,” whom Brown, for instance, calls “Fake Geek Girls.” Tara Brown and those similar to her seem to believe that being a geek is something that must be earned, but that nowadays, people, especially women, want to “pretend” so that people will give them attention. A lot of nerds may feel as though they’ve been persecuted for their hobbies, and thus, feel more protective of those hobbies, taking any bullying they received as badges of honor and viewing those that bring popularity to the hobby as a threat to what makes that hobby unique.

So why is cosplay so tied to this conflict? Well for starters (and returning to the gender issues of the conflict), cosplay is one of the few female-dominated areas of nerd culture. It’s a much easier entry point into the subculture for women who may feel more intimidated going into a comic or game store and being surrounded by mostly men. But the backlash against cosplay also goes beyond gender. Cosplay is an easy way for anyone–male, female, or other–to get involved with geek culture in a casual sense. Video games require skills and money to spend on the tech, comics draw on decades of knowledge and convoluted continuities, but dressing up is easy to get started with if you have a little creativity and can find (or make) a costume. Elitists naturally find themselves against this easy point of entry for casual fans, and assume that cosplayers don’t care enough about the subjects they portray.

To assume cosplayers don’t have the same level of passion as “real fans” or that they’re just in it for the pictures is a gross generalization, however. For this article, I’ve interviewed a few cosplayers to learn about their experiences and wound up finding a wide variety of motivations. Here’s what some of them had to say when asked to talk about what draws them into the hobby and to respond to Broderick’s claims that cosplay adds nothing to the industry and that it’s a form of narcissism:

“Sure it’s nice to take pictures of your own costume and others because they look cool or you’re proud of your work and want to remember it or show it to people who didn’t get to see, but it’s also about the experience while you’re there. . . . It’s also a way to express one’s enthusiasm for a certain work by putting in all the time and effort to get a costume together, so I would think to some artists it would be flattering to have people so excited about wanting to represent a character that they created. . . . For me, I just love the atmosphere of cons. I go to a few panels, but for the most part I like walking around and interacting with all the like-minded people. A convention for a lot of people is a gathering of ‘comrades’ (if you will), and a big meet-up of people who enjoy the same things. Having cosplay is just another way for people to come together over the things they all love.” —Mackenzie Stricklin (on the left) cosplaying as Misty from Pokemon

“For me personally, it’s that I get to be someone I’m not usually. When I cosplay, I get to place myself within the context of a world and a character, which I deeply admire, and it’s also a lot of fun during the creative process too. Part of my enjoyment is being able to construct a costume for myself and be able to watch it come together and look fantastic when I’m done.” —Leigh Parrott cosplaying as Black Rose from .Hack

“Creating a costume feels like an achievement when it’s done, and something fun to do in my free time while it’s being made. Usually the only people who get what I am are my friends, so when someone I don’t know recognizes it, it makes me feel happy, like I’m not an outsider. That’s why I want to go to more conventions. At Katsucon the Crunchyroll booth had a camera feed livestreaming on their website where the people at the con could see what comments the viewers were making, and when I stepped in front of it as Kurisu, a whole bunch of comments on it started coming through and I felt so proud and recognized. It’s a feeling I don’t have too often, so it’s really nice.”–Megan Hansen cosplaying as Kurisu Makise from Steins;Gate

At the end of the day, most cosplayers like to dress up for the same reasons comic fans read comics, gamers play games, and TV and movie fans tune in to watch shows and films: because it’s fun and they get to be a part of something greater than themselves. To respond to Broderick and other naysayers, what cosplay brings to “the industry” is both a new way to enjoy pop culture and a hoard of fresh new fans who may have previously missed out on the nerd subculture. There’s no reason to exclude fans of any kind, and artists, writers, and their followers aren’t doing any worse from a little extra attention. At the risk of sounding too preachy, perhaps what fans and creators who consider themselves more hardcore than others need to wrap their heads around is that they do not, and cannot exclusively own the right to enjoy any form of genre or media.

Mobile Gaming: Are You Really Having Fun?

May 27, 2015 / Patrick Meier / 14 Comments

Smartphones are pretty amazing. Seriously, I only just got one a few months ago after having the same dumb phone for 5 years, and it has changed my life. And by “changed my life” I mean “it’s made me waste a whole bunch of time.” Some of this time is wasted on YikYak, some is wasted watching Whose Line clips on the toilet, and some is wasted swiping right on every single human being on Tinder. But all of those pale in comparison to the time I’ve wasted playing games on my phone. As we all know, the gaming and smartphone landscape has been transformed by the emergence of mobile games, but why are these games so popular? No doubt their price, easy access, and simple play mechanics–but I would argue that there is one more element not usually considered. These games trick us into thinking we enjoy them.

Quite an accusation, right? Trust me, I can back it up. I spent this semester helping Prof. Steirer with research on mobile games, and my job involved playing every mobile game that was related to a console game or franchise from the last three years. This came out to about 35 companion apps and around 30 actual games that could be played without owning the console game. I think I could argue that almost all of the games I played involved tricking the player into thinking he or she enjoys the game, but two stand out above the rest: Injustice: Gods Among Us and Marvel: Contest of Champions.

Both games are superhero fighting games with an emphasis on collecting heroes and building up their stats to fight against other heroes. They differ in the fine details (Injustice features teams of three heroes in each battle, Marvel has a map screen where you can decide what battle to do next), but these differences are mostly irrelevant. The core gameplay remains the same for both games. I won’t go into detail as to how the gameplay works, as the games are way more complex than they need to be. Plus they’re free, so you can go play them for yourself if you’re really curious. Simply put, the gameplay of each game involves picking a hero on your team who is stronger than your enemy and tapping the screen until you win. I wish I were joking. And yet each game has over 10 MILLION downloads, and some surprisingly active communities on Reddit and on the games’ respective official forums. So why then are these games so popular? Because each game adds a few simple features that make the game feel rewarding to play without actually being an engaging experience.

Both of these games use design choices that help disguise how boring the gameplay actually is. Essentially, the game is designed to make the player think he or she is having fun when really he or she is just enjoying being rewarded by the game. The games reward players do in a variety of ways. For instance: Booster Packs. Both games have “booster packs” (Marvel calls them Crystal Packs because I guess superheroes all come out of crystals now) where you pay some in-game currency (or real-life currency if you’re that bougie) to get a few random heroes or power-ups. What makes these packs feel rewarding is that getting something really good isn’t guaranteed. Rather than being like a store transaction (boring…), they’re like gambling (exciting!) where gains are determined by chance, thus making any gains feel much more rewarding. The impatience aspects of Injustice and Marvel serve the same purpose. Because your “energy” (ability to just play the game) will run out after a while, you start to look forward to when your energy will be refilled and you can play again. Or in Marvel you can just spend some money to be able to play again. You know what they say, “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” And in this case, the game is purposely being absent to make you miss playing it. It’s deceptive and annoying but it seems to work.

Injustice and Marvel also make use of RPG elements like stats, leveling up, power levels, and experience. Again, the fine details differ somewhat. For instance, Marvel makes you spend an in-game resource called ISO-8 and gold to increase your heroes’ stats, whereas heroes in Injustice will level up from experience alone. And once again, these differences don’t really matter because they don’t change the way you play the game. Injustice levels up the character that I use the most, and Marvel lets me choose which characters to upgrade by spending money and ISO-8. But I’m only going to upgrade the characters that I use the most anyway, so Marvel is just putting extra steps in between playing the game and leveling up characters to make it feel like I’m accomplishing more than I am. Heroes in each game can also be promoted (subtly different from leveling up) by spending yet another form of in-game money. Two types of leveling up means twice as much opportunity for the player to feel like they’ve accomplished something! This leads to a complicated interface with over-designed, confusing menus that serve to help me do something that could just be automatic. But the games employ effects that compliment what should be an annoying time-waster to make it feel fun. Leveling up in Marvel feels good because of the flashy visuals and big sound effects–never mind the fact that you don’t ever get to really feel the effects of leveling up a character, because every battle plays out the same way. Tap the screen for a while (maybe swipe left to right a few times too) and if you’ve spent enough currency and have better numbers you win. Which brings me to my next point…

Money. Currency plays a major role in both games. Injustice has three different kinds of money (challenge credits, power credits, and alliance credits, plus you can spend real money to get more power credits). Marvel has five! FIVE different kinds of money! If Marvel: Contest of Champions was a country, it would have the most insane economy of all time. Battle chips, ISO-8, gold, alliance points, loyalty, not to mention crystals, experience, “units”–GOOD LORD, WHEN DOES IT STOP?! Marvel and Injustice have so many different ways to reward the player, but none of these things have any real impact on how the game is actually played! Collecting things is fun, sure. But what’s the point in having an inventory screen full of stuff and a virtual wallet full of money if there’s no fun way to use it? The thing to note about all of these RPG elements, items, and currencies is that they make the games incredibly complex, but not at all deep. Complexity is simply the number of rules that a player needs to know in order to play the game. Depth is a measure of how many meaningful choices a player can make given a rule-set. Having a ton of stats, upgrades, currencies, and items adds a lot of complexity. But the only choice a player makes during actual gameplay is which hero to use in a fight (and Marvel already tells you which character in your party has the best chance of winning so even that isn’t really a choice). With all of that complexity, the games have almost no depth because the player doesn’t get to make any real choices during gameplay.

All of these elements serve to reward the player. These games feature tons of different items and currencies so that after a battle the player is rewarded. Finishing a fight and seeing a list of stuff that you earned feels satisfying! But these rewards are artificial and don’t change how we play the game in any meaningful way, so what’s the point? The point is just to compel us to keep playing the game even though the game isn’t really engaging. The rewards exist for their own sake, and don’t really factor into any greater purpose. Getting rewards are just a means to get even more rewards. To me, the most well-designed games are ones in which simply playing the game is its own reward. The reward in a fighting game should be that you won the fight! Not that you got some upgrade stuff and some money. Getting to the end of the story and beating the bad guy should be the reward of games with linear narratives. But maybe we don’t want all that depth in a mobile game, right? Maybe we just want something fun to makes us feel satisfied that doesn’t take much thought. I would counter that with one example: 2048.

Everyone reading this has heard of and likely played 2048. The gameplay is simple: swipe numbers together to create bigger numbers with the ultimate goal of getting a tile worth 2048. There’s no RPG elements, no upgrades, no money, no levels, and no rewards beside the main goal of the game. It is a game with little complexity, but a surprising amount of depth. The game gets harder as it progresses, rather than keeping the same level of challenge throughout and just giving the player higher numbers to throw around. And the good news? There’s actually a lot of games out there like this (1010!, Cut the Rope, even Flappy Bird could be argued to be like this). More and more unfortunately are starting to include elements of trickery like the ones used in Injustice and Marvel: Contest of Champions. Cut the Rope when it first came out didn’t have any fake rewards or impatience aspects. But Cut the Rope 2 came along and gave us solar energy that drains as we play, superpower upgrades to let us do the levels without actually doing them, and a silly pointless map screen to give the player an artificial feeling of progression. Games don’t have to be like this. Playing a game, even a mobile game, can still be an engaging experience in and of itself; designers need’s doesn’t resort to trickery to get us to keep playing.

So next time you play a game on your phone (or anywhere else for that matter), think about how you’re experiencing the game and ask whether you’re really having fun, or if the game is just trying to trick you into thinking you’re having fun. And don’t be satisfied with games that do the latter when there are so many better ways for games to engage players.

How I Met Your Victorian Society

May 8, 2015 / AVeryStrangeHoard / 0 Comments

I’ve been taking a Victorian Sexualities class this semester. And throughout I’ve been surprised by the connections between Victorian society and our present-day society. For example, both involve radical changes in technology, concern over family values and morality, and a large amount of coded talk about sex. Although a lot has changed and the conversations differ in content, many of the anxieties of the Victorian era, especially around sexuality and gender, seem to pop up today. One of the places where I was surprised to find myself suddenly thinking about the Victorians was the TV show How I Met Your Mother, created by Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.

The unmarried woman was a big concern for the Victorians. The growing number of single women in Britain was in conflict with the traditional role of women as wife and the mechanisms of inheritance and property. William Rathbone Greg wrote “Why are Women Redundant?” in 1862 to address this problem. He believed that it was in women’s nature to marry, so that if they weren’t marrying, it was for unnatural reasons: bad temperament, desire for work, and a lack of eligible men. I think the Robin, one of the two female protagonists, is the modern day manifestation of a similar fear. Most of her characters’ conflicts have to do with whether she wants a man or a career. So which will she end up with? And if a man, who? The show spends a lot of time dwelling on which path and which man is a better choice for her. This focus on marrying off the single women strikes me as very Victorian. Her role as a woman is also complicated through her non-traditional portrayal of gender. Robin has a lot of traditionally masculine characteristics, and the show wants us to see them as such. Her drinking scotch and smoking cigars makes her a ‘bro’. As does her lack of desire for children or for commitment.

Set against Robin’s gendered identity, Lilly’s performance of womanhood becomes the other half of the binary. Lilly wants a husband and children. For most of the show she is a kindergarten teacher. Her character has nurturing and maternal instincts that Robin seems to lack. Though Lilly isn’t always traditional, she is aligned with the traditional ideals of womanhood as mother and wife. Just as Greg was thinking about what the proper role for women was, How I Met Your Mother proposes these two ideas: Robin or Lily. In addition, Wilkie Collin’s book The Woman in White sets up a similar binary with its two main female characters, Laura and Marion. Laura is a traditional woman—quiet and passive—while Marion is frequently compared with men—rational and stubborn. This concern over what makes a woman is also in our consciousness today. Certainly How I Met Your Mother’s women are different from those in the Victorian period, but we are still trying to figure out what gender means—especially for women in relation to marriage. What is the ‘natural’ role for women? Is there one?

Another Victorian trope that has found its way into the show is that of the potential (or definite, depending on how you see it) homoeroticism of male friendships. Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest is packed with jokes about gay sex. In Wilkie Collins’ work, there is a pattern of homoerotic love being expressed through the desire for the same woman (see, for more on this, Carolyn Dever’s “The Marriage Plot and Its Alternatives.”). In How I Met Your Mother, the bond between Ted and Barney has similar coding. The greater importance of their relationship with each other over their brief and unimportant heterosexual bonds mimics that of men in Victorian literature. Their strong and foundational love and care for each other is greater than that of marriage—which is shown as shallower. Add to this Ted and Barney’s mutual love for Robin and you have a Victorian love triangle. The homosocial relationship is, perhaps, coded in their desire for Robin. The questions that Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde asked are still concerns today: What is the role of homosocial relationships? Is marriage still the most important relationship if the ‘bro code’ is supposed to come first? Or does the show’s narrative framework suggest that, despite the importance of homosocial bonds, marriage wins out in the end? The whole point of the framing narration is, after all, to tell an audience of children about their family history or what—for lack of a better world—their inheritance.

While I believe that a lot has changed since Victorian society, it seems odd to me that so many of the questions they were grappling with are still valid today. Have our thoughts on marriage changed so little? Or have we returned to a time of these odd hypocrisies? Morality, family and marriage are central concerns while sex and sexual deviance are both immoral and everywhere. I don’t have a claim, or a ‘so what’ to answer these questions. I think the pattern is worth some thought however. The Victorians were trying to adjust to changing gender roles and ideas of sexuality. So are we today. Our society is in the process (hopefully) of rearranging how we think of gender and all of its institutions. Do we look to the Victorians for help perhaps? How come we’re still so stuck on these issues?

Interview with Leigh Arsenault

May 7, 2015 / Theo Xenophon / 0 Comments

Leigh Arsenault is the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy at the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, where she oversees the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. Before joining Aspen, Leigh served as a Senior Policy Advisor for higher education at the U.S. Department of Education. She also worked as National Youth Vote Director and National Policy Coordinator for Obama for America for the 2008 and 2012 elections, respectively.

THEO: Okay! So I’m going to pull up you’re LinkedIn profile.

LEIGH: Oh jeez, so you’ve been doing research!

THEO: Yes, I came prepared. . . .Okay, so you worked on the Obama campaign. How was that?

LEIGH: It was an incredible experience! It was my first job right out of college so I actually moved to New Hampshire when President Obama announced in 2007 that he was going to run. I worked the primaries as a campus organizer, so I moved to colleges across the state to organize student chapters of what was then called Students for Barack Obama. It was an amazing opportunity for me to be a part of something where you could really feel the day-to-day tangible impact you were having. I had to measure the number of people I was talking to, learn what they cared about, and figure out how I could then turn that into real organizing on the ground. It also taught me a lot of skills that I continue to bring to my day-to-day work.

THEO: So your interests fall on the political side of things, but also lie in education? Would you say that you’re more interested in one or the other, or are they equal for you?

LEIGH: I would say that I am now on a track that puts my career squarely in the field of education, particularly education policy—and, in my current work, also research on institutional practice. What I think connects those two things—my political experience with my work in education—is my own personal drive to dedicate my time to issues that will help make positive change, however that may be. With education, I think that if we can further improve outcomes for students and ensure greater equity within our system as a whole, that can have larger benefits for our society. As for my organizing work, I would call it more organizing work than political work really in terms of how I view it, but I was also compelled to work on things that would have an impact on social issues and help produce change that would really be meaningful to people.

THEO: So when would you say your interest in education began?

LEIGH: My mother was a teacher, my sister’s a teacher…I come from a background where the importance of education was told to me early and very often, so I always understood the importance of that. I’ll be honest though: When I was in college I didn’t know that I would work in the field of education. I didn’t plan for that at all. When I completed my work on the Obama campaign, I moved to Washington D.C. and I was hired to work at the Department of Education to support the Under Secretary of Education—her name is Martha Kanter, and she was the former Chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District. My job was to support her in her work and through that I was exposed to a number of different issues on a very global scale, in particular those related to higher education. Martha was the first person to take me under her wing (she does this with many people), and she quickly became a mentor to me. I was very lucky in that regard. Once I was exposed to higher ed issues, I began working on them and moving further down that path so, though I wish I could say I planned my career path all out from the beginning, it really evolved organically on its own for me.

THEO: Was there ever a point where you wanted to teach at a college or a high school or did you want to do something different with education from the start?

LEIGH: Working at the Department of Education, I was exposed to policy issues and I now work for a nonprofit organization that researches community colleges specifically in terms of the practices that result in successful outcomes for students. So I’ve continued to be exposed to that work, but I’m continually drawn down to the institutional level of education. In fact, I’m actually considering whether to continue my own education by pursuing a doctoral degree in higher education. And I hope to have the opportunity to teach—that’s something I’d really like to do. So the short answer is yes, I hope that I will teach in my career.

THEO: So you mentioned briefly the program you are working with now. You are the Program Manager for Federal and State Policy in the College Excellence Program at the Aspen Institute. Can you tell me a bit about that?

LEIGH: Our program is to support institutional practice and policy and leadership that results in high and improving outcomes for students. That’s a quick summary of the work. In terms of how we do that, we offer what’s called the Aspen Prize for Community College Excellence. It’s a million-dollar prize for which community colleges across the nation compete. To identify colleges doing ground-breaking work, first we look at data in terms of how students are varying in persistence and completion at a different colleges. We reach out to the top ten percent of community colleges from a pool of over a thousand and invite them to apply for the Prize. From the information they provide, we then learn more not only about how many of their students complete certificates and degree but what strategies the schools use to measure student learning. That is, what are students learning in their courses, and what value will those courses have for their jobs in the future? We learn how well colleges help students complete and also how well they help them land jobs, whether or not they earn livable wages, whether or not the outcomes achieved are equitable, and whether the students who would like to receive an education are able to obtain it. So that’s the work we do. It’s really fun, because we get to go to the colleges, spend time with professors, students, and college presidents and learn who they are, why they do the work they do, and how their personal dedication translates into the outcomes they’re achieving. At the end of the process, we acknowledge the top ten colleges and present the prize to the winner.

We also look at leadership for higher education more generally, so we try to study the qualities that make exceptional leaders–exceptional meaning they’re able to ensure that their institutions achieve great outcomes for students. The other thing we’ve been engaged in recently is looking at ways in which we can encourage the top colleges in the country to increase their diversity in terms of socio-economic status, how they can enroll greater numbers of students who may come from low-income families and who may not otherwise have been able to afford college without some sort of scholarship and assistance.

THEO: So you work with colleges to make this happen or are you working with students?

LEIGH: We’re working with college presidents and with policy makers really, to ask the questions and look at the data to find out what the current level of socioeconomic diversity is for colleges in America and then ask the question: How can we improve upon that? How can we ensure that more low-income students are able to access and enroll in colleges where we know they can and should succeed?

THEO: How long has this program been going?

LEIGH: We’re pretty new. Our program was founded in 2010 and it was founded specifically for the purpose of delivering the Aspen Prize for Community Colleges that I mentioned.

THEO: Alright, I’m really curious: Can you describe your average work day?

LEIGH: Oh, that’s tough! Every day’s a little different…I’m trying to think what my day was like today and see how that maps out…So, for today, I basically edited a report—I’m giving a full laundry list, here—I edited the report, also edited the design component of that report. I staffed a meeting where my boss was producing video clips talking about who this year’s prize winners would be. I worked with our Communications team to develop press releases to talk about that. I had a staff meeting talking about program management and how to improve our budgeting practices in our program. And I worked with researchers to define outcome measurements for colleges that we’re working with that are setting improvement plans at their institutions. So as you can see, there is a whole host of things that occupy my day everyday.

THEO: Seems very busy! So you’ve been with this program since it started in 2010?

LEIGH: I joined the program a year and a half ago.

THEO: And are you thinking about staying with them afterward? What do you see yourself doing in the future?

LEIGH: As I mentioned, I recently applied to graduate school, and I’m considering now whether to enroll in a PhD program for higher education. That would be a five-year program, so that would entail research and teaching experience and also developing the course skills and cognitive skills that I need to hopefully one day lead research efforts and work at an educational institution perhaps. So that’s really exciting.

In terms of the College Excellence Program, one of the really great things about working at a non-profit is that you get exposed to a lot of people and ideas, and the programming you do always has to quickly change—there’s a lot of change in terms of the projects that come your way. So, as I described, we have the Prize, and in our leadership work we’re developing a new curriculum to help prepare the next generation of community college leaders, and that adds a whole host of aspects to the work that are really exciting and involving. We have policy projects like the one I mentioned to you about increasing socio-economic diversity at colleges. That would be a year-long project and evolve into many other things, so it keeps me creative and on my toes at all times. For that reason, each work day is always different, but also very engaging and exciting. So, if I don’t continue my education, there’s a lot of opportunity along the road at Aspen. And the work I’d be doing here would have a lot of impact on the world, which is, you know, what you really want out of a career.

THEO: Going back a little to your time in the Education Department, I was wondering: How did you get involved in all this? Did they come to you, or did you seek out them? Again, I’m a college student, so I’m interested in how I can get involved in this as well as other career paths.

LEIGH: My work on the campaign was actually a natural pathway to that job because I was what is called a “political appointee.” Those who had worked for the President on his campaign were given priority for positions classified as political appointments, and because I would be starting out in an entry-level position in terms of providing administrative support, those kind of job opportunities were available to me. It took two long years on the campaign (and super long days!) to get there in DC, but that was my pathway. I know it’s not the natural pathway for everyone.

In fact, there are two additional pathways for government jobs in DC. Instead of being a political appointee, who’s only employed for the life of the administration, you could be a “career employee,” who’s in their job for their entire career, across multiple administrations, and really keep the government functioning at a high level. So for you, when you finish your degree, you could apply right away for a position in any of those offices as a career employee. There are also opportunities called Presidential Management Fellows, where you would apply to be a Fellow and spend time in multiple agencies. That’s a great opportunity to get a bird’s eye view of government/public service work and expose yourself to subjects you might want to grasp onto, such as education. Does that help?

THEO: Definitely, thank you. I’m a junior, so I’m still trying to figure out what I’m going to do with my life after I graduate.

LEIGH: So you’re a junior, and you’re making decisions now. You’re an education minor.

THEO: Yes, I’m an English major with an education minor. My original plan was to become a high school teacher or teach at the college level, but I keep hearing, especially from Professor Steirer, that I should keep pushing myself and try to look at all the different avenues of the education sector. It’s a lot of exploring right now, and I’m still trying to figure out what to do. It’s pretty interesting.

LEIGH: That’s great! And when you think about it, what sort of careers pop out at you?

THEO: I don’t know yet. That’s a lot of the reason why I’m looking around. I had always thought the idea of being a teacher would be nice. I volunteer a lot at schools, and I like working with kids. I guess I just don’t know yet everything that’s out there, career-wise.

LEIGH: Teaching obviously is a great profession, but I agree there are a lot of other options and knowing that you like to work with people is good. Starting there with what you enjoy is a good place to start. I guess my message to you for right now would be: You don’t need to figure out what you’re going to do for your whole life. You need to figure out how you want to spend your time, what you think is rewarding for you, and what you think you’re good at—like working with people. Then spend your time in that way, and I think opportunities will always follow. So if education is the path for you, know that and follow that, but a lot of different things can emerge and you don’t know where they will lead you.

THEO: So plan for the next year or so rather than the next five or ten?

LEIGH: Someone once gave me the advice that you always need to have an answer for where you will be in five years, but it doesn’t mean you have to stick to that path. You just have to do the hard work to know you’re moving forward. You need to focus and know you’re doing good work and you need to have a plan, but being flexible is okay. Be adaptable. Things may change, and that may be for the good. As long as you know how you’re oriented, what you care about, and where you hope to go, you’re on your way.

THEO: Alright, well thank you. it’s been very informative!

LEIGH: Thank you! And good luck!

The Dick Van Dyke Show

May 3, 2015 / Claire Colburn / 0 Comments

The Dick Van Dyke Show can be seen as one of the first sitcoms that resembles our modern conception of the genre. The show strayed from its predecessors, with Mary Tyler Moore’s spunky take on the housewife role and a new mobility evoked between home and work. At the same time, The Dick Van Dyke Show has roots in the older Vaudeville-variety style of the 1950s. This in-between existence is perfectly exemplified in the season one episode “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced.” The popularity of this episode most likely stems from Van Dyke and Moore’s incredible comedic and dancing talent, both of which were hallmarks of the show. However, this seemingly simple episode reveals much about the historical, political, and industrial contexts of the series.

One of the most popular episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” reveals how Rob and Laura Petrie, the protagonist couple, first fell in love. When Laura comes upon Rob’s old Army boots, Rob tells the story to their son Richie (played by Larry Matthews) through a series of flashbacks. The scene opens on a dance number for the USO during World War II. Rob is working as an emcee for the stage, and meets Laura during rehearsal. For him, it’s love at first sight, but Laura is utterly disinterested, prompting Rob to go to great lengths for even a second glance–but, of course, ultimately winning her over in the end.

This episode heavily spotlights Mary Tyler Moore, whose take on the housewife character offers insight into the changing representations of women throughout the series. Given that The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered the same year the National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded, the nascent radical feminist movement is nowhere evoked in the show. Instead, one can glean progressivism with regards to gender roles from certain creative choices behind the show.

Even today, Laura Petrie remains iconic, from her warbling exclamations of “Oh, Rob!” to her fashion-forward cigarette pants. This sartorial decision in particular–apparent throughout “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced”–is symptomatic of the understated feminism throughout the series. Originally, Moore was supposed to wear the classic pearls and dresses of the 1950s, but at her insistence that this would not be an accurate representation of the modern housewife, the costumers agreed on her soon-to-be ubiquitous pants. This decision to break away from previous tropes, however trivial, foreshadows the atypical housewife that Laura would prove to be. Unlike the unobjectionable domestic goddesses of The Donna Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver, Laura had a more fully developed personality. Like Lucille Ball’s Lucy, another exception, Laura was depicted as sarcastically funny, physically attractive, and domestically gifted, all simultaneously. Also like Lucy, she sometimes longed for a life beyond the kitchen, fondly remembering her days dancing in the USO, as seen in “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” (and in one early episode even going back to work as a dancer). Though she was by no means a major agent in the then-burgeoning women’s liberation movement, Laura presented her own discreet, feisty, sharp-witted kind of feminism.

Though The Dick Van Dyke Show can be seen as politically progressive, it should be noted that stylistically it bridged the gap between the classic vaudevillian-comedy shows of the 1950s and the more realistic products of the 1970s, but often retained some of the increasingly old-fashioned comedic devices of the former. Throughout “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced,” the influence of vaudevillian comedy is particularly evident. First, the flashback opens on a soft-shoe sequence, one of several such scenes. This focus on stage performance hints at the traditions of old-style variety shows in which dance numbers were a major attraction. The climax of the episode occurs when Rob and Laura finally dance and sing together, strengthening the importance of the stage through the show. Perhaps even more revealing of vaudevillian influence is Rob’s comedy intro to the dance performance, a programming format directly derived from variety shows. With slapstick physical comedy, Rob entertains the troops before turning the stage over to “The Idaho Potatoes,” a jazz band, thus alluding to the show’s vaudevillian origins. To heighten this similarity, the scene is shot head-on, effectively putting the viewer in the dance hall audience’s position. It is unsurprising that the show features vaudevillian characteristics, since many show regulars, including Rose Marie (Sally) and Morey Amsterdam (Buddy) started their careers on the vaudeville stage. Carl Reiner, the show’s producer, also sometimes sent scripts over to radio scribes and vaudeville fixtures for “punching up.” With this continued influence of variety, it’s clear that The Dick Van Dyke Show was truly between eras.

Many sitcoms that followed this iconic series borrowed ideas that either originated from or were made popular by The Dick Van Dyke Show. This sitcom was one of the first that explored the meta-subject matter of a show-within-a show. Largely basing it on his experiences with Your Show of Shows, producer Carl Reiner created the predecessor to 30 Rock and The Larry Sanders Show, which also followed the behind-the-scenes of fictional TV shows. Like these later iterations, The Dick Van Dyke Show used self-referential humor to poke fun at the entertainment industry in a refreshing new brand of comedy.

The Dick Van Dyke Show was also original in its focus on both the home and the workplace. Previously, sitcoms such as I Love Lucy mainly followed domestic life. In this series, however, Rob moves freely between home and work, as plotlines weave among all the characters. In “Oh How We Danced the Night We Met,” the story shifts from the home to the professional pasts of both Rob and Laura. Indeed, Laura’s background as a dancer, an unconventional career for a sitcom housewife, is a surprising variation from her wholly domestic predecessors. This mobility is representative of the increasing movement of women between the public and private spheres occurring on a larger societal scale. In terms of sitcom history, this mixture of settings paved the way for future shows to provide insight into the workplace and the home, a feature prominent in modern television.

Perhaps the strong influence that The Dick Van Dyke Show still has on modern sitcoms is the reason for its ability to withstand the test of time. Over fifty years later, “Oh How We Met the Night We Danced” continues to be utterly hilarious. Van Dyke and Moore delight audiences with good-natured sarcastic banter and charming chemistry. The dance numbers, though they were actually challenging for Van Dyke and Moore to master, look effortless and hold timeless appeal. Like the rest of the series, this episode feels both modern and decidedly vintage, as universal humor mingles with classic vaudevillian presentation. A time capsule from the Camelot era, this upbeat, sharp-witted show will remain a classic worthy of its place in the annals of television history.

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